Director's Diary - Part 4: All that remains

Hell, we thought this was gonna be fast and easy. Basically what we had to do were some detailshots, a couple of shots of the monitor while being in a chatroom and getting a call, and two tracking shots through the hallway. The one thing that we hadn't have a solution for so far, the thing we thought was the most difficult to do today, was then brillantly solved by our cameraman in a couple of minutes.

What we needed was a blinking button that said "1 new message". And we needed that in one of the takes we had shot on Tuesday in the other room that would play on the computer. He simply took a still from that take and included a nice button in one of the cornes using photoshop. Then he used a program on his laptop to automatically switch between that still frame with the button and one of the same frame without the button in it. Worked fantastically.

Other things turned out to be a lot more problematic. Again, there was loud music playing next door for a while that made shooting with sound impossible. And then it's just many small things that you don't think of beforehand. We needed some scenes in a chatroom. We had chosen one of those free access things ... but today we needed a shot of our antagonist joining that chat we (our protagonist) were in. So we needed a second computer to log in. But since we had only one internet access on location the second computer had to go online via iphone.  JavaRuntime was also not installed on that computer which is why we lost another few minutes. We then realized that this particular chat wouldn't show when people entered or left so we decided to just join and just type a message like "... has entered the room" in ourselves. It worked just fine, I guess.

It was funny whenever we wrote the lines we needed in the chat or made some close ups of hands typing on the computer the other people in the chatroom really wondered what we were talking about since for them it just didn't make any sense the way we repeated ourselves for the takes and all that. We even made it into the ignore list of some user.

For the some close ups we used my hands instead of the actors' hands because he wasn't available anymore today. Hope noone will recognize that *sigh*. But I guess it will be just fine. For the very last shots through a hallway we used a wheelchair for the camera movement. Sadly we had to do some compromises here, again. It wasn't even ground there and we had some little shakes in there and also the hallway was the only time we didn't find a proper way to light it without being too dark the further we got into it or too revealing which wouldn't fit the mood.

But since compromise is the thing I started on with this special, it is also a good way to finish. After four days of shooting the only thing left is one short scene with a third role that we found an actor for just yesterday.

I hope we didn't forget to shoot anything, if so it is all my fault. It was my responsibility to keep track of everything. But I think it'll work. We'll realize that in the editing process. I'm out.