Location difficulties...but not difficult locations!

There have been a few difficult sets these past few days, so it still kind of feels like we're going up the hill. By difficult I don't mean that things haven't been running fairly smoothly, because they have- I just mean we have some difficult set-ups.

For one, a prominent location in the story is a forest/forest clearing. We have limited time at this location, so we have to cram in a lot of scenes in a couple of nights. The location itself is perfect- exactly how I pictured it when I wrote the script to take place in West Virginia. It's in a small town near Bastrop, and the owners of the property have been very nice about letting us use it for all of the late night shooting.

But the night shooting has been part of what made the location difficult- even though we have access to power outlets, we only have a four light kit (which includes a 300W, two 650W, and a 1K W) and a Blond 2K open face light. The 2K didn't fit on the c-stand, so we weren't able to use it that night. Our lighting set ups were very limited as a result. In addition, a few miles away somebody was having a huge music party. We could hear people singing and playing folk music at the location that we thought was in the middle of nowhere. When they stopped playing, a train would go by. We heard a few airplanes as well. I remember saying at one point, "Let's get this take before the band starts up, the train comes back, or an airplane flies by."

So that night, I edited a scene that we had filmed in the forest. It looks great, even though it's a really rough edit. I was concerned about how the movie would flow, and with this particular scene I was worried that it might be too dark. But it looked and sounded great, and I was very impressed with the performances of the actors. I'm very psyched to finish filming now...

Second, we're staging a small town folk festival. Luckily my dad has been to enough folk festivals to have an idea of how we could set this up, but it's been a challenge none the less. Getting enough extras, in particular, has been an issue. Many crew members have already had cameos in the film. Yesterday the set-up looked pretty realistic, I'm just hoping that the scenes we're filming today (that will require more extras) will turn out as good. There are two scenes in the movie that I think are the most crucial to the story: The last scene, and one of the ones we're filming tonight. For that reason, I'm both stoked and nervous about tonight.

I've uploaded a few pics from filming at the forest the other night. Enjoy!