Decompressing

nathalie gets light-metered
Originally uploaded by que sera sera.

The film is at the lab and I am finally starting to relax...a little. I've posted lots more pictures on my flickr page but you have to be "friends and family"- I count all my blog-fans in that group...so if you want to see them let me know and I'll "invite" you.

In the meanwhile I have to be very patient and just wait to see what sort of image appears on the film- what if there is a horrible technical problem? I can only imagine what awaits- editing nightmare...but really when I see pictures as cute as this I have a little bit more hope. Those who see the film will never have to know what coaxing we had to go through...

Re: Resto: comptage

Arghhhhhhh.

I just spent more than 11 hours in my rental car!!!!!!!!!
Returning crap and making three round trips from one side of paris to the other, always in terrible traffic, always getting lost, very very very tired and never want to go in a car again.  Though I am now an official expert paris driver.

I made so many mistakes- forgetting the extension cords we rented at home and having to make and extra trip, not planning things at all efficiently, driving the wrong way about a million times, showing up at a lens rental house just as the 1.5 hour lunch break had started......

Well, it is done and I can walk again in my (still very messy with props) apartment.  Must sleep but haven’t yet done my grammar homework.  Le subjuntif anyone?

It's a wrap!

We finished shooting at 6 pm yesterday, on an absolutely gorgeous spring day, in a beautiful park in paris. I had not anticipated how many flowers and blossoms there would be and that made me very happy. Nathalie was quite the nightmare- being a capricious brat and really trying our patience with her antics. But we had another 5-year old in the film, and I realize how relatively great Nathalie is, because the other girl, though equally adorable, was nowhere near the actress Nathalie is.

Friday we filmed in the back storage area of this cinemaplex- all went fairly well and I was feeling okay. We got out of there 30 minutes later than we promised, but I don't think that was the end of the world...but then I learned yesterday that after I had left, one of the crew member's car had the engine left running for a little bit and smoked up the loading dock area. This set off the cinema's fire alarm system, fire walls and all were activated within 1 minute, 4 screenings had to be stopped and the cinema had to refund tickets! I have no idea if they will hold us responsible, apparantly my AD thinks we should just send them some fruit baskets and pray...so we will.

Well, fire alarms and all, I am so relieved it is over. My apartment is a total mess, there is hardly room to walk with the camera and lights and props everywhere, and I can't wait to get rid of it and start anew. The film goes to the lab monday and then the wait begins and we pray we have an image and that image is what we filmed and that the whole thing can edit together into a semi-coherent movie. But I am not going to think about that for at least two weeks.

no time, no space, no energy

I have about 3 square feet of space to make it from my door to the bed- which is really all I need since I'm spending so much more time than I planned at the shoot. Somehow this was going to be the shoot of "6 hour days" that turned into 12 or 14 hour days...how???
It has been so exhausting and I'm dying for it to be over (tomorrow! plus returning gear on Monday)....but today was actually quite good and Nathalie was behaved, a miracle given yesterday I wanted to strangle her. She is a good actress and knows what I want when the camera rolls, but still, why does she have to take a milion hours to get coaxed into doing another take? Well, today was smoother and hopefully tomorrow even more.
I need to get to sleep and prepare my shot lists and so this is a quiet and uneventful friday night. Looking at some stills today made me so hopeful- maybe it really will look cool when it is done- at least no one who sees it will have to go through what we've been through this week.

nothing is easy

After four straight days of filming I am totally wiped out. I haven't been sleeping well. My house is covered in film gear and lights and props and junk. There is nothing in my fridge except film stock and some sandwich meat for the crew. Yesterday Nathalie fell while playing with her brother in the streets and (though she did not really hurt herself) decided she couldn't walk right after that (this is before the shooting started)...so in these shots where she is supposed to be running she is sort of half-limping along. Plus I chose this lovely pedestrian passage that is normally semi-calm, but given that it was "easter monday" (a holiday here), everyone and their mother was crammed into this street where we were trying to film. Pretty awful.

