Pop Pictures

Appropriately enough, our last day of production (day 26) was a party scene.  If the Suvarnabhumi Airport scene was the one that changed the least throughout the writing process, this was the one that changed the most.   Basically, party scenes are very difficult to shoot.  They have everything that causes problems:  lots of people, expensive locations, night shooting, the need for music, the need for alcohol, and most problematic, the need for fun.

Fun is the tricky one.  It’s very difficult to fake.  If the actors aren’t really having fun, you can tell.  The challenge is to create an atmosphere where everyone is relaxed enough to feel like they aren’t in a movie.  That’s the reason the scene changed so much over time.  It went from being in a disco to a bar to a house, from techno to hip-hop to whatever we could afford, from dancing to running on rooftops to drinking lots of whiskey.

The crew is also rushed.  People can only have fun for a certain amount of time.  After that, they start to get drunk and want to move on.  The paramount importance of filming exists only for us;  for the partygoers in the scene, it’s like “okay, that was cool, but how about we head over to a real party now”.  Everything needs to go just right, and it needs to go just right fast.  So you gotta throw a good party…but not let it spin out of control.

Bob Hoskins once said “directing is like being pecked to death by penguins”.  He was probably shooting a party scene when he said it.  You want to avoid penguin death?  Don’t write it into the script.  Writing is easy, almost criminally so, like playing cards with your grandma.  The repercussions of your writing however, only reveal themselves a year later when you’re sitting there on set trying to shout direction to 20 drunk people over really loud music.

It was a total mess, but in the end, we finished on time and against all odds, it was fun!  So at midnight on February 14, we officially wrapped production on Hi-So!  We were all so tired we didn’t have much energy to celebrate though.  We cleaned up the mess we had created, dragged ourselves into the vans, dragged ourselves home and into bed, and only the next morning did we realize we forgot to wish our loved ones Happy Valentines Day.  Whoops.

Anyway, a job well done!

~ by admin on February 22, 2010.

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