Today is the day every filmmaker has at one point in nearly every project: The Day That Almost Didn't Happen, And By Some Extreme Luck, It Went Well.
My AD had an emergency to attend to, which left me at without an AD and camera operator about fifteen minutes before I was to start a 8.5 hour day. At 8:45 a.m., I was running out of options, and I thought of scrubbing the day and switching it to tomorrow, which I really didn't want to do, given the unpredictable weather was cooperating and I had everything in order.
Sitting at the kitchen counter, brooding over my cup of coffee, my mom, out of what seemed like total nowhere, quietly volunteered to take the task as camera operator. Sure, she's an award-winning professional photographer, meaning she had a natural eye for composition (which I'd need that day, since I'd be setting up shots I couldn't do with a stand-in), but she had zero experience with a video camera. Kind of how I'm a passable cinematographer but an amateur photographer.
I then warned her of the conditions I had prepped my crew for, and which I had witnessed the day prior when scouting the location: narrow "cleared" paths through the woods (cleared mostly by peoples' footprints and my own shoveling) and, beyond, snow about 2-3 feet deep if you took a wrong step.
My mom trooped up and donned some snowpants while waiting for Kyle to arrive. He showed, and with a trunk full of gear, we went out to our staging area. It was only about three hundred feet from the parking lot to our first drop-off point, but I learned that carrying a full backpack, guitar case containing a sniper rifle, and 50 lb. camera case was going to, plainly, suck going through the woods.
We started off shakily. My mom, understandably, was nervous about handling the camera, since the first thing she did, without realizing it, was offset the focus, zoom halfway in, and complete close the iris. Fortunately, after a little instruction, we pulled off the first few shots.
Then we headed into the woods. All told, it was probably a half-mile walk, which I'll now mentally refer to as The Archetype Death-March. Of course, as director and producer and whatever, part of my job is to make sure everyone isn't miserable and be completely selfless and silent when concerned with my own misery.
We finally staged and started the next sequence of shots. We struggled through with focus problems (for its cost, the eyepiece of the XL H1A is frustratingly more of an approximation of the final image than the final image itself), frost getting blown off the trees that basically made it snowing, airplane noise, and getting progressively colder. I didn't do myself any favors with the latter, given I had to kneel in the snow with a rifle for the lion's share of the shots.
We had a brief reprieve when my dad surprised us with some hot chocolate - after, of course, calling my cell and getting obscure direction of where to find us in the middle of the unmarked woods.
Near the end of the morning sequence, I asked my mom to do a close-up and she asked me to set the focus. I told her to guess, since I had run most of the day on f/22 and f/16 and figure I'd hit the hyperfocal somewhere around 4 meters. (Another problem of the H1A: No option to use imperial measurements. I know when something is five feet away and can only guess how many meters that is.) She then told me that, with her glasses on, she can't focus - she only photographs with contacts in. I told it'd probably be fine, but she insisted I check the shot right after.
Of course, it was horrifically out of focus. She started to backpedal, saying that if all the other stuff was OOF she come back out in the woods with me and reshoot it. My least favorite thing to do is to redo something that I've already done, so I was still in a bit of a gloom when we wrapped the morning early and decided to head back to the house before my actor showed for his scenes back in the woods.
The footage, of course, was fine. It was strangely just that last shot that was really OOF.
My actor showed, so we headed back into the woods. My scenes were done, so we needed considerably less gear and props. Also, I could operate the camera myself. Another semi-Death-March later we were back near my poorly-cleared paths, and we started running takes. Pretty straightforward: shooting Stephen's/Drake's part of the scene as a long take that I'd intercut, and shooting coverage from a wide shot, medium, close-up, and extreme close-up. Stephen and I ran over the scene in the studio before we set out, and we had talked about it countless times, but in the wide shot, I, deliberately, couldn't see him except as a dark smudge in the tangled woods.
After I called cut, I ran to his position some fifty feet away.
"I was doing a wide shot, so I didn't see anything," I said. "But I think it was good. How'd it feel for you?"
I had only minimal notes for the rest of the takes. He nailed each part of his scene, and it gave me a bit of a director boner to direct another actor in portraying a character I had written. Add to it that Stephen takes the role quite seriously and had some excellent ideas of his own.
So against all odds, the day was shot, and the shots work. And all that labor and hardship disappears when watching the footage. It's not three people up to their knees in snow, all in various stages of going numb, but a lens floating in midair, telling part of a story.
