May 23rd: Day Two

Yeah, this is how it looks the first week...but it's a different story by week 2.

May 23rd

Awake at 8am. I make the hour drive to the location.

First day at Tuckahoe. It’s a park that’s pretty much Camp Crystal Lake without the lake. Woods, some old buildings, a lone train car. It’s WAY out on the eastern shore.

First scene is where Peters takes Lynn to Tuckahoe—they pull up and chat. It starts with two shots, both dollying shots. But it takes a while to set up the dolly tracks and level them, so we only do a dolly on one side, and use the steadicam on the other. The dolly is obviously superior on slow moving shots.

It’s funny, but I haven’t seen Jacky in over a year. We did no rehearsal and I had just assumed she’d slip back into Lynn Blodgett with no problem.(she now lived in L.A., so there was no way to get her in early enough for rehearsal)

But she’s a little cold. Comes off kind of bitchy, so I pull her aside and tell her to warm it up. She’s not aware she was cold, but that’s just how she is. Ice queen.

I’m actually lying about the Ice Queen part, because I think she’s reading this and I like to make fun of her.

Jared Noe messing with sound, Jamie Bender shows his backside, 

Luke Theriault looks clueless, and Dave Mun already looks bored.

The scene comes out okay but we’re running behind fast. Finally we bring Adam Ciesielski in and shoot that stuff. He drives in, skids the truck, and hops out. He’s been a stunt driver so it’s no problem for him.

The scene’s good except there’s a giant lumber mill behind the trees that’s fucking the sound to hell.

It’s like the monster from Lost—you can’t see it, but it’s this gigantic roar behind the trees. Not sure how I’m gonna fix it in post.

We moved to the Tuckahoe kitchen house and set up the interior. We get some nice shots of them playing cards, some exposition talk, and then we break for dinner, still running late.

The final scene of the night has us running to the field on the outskirts of Tuckahoe. Frank and Adam stare off with their binoculars in the distance.

Rigging up lights in the pitch black takes longer than expected. This is the country, man, so there is ZERO light. You can see every star in the sky. But you would not be able to see an albino if he was two inches away from you.

Mun comes up with a neat way to make the barn looks like it has a light hanging off of it, and it looks natural. I communicated a number of times(he tells me) that I don’t want crazy artificial lighting, so he lights it very dimly on the actors. It looks very realistic, but it’s not too pretty.

We both like it though. Now we just have to get a reverse of their pov at the other farm, but it’s pitch black. We may day4night it, but I’m not a big fan of day for night, so we’ll see what we can do.

We finish about 12:30am and mun and I decide to make the drive back across the bridge; we need to pick up some gear for the next day over there. We get there and my wife fixes us steak sandwiches at 2am(it’s over an hour drive).

I try to get some sleep but I get a migraine and my stomach freaks out. Not too great. We have a late start though, so that’s good.