Making the Day

As many of you already know, I finished grad school last May. Before finishing in May, I made my thesis film with a fellow classmate. Things were chaotic, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing half the time, and somehow the film got finished (well almost, but that’s besides the point). Two days ago, I felt like I was in film school again.

Things, ummm, aren’t going so well on set after three days. When you start a day of filming you get a call sheet that has a set number of scenes to shoot by the end of the day. We call this “making your day.” If you don’t “make your day” it’s a pretty big deal. Well, the last three days, yeah, we kind of, sort of, didn’t come close to “making” our days. Basically the problem lies with the director. He is in way over his head and has never really handled working with a big crew before now. (He wrote and directed a film before this that did well in film festivals but it was definitely made by friends and family.)

The first day of shooting, things were very slow. The second day we got ONE shot off before lunch. BEFORE LUNCH! That’s 6 hours and only one shot. This was not, however, for a lack of trying. One of our lead actors needed to have some discussions with the Producers about the direction of the film (and I actually don’t blame him). Now, after a third day of getting only half of our workload done, I don’t know what they are going to do. They might cut entire scenes for filming. The Producers might tell the director that he needs to get himself together and be much more efficient. If not, then who knows what this film is going to be like in a few weeks.

So, the stars of this film are…

I know, I know, this is the fun part. Alright we have three different eras involved in our little film. The old, the spunky, and the new. The senior member of the cast was immediately known in my mind for doing a movie involving a president and a double for the president (due to the original president’s heart attack during…umm…discreet actions). In the movie, the guy who plays the conniving senator is our leading male. The spunky one with a great attitude has been in an HBO series as well as a popular Nick Hornby book turned film about relationships. The third, and youngest of the actors, is female and was on the same HBO series as the spunky girl. She is mostly known for her rebellious character as well as the morbid theme of the series.

Day 4 is up tomorrow. We won’t make our day, but maybe we’ll get 3/4 of it done this time.