On Saturday, while Kyle had the cast and crew shooting scenes on the side of the road, I spent a couple of hours hanging around the trailer trying out a new target I bought for my .22
I did get one jackrabbit on the trip. Unfortunately, I got it with my car.
Thanks to Scott Halford for this photo. Lots nicer than all the other photos on this blog that were taken with my phone.
A year ago I wrote and acted in a short film for Kyle Mallory. I even blogged about it last April. Kyle liked the script, but he wasn't happy with the way the film turned out, so for the past year he and I have talked about remaking it. Last week we finally did that.
Kyle got together the team from our 48 hour project (Team Firepants), and we headed out to Skull Valley to shoot in the desert. You know you're in a fun place when you get off the highway and immediately pass a sign that says "No dumping nuclear waste without a permit".
We set up and shot the first scenes in the middle of the night on Friday. Scott Halford was on set, even though we really weren't going to be doing much editing yet. I think the main advantage to having him there was so he could transfer all the footage from the camera's hard drives to his editing bay and they could use the hard drives again.
So Scott spent the evening in the trailer teaching his assistant editor Gillian some of the ins and outs of Final Cut Pro.
Since my work on this project was really over about a year ago, I had the luxury of coming and going as I saw fit. About 1:30 in the morning I decided I was tired and I just went into the bedroom of the trailer and went to sleep. They kept shooting until 7am, but I slept right through it. Then they all drove back to Tooele where Kyle had hotel rooms. Scott and I stayed in the trailer. I was up from then on, but I still got the best sleep of anyone on the picture.
About noon on Saturday the group all came back to the campsite and got ready for the second day of filming. Most of the shooting was in a car and on the side of a road. It needed to be out in the middle of nowhere, and Skull Valley was the perfect place to look like the middle of nowhere, because that's exactly what it is. We were a few miles from Iosepa, which consists of a graveyard and a monument to the town that dried up and disappeared sixty years ago. The funny thing is Iosepa is the name on the highway exit because it's the closest thing to civilization anywhere around.
It was well over one hundred degrees and we just cooked all day. In the picture above, Richard Terrell holds the boom. Behind him is Chazz who was shooting behind the scenes footage. In the blue cap and tan shorts is Jim, who I knew from the Utah Screenwriters Group. Jim helped as a grip for this shoot. Standing in the shade of a large flag are Mike Terrell and Wendy Macy. Mike reprised his role for the team as production design. Wendy was an actor in the team's last production, but this time she was here taking care of hair and makeup. Pushing the dolly in the gray shirt is Cory Anderson, a new face to me but a guy who knew his way around the set. You can just see the green sleeve of Chris Forbes who was back as director of photography, and in the red shirt is the assistant director Clayton Farr, who was a real professional all the time.
Here, Kyle (center) discusses the scene with the actors, from left Kellie Cockrell, Robert Easton, and Jamey Martinez.
I broke off and went back to town about four o'clock in the afternoon. Then on Sunday morning, we got to do our work in a more civilized environment. We shot in the front yard of a very nice home in North Salt Lake.
Here Chris Forbes shoots through the car window to pick up some detail shots of Kellie shuffling through maps and papers.
I'm interested to see how this film turns out. I'm always nervous to shoot things at night because I rarely see it come out looking good. Of course, I won't really be able to compare this version with the version we shot a year ago because Kyle's the only one who ever saw the way that film turned out.
Still, here's hoping.
