August 7th, 1999

Lisa played Barb, the secretary

Mun(with beer), Ganz, Gil, and Shipley
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I remember this day as being kind of fun. The environment was semi-controlled.

Biggest hassle was my stomach--early in the morning it just decided to freak out. To be delicate about it, I blew up the only bathroom in the office, so we couldn't shoot down that hall until the stench cleared out.

As I look at the pics above I remember that Gil got into a little mood and asked Mun if he wanted to shoot a couple of takes. This made me very uncomfortable, since I had seen nothing Mun had ever shot.

I let Mun do it for a couple of takes, but I supervised even closer on those.

August 7th

Earlier than noon, I don't perform well at anything other than complaining, so you can imagine the state of things as I picked up the camera guys at 8:30 am.

We arrived at the office at the scheduled time of 9:30, but there was no one to let us in. Jeff, one of our actors for the day was already there, and after a few minutes, Ganz arrived with the key.

We hustled all our equipment in and set up.

Rick Shipley, a local filmmaker who had helped us cast a lot of our talent, showed up to help us out. He shot a movie on DV called Dangerous Mode, so keep an eye out for it.

The girl who would play Barb, the secretary at Aric's workplace, is named Lisa. She and her boyfriend Brian showed up. Shortly after, Duke arrived. He played Brad, another of Aric's co-workers.

As we set up, I could quickly tell we'd have a problem shooting sound in the office that was to be Aric's. It was small, and the sound was reverberating the slight camera noise right into the shotgun mic.

So for every take, we would shoot film and sound, then another take without the camera, so I could try to place it in. I've a feeling, though, that we're going to be doing a lot of ADR(Automatic Dialogue Replacement). That's a tedious process and isn't exactly cheap.

We started rolling through the scenes, but some of the people we were using weren't actors, so they'd flub lines left and right. I had to have Gil get a lot of coverage from behind in case I had to just dub in the lines while the audience is staring at their back. I've had to do it before, and I did it with success, so I'm not too concerned about it.

One of the funny incidents: We didn't have enough hands to do the slate, so we had the actor in the scene doing it. It was something like Scene 33, Take 2. He reads Scene 33, Take 6. None of us could figure out where the six came from, but that's one way to make it tough to sync up sound in the editing room.

As the day wound down, it turned out I didn't have enough sound cable to run outside around the side of the building, so we had to scrap that shot for the day. That made two scenes total that we missed. It looked like it was a good thing that I'd left an extra week for anything we missed.

We were probably going to need it.

We wrapped about 9:00 pm and I flew home. I was asleep by 10:30, so that the next day I wouldn't be comatose.