Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Oct 10 2005

Spyvan!

We’d planned to get all the van action this weekend. The weather had been great all week while we were all stuck in various cubicles, working our day jobs. Come Saturday, however, I woke up to the sound of heavy rain pelting on my window. We had to call off all the outdoor shoots.

There were still shots we could get, however, inside the van. Dean, Josh and I met up at Dean’s place, and when the rented van showed up, complete with driver, we piled all the equipment and various knickknacks we could find inside, and headed off in search of a relatively dry, yet outdoor location where we could film the van interiors with Josh. We ended up at the empty end of a parking lot underneath the Jianguo Expressway, just south of the Flower/Jade Market. The driver took out all the seats from the Volkswagon, and we proceeded to try and make it look like the back of a spy van.

It turned out, however, that we’d forgotten one key component: shelving. So Dean had the driver take him back to his place for some shelves, while Josh and I sat amongst the seats and
all the junk strewn over a couple of parking places, looking for all the world like a couple of guys whose car had been mostly stolen.

We waited for over an hour, as Dean was stuck in traffic. An old guy who most likely went jogging in the park ran up and down the metal surface of the parking lot. Eventually Dean returned, and we promptly found that the cigarette lighter power adaptor we borrowed from Paul had melted to a degree that it no longer worked. So we turned on the overhead lights in the van, which weren’t quite bright enough, and I opened the camera all the way up, planning to do the rest of the brightening in post, and we shot all the scenes we needed, including some with Josh talking with his hand over his mouth, just in case we need to insert other dialogue down the road.

It was still raining on Sunday, so we got together again at Dean’s place to film Josh hacking a computer that is supposedly located in the baron’s evil complex. This time we used lamplight and the flickering monitor, and got some nice shadow effects as well. Afterwards we went out to Carnegies where we met with Doug, he guy who is helping us round up jeeps for our jungle shoot next weekend in Yangmei. He showed us his black Jeep Wrangler, and gave us some pictures of the area, which will help in the planning, as we’re going to shoot this one cold, without having seen the place ourselves. Not the first time we’ve done this, and it probably won’t be the last, either. Still, it should be interesting at least. As long as the weather holds out.

posted by Poagao at 4:19 am  

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