Vamp II

The pom poms and the naughtiness have been postponed a day due to the exigencies of production.  Instead, we'll have a look at last Saturday's return of the International Space Stations's Expedition 24 crew.

Landing in Kazakhstan in their Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft, astronauts Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko are once again welcomed with a blanket and an apple.

You may also notice that Skvortsov has half a pickle -- clear evidence that upon his return he tossed back a shot of vodka.

Extra! Extra!

Before we get to the pom-poms proper, we need to pause for a moment and acknowledge the important work of the background player.

Yes.  We do.

The big soccer game scene is being shot at a location almost two hours outside of Kiev.  Many crew have relocated to hotels out there since we're there for five days and a twice-daily commute to Kiev and back would be onerous indeed.

I hitched a ride out there with Ksusha and a small cabal of Camera Dept. elites (I say 'elites' because just try making the movie without the guys in the van that evening.  Go on.  I dare you.  I double dog dare you.)

This particular vehicle had no discernible suspension system, which is unfortunate since the roads generally had no discernible flat parts.  As such, there was much bouncing and jostling.

So after winding our way over many a highway, byway, country road, garden path and a sandy trail that seemed more like it was going to empty out on a beach, we find ourselves at the location.

As you can see, some of the trucks were tucked cozily, nestled, if you will, against a high berm that really seemed more like a kind of levee.  Still, without water, is it really a levee?

Doesn't matter.  What matters is that the soccer game scene requires over 200 extras at any given time.  All these people need to be clothed and shod in 1812 outfits.  That's the year 1812, not one thousand eight hundred twelve outfits.

So all these folks coagulate around the wardrobe and hair/MU trailers and wardrobe tents and the various pieces of scenery flotsam tossed around the area.

Okay, so that doesn't look much like a scrum of extras (Lauren, that's 'scrum' number three!).  But trust me, there's a horde of them.  They line up at whatever station they're ready for (hair, MU, wardrobe, etc.) and get semi-to-ill fitted and given their garb.  As you can imagine, precision tailoring is not the chief value here.

And then they play... the waiting game.

To be an extra (or background player) is to wait.

I remember back when I was 12, my mom took my brother and I down to the Cotton Bowl to be extras in a big football scene for "Semi-Tough". Or was it "North Dallas Forty"...?  No, it was "Semi-Tough".  I remember because Michael Ritchie directed and it starred Bert Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson.  I don't remember if my sister Liza was there or not.  She would've been seven.

So there we were along with about 5000 other saps in the dead of a Dallas winter freezing our asses off. I could barely see all the cameras and other filmmaking stuff going on down on the field but I was riveted. They were making a movie!

But of course it was all about the waiting.  Some extras do it better than others.  Some sleep.  Some are natural raconteurs.  Some hit on girls (with varying degrees of success).

Others go Full Troubadour.

And of course it helps when other people know the words.

Some people leer...

Some rock rad specs...

Still others stand off awkwardly in the distance.

But still they wait...

Soon they'll all be rustled up and corralled over to the set.

Sets meant to only be seen at night always look funky in the day.  But that's one of the fun things about moviemaking.  Well, fun to me, anyway.

Naturally, any ode to extras must include an ode to the team of assistant directors who must necessarily wrangle all these people.  I don't have any actual photos of these heroes of patience and forbearance but believe me they're there.  My brother Mark actually was a pirate wrangler on the Steven Spielberg movie, Hook.  Oh the tales he could tell.  And has, actually.

Meanwhile, actors and directors are arriving...

(Having just pulled up, that's Marius on the phone down there in the middle of the frame.)

Tomorrow, pom