The making of/night of the short film L'amour de Montparnasse! (part 1 of 2)

Waiting out side the gates the public left and we moved in.  It took an hour of setting up make-up, wardrobe, craft service and the first shot.  Due to the necessity of me having to multi-task I was running around like a headless chicken with no one to help in the behind the scenes as they were all setting up the jib arm and dolly.  Thankfully Chantelle who was the Travel Town representative was great and couldn't have done half the set up of make up and wardrobe without her.

http://www.traveltown.org

That day we found out that our shooting time had been given a limit.  Initially, we were able to go on longer than we had paid for if it was necessary which was great, however, the TV show Flash Forward had booked the location from 4:30am which followed on directly from the time we had paid up until.  This meant that we didn't have any leeway and had to get the shots, if we didn't then we couldn't afford to come back and shoot again; this put a cloud of anxiousness over all of us.

The first shot was the most trying for us.  We had smoke machines set up underneath the trains with a couple of guys hiding with them ready to set them off;getting the timing and the right amount of smoke was certainly a challenge!  Lights were set up with long leads running from the generators that were out of hearing distance and the extras were in place.  Because of the limiting amount of pre-production time and budget we only managed to get 6 extras with full costume; one of them was me!  I appear in about 4 seconds of the film riding my bike down the platform, great fun!  Two hours of precious time passed and we'd only succeeded with two shots in the first set up.  Toby was brilliant keeping his cool together as well as working with minimal crew to get the set ups moved smooth and fast.  Having been on set with him numerous times it was great to see how after being under the guidance of Director/Executive Producers both Randy and Craig Zisk on TV shows Monk and United States of Tara he had picked up so many things which made him able to know exactly what he wanted out of the actors and the shots.  It helped us to get all the shots we needed 100%.

Ten shots in total. We took it in shifts to have a 30 minute break to have something to eat and get some caffeine in us.  One of the difficulties was producing Tobys' tea as that is his vice for getting him through a shoot and as you can imagine when everyone else is on coffee, tea isn't the most easy thing to produce on a small production in a train museum!

We had several big dolly moves that were a bit bumpy but nothing that good old 'fcp smooth cam' couldn't fix in 15 minutes!  Our longest dolly was 12 metres which was when they run down the platform to hide...you'll have to see the movie to see the whole shot but there is a bit in the trailer.

Will continue with the next 6 hours in a couple of days as have to get on with some editing of another project.

Thanks for reading!

H&T