IT'S A WRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, I will need to blog in more details, I'm still on production schedule and only got a few hours of sleep. Here's the great news - I CAME IN UNDER BUDGET (ok, only by about $50) AND ON TIME.

I'm pretty much done, I need to get the opening montage which is the band hanging out in various parts of Venice. Scheduling the actors was a total nightmare so knowing their busy schedules it'll probably be sometime in July. I needed to manage the time as efficiently as possible because I only had 5 days to shoot and I wanted to get EVERYTHING. The band in venice is something I can get anytime because that location is always there. I needed to get all the scenes in the house (about 65% of the film done in 3 days).

The crew was tiny, I had worked with all those guys on the last round of production and I also PAd on a film that they all worked on. Carrie and Ray - our sound mixer (Carrie) and boom op (Ray) from the last round were unavailable so Carrie hooked me up with Jarred (sound mixer) and Ian (boom op) - Matt (DP) has worked with them a lot - if I'm not mistaken, I believe they all came from the Brian Sorbo school of sound training. So even though I had never met Jarred and Ian, they immediately became part of the family. You should see how cute they are, I call them the kids because they are so young, passionate and so efficient. Because the crew was so teeny tiny, Jarred and Ian (as did all of us at one point) helped move lights, they did slate, helped move stuff - really, this film was made in true indie style.

Then, there's Suzie and Natasha - Suzie did make up for us on the last round and when I called her offering her way less than her going rate (everybody on the crew worked for way less than their going rate), like the rest of the guys, Suzie came on board with love and a smile. Natasha came via Craigslist. One of the scenes in the film is the band's photo shoot. I tried reaching out to a couple of local designers but like Laura said on her last post, it's hard to get people to donate stuff. No one wanted to lend me their clothes, mostly, they didn't know who I was. I told Laura to put an ad on Craigslist. When I was talking to Matt about the look of the photo shoot, I told him it needed to be like a post apocalyptic fairy tale, think Disney after the world blows up and starts again. We came up with a Mad Maxx meets Sleeping Beauty theme - we didn't quite get there but I love the results we got. For the Craigslist ad, I told Laura that I needed a cross between Galliano and Gaultier. When Natasha replied, so eager and sweetly I was taken by her, then I saw her designs, OMG, it's like she read my mind - there it was, Mad Max meets Sleeping Beauty. The only problem was that she lives in Canada. That didn't stop me from getting what I what I wanted. Natasha was willing to ship me her stuff, but to ship it back and forth was going to cost almost $1,000 - for half of that I bought her a plane ticket and in exchange she brought EVERYTHING and was a HUGE help on the set. Did I mention she's 24!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then there's the actors - I don't think I've seen an indie movie with as many beautiful people (and they can act, actually, they are exceptional, I predict big things for all of them) - I will blog about this as well because casting your actors is KEY.

I had a few friends come and help a day here and a day there, I am so grateful that they did because the crew was so small -
here's a breakdown;

Cinematographer (Matt)
Gaffer (Brian)
Cinematographer's other "right hand" and P2 downloader (Frederic)
Grip/A.D. (Casey Slade) (he was there the first 3 days)
Grip/Still Photgrapher (Lynn)
On day 3 & 4 we had a lot to do, and with Casey gone we needed additional help
Grip - Jeff (aka Sid Vicious)
Grip - John
Grip - Stephanie
Script Supervisor - Declan
Producer - Meagan Watts

Then there were the people who came to help:
Tony, Mak, Mike, Kevin (Brian's buddy and owner of the 5 ton grip truck - Oh yes, the same 5 ton truck from Laura's Cerrito's pool scene. If you go back and read about our first day of production in Cerritos, you'll read about the heart attack Christine and I got when this monstrous truck was parked outside the Cerritos Swim Center - fast forward 7 months later to a tiny, one way street in Venice with this crazy truck and I almost got an anurism as Brian was trying to park it and almost chopped off the top of a beautiful tree. I thought for sure the neighbors were going to kill me if anything happened to that tree, yes people, this is Venice and in the west side of Lala land we take our trees very seriously - no worries, tree was fine). Then, there's my friend Declan who I met at a class two weeks ago. He's from Europe and came to LA to take the Acting for Director's class and somehow, he ended up staying and became my script supervisor and grip! I also met Mak in that class.

So that was the crew - really, that was it! We shot for 3 days in a lovely home in Venice - that's another blog's worth, I promise I'll write about it once I catch up w/my sleep. I'm averaging 3 hours a night!

I wore many hats as well - director, producer, PA, production designer (I'll share that with Matt, we made the nice house look fantastic) - between the two of us we redecorated the house with colorful artwork, candles, curtains etc. Two nights before filming I went to Kmart, Ross and Bed Bath and Beyond - I spent about $800 (most of the stuff is being returnend in the next few days), but we made that house look AMAZING.

I really wanted to get this as real as possible - I wanted Shane and Dustin to live in Venice and shoot in Venice. Everything, except the photo shoot and Jim's apartment was shot in Venice. The scene in Jim's apt. was shot as an exterior in my apartment complex's swiming pool and the photo studio was on melrose.

I set out to make a movie about a girl from Venice Beach who sings in a band and has a crush on her roommate. The film was inspired by my love of music, the ocean and the RHCP - I know I'm about to give Christine a heart attack, but there's a scene of Shane reading Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis - hey, worse case scenario, we can blurr it in post. I hired Matt as my DP because he got my vision. When I gave him the script I told him to listen to RHCP and then read it, I told him what I wanted and he didn't second guess me when I said that basically, I wanted a 35 minute music video. He didn't try to disuade me, he didn't try to recreate my script, he just got it and we ROCKED IT! I'm really proud of the results we got.

As we were setting up the 2nd scene on the 1st day, Brian and I were standing in front of the monitor and I told Brian that he did a great job because what we were looking at on the monitor was Entourage/Californication quality. Here's how that exchange went.

Brian adds a gel to a light, and tells one of the guys to move something to get rid of a shadow - as I look at the monitor I'm amazed at what this tweak did for the scene

Lucy
Brian that looks great, thank you.

Brian
It's a team effort Lucy, it takes a village and you're welcome.

Lucy
Yeah, well in this case, we're just a little hut in the village.

That's how I think of this whole production, there weren't enough of us for it to be a village, we were just a small family in a little hut working our asses off.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

XOXO,

LUCY