Tag: Depleted

We concluded the Depleted: Day 419 pickup shoot on Sunday with a truly hellish shoot day.  The day was set to begin at Noon and go until Sunday, with a fairly reasonable driving related shoot.  However, rain pushed back the shooting until after 1 PM.  We then pushed into the dialogue sequences that we needed to record between Jenna (Kat Carney) and Andre (Tim Smith).  DP Nate Eckelbarger managed to come up with an extremely creative way to capture the shot which also permitted us to set up our “video village” (laptop and GV ADVC 110 video converter) on the truck’s inverter.  However, the shot took longer than expected and the inverter failed to shut down before the battery on the truck was drained!  As such, the truck refused to start and had to be jumped in order for us to get the next shot!

Unfortunately, the next shot proved to be an absolute bear.  The truck couldn’t back out of the parking spot it was in, so most of the entire crew ran down to try to push the truck out of its parking place.  (As I was trapped with the video village, I managed to snag some footage of this amusing scene, as did de facto videographer and co-star Eric Henninger!  The footage will likely find its way into easter eggs and DVD extras later on!  To see a sneak peak of this footage with Kat Carney’s thoughts on low-budget filmmaking, check out this YouTube video.)   Eventually we managed to get the truck finagled so we could capture the next shot and we moved on to our next location: a nearly abandoned intersection in the college town of Wilmore, KY (which is all but empty in the summer).  Despite all of the work we had put into finding a location that had nobody around it, the intersection was busier than Time’s Square.  Fortunately, the adroit fingers of Eckelbarger managed to snag a golden shot in the midst of the chaos.  (At that point, I finally stopped asking people to help me commit sepuku on the hot street corner!)

By the time we managed to work on our actual driving shots, we only had an hour and a half to get all of them.  Undeterred, the Director and DP jumped in the back of the picture truck with the camera rig and recorded driving shots that way.  From time to time, at a particularly picturesque location, the two would have the actors stop the truck so they could exit, setup the camera, and grab a tracking shot from the roadside.  In the end, the shoot day was made!  However, everyone was badly sunburned, especially yours truly, as I had neglected to reapply any sunblock on my head or even apply any to my arms!