Razor Man

So, we had a heck of a weekend. What began as a rogue film--not for a class, not for any particular organization--became one of the most exciting shoots I've ever encountered. We all kicked ass for four straight days, for what is sure to be an incredible product.

We are all extremely excited about how this comes out!

Thursday:
We arrived on our first location (a field of tall grass) and shot the final scene of the film. We were battling daylight, leveling a dolly with whatever wood we could find, and our costume designer had to make a dress in an hour! We shot a beautiful death sequence; both actors were so engaging and truthful.

We then tried to shoot a scene with four horses and the bandits breaking up...the horses did not really feel like cooperating. One of our actors got thrown...oops. We got the shot, though, or we got part of it...

Thursday night we built a campfire and shot the love scene. We had our G/E team hauling branches and logs out of the woods and breaking them apart with a bat...awesome. The scene went very well. It had the potential to be uncomfortable, but the actors were very good sports and just went with it.
Wrap: 2am.

Friday:
Friday morning at 5am the skelaton crew woke up and went to a section of woods for another death sequence. This scene is the opening of the movie.

One of our actors, Paul, sat by a tree, in the coldest part of the woods (with no whiskey) for about 4 and a half hours. He did really well, and his performance was fantastic. We got some lovely, serene sleeping and forest coverage.

While we were shooting that part, the rest of the crew was at our quarry location, setting up mirror boards and the dolly for a very complicated tracking shot.

We arrived at the quarry at around noon, and shot the betrayal scene. The quarry was gorgeous: enormous slabs of brown and red rocks, thick trees with deep greens. We shot everything but the dolly shot first, including a chilling scream from our main actor as he coughed up blood.

The dolly shot, as we had planned, took a long time to get right. Our actors were so good about it, especially poor John who we had under a slab of dripping rock, trying not to get too muddy.
Wrap: 6:30

Saturday:
We went to the barn at around 6:30am and began setting up. We dressed the barn and hung lights, set up mirror boards, and then we shot all of John's coverage first. At one point we had to set him up with a knife in his shoulder, which ended up looking really nice. Then he got shot twice, and we went outside the barn for his final death sequence. Very cool.

Then we went back in the barn for Kerem's coverage, which is going to look totally bad-ass.

The barn was incredibly old, and gorgeous, but dusty! Our camera team got the worst of it...Elie is still coughing up dust.

Then we captured a few "sunset" shots of Kerem riding away on his horse.
We all took some nice, well deserved showers that night.

Sunday:
Sunday morning we went to our final location at 6:30am. I went in search of a nice tree for the mirror/shaving sequence, and soon found one next to a pond. We had a skelaton crew and our two actors for a few hours as we shot that, while Tyler (our gaffer) was preparing the river with mirror boards and George (dolly grip) was getting the long tracking dolly shot ready.

We then took Will (Billy) to the running location, and I showed him how he was going to run, duck under a fallen tree, scramble through brush, push off another tree, fall, scramble up, leap over a pile of thorns, swing against another tree, and trail off towards the river bank. This, of course, would be in one continuous dolly shot taken across the river from him.

Sooooooo cool.

Once we got that, we went to the final river location. Will got to run INTO the river, get stopped at gunpoint, say a few lines, get SHOT, fall to his kness, then plop face first into the water. Then he got DRAGGED through the river (still face down) and onto a small peninsula, and searched.

Yeah, it took awhile to get it done, but the way we played with the water reflections and the shape of the foliage around us (there is this gorgeous old tree jetting out over part of the river...) will make this one of the most stunning sequences we got.

Then we wrapped and came home!!!

Wrap: 4:30pm
Home at 9pm.

So that's a brief rundown of what happened, during the time we were all supposed to be studying for our Monday morning exams...

Keto