Week 1 Gallery

Week 1 gallery here:

Ben Flies in for the Night

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

So the other night Ben Savage (Patrick) came up for night to film his cross over scene with Autumn (Jaime) and Johnny (Nolan). He flew in just for the day but it was a good change of pace. Autumn and Johnny were starting to smell and we were already for a new actor.

The way we are shooting the film is one story at a time so we have our actors for each story fly up for about 8 days. Once we finish the Jaime/Nolan story, Autumn and Johnny will go back home and we’ll get a fresh shipment of new actors to film a different storyline. Since the storylines overlap a little, certain actors fly up for other story lines like Ben did. In a couple days Aaron Ashmore (alec) and Ryan Hansen (Anthony) will be up here for a night to film their crossover with the Jaime/Nolan story line.

Ben’s scene was outside a house party so we needed to throw a fake party. We gathered some local kids to be extras and threw them on the front lawn with those signature red plastic cups. If you were at the shoot you wouldn’t know it was a party scene because everyone was silent except for our talent. A cop came by during the shoot and just kept on driving without stopping. Someone made the point that if you want to throw a party with under aged drinking you should throw a couple lights up and say you’re filming a movie. The cops will just pass on through. Well, at least in Palo Alto that’s what they’ll do. The night went pretty well and we fought the sunrise as usual. I have to say we threw a pretty kick ass fake party.

Dusk for Dawn

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

The film takes place all through the night and into the morning where the final scenes occur. Lately we’ve been filming until sunrise each night and have even had to pull some American Graffiti action on a couple shots. Anyone who has seen American Graffiti will know what I’m talking about. So for scheduling reasons we always thought that our morning scenes could be filmed directly after sunrise while we still had all our equipment out from the night before. Makes perfect sense right?

It turns out that in Northern California the sun doesn’t manage to clear the overcast until about 10 or 11 am. I guess living in LA for a couple years has made me forget. This meant that if we were going to film until sunrise at 5:30am, we’d have to stay an extra 5 hours at location just to start filming the morning stuff we wanted. That means two things: the crew would be working at 19 hour day, and the sun would be too high in the sky to suggest early morning shadows. So we decided to use a little movie magic and shoot dusk for dawn. We wrapped at 5am like usual and called everyone back at around 5pm to shoot the “morning” scene. Anyone who lives at location will tell you the sunlight is facing the wrong direction but we figured we could take that risk. We started filming at around 6pm and at that point the sun was casting nice long shadows. This made everyone very happy.

This was the first day we took out the crane aswell:



The crew also got a taste of what it is like to shoot with daylight. We fired off about 4 hours of nighttime filming in one hour because we didn’t need dozens of lights set up. The DP could shoot 360 degrees without worrying about hitting one of her lights. Everything went very smoothly and made me question why we set the story at night.

It’s too bad that the next script I am working on is set at the summit of Mount Everest in a hovering helicopter. In the middle of the night. During an Earthquake. That will be fun.

Back in Palo Alto

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

We are back in Palo Alto and it has been great so far. Going back home to film a movie about kids who go back home has created a very interesting feeling in us all. I say “interesting” because I am too tired to open up my adjective vault. Yea I’m a writer.

Filming outside of LA is wonderful. Families come to the curb and watch us film, traffic generously stops when we take, and when cops roll by they usually stay and watch. In LA you’ll be kicked out the moment you put down a tripod. But Northern California is not perfect. It is very cold. I have to double sweater it on most nights when we shoot outside but in Southern California I could bust a t-shirt and be fine.

The first couple days in Palo Alto were spent filming the last scenes of the Jaime (Autumn Reeser) and Nolan (Johnny Lewis) story line. This wasn’t ideal, but due to scheduling issues we had no choice. If we shot the story a little more in sequence it would help us and the actors realize the proper character arches. The way we have it now means the characters are very different each day and we have to keep track in our head where the scene falls in the film.



Me, Brad (Director), and Rachel (DP)




We have encountered some interesting problems that I’ll talk about in a future post.

Second Day of Production!

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

Today we are at USC shooting the School Bus exteriors. This is also the first day for Morgan (Tom Arnold) and we should have some fun with the scene. The last time we talked to him he had some great ideas for his scenes and I am excited to see how they play through.

So lets talk about night exterior shots. In case it wasn’t already clear, Palo Alto is set entirely at night. Exterior night shots are intense because they require a lot of light everywhere. Lighting the actors in the foreground isn’t too bad, but then you are left a completely black background and the audience won’t know where the actors are. For this reason we needed to throw a lot of light off rooftops into the background. Rachel (DP) will explain about lighting in detail later.

Everything below this line is now being written after day two, in past tense. I am not clever enough to figure out a better transition.So the night was very interesting.

We had 18 shots to take compared with 5 from the night before. As usual we started late and had our first shot at 11pm rather than the scheduled 10:30 pm. It was partly because USC wouldn’t let us set up until 8:30 pm and partly because we had a lot of exotic lighting rigs.

Lights up on the roof:


Lighting the School Bus:


We also had to block the action of Morgan driving the school bus up onto the curb which ended spilling some blood around too:


At around midnight we were way behind shooting schedule and we discussed the possibility of cutting a few shots from our list. Unfortunately the list was already trimmed down so nothing ended up being cut. On top of all this someone informed our grip team that some of the sprinklers hadn’t been shut off and they were going to go on “sometime in the early morning”. Luckily we had a solution for this:

Once it started to get late, we had to a call USC for an extension. Luckily they were very nice and generously gave it to us. The new problem became the Sun, which ruins the set at 5:20am no matter what. It would take some kind of super villain to help us out in that department. Another early morning issue turned out to be chirping birds. They pretty much chirped through most of our takes and we decided to hope it could be edited around.

Ultimately the sun rose with 4 shots still left to take. Poor Autumn Reeser had been waiting around for a couple hours and we never even got to her last shots. She was a good sport about it though. So what happens when production has to wrap early? Pick ups. We are returning to USC tonight to pick up the rest of what we didn’t get as well us the stuff scheduled for tonight.

In retrospect it is good that we went over because it gave us an idea about how much we can handle. This will help scheduling in the future. It is just lucky that we had USC two nights in a row otherwise we’d be much poorer.

First Day of Production!

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

The first scene we shot was in a laundry mat with Nolan (Johnny Lewis) and Jaime (Autumn Reeser). It is a cute scene between the two characters after they’ve just met.

Since this is the first day of shooting we gave ourselves a lot of time. The shot list consisted of four shots and one insert. We had the laundry mat for ten hours total and used three for set up, one for break down, and six for shooting. Now you’re probably wondering how much dicking around we did to only accomplish four shots in six hours but the truth is we were pretty much on the ball the whole night. A lot of work goes into lighting set up and rehearsal time. Even more difficult is shooting on location because we have to be respectful of the area and are only allowed a small amount of time to do everything we need. In fact, if we were in the laundry mat for even one minute past 5am we would be charged another $100.

Anyways everything went smoothly and we were mostly out by 4:30. Tomorrow is going to be big though because we have 18 shots and they are all outside.