Take 2
October 21st 2002 -
Trying again
I spent thirty minutes or so on Sunday writing up the film-making experience on Saturday, and then Mozilla crashed out on me. It wasn’t even the weblog window, I just hit “back” while looking up something in the IMDB, and bam, goodbye Mozilla. I swore at the time that I’d only compose entries in a text editor, and then transfer them over to Mozilla when they were finished, but here I am again typing it directly in…
Guitar practice
I went to guitar practice on Friday, but forgot to bring my guitar or sheet music. This is nothing new – for a while now I’ve been using my guitar tutor’s guitar, since it’s simpler than carrying my own guitar from Chatswood station to his place, a twenty-minute hike. But now I’m driving straight from work. Anyway, the point is, he didn’t have a copy of the music either so I couldn’t play the piece I’d been practicing, and instead Chris pulled out some duets.
Wow. The guitars weren’t perfectly in tune with each other, and I was missing every other note and my left-hand was clenching the neck of the guitar like it was a live snake, but – we did music. It was thrilling. There’s a huge difference with this kind of playing. The piece was designed with a back-and-forth kind of structure, tossing the melodic lead from player to player and, for the first time, I really felt musical. Something clicked.
Take 2
On Saturday I went along to another short-film shoot, this one by Tara B., a friend of Richard A. (a friend from Baltimore days who is writing the Bob-the-Headless-Chicken script that I may have mentioned). This was Tara’s first short film as a writer/director, and she was very nervous before the day. She had some excellent actors lined up – stage actors – but not much in the way of crew. So I brought along my sound and lighting gear for a day’s filming.
It was good fun. I made friends, the experience was pleasant, and there was drama.
I will now introduce a little bit of foreshadowing by pointing out that the location for the shoot was in an office block opposite the Powerhouse museum, and that on-street parking was only two-hourly, so when I arrived at 10:30am, I was very relieved that they let me into the underground carpark.
There I met the cameraman, who’s name I have forgotten, as with all who were present except Tara – and I only remember her name because I have emails from her. Anyway, during the course of the shoot we were working out who resembled which movie-star. He was Hugh Jackman. (Pathetically, I was Hugh Grant once again, a sure sign that I need another haircut.)
We had two hours to get used to the location, the second-floor office of Clear-Blue Day, where Hugh worked. The actors weren’t due to arrive until 12:30. Apparently, they had already done some rehearsals during the week on location, which was a bit of a novelty for me, and Hugh had prepared a remarkable set of story-boards. He’s a graphic designer. The story-boards looked cooool.
We did some trial lighting and camerawork and tried out Hugh’s microphone versus my one, and decided to use mine, because it has more reach and has slightly better bass performance. The office had quite a few big glass windows, so we carefully worked out which angles didn’t show any of the crew or lighting. And the time passed quickly, and lo, Tara showed excellent producing skills by providing many sweet snacks, and I was sorely tempted, but resisted temptation. The other member of the crew, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, arrived. He was the stills-photographer and ended up doing first-assistant-director work throughout the shoot, while Hugh and Tara and I crowded around the camera LCD screen and mucked around with the framing, the actors, and the lighting respectively. It was a very smooth shoot. Tara had a very definite feel for what she wanted done but was perfectly happy to take suggestions, so we were all happy and felt nice and creative.
The main actor, Naomi Watts, proved to be excellent. She knew her lines perfectly and gave a wonderful reading for the stressed-out main character, including a terrifying attack of her boss, Hugo Weaving, who was so enjoying the shoot that he stayed on for quite some time after his last shot, which – foreshadowing again – he may perhaps have regretted. The secretary, Suzie Porter, had a very brief but concerned cameo and got to play with a great big toy airplane.
Anyway, I could talk about the shoot for a while, but it was all really rather boringly smooth and fun. We got some excellent shots done, some really nice footage, and although there were heaps of problems with my bloody microphone power, it pulled through when it counted, I think. By the time 5:30 rocked around, I was still happy and energy-filled. At that point, we still had a couple of indoor shots remaining, but we also had to do some outdoor shooting with Naomi and her boyfriend, Seth Green, so we decided to do the outdoor filming while we had decent light. Hugh and I headed down the elevator. Just before the doors closed, Hugh shouted out, “Don’t forget the pass-key!” There was a pass-key required to let us back up to the second floor, you see, and we only had the one.
We went downstairs and got the camera and sound-gear ready, and the actors arrived and happily, Tara had remembered to bring the pass-key. We hadn’t quite left enough time to do the outdoor filming, though, and some of the shots were a little bit dark. Oh well, we figured we could reshoot them later. Then we tried to get back upstairs.
Well, the pass-key worked fine. It let us in through the front door. Unfortunately, there was also the matter of the elevators. Hugh had unlocked the elevators to level 2, but there was also another company on level 2. One of the office workers there came in, and when they left, locked the elevators.
Hugh’s keys for the elevators were upstairs, as were my car keys and mobile phone, and everyone elses mobile phones. And also the remote control to open the door to the underground carpark. Basically, nobody was going anywhere.
Craaaap.
There were a couple of emergency numbers listed downstairs – for security, for the elevator company, and for the building management. We called all of them then sat outside and waited. And waited. And waited. We talked about our favorite films. We bought some beers and drank them. We improvised a bit. We bonded, even more than we had with the film-making. Hugo Weaving, who had hung around after his bits had been shot, was with us, because he’d left his stuff upstairs as well. Much silliness went on. We had the camera and sound-gear, so after two hours or so, I turned the camera on and we did a little documentary about how we had been locked out – and after about twenty minutes of filming, and after Hugh had disappeared on a desparate quest to find a workmate with an elevator key, the security guard finally arrived, and we convinced him to let us up. Hugh arrived back, and swore hideous revenge against the level 2 office worker who had locked us all out – apparently he had done this kind of thing before, knowing full-well that we were still there, and locking us out anyway.
So anyway, we did the final couple of scenes (Naomi and Seth’s car was also broken down, so they had to wait for the NRMA anyway) and I finally got home at about 10:30pm, approximately three hours after I had hoped to. Anna was very sad, she had arrived home early especially because she thought we could have Saturday night together.
Sick
On Sunday we headed out to the CISRA fun day, which was kinda fun, but I was feeling sick (and still am) so headed home early and lounged around at home until Anna convinced me to go and see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. Which was pretty good, fairly mindless romatic comedy fun, but with some surprisingly nice romance bits. I was tired and emotional, and I even got a bit teary. The story has quite a few parallels with Anna and me, except that I resembled the male lead only in that I am male and non-Greek, and Anna has always been beautiful. Heck, all of the details are wrong, but the feel is right.