These Gloomy Days

Here I am again, huddled up with my coffee… and today I’m alone on the Swork Coffee patio, watching the clouds gather overhead. You can practically see the storm coming in. I really do love this weather to shoot in, though. It takes so much time to deal with the glaring sun when you don’t have a truckload of reflectors and diffusers… On a gloomy day like this you just use a few small reflectors and it takes a fraction of the time to shoot something… and the actors’ skin looks even and smooth.

Should I bang out a script and do a shoot right now before the sun goes down? I can be impulsive when it comes to shooting, but better not be that impulsive today…

Cold damp weather isn’t too much fun for the actors though, despite the fact that they look better. On an independent shoot in the hills there’s no trailer to get warm in. I remember the day we shot some of the “Blood Sucking Babes from Burbank” attack scenes in the mountains it was freezing cold like this… Especially one scene where Wendy (Ker’in Hayden) is running around in the brush in her bra and panties, biting Josh’s neck (Kevin Surrey) and then full-on eating him with blood covering them both. We had a very realistic foam rubber arm that matched Kevin’s skin tone perfectly… but we needed a shot of the blood totally drenching his shaking real arm first.

Ker’in and Kevin were freezing cold, but hung in there to get a great attack scene. Cold, sticky mint-flavored blood matted in their hair didn’t help, either. I was shooting camera that day, and I even had some of the sticky blood on my fingers which was glopping on the side of the camera, too.

On second thought… I’m definitely not going to shoot anything today… I’m just fine sitting right here!