Nathan, Nathan
Quite con… trathan?
How did your Thursday go?
[On Thursday night after I got to work I sat down and started writing about the final shooting day of Season 3, Episode 1. When I signed into the blog the next day Nathan had already written a summary of the shoot. Looking over mine now, I did cover some of the same stuff, but there isn’t a whole lot of overlapping of ideas. I decided to go ahead and post mine up as well. Enjoy.]
We had our final Thursday Meeting for this ten-weeks. It was pretty productive.
To start with, I woke up pretty early, so I left out a lot earlier than normal hoping to avoid traffic, which worked a little. Then I got a call from Nathan saying he was going to be late. Go figure. He got home pretty quickly though, and he put dinner in the oven, some sort of automatic pasta. We looked for some props, put the front license plate on my car, and by that time dinner was ready. We watched an episode of Case Closed while we ate, and then got to work on the last footage for Season 3, Episode 1.
Our ad-lib skills were up to snuff, and we found some silly things to do with the scenes. For the scene where Stout Man confronts a prank caller, Nathan intended to dress up as a woman and play the prank caller. I told him as we shot that we should probably just do the woman as a voice, like Charlie Brown’s parents but comprehensible, since he was going to do the costume for the Public Access Script Review scene. The only thing I didn’t keep in mind was that we didn’t deliver the lines in one constant dialogue. So later he got his wife to motion her hands and speak the lines.
[Note: Nathan seemed confused as to why I suggested not using the Nathan in drag bit for the prank caller. There were a variety of reasons, or I probably wouldn’t have said anything. First, as I said above, we were already going to use the drag bit in the Script Reviewers segment. Second, it’s something we haven’t done too often, but occasionally do, where we speak to a faceless individual. Third, we were working against fading sunlight, and as Miguel talks about in the Sniffles (sniff) history, when the sun starts going down abruptly, lighting problems ensue. Fourth, and probably most importantly, we were trying to figure out the logistics of how to shoot everything where Nathan has goatee (the Nathan character) and Nathan has no goatee (female characters and Greenly Meadows.) We seemed to be confused, so I figured we could either create a flow chart, or for the reasons above as well, not shoot the prank caller. Although Stout Man would say that the villains should be shot. The rest of the shooting didn’t turn out to be that complicated, but that’s fine.]
We did a scene where both of us had to hold the camera on ourselves and run. I was worried that the footage would be bad because they were such strange shots. I suggested we look at them, but Nathan was sure they were ok. It turns out Nathan’s cuts out halfway. He’ll possibly have to re-shoot, or edit my shot to look like his.
Then we did the Public Access Script thing, which was pretty easy. And finally the Greenly Meadows segment, which I think was about to make Nathan cry. The lines are pretty precise, and he kept getting tripped up. Finally he did a passable take, but by that point he seemed to know the lines pretty well, so I told him to try one more time. He delivered the lines almost flawlessly.
He made the choice to do the video encoding immediately, so that he wouldn’t put it off. There is a scene where a globe hits him in the head, and when you see it you may believe that we found a funny sound to put in there. The truth is that was just how it sounded. It really made me laugh, and I told him he should keep that sound.
[He called me Saturday and said that the editing was going pretty well. The goal was to have the episode online by 11:59 pm Sunday, May 16, 2010, but even if it takes him a day or so more, I think we did a good job with this, and I’d rather it look good than for him to rush it. Nonetheless he said he has Sunday open to work on it, so maybe.]