Monday, May 24, 2010

Sometimes The Shoot Is Actually Cooler Than The Scene You Were There For.

Sometimes, you work on a scene that's an absolute ball-buster, but that's OK because it'll all be worth it to get a totally awesome scene onto the screen.  Sometimes you work on a scene that's an absolute ball-buster and you resent the hell out of it because the scene and the movie it's in both suck like a black hole devouring a galaxy.

And sometimes, you work on a scene that's an absolute ball-buster and you couldn't care less how hard it was to put together and you don't give a rat's ass how it ends up looking in the movie because actually being there when it gets shot is cooler than cool with sprinkles and a cherry on top.

To shoot the following scene, we
-were turned down for permits for our first three choices of location.
-had something like 6000 extras.
-couldn't find enough vacant space for holding areas for all of those extras, so we closed down 2 blocks of 40th Street and put up tents in the middle of the street.
-had about 10 camera crews.
-got permission to shoot from a bunch of windows and rooftops of surrounding buildings.
-hired 40-50 security guards.
-hired 25 or so traffic agents (in addition to the cops from the Movie-TV Unit).
-hired an additional 50 Production Assistants to help with moving the extras to and from set.
-rented an additional 100+ radios.
-rented 75 port-o-lets.
-and dealt with a bajillion other roadblocks and details that have happily eased their way from my memories.

Setting up this shoot day sucked.  It sucked bad.
Shooting the scene was a blast. It was getting paid to have a backstage pass.
The scene, as it ended up in the movie is just fine, I guess, but for some reason, they decided they had to focus more on the story than on the band.  Oh, well.

2 comments:

neurondoc said...

Wow! Shooting that scene must've been a full time job for a while...

Nathan said...

I actually made a few stabs (5 or 6?) at writing this up in detail. Each time, it got longer and longer and I found myself hating the scene all over again. :D