Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Christmas Experience begins production

Tuesday November 18, production began on the Vineyard's Christmas Experience, which is now officially called "The {Re}Gifter Show", which will include elements of live drama performed on the stage, but also mixed in with video roll ins, much like last years drama "A Cat Named Bruce", however, The {Re}Gifter relies much more heavily on the preproduced video parts. I actually hesitate to call the roll ins, video, because they are being produced film style, which is much more painstaking.

We completed 3 scenes in the same location yesterday. Actually they are quite short scenes. We put about 9 hours worth of work which resulted in about 4 minutes of The Regifter, but those 4 minutes look phenomenal.

How was it? We shot in an unheated garage so it was cold, really cold but they fed us and gave us hot chocolate so that helped. We cleaned out the garage of 90% of it's stuff to make room for crew, camera, production monitor, lights, props. The second challenge is finding power for heaters, lights and production stuff. The ceramic heaters kept tripping breakers so eventually we had to turn off all heaters.

We probably had 30 people working on that shoot at one time or another. We have a Director (Brad Wise), Director of Photography(Mark Denny), Gaffers, Grips, Production assistants, prop masters, wardrobe etc etc etc. It is amazing to see how much work goes into something that will, in the end, look like 4 minutes of a guy in a garage.

It is exciting to be a part of, i can't wait to see this stuff edited together.

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