this lossy codec

After a heightened evening of more ventriloquised playback with Steve I ended the night (and the Albuquerque portion of the shoot) booming a dog named Chaos barking through a fence in fake rain. That wrapped me. And a fitting end it was. Afterwards I went out for a beer with the director and some of the producers. Good people. Good times.

Approaching the finish line on this one and time is seeming to stretch on and on. More night shooting and my body is surprisingly adaptive. Last night we were shooting at a junkyard, making our own rain. The noisy rain required us to wire the actors directly but we generally fill in with the boom anyway to capture some ambience (lapel mic’s don’t sound very natural). Well, Cole, being the generous guy he is, decided to offer up the booming for the night to me. What a guy. Luckily I had a little rain gear. Though apparently not enough. I will tell you that fake movie rain is just as wet as real rain.

I’m heading in for one more night of shooting here pretty soon (sans rain), Sunday off and then back in on Monday to reshoot because something happened to a film reel in developing. That means I’ll be doing more ventriloquism playback with Mr. Buscemi.

“That’s hollywood for you,” Steve Buscemi remarks, peaking around the corner of the bathroom stall (the picture shows my view). I was planted in the rear stall of the Route 66 gas station outside of Albuquerque while Steve acted out a phone call with Sarah Silverman. As Sarah had finished her bit last week, I was playing her part (no easy task…). Seriously, though, it wasn’t too hard. After finding out what the best take of her end of the phone call was I imported the track into Sound Studio(a decent enough little sound app for most purposes). From there it was just some inserting silence here and there and (most importantly) inserting markers before and after all of Sarah’s lines. The segments of her dialogue were then selectable on their own with a quick double click. I played each line back in response to Steve’s dialogue. The result was a kind of digital audio ventriloquism. At times it almost felt like the conversation was really happening and in fact several people told me later that everyone (the director, Steve, producers) was really impressed with how smoothly it went.

Ah well, don’t I get to feel good about something?

Only a few more days of this project and then I will have to find something else to blog about (uh…and make some $$). I’m sure something will come along, although the guys I’m working with, David & Cole, have told me they are planning on taking September off. Oh well, there is plenty to do around the house.

This week brought a major change of scenery. No longer are we communing with carny folk through long dark nights. No, this week we are shooting in an office building in downtown Albuquerque. We lounge between shots on an entire floor of cubicles. Perhaps not surprisingly, in my moments of downtime it is harder to stay awake than it was sitting around at 3am. Reminds me of another existence in a not so different place.

On a more interesting note, Sara Silverman (of comedy central fame) has joined the cast at the last minute to play the leading lady. I think she is a great addition to the cast. Going to be a funny movie.

The main cast is:

Steve Buscemi
Romany Malco
Sara Silverman
Peter Dinklage

Each is really great on their own but their chemistry together brings an already funny script to life.

For the past few days we gave been filming on To’hajellii (sp?) reservation, about 45 minutes west of Albuquerque no cell reception for anybody. Really changes the scene. Any down time is spent scurrying for shade (or snapping photos). Really beatiful location. Most of the shooting so far has been way out on a dirt road amongst some stunning vistas. More pics to follow.
Today is Saturday and I’m working and it is HOT. At least a hundred degrees. Sun screen is essential. Don’t think I am that burned yet. Been drinking water pretty much continuously today (yesterday too). Tomorrow I’m off (ahhh) and then we begin a week of night shoots out here. That may be rough. At least it won’t be hot.

Ok gang here we go again. Still posting via email from the phone, which while having an element of spontaneous creation in the midst of life certainly has it’s limitations. Like typing only with your thumb (as in singular). Hopefully I will get the new wordpress iPhone app to stop crashing on launch when 1.1 comes out. For now I’ll deal and try to get the posts happening again.

Sometime around 4am I wandered around the prison and snapped this photo of a wraith like entity sneaking out of the prison. Just so happens we were wrapping at the same time. That’s a 17 hour day…uh…at least that’s what someone told me. I can’t really count or add at this point. Anyway, tomorrow is a new day.

Today we moved inside the panoptic fortress that once was the New Mexico State Penn. This place (not surprisingly) has an odd air about it. There was a massive riot here back in the 80s. Pretty heavy duty stuff. There are all kinds of gruesome stories of what happened here during that riot. Some 33 were killed, some dismembered, some incinerated. Makes even filmmaking seem benign.
Today it seems we may get off a little early (only a 12 hr day) and instead face some ridiculously long day tomorrow. Oh well. Perhaps I’ll get some time to go explore cell block 4, the most potentially haunted place here.