I was really pissed off at the production for not having the day after Andy’s departure a day off, but instead scheduling a long outdoor scene to the end of the day. 6:15 pickup was pure bullshit scheduling, when I would’ve really needed a day of rest and reset after such an intensive push with Andy; now, I had to readjust my brains in just few hours to a completely new setting and have only few hours of sleep in between.
Well, what can you do. There I was sitting in a car at 6:45 (yeah, I was late…) headed to a Qingdao Tech University for the shoot. The sun was making its’ way through the thick layer of pollution, which gave an eerie feeling to the morning traffic. I tried napping during the long car drive, but couldn’t get to sleep. David Bowie was singing in the background and I let myself drift through the last week’s shoot eating my bacon and croissants.
Since this would be the last outdoor shooting day and there was no big name actors involved, I knew already the production hadn’t bothered with trailers. But this time, I had my long johns on, so nothing could stop me, not even the freezing Qingdao winds. I was wrong. After sitting in my monitor in the freezing wind for few hours, my legs felt like ice sticks and my face was frozen over.
The first part of the scene was really jumpy. I liked the way the scene read on the paper, but didn’t like the location that much, and the conditions were not nice. I was – the whole team, actually – were all very tired after the big push this week, so everything worked a little slower this time. I tried to tackle the scene but couldn’t get my head around it, and didn’t have time to solve it properly. We had been scheduled for four and a half pages of scenes to be shot for the day, which was a *lot*, and got stuck right in the first lines.
We had to change some of the dialogue on the fly and fiddle with the props and costumes, and all had to be done in a sub-zero temperature. Yeah, the sun was out but somehow it doesn’t warm here the same way. I was grumpy after we finished the first bit, and went out to McDonald’s for a healthy lunch.
We did take our time on the lunch and coming back realized we had been longer out there than we realized. Our production manager was pissed off, complaining to me in Chinese something I understood had to do with the time. Also, we had a scene coming up with a girl in a skimpy dress, and we just couldn’t and didn’t want to put her standing there in the wind for hours. She would freeze over and die, so we changed the scene a bit and put her sitting in a nice car instead. It worked perfectly and gave the character an aura of respect around her, and suddenly, the rest of the day – the remaining 3 pages – went flying by. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon we wrapped the day and went on our merry ways to enjoy the day off the next day, with a nice two scenes in the bag!
Mika wanted to go out to have a dinner at the Big Tits Seafood, and we took Ants and David with us and had some raw beer and seafood hot pot under her watchful big tits and cheerful smile.
A great week done, few more to go!
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