| Nov. 17th, 2007 @ 11:22 pm Blood + Roses Day 8 |
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Well, not done a very good job on this blog keeping thing. Sorry.
A bit sleep deprived at the moment, I moved rooms to share the double room with Simon and Ben on Tuesday night so Kane could get a decent bed, but the last three nights I haven't slept well at all because it seems to get really cold and dry in that room and it wakes me up after a couple of hours. Dunno what happened, the first night in there it was perfect. I actually kipped on the living room sofa for a few hours last night and on Wednesday night. Need to re-rethink the sleeping situation. I can be a very light sleeper and I'm especially susceptible to low humidity.
Things have been going pretty well aside from the odd tiff about lack of runners, late shooting and food not being ready when people want it. Today we finally have runners, two of them, but we have lost Ben (Seth), he's gone back to London for a week to work and get his back fixed up (no we didn't break him, he broke himself doing kung fu way before the shoot). We also have a cook coming in to do lunch from now on.
Because Ben was going away for a week we shot a lot of the Seth stuff over this week, all the stuff except the big final scene with everyone in it which we'll do in the last week when Adam (Ted) and Pamela (Alice) are here. Some very intense stuff and from the look of the rushes we got some pretty impressive sequences. I also did some rather nifty stills photography, unfortunately I can't take stills from scenes I'm in. But as we're shooting HDV we should be able to get stills off the footage as well.
We had the 100th slate today, drank some cheap fake champagne.
I got stubble burn from kissing Ben in the seduction scene and it's a real pain in the ass. The skin went all dry and hard and tight and red by the next day.
Simon and Ben and Kane and I have gone for a couple of walks along the country lanes and I found some wild strawberries which were really gorgeous, also some blueberries and brambles, but they were a bit sour. We saw some sort of big bird of prey and a man who had been hunting with an albino ferret.
What we've been up to...
Mon - we did the freezing cold evening in a field scene, wasn't too bad really (actually it was f*cking freezing), but on watching back the rushes my nose looked very red. Ben and I had our first kissing scenes today, always strange doing romantic scenes with someone you hardly know, but particularly odd for me as I've never played a feature length romantic role before so this is kind of a scale above what I'm used to on the intimacy with strangers front. Fortunately Ben is very easy to get on with so there was no akwardness.
 
Tue - shot in a local pub all day and had dinner there too. Some cool vampirey moments with Seth and victim (Eria Sainio) and the first vampire teeth shots. Took us some time to figure those out but we got there eventually. We had initially planned to have teeth custom made but in the end it made more sense to buy standard ones and fit them with wax and fixodent. I took some cool stills this evening.
 
Wed - shower scene with Kane (Martin), a bit fraught really. The hot water ran out and that and having to play the "I don't want you to touch me" thing while semi-naked in front of a camera crew can make things a bit weird. Plus when we did have hot water the lens kept steaming up. Today was the day for such things though, as we also shot the big seduction scene in the living room in the evening. Ben and I decided we wanted to really grab the audience with this one, having seen the rushes I think when you see the result you will agree that we succeeded. There was a bit of a mini rebellion among the crew over the food situation, despite the fact Ben very kindly ran in after his bit was done and got a meal going while we were finishing up outside on a dream sequence. We hid in the bedroom while they "discussed" the situation. This was one of the longest days of the shoot, but I felt it went really well and we got a lot of really good stuff despite all the challenges like rain, tricky fx shots and crew members having laughing fits at inopportune times.
 
Thur - more fake blood and vampire teeth fun and games. Kane and Ben choreographed a mini-fight sequence to spice things up a bit. I took more cool stills. Kane and I had to go out and reshoot a bit from the first day that had focus issues. Tomorrow being a day off a lot of the cast and crew decided to stay up late drinking, but I was tired and went to bed reasonably early. We did sit and watch through a pile of rushes and it was good to see how nice things were looking, though there was one shot of me I really hated. Watching rushes is something I'm always cautious about, it can be very hard to watch your own performance.
 
Fri - our first day off. Simon (director), Ben and I head to Plymouth to find Ben a burger. That was pretty much all we accomplished. There are an unexpectedly large number of Greek restaurants in Plymouth and they all seem to be owned by the same people as they all have identical menus. On getting home we inflicted White Admiral on Ben (the film Simon and I worked together on in the same location as we shot this), I didn't mind watching it as I had never actually seen the second half of it as my first dvd copy was damaged and when the director resent me a copy I never got around to watching the rest of it.
(posted 2nd Dec and backdated) |