Wrap principle photography, 10/18/04

At 4:30 AM, Sunday morning, Stomp! Shout! Scream! principle photography wrapped. While there's a few pick up shots left to get, I think-- I hope-- there's a whole film's worth of film waiting to be edited. I'll get my first look at the footage this week. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be just organizing all my materials to edit the film, so instead of detailing that kind of busy-work, I'll dole out some on-set anecdotes.

DAY ONE
Location: Lenny’s / Dive Bar

The day starts with the actresses arriving at my house at 11:00 AM for band practice, then they are in makeup for a couple of hours. Call is for 2:00 PM, we get our first shot about 4:00 pm. I meet virtually all the crew members for the first time on set. The stress of directing has me more antsy that I realized it would. I'm most freaked out by how brightly lit Lenny’s is. In my mind, it's supposed to be a dingy, dirty dive bar and the last thing I want is for it to look like it's been lit for a movie. Evan Lieberman, the director of photography, assures me that is not the case. It's very hard to let go. I feel like I'm whining at every set up. Once I realize I'm just going to have to trust him and the crew he's assembled—- because, really, what choice to I have-- I feel much better. I can concentrate on the actors, the shot lists, and getting everything done.

Feature films usually try to average a couple of pages of script a day, but on our budget/schedule, we're shooting our 95 page script in 11 days. That's 8.6 pages per day and today we had just under 5 pages scheduled: a conversation over beers, the opening credits sequence where the on-screen band plays the theme song and the introduction of the love interest, Hector. We get it all with plenty of coverage and wrap at about 2:00AM.