The Year of Archetype: Day 28 / Shooting Day -3

I joke about how the process is equal parts film-aching and filmmaking. If there was as much film-aching as filmmaking, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Sure, I piss and moan about little things, but in the end, I have what I can only describe as a voracious zeal for the whole ordeal, about telling a story in a method that's complicated in process to make cohere in the end.

I've been trying to avoid my old Rules of Filmmaking. One rule of which is that the more I suffer or have a hard time during shooting, the better the product. This mostly came about making my Production I final, which was an uphill battle and which turned out as one of the better things I've done with a camera. Contrast that to my Production II final, which was an ambitious undertaking but which I made with friends and mostly coasted along. The end product was extremely confusing, probably moreso a result of finally getting to use sound and piecing together a wordy plot that required a careful read-through of the script to follow.

So today is Day -3 because Saturday and Sunday are Days -2 and -1, respectively. Preliminary, short-term efforts before the shoot proper. Today involved getting shots of kids entering an elementary school in the morning and leaving at the final bell at the day's end. It's just a scene-setting device to frame the time a certain event takes. And something thematically, probably.

(And no, don't lecture me on the possible legality or ethic of anything. My parents claimed I was going to get either sued or attacked by a protective parent, despite filming at a distance never closer than 200 feet, and never zooming close enough to visibly identify any child.)

It was only two shots, really. Well, two shots on paper; I went for a few different compositions, focal lengths, all that crap. But now, at the day's end, I'm absolutely exhausted. It reminds me how, the day after my first day of Transmissions shooting, I was more physically sore than I have ever been, probably on account of having to move furniture, constantly change camera setups, and do everything myself.

This, though, shouldn't be the case. I woke up at the fairly-generous hour of 7:45 to stage outside the school by the 8:30 first bell. Sure, the windchill was -19 Fahrenheit, and I forgot gloves, and only a grand total of about ten to fifteen minutes outside resulted in losing all feeling in my fingers, following by the extreme physical pain of the thaw, then running my hands under lukewarm water for quite some time.

Later today I staged at a different spot and had to walk a total of about three-quarters of a mile round-trip on a rough trail through the snowy woods, all while carrying a camera that weighs probably about fifteen pounds.

None of that, though, seemed to equate to the dead-tired weight dragging on my eyelids. Maybe the prospective-ankle-twisting walk through the woods did me in, or being out in the brutal cold about an hour total. And, well, also taking my sister's dog on a half-hour walk.

Before I write what I just realized is the obvious answer, I could just posit that it could be sheer mental exhaustion leftover from Paperwork Wednesday, which was far more grueling than I imagined. I've also been reading the script these past two days, revising it here and there, visualizing the whole damn thing, thinking about the shoot and post. That's maybe a bit too romantic, as I mentally approach filmmaking from a more logistical and technical aspect; almost scientific. With regards to the latter, I think today's exhaustion was probably just the culmination of five cups of coffee spaced evenly through the day to avoid a caffeine crash, and said crash is happening right now.