Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Six

Man, this shoot-a-feature-in-eighteen-days (or-seventeen-if-you-lose-a-day-early-on)-thing has really started to tell. We shot five pages of script today, which is great going (5 pages x 18 days = 90 minutes) especially in terms of feature films, but we're still behind. Today we had effects - piercings, cuttings and the like - all of which take time to set up and time to reset + we had some tricky art dept. rigging with wires and stuff - and it was really tough on Olga, who had to spend most of the day held up by metal wires, so it was a lot to contend with, but I think we got some good stuff. It's just that we missed off getting a couple of other dialogue scenes which we could have done with knocking off. Which means that tomorrow's schedule is horrendous. I've just been looking at it now - at the moment we're averaging somewhere between 25 and 28 set-ups a day - and the minimum I can see for tomorrow is 31 - so we're going to have to go some - we really need to be moving out of the set that we're in by the end of tomorrow.

Being in Lena's room - the main torture area of the film - is starting to do my head in. Although it's quite empty, it's also airless - as a result of the window being blocked in and the doors being closed. So very quickly it gets very hot. Also, that space seems to get eaten up by various crew members - at one point today I counted 19 people in the room (which is basically the size of a master bedroom). Part of me looked round and wondered why the hell we needed 19 people in the room, while the other part of me rationalized it by reminding myself that it's all because I've written a script which requires loads of attention to art dept., lighting, make-up, costume and fx. As far as I'm concerned, the blame always comes back to me - it's more comforting that way - at least if I think it's my fault that things are complicated, I can think of ways to change it in the future.

Everything's looking good though - we had our Anna, our unit stills photographer on set today and some of the stills she took looked great. Hey, maybe that's a cheaper way of doing a scene - film it all in a series of stills with captions in between - it'll be daring and avant-garde - and it'll save a load of time...