Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Four

Friday the 13th should be a lucky day for horror film makers, but we seemed to be a bit cursed today. The morning went fine - we just had Perry in alongside Mark Devenport, who's playing Van Man and we did a nice little scene where Mark is trying to sell Perry a van, which Perry is trying to get for a fraction of the price (I know it doesn't sound very horrorfilmy, but it's all part of a larger bit..). Mark and Perry seemed to get on well and they worked well with each other, so it all seemed to go pretty smoothly and we even managed to break for lunch early. Then we went over our other (main) location where we were shooting for the afternoon. The art department have been in there for a couple of weeks now and have made a fantastic job of Lena's room and Dad's tool room (which are the two really horrorfilmy (that's a really ungainly adjective, isn't it?) sets. After doing a quick prelight for those rooms, we had a bit of a wait until Dido (who, because of our change in schedule wasn't initally in today) was available. Then I got to kill Mark. Or rather, Dido and Ainsley did. And it looked great - the three of them did a terrific job of really selling it, with Mark adding in a couple of extra-horrible suggestions of his own.

But while we were filming that, we found out in quick succession that a) the location we had planned to shoot in tomorrow - a bathroom, which art dept. had already painted, retiled and dressed - was now not going to be available - causing us to do a rapid rethink of scene staging, blocking and framing (especially considering that the stuff we shot this morning was part of the same scene and was designed to match with the other bathroom)...and b) that Olga is still ill and unable to work. Which actually - weirdly - made a) a bit less of an immediate problem. With nothing else to pull into the schedule (Olga's in pretty much every other scene, apart from a couple at other locations, which we haven't got access to yet), we've had to postpone tomorrow's shoot. Meaning either picking up the scenes at some later point in the schedule or adding another day onto the end, both of which cause us a bit of a headache. It can't be helped though, so we've just got to get through it and hope that Olga is better for Monday. If not...well, I can always say that I made a quarter of a feature film once...

We also hit our 100th slate today - which Owen (Camera Asst) pointed out is sometimes referred to as the champagne slate (meaning that on it's completion everybody in the crew gets a glass of champagne), but considering the headaches that production have been trying to navigate around today, I thnk that was probably the last thing on their minds. And we can't afford champagne. Unless Lidl do one...