Three Days of The Filming

Three days in a row of filming may not sound like much, but it is when the entire cast and crew are high school freshmen. My parents invited my older cousin Brian from Massachusetts to be the adult supervision over the three days. He also got to play a nunzie as well.  About 15-20 of us gathered at my friend Mike's property to set up the Excavation site and to film all of the scenes in that location.

One lesson I had already learned and which I implemented was to film the scenes that involved the most people first, and then downsize from there. The very first shot was to involve worker characters "digging" in the distance. I use digging loosely because Mike's Dad didn't want us to actually ruin his lawn. I had one friend that disagreed with this decision and decided to argue about it. The whole thing was not a big deal, but the funny part is that the entire argument happened on camera for about 5 minutes after I had called Action.

By the end of lunch on the first day, someone had spilled an entire pitcher of iced tea on the giant sheet of story boards. There was obviously nothing I could do to fix it at this point, so I had to plot the rest of the shots out by memory. Since the storyboards were ruined, I guess we will never know if my memory was accurate.

The only on set injury I can remember is my friend Chris got bumped on the head by a shovel; I believe he fell down while holding it. My friend Kalee had hurt her ankle playing tennis so we did what we could to hide her limp.

Filming inside tents proved more difficult than expected--mostly because this was summer and the tents held the heat inside. That was another argument--it was too hot in the tents, but the longer we spent arguing about the heat, the longer people had to stay in the tents being hot. Life lesson: big problems at the time can be laughed about years later.

At the end of these three days, we felt so accomplished (little did I know how much work I had left to do). We even had a little party and were able to use Mike's pool and hot tub.