This week the BCinemaTV Talks Podcast had us speaking Christian Jude Grillo. Christian is an all around artist. He writes, produces, directs and makes music (now under the name PuppySlut).
The Topic: As one does with many conversations, Tina begins the interview by asking Christian how he is doing and the topic of the crazy "Spring" weather the East Coast has been experiencing came up.
This strange weather is worse this year than in the past, but it's hardly new. I find that since I've moved out of Central Florida the weather has become less and less predictable. To a filmmaker this is wrought with problems and Jack vs Lanterns ran into most of them. To hear how the weather affected some of Christain's productions listen to the Podcast.
Was that Snow?
A lot of shooting on JvL was scheduled around when out of town talent could be here. Anjanette Clewis had time in January. We don't generally get a lot of snow here in January, but during her short stay we got our fair share. I finally wrote a new scene in using the snow just so we wouldn't lose an entire shoot day. I spent that afternoon cancelling an rescheduling other talent because the drive to the house was dangerous and then shoveling the driveway in case we needed to get out for any reason.
The following day snow and ice were still a concern in nearby Asheville, but we had a location that we weren't going to get another shot at, so we HAD to shoot that day. Fortunately, Brewier Welch has no trouble driving in the snow and GRIM got Anjanette and I around no problem. It even hauled the equipment, which we then had to carry over ice to get into our location. Fun!
Wind:
The Topic: As one does with many conversations, Tina begins the interview by asking Christian how he is doing and the topic of the crazy "Spring" weather the East Coast has been experiencing came up.
This strange weather is worse this year than in the past, but it's hardly new. I find that since I've moved out of Central Florida the weather has become less and less predictable. To a filmmaker this is wrought with problems and Jack vs Lanterns ran into most of them. To hear how the weather affected some of Christain's productions listen to the Podcast.
Was that Snow?
A lot of shooting on JvL was scheduled around when out of town talent could be here. Anjanette Clewis had time in January. We don't generally get a lot of snow here in January, but during her short stay we got our fair share. I finally wrote a new scene in using the snow just so we wouldn't lose an entire shoot day. I spent that afternoon cancelling an rescheduling other talent because the drive to the house was dangerous and then shoveling the driveway in case we needed to get out for any reason.
The following day snow and ice were still a concern in nearby Asheville, but we had a location that we weren't going to get another shot at, so we HAD to shoot that day. Fortunately, Brewier Welch has no trouble driving in the snow and GRIM got Anjanette and I around no problem. It even hauled the equipment, which we then had to carry over ice to get into our location. Fun!
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| Added sequence due to snow |
Wind:
One brilliant idea I had to give a larger scope to JvL was to include a "festival". It's a movie trope that all of these horrible things happen during a big festival in a small town. Who am I to ignore such a tradition? The difference here is that neither the festival nor the Gala are even under a threat of being cancelled because of the killer pumpkins. Nobody in town knows about the trouble long enough to make a stink about it before falling victim to a gourd over the head.
My idea for the festival set was to set up tents on my cousin's land (Thanks Sprinkle Family) and film the close ups there and then cut that in with festival stock which I already had. It was a good plan except for one thing. A wind storm that was blowing our tents down long before we were finished filming. I was forced to finish the shots indoors. Luckily, my wife had been keeping track of the weather and warned me about the impending storm. I had shot background plates first so we were able to match things up pretty neatly.
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| On Location before the windstorm hit us hard. |
The Rain!
The "slight rain" we were expecting the last night of filming did not give us quite as much warning as we needed to correct that nightmare, however. What we got instead was a near monsoon. The rain fell so hard it washed away parts of my driveway. When you see a bunch of disjointed, rewritten (that night) studio shots in the finale it's because we were forced to film those in studio "on the fly". We had figured we could around a little rain, but a "little" was not what we got.
I had scheduled a pick-up day, but a cast member had been surprised with a gift for that day and it was "non-refundable". I was left either shooting in studio or adding about 20% to my budget in order to reimburse someone for what everyone else saw as a pleasant surprise. It was kind of like my own personal "Superman's Moustache" in "Justice League".
I had scheduled a pick-up day, but a cast member had been surprised with a gift for that day and it was "non-refundable". I was left either shooting in studio or adding about 20% to my budget in order to reimburse someone for what everyone else saw as a pleasant surprise. It was kind of like my own personal "Superman's Moustache" in "Justice League".
So, in the end unpredictable weather can really change your plans and if you don't have the money (and thus the time) to throw at the obstacles you have to be creative just to finish the movie, which I haven't even accomplished with Jack vs Lanterns yet. I'm pretty sure I have shot everything I need, but I definitely didn't get to shoot everything I wanted. The movie will never achieve the vision I had while putting it to paper. Everybody complains about the weather, but only supervillains ever actually do anything about it.
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