The Production Hangover

A year after beginning an attempt at shooting Meter, principle photography is complete… Maybe.

The shoot went rather smooth despite all the disasters we had if that makes any sense at all. The day started off with me right on schedule and the last minute resources filling in with every stop I made. I even had time to visit with the folks awhile.

The only worry of mine at the time was the article that was published in the paper earlier that day. The article had come off that we were actually firing off a gun in downtown and that was obviously not the case. The gun fire and blast were to be CGI’d in post, so I was a bit worried that we would garner a medium sized crowd downtown that may interrupt our shooting if they could not be contained.

I pulled up to the square at 3:45pm and immediately began unpacking. Freddy and Mark began rehearsing as I put up lights etc. We were to pick up the Taxi at 5:30pm. With the newspaper ad making it clear that we were using a fake gun we decided last minute to do the "Action" scene first and get it out of the way. This may have been the wrong move because as three of our crew members bailed on the project last minute, we found ourselves short staffed with our primary electrical connection dead, we lost nearly an hour and a half of production time.

Then we ran into trouble with the taxi rental where the cost went up and the cab had to be back by midnight and so we rushed through some setups with the alternate plan to send this cab back and then rent another one at the standard, $20.00 an hour rate, but my wonderful wife smoozed the man and we got away with keeping the cab all night for $100.00, but it did not change the fact that I had rushed through four set ups and we had broken our momentum with driving the cab off the lot and putting it back on again. By the shoots end it was closing 4:00am and I had not gotten all the shots I wanted and I worried that I had missed a couple of key shots for the action scene, due to the extreme pressures of the time loss, but I was confident that I had indeed made a descent film on a shoestring budget and with what I had seen on the video assist, the film looked and felt great through Phil Vaglia’s pristine Cinematography and the performances were tremendous and dead on through Mark Alton Rose and Freddy Robinson’s talents and I could appreciate that no matter how simple and little this film was when I was typing it up three years ago, I had followed through. I had not compromised and had dedicated myself to completing it and succeeded if only to have suffered a few, "rusty spots" in the filmmaking process that now, would carry on to a better production next month.
I was depressed that it was over, but relieved to know I still had what it took.