Today was better, we shot in the lovely pet cemetary under perfect weather for a relatively short 8-hour day. But some crew got lost on the way there and some people were mad about the lack of fancy lunch and it still was nowhere near easy. But, it is getting a wee bit better. Or maybe I'm just deliriously tired. I have no perspective. I don't even know if what we're shooting is the movie I mean to shoot or just the one I planned out. Tomorrow we have a day to organize and run around and find props and that is very good. Then three more days shooting and then I will just collapse with joy when this is over. I am not meant for this. Well, maybe if I had a real production company that did all the details and drove me around and made me lunch and coffee. And paid me. Okay, I'll do it.

hello world

it's 1:30 am and I am home, squeezed in between a million cases of lights and camera gear- finally ready to get to bed. very tired. the past four days have been a bit hellish and I think I've gained many gray hairs.
Thursday and Friday preparation did not go as planned. Equipment was not picked up, nothing was smooth, everything basically went wrong and I was freaking out Friday. But we still started shooted on Saturday. We were supposed to stop shooting at 10:30pm, we stopped after 1 am, poor Nathalie, delirious with sleep, I didn't get home till 3 am...plus we were all starving as the assistant "forgot to bring the dinner"...oops. then one crew member's car broke down at 2:30 a.m. on the periphery.... very, very bad first day. today was much better, but still really hard on me. I really hate producing which is a lot of what I'm doing right now- why, oh why oh why. never again will i make a real film without a production company and producer. It's good thing this is my thesis film because I can't keep being the one cooking the lunch, chauffering the materials, and calling the shots. horribly overwhelming and unenjoyable...
I pray this week gets easier. And I sleep.

Counting down

Things are getting extremely stressful around here- feel like it's all barely hanging together and there is a lot of little details to work out. What will the crew eat? How will everyone get to the locations, some of which are quite far away...How will we lug all our crap there? Who can make me a PAL videotape of American television news in the next 24 hours? Will the fake belly be ready on time? And on and on and on.

Yesterday I met with a good editor- thank god I've finally found someone I click with- and I talked a very talented musician friend into composing a score. Today I met with my DP (stressful, he feels I'm not prepared, adding to the actual reality of us not being prepared), picked up the lights at my school (involving practically breaking down the doors to get entrance to the now closed campus), tutored english ("lets talk about making my movie") and made about a million phone calls and emails. And tomorrow it's camera tests, drop film off at the lab, pick up props, meet with sound crew, rehearse with some actors, pick up more props, sent out reminder emails and get sleep....Friday is run around finding gear, all-crew meeting and final mad-dashing. Saturday the camera starts rolling....I hope. So that's really all for now.
Will try to update the blog lots during the shoot. A good record of my madness I hope.

nathalie in the catacombs

nathalie in the catacombs
Originally uploaded by que sera sera.

Just to show you how impossibly cute our young star is, check out this picture from our first day of shooting. What do you think of the costume? Much agony of the coat, which was originally going to be dark blue.

Three days to go- camera tests, equipment pick-ups, rehearsals, call-sheets, food organizing, and a massive prop search are all underway. Tonight I found a peacock feather for the "lost and found". The shoot seems so immense and I am already very tired.

busy bee

It has been an extremely busy week and I keep meaning to blog. The police are still everywhere- I see truckloads of them driving down Blvd. St. Michel everynight. Looking for action? I don't know. The country seems wrapped up in a hugely confusing mess. Yesterday, muh to my frustration, my school was blocked (again). This meant I couldn't enter the buildings, and therefore couldn't pick up the lights I had reserved for the shoot. There was about a hundred students milling around outside the campus, half of them dissapointed and half of them in festive-its-spring-break mode. Most of them smoking cigarettes and enjoying the spring weather. But the ones I talked to were just fed up- they all seem to support the movement but not the tactics. A small percentage of students and administrators, all of them anti-cpe-movement-supporters, hold a vote, announced at the last minute, held in some non-central location, that determines they are going to block access to the university. And it's done.

Well, I'm told I'll be snuck in to secure my lights next week so I'm not going to worry to much. The shoot starts one week from today. I feel good about it and terrified. We actually had a little shoot on Wednesday already- me, the DP, the girl and her mom. The four of us went incognito for a secret location shoot. I would say it went okay- only a few tears shed over a nightgown incident, no more lice eggs in the haircut, one ice-cream bribes, and lots of running to keep up with Nathalie. Why do 5 year olds have so much energy?

budding

The past two days the most amazing amount of buds have suddenly appeared on all the trees. It feels like if I hold me breath they might slowly all pop into leaves as I exhale. I am counting on sudden spring blooms to bring life and energy into my movie. The camera problem has been resolved, I pray, by renting a camera. Money can do amazing things. It turned out much less than I thought- and we'll have a nicer camera model and our beautiful zeiss lenses and that makes me very, very happy. But alas, in a few days we're shooting the tunnel scene- without a permit, alas. Which means, our star must have her costume by then. Yesterday I had an exhausting time looking at every children's clothing shop in Paris for the perfect coat- 5 hours of searching and nothing remotely acceptible. I am apparently totally out of season- all pastel pinks and lime greens. Tres embettant! Plus, our starlette caught headlice at sleepaway camp last week and is now quite itchy. yikes yikes yikes.

Well, the shoot is happening lice or no lice, rain or shine.