I’m half asleep as I write, laying on the floor of my hotel room, exhausted from the little bit of sleep I had last night and by the energy expended on this, our first full day of shooting for the film.
My producer and I arrived in Aberdeen on Thursday evening, with most of our crew (about half from Los Angeles and half from Seattle) landing in town last night. After a dinner at a local (but apparently a chain popular in southwest Washington) Mexican restaurant, we all met to talk about the task ahead. Some of us, the more hearty souls, ventured over to a local watering hole where we got to know each other over pitchers of Oregon microbrew Mirror Pond (according to the bartendress, “the only one of the importeds that doesn’t taste like crap”) and took on the locals in pool and head-to-head karaoke.
This morning, on little more than three hours of sleep, we gathered together and ventured over to Aberdeen High School, where we were going to be shooting a number of scenes, both with students and without. Luckily for us, my old friend Bela flew up from Los Angeles for the day to shoot steadicam with us. Additionally lucky, the students were completely right on, just so easy to work with and excited and, well, totally real. When you’re around a bunch of actual high school students, you really realize how all the “high school” students on television are actually 24.
Later in the day, we moved over to downtown Aberdeen where we shot in the rain (it’s been raining on and off since we’ve been here, hardly news to Aberdonians, but worth noting to other Angelenos) and tried to come off with succinct answers to the question “what are you shooting”. One guy, when told, warned us ominously that we better not “do Kurt wrong”. I later learned that other crew members had spotted a gun in his waistband.
All in all, today was pretty amazing. By any standards, first days of shooting are difficult. A lot of people are working together for the first time, you’re in a strange location, you have unpredictable people as either actors or subjects, oh yeah and it can rain. For whatever reasons (I’ll give credit to my crew and all the folks at Aberdeen High School who helped make today work) we had a great day. We never fell behind by more than 15 minutes and we ended up wrapping early.
Tomorrow, we are joined by Charles Peterson, legendary Sub Pop photographer and all-around great guy, who will be shooting still photographs with us (which will later be matched and intercut with motion 35mm). There are more locations tomorrow, a couple of which seem particularly challenging, and there are calls for more rain. But here’s hoping that day two picks up where day one left off.
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