Sunday, April 17, 2011

Robowar 3010 AD: The Fall of Mankind

So we've been shooting shorter days than I was expecting. Yeah, we may have front-loaded the picture schedule with shorter days, but that's not entirely the case. I was expecting set building to take longer than it has. But few of the sets require much "special" stuff (like working ceilings you can crawl up into). So the builds have gone quicker than I estimated.
Also, because we're shooting in what I ostensibly think of as a looser and more "documentary" feel, I'm not doing as many retakes for focus issues.
Virginia Logan with her BFG and pleather pants. What more, exactly, do you want?
Are we getting all the dialog in closeups? Yup. Are we getting all the coverage? I think so. But, for instance, we only did 40 takes of picture yesterday. And no more than a dozen sound takes. We even did reshoots of a closeup from an earlier day.
But we're still finishing pretty early.
And that even includes a day like yesterday when we spent a considerable portion of the day doing something else entirely -- taking still photos for our sales rep to make the key art with. He (and his artist) had/have something very specific in mind so we were actually taking pictures early in the day, uploading them to his server, and getting notes at lunch time so we could shoot more stills to upload to him.
As we all know, actually making the movie isn't what's important. Delivering stills and properly formatted DM&E tracks is what's important.
It's critical that we get stills to our rep for this movie by the end of yesterday, and that we get as many visual effects shots for Earthkiller by Wednesday, and that we get visual effects and footage for this movie by next Tuesday, and we get screener DVD's of Day 2 to our North American rep by tomorrow.
So I can't really complain when I'm being harassed for our movies. Nope. Karma police will pick me up and gimme a ride downtown if I do that.
Sara-Doe Osborne as the lazer-sword wielding android Yurra-1.
And the one thing I've learned to be thankful for is how incredibly prepared our actors are. Even when we pull really jerktard moves like removing pages and pages of dialog just before we go to shoot. Everyone's really en pointe and it means the only time we have to cut in the middle of a take is my freakin' fault (usually because I "cut" rather than push the shutter button down halfway for autofocus.)

Joe Chapman as Hammermill with an EMP grenade in one hand and a BFG in the other.
It also helps that all our actors are gorgeous.
I don't know what he was referring to in a recent email, but Joe used the title "Robowar 3010 AD: The Fall of Mankind" which is basically the best title of any movie ever.

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