Day 6 – On This Day, Nothing Happened
I’ve decided to jump straight to Day 7 as quite frankly nothing in particular was exciting about this day. It was another large day with 93 SA’s and the only thing noteworthy to mention is after the drama of Day 5 I decided to bring in my own breakfast. Quite frankly, can you blame me?
Day 7 – The Night Shoot
Night shoots are a necessary evil when it comes to filming. In any scene in any movie/show you’re watching there’s always that one bit where it’s dark and you’re made to believe it’s 9pm at night. When in reality it takes 10 hours to film the scenes so it’s deep into the night/early morning to maintain the darkness, the actors are dosed up on triple espressos and donning heavy make-up to hide the insane baggage under their eyes. This occasion, it was a 6pm call-time to get prep’d and ready for the latest finish of 5am. Yay.
In retrospect we were all well looked after, normally on location night shoots you’d be lucky to have a tent over your heads (and this is when thermals can save lives!) but as we did one interior scene in a local period building, the locations department had pre-secured a green room for us which was warm and cosy. I was kicking myself as I expected the worst in being abandoned in a cold, dark forest being eaten slowly alive by the bugs and whatever nasties are out there and I really wished I had brought my laptop with me. But c’est la vie, I spent my down-time killing the world instead.
Another common occurrence on night shoots, which happened on this shoot, is what is called a continuous day. Now as with the night and the fear of the slightest ray of light ruining the continuity of the shots, time is of the essence so instead of you and the crew taking an hour lunch break as per the law, you work through your lunch eating food as you go normally issued out in polystyrene trays and get paid an extra hour at the end, ergo continuous day. Often a controversial ideology as there are positive and negative arguments against it. For example, the extra hour added to your pay-packet is compulsory regardless what time you finished, so as we were actually released early at 1am as we weren’t needed we were actually paid til 2am. On the downside you can potentially work-flat out for hours straight without any respite which has happened to me in the past but luckily this wasn’t the case today for myself or any of the busy, hard-working crew.
Still, night shoots still instils a great mentality within everyone. The majority are surprisingly chipper considering the namely dreary environment.Personally, I think it’s down the the solidarity of everyone being in the same crappy situation and making the most out of it. A few of the guys even suggested about hitting the town afterwards as it was a Friday night. I, on this occasion, was the party pooper who questioned where they would go. Considering our faces were plastered in fake dirt, our hair looked like we’d been dragged through a hedge backwards (a common cliché, but not an over-exaggeration in out predicament) and out necks had been stained silver with the residue from the chain-mail. Like we’d proclaimed “WITNESS ME!” like Nicholas Hoult in Mad Max: Fury Road but then missed our mouths completely. And somehow got it on the back of our necks. And then quietly walked off in shame, hoping nobody would notice the unintentional chroming.
In hindsight, it’s not a great look.