Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Apr 17 2005

Portuguese

I was running late, therefore, according to Murphy’s Law, the other glove I was looking for had to hide in another dimension while I wasted time looking for it.

I was supposed to be at Dean’s at 5pm so we could shoot museum exteriors and some other stuff, but as April needed black gloves to complete her cat burglar outfit, I needed the other glove. I turned my closet upside down and finally found it, now that it had accomplished its mission of making me late.

We did some dark-room shots of Dean and Maurice, featuring some dolly shots as well as some really kick-ass blueprints Dean had obtained. The smoke from Dean’s cigarettes looked pretty good under the single light, and the reflected light from the tabletop was plenty for fill light. April and Mark, aka “Cranky Laowai” on Forumosa.com, arrived later, and we headed over to what Dean calls “the Portuguese Whorehouse”, aka the exclusive, extravagantly designed Agora Garden, the temporary residence of Steve Chicorel, the producer who met with us last year.

I put the camera and tripod in an empty fountain, hoping that they wouldn’t chose that particular moment to turn it on, while we got some climbing shots. Then we went over to a gap in the wall/hedge and got some shots* of Mark, who was playing our all-in-one security guard. Then we needed another shot with another security guard, but as we’d only brought Mark, and everyone else was already in the film, I donned the uniform and played the part while Darrell operated the camera. Thankfully nobody turned up asking questions as I disrobed in the middle of the courtyard. In any case, Dean’s been after me to do some kind of cameo the whole time, so now at least I can say I’ve done one.

Tony, aka the gangster “Tang” from the last movie, had arrived by that point, so we went over to the building where he owns an apartment a few blocks away for another few shots. Dean went back to his apartment for the dolly tracks, so we got there first and did a few non-dolly shots. Then Tony showed us something pretty neat: along the long-ass hallway were framed pictures. They look like they are there for decorative effort, but they are actually little hinged doorways to access the pipes in the walls. Cool! When Dean arrived and we showed him, he got all excited as well. We just had to use it, so we wrote it in right then and there. April, being the trooper that she is, got in the little space behind the wall and popped out of the portrait at the right moment.

The whole time we were filming our shoes were making extremely loud squeaking noises every time we moved. Most of us took off our shoes to avoid making the noise, but I don’t know if the residents care; we could hear arguments and TV’s from the rooms in any case; the walls and construction of the building didn’t seem that great.

It was well past midnight by the time we finished. I’d wanted to get some more exteriors in Danshui on Sunday, but people were too tired from Saturday, so we’ll get it another time.

In other news, we seem to have found a real, live lab to use. Time is short before our window of opportunity, and we still need to see it, but it looks promising from the pictures Paul has sent. This is a very complicated scene and will take a lot of planning to get done at all, much less done right.

I ran out of hard disk space a little earlier than I expected, so I got a Seagate 400GB SATA drive. Hopefully it will tide me over until I need even more space. I’ve got one slot left on my motherboard, and I’m saving it for at least 500GB.

*Well, no, we didn’t, actually. I screwed up this shot through pure and unadulterated idiocy; hopefully I’ll get more when we go out to Danshui.

posted by Poagao at 7:18 pm  

3 Comments »

  1. Wondering if you’d mind posting a complete list of your cast members thus far, and what roles they play. Thanks!
    Looking great!

    Comment by Anonymous — April 20, 2005 @ 1:57 pm

  2. That’s a good idea. I’ll make a separate page for tentative cast/crew lists.

    Comment by TC — April 20, 2005 @ 2:24 pm

  3. Okay, the tentative cast list is up under the “Accomplises” page.

    Comment by TC — April 21, 2005 @ 6:30 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment