Saturday, November 23, 1991

I awoke at 6:45 a.m. this morning, unusual for a Saturday morning, or any morning for me. I tooled down to the director's house for an 8 o'clock call.

Flashback: On Thursday, the director, Katherine, and the other actor, Katrina, and I met for rehearsal at USC. I made my appearance for the 6 o'clock gathering at 6:45. Bad start. Then, we rehearsed for over 2 hours. Suffice it to say we were well rehearsed for the 3 minute scene.

So, the plan was to meet at 8 a.m., rehearse for an hour, and then the crew would arrive at 9, set up, and we'd shoot. In an effort to thwart these plans, Katrina showed up on the scene at about 8:45, sufficiently turning the tables on me and effectively reducing our pre-shoot rehearsal time.

We still managed to run the scene a dozen times before shooting, and then proceeded to do nearly 20 takes. Katherine is going to go nuts in the editing room trying to decide between at least a dozen only subtly different takes. We took a donut break and shot close-ups, a few takes for me, about twice as many for her, for absolutely no discernable reason. Then, we shot some pick-ups, so to speak, mostly getting different angles of the opening shot. The entire project was wrapped around 1:30.

This is, of course, my second experience out of three where over-rehearsing, or over-preparing, reared its ugly head. It would seem to me that over-rehearsing might be the norm, although my fellow actor, in each case, expressed annoyance and fatigue due to the director's methods.

It was only Guise which was quick and painless. The reasons for this may include the fact that it was non-sync sound, plus my "cameo" status, plus a decreased concern for a professional look, i.e. simpler lighting set-ups, simple camera angle (for my shot), and a smaller crew. (For Guise, Todd set up the lights, the camera, directed and operated the camera. I guess the future will show which is the "norm".) (Let's hope it does, anyway.) I would have to guess it leans more toward meticulous and drawn out as opposed to quick and painless.

But it sure is fun

Picked up copy of final version

Singles | Student Projects | Resume