In the last post I talked about having a complicated day of shooting and how we shifted roles and managed to get through a good portion of our day’s filming. The ‘day’ part of filming held a number of challenges and we got through them relatively smoothly. The ‘night’ part held different challenges and we got through them, but it was not smooth.

There were only what I’d count as two locations for the night shots, a number of scenes and different character interactions, but two basic locations. I think there were 5 hours scheduled to get all these shots (again I’ll refer you to me being insane). In my idiotic schedule making the thought might have been (a lot of the months leading up to filming are a blur now) that the two locations were only forty feet away from each other and thus the move would be easy. That forty feet, though, was a vertical difference and we ended up having to haul crew, cast and equipment all the way around the farm to get from one location atop a cliff to the second location at the bottom of the same cliff.

Then we were setting up our big 2K light (I’ll detail the silliness of that rig later when I talk about my old man) in a hard to reach corner of the farm and hadn’t been able to test it in that spot prior to the night’s shoot. Raubyn and Lara had a good idea of what it’d look like, but reality is always a little different and it took time to maneuver and change the positioning of the light. After it’s completely dark and we have the lights in position and we’re ready to start shooting, we were maybe 45 minutes to an hour behind schedule. And while the theme of the schedule being ridiculous had been irksome for the first few days of the production that night it became a thing that could induce madness or rage.

We staredt to rush through the shots on top of the cliff as quickly as possible, and there is a lot that goes with that. There is the safety concern of the sheer cliff and the uneven rocky ground. There’s the cold, it was below freezing pretty much every night that week. And the desire to take as much time as we could and get quality images in what was an atmospheric location. The clock keeps moving, as it does, and we’re well behind schedule by the time we start to break down and load up everyone into the trucks and ATV and drive them a mile and a half to wind up nearly right back where we were.

The load in and out of the second location that night is a hundred yard walk through pitch black to the base of the cliff. And by the time we have actors in place and cameras ready we’re past our allotted time. And we hurry through everything we have planned for this seemingly unending night of filming. There are a few distinctive moments etched into my brain from those freezing hours scampering around under that craggy rock face.

A mad search for a misplaced prop that came close to destroying my relationship with my fiance.

Absentmindedly asking Cameron (my AD) if I was ambitious or insane for trying to make the movie. With him consolingly saying ‘maybe a bit of both’.

And then what I just call the quiet circle. We had finally finished and the actors had been sent back to wardrobe so that they might have a chance to get back to the hotel by 3 or 3:30. We got the equipment loaded out and were essentially ready to leave. Raubyn, Lara and I think Jeremy (Lara’s brother) were standing by the trucks smoking, and I came up and we stood in a circle saying nothing for like 3 or 4 minutes. For like a minute or so Raubyn and I just held eye contact across the darkness. Now he can dispute this, but in that moment I reckon he hated my guts. Which is totally legitimate because in that moment, and for a few hours beforehand I hated my own guts.

I had been pushing and asking a lot from everyone all week. And everyone gave me what they had, continued to show up and no one complained. Actors, crew, my family; everyone was giving me all they had and in my mind the only thing I did in return was ask for more. I felt like a monster that night. I thought that this was the only chance to shoot those scenes and strove to get them. Looking back I probably should have called it, and tried to figure out a way to pick up that material later, but didn’t have the budget and would have been asking everyone to come back and spend another night out in that cold rocky hole. Whats better 30 minutes, two more hours, right then versus calling everyone back and screwing up their schedules in another 2 weeks or month? The entire thing was one of those ‘destroy a little piece of your soul’ moments.

Anyway in the quiet circle the silence was finally broken. I think Raubyn let that moment of hating me slip passed. We were in the trenches, as it were, you took your licks and kept moving forward. I went on hating myself for some time though.

The next day, our last day of the main shoot, went much better. We still wound up running a couple hours over schedule, but what else were we gonna do.