Airports,
Dean rented a car last weekend so that we could hastily shoot the last of Azuma’s scenes before he left for a semi-permanent position in Hong Kong this week. Azuma, Maurice, Sandy and I met up at Dean’s house on Saturday morning. Dean provided Azuma with an overcoat so that he wouldn’t garner too much attention walking around Taipei in a PLA general’s uniform.
We walked to the car, set up inside and started filming car interior shots while Dean headed to the train station before us. Maurice didn’t quite know where we were going, and traffic was stop-and-go the whole way, it being a weekend and this being Taipei. Continuity between car-moving and car-stopped shots is going to be a real headache to patch together. At one point I saw a place to pull over but was too late in asking Maurice to pull over, so when he stepped on the brakes our ears were greeted with a chorus of squealing tires directly behind us. “Ok, uh, let’s not stop here,” I said.
After getting pretty much all that needed to be done in the car (I would have preferred more time and more takes, but Azuma had to get going), we drove to the train station, which would be standing in for our airport in Beijing. As Dean went to park the car, I found that our dolly wouldn’t work on the tiled floor of the station, so we would have to resort to using our homemade glidecam to get certain shots, such as the two parties walking to meet each other.
Azuma reluctantly put aside the overcoat once again, but besides a few strange looks we were ok. Before doing the glidecam shots I first got the tripod-mounted shots overwith. The glidecam shots turned out shakier than I would have liked, but we got them, and that was that. We still have more scenes to do in the same location, but with different actors, mainly Dean and Azuma’s wife Jane.
On Friday night after work I went over to Dean’s again to get some shots of the more-or-less completed MacGuffin- I mean, Gozen Engine for the new trailer. Rowan was there as well, so I got a couple of shots of him for the trailer as well.
Next up are the rest of the airport shots, as well as some Beijing HQ shots that we should be able to shoot downstairs in my very own apartment building, sometime in the next few weeks. The narrowing-down of our “to do” list proceeds, and as always I look forward to possibly the most challenging part of the filming, at least in terms of locations, i.e. Rowan’s scenes. We still need to find environments exuding “a deteriorated grandeur”, which can be difficult because grandeur in Taiwan deteriorates rather quickly and thus doesn’t last that long. We’re also still looking for an airplane, but we might just wait until October and take a chance on the new high-speed railway, if it’s completed in time.
Have you ever been to the museum at Taoyuan Airport? there’s a fighter cockpit you can sit in. A single seat, low wing, single prop plane in there. There’s a couple parks around town that have parks with planes you can enter.
What kind of plane scene are you shooting?
Kelley
Comment by Anonymous — November 16, 2006 @ 3:05 am
We got the scene at a different location. We were looking for a commercial jet interior, but it didn’t work out.
Comment by TC — November 16, 2006 @ 3:08 am