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Scene 3 is probably the most complicated shoot in the movie. The reason for this lies mainly in the fact that it has more people and more speaking roles in it at one time than any other scene in this already-complicated script. I knew that expectations were building as we near the end of principal photography, yet we could only budget one afternoon for it due to scheduling concerns.
Dean wrangled a university meeting room for the location. We’d been hoping to find a better location but it never happened. I guess zeppelins are harder to come by than they used to be.
We arrived at about 11am to set up, and other cast and crew started trickling in at about 1pm. Rowan and Alex, the main players, arrived last, and we began filming with me walking backwards on top of the table, dragging the camera on a dolly as I went.
Along with Alex, Jane, Bill, Rowan, Norm and Sarah, we had quite a few new faces just for this scene. Dean had photoshopped pictures of Rowan wearing various costumes into so-called portraits of his character’s ancestors to ordain the walls. They looked pretty amazing.
I was shooting according to the storyboards, but it soon became apparent that unless we cut out part of the scene we wouldn’t get it done without at least one mutiny, as most of our volunteers had simply come out for some laughs and a little light filming. Unfortunately, this meant we had to ax a nice little fight scene we’d all been looking forward to since the inception of this story. It also threw me completely off track as far as the storyboards went, and spent the rest of the time going by pure guesswork.
It’s not the first time this has happened, but it was worse this time because we can usually browbeat our good friends into staying long enough to get all the shots we want. This time, however, the cast outnumbered us and could have taken us in a fight, so that was that. We did what we could and wrapped up around 6 or 7pm. I was disappointed in myself for not foreseeing that it would go down like that, but as I said, expectations were high. They’ll be even higher next week when we have an even bigger scene to film, albeit with fewer people to deal with. We’re getting together with our swordmaster Eddie for some sword practice on Wednesday.
On Saturday we filmed some stuff up in the hills near my place. We found an old temple (I think it was a temple; I’m not sure) for some dream-sequence shots and a nearby patch of jungle for a flashback. Yes, we have dream sequences and flashbacks, two real no-noes according to script readers. Then again, our script is never going to go through that process, so screw it.
