answer: 19 hours

question: how long was the shooting day on saturday?

so even with the best intentions and the most meticulous planning, things fall apart. on thursday evening, i found out that our dp, gerry, would not be joining us on saturday as he was stuck in eastern/southern oregon on a paying shoot that was running long. that left me the option to either (a) cancel saturday's shoot or (b) shoot that day's scenes myself. it was odd getting that information, because just the day prior, i had found out that my friend jered was having to cancel on us for the weekend. and when i told alicia about jered, she thought i said gerry and we both had a laugh about how terrible that would be... however, neither of us laughed thursday evening, when gerry actually did cancel. there were already too many balls in the air to cancel saturday's shoot, so i chose to stick to the schedule and handle the camera myself. and it actually turned out pretty well.

we started out at the basement, where a narrow hallway forced us to use an extremely wide lens and simple, stark lighting. the inimitable bob ham (bobham!) was kind enough to join us that day and spent the better part of two hours hiding in the bathroom and waiting for his cue to flush the toilet and exit. mike and joe were in top form and we were off to a solid start.

then we drove up to washougal, where we were shooting the first half of keira's scenes at home (using dennis and misty plock's duplex). shooting slowed just a little at that point largely because we started on the exteriors and therefore had to wait on things like trains, airplanes, and pimped-out ghetto-blasting mini-vans. but we pushed through and slowly but surely got what we wanted. dana and dylan showed up around 2 o'clock for dylan's scenes as zach. being that we were running a little slow, there was a lot of down time for dylan. the kid's a trooper, though, and it helped that his dad brought along his bike and scooter. he mostly seemed to entertain himself by gawking at an earless cat that was wondering around the neighborhood. (it was pretty creepy.)

i've always felt the mid-evening was the perfect time for nepotism. and sure enough, at 8:30, my mom and sister showed up in washougal to prepare for shooting mom's cameo that evening. her scene was to shoot in vancouver, but since we were running late, they drove the extra 20 minutes or so to hang out and observe while we finished up. two hours later, we were finally at a solid stopping point and we packed up as quickly as possible, and re-opened the house to misty and her kids.

then came the really fun part. at the 16th hour, i realized i was out of dv tape. i had only brought two fresh tapes figuring we wouldn't shoot more than 2.5 hours of footage. i was wrong. so after a minor detour in which i led a three-car caravan astray for 1 mile or so, i dispatched my sister to track down a store that sells dv tape (keep in mind it's after 11pm at this point), in a town she doesn't know very well, while we set-up the scene. luckily it all worked out and by the time we were ready to shoot, she had returned with two consumer-grade tapes (on which the footage looks just fine). the pov of first shot was from the street, and a little scary since all of the equipment and crew were in the middle of the road. luckily there was only one close call wherein some jackass either didn't see us or didn't feel like slowing down until he was right up on us (in spite of our yelling a waiving flashlights). he got close enough to running us down that, apparently, lucy briefly considered having to jump up on the hood of the car so as not to get run over. then he called us dykes and faggots and honked his horn all the way home. some people, eh? so we got back to work as quickly as possible, finishing my mom's scene first, then wrapping up with dylan (who was passed out in his dad's car for most of the set-up time) around midnight. finally, reduced to a four-person crew and two actors, we shot the last scene of the day and wrapped around 2am.

(wow. this post is almost as long as that shooting day. i had a coffee this morning - which i usually don't do - and also i haven't been writing lately. those are my excuses. sorry, if you're still reading this.)

so, sunday... i got to dot's at 6:15 (only a few minutes late) on about 2 hours of sleep. alicia was right behind me (what a trooper!) after stopping to pick up some batteries and creamer for the coffee she was going to make on set. everyone slowly filtered in and gerry (not having suffered through our 19 hour day) started working on sorting through the minor mess we made out of his equipment. mike arrived at about 7:30 and we start running lines. joe was not there yet. at 8am, i tried calling joe and lucy. no answer. at 8:30, i started to get more than a little concerned as there was nothing left to do but wait. so alicia (again, doing the dirty work (isn't she great!)). set out to go wake them up - and this involved knocking on someone's door so that she could ask permission to get into their back yard at 9am and throw coins through joe and lucy's window while shouting their names. apparently the coin thing worked and they showed up on set only a few hours late. but again, it worked out probably for the best. joe had it seemed just enough rest to get through the scene and we wrapped for the day at about 11am, canceling the scene we had scheduled for the afternoon.

i'm hoping that was the worst of it.