Production update (September 28, 2007)

One Week Out

We're currently one week away from production.  Things are stressful but coming together.  It's always a scramble at the end, as things seem to mystically fall apart and come back together again on a seemingly hourly basis.  We lose personnel, we get charged extra for insurance, we search for food vendors, and a littany of other little speedbumps and caution signs on our way into production.  But it's those times when you have to take a step back, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that you're about to make a movie, that you're working with really good and (for the most part) dedicated people, and that if you keep your whits about you then you'll make something good happen.  In the end it's only an eight minute film.

Camera Department Changes 

This afternoon I'm meeting Ryan Scheer, who has become unavailable for the shoot, to pick up the camera package and go over the P2 Store with my brother, who will be stepping in as 2nd AC / "P2 master."  P2 cards are the discs that the HVX stores its data on.  They hold 8GB of data and can be easily offloaded to a "P2 Store", which immediately transfers data to a hard drive and stores up to 60GB of video, that can then be transferred to a laptop or hard drive.  Anyway, Ryan is going to run Mark and I through the process so that we don't have any hiccups (fingers crossed) on the shoot.  The good news is that Ryan is letting us have the camera package still and that Mark will be able to help out and be more involved in the process, the bad news is that we're losing Ryan and partner Andrew, who are two hard working and talented guys who would have been good to have on set.  So it goes.

Hungry Hungry Filmmakers 

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has offered us food so far: Irie Bean Coffee, Threadgills, and ZEN.   We're still looking for a few more donations to help cover breakfast and lunch for Friday and at least one more meal over the weekend.  We've condensed everything to a three day shoot which, if we stay on schedule, will also mean we need less food.  Which is a good thing.  Because free food is hard to find and filmmakers like to eat!

Vehicle Insurance Mystery 

If someone could please explain to me why getting insurance on a truck for three days is over $200 per day, I would greatly appreciate it.  To insure our vehicle rental is nearly doubling our cost of production insurance.  To cover the truck, which almost undoubtedly will be returned free of any damage, costs more than general liability and almost as much as liability and $150,000 worth of equipment coverage combined.  Oof.  If our truck weighed less than 10,000 lbs., we'd be fine.  But unfortunately it is carrying a heavy load of filmmaking equipment, which tends to be heavy.  I understand that a big, heavy truck is more liable to cause damage than a smaller one.  But I could literally rent a U-Haul truck and pay their insurance for half the cost of the private insurance on this other truck alone.  Production equipment rental houses ought to self insure their vehicles... they could make a bundle.  I realize this last paragraph was probably interesting to nobody.

Here's Tracy being awesome at the road house.