First a brief point about my significant other. She (Amber) helped me in every stage of the project. From the earliest ideas of making the movie to notes on the script down through casting choices and set construction and right into production. She drove folks to and from set, filled in as location sound, and even got a little 2nd AC time during our last day of shooting. That last day was a big day for her as she was also our set medic.

Now we obviously didn’t have a massive production, but we did have stunts and live animal and rather harsh weather conditions during filming; though her medic skills weren’t required due to any of that. In order of severity she doctored an irritated eye, an out of alignment back and a dog bite.

The eye problem one of our actors had I might guess stemmed from the copious amount of sawdust in the air at one of our sets. We were using the sawdust to hide a concrete floor. She wears contacts herself and keeps medicated eye drops in the medicine cabinet. Fairly straightforward.

Another of our our actors somehow threw his back out the previous day of shooting. Cody (the actor) had carried people around on his back, climbed up and down rocky slopes, and partook in our most action oriented scene in earlier weeks of the shoot. None of those activities were involved in the day prior, but whatever had tweaked it put him in a fair bit of pain on our last shooting day. So Amber doctors him up with some saved painkillers. His back eased up and we shifted a couple scenes to try and get him wrapped a little earlier than planned.

The dog bite shut down the set for a bit. Lara, one of our cinematographers had run back to the house she was staying at to grab a piece of equipment. In a hurry she ran into the house and the host’s dog (a nervous animal to begin with) freaked out and bit her. On set we’re setting up for the next scene and Raubyn, our other shooter as well as Lara’s husband, gets a phone call and rushes off set. I believe that the story Lara and Amber told him when they returned to set a short time later was that they cleaned up the wound and Amber only had to put in 6 or 7 stitches (in reality there were no stitches).

We lost abut 45 minutes to the incident, but if the bite had been truly serious, or if Amber hadn’t been there to assist and assess the bite it could have blown the whole day. Everybody, including Lara, worked for like another 10 hours that day. And Amber went back to her camera assistant duties once it was taken care of.

Indie film everyone wears multiple hats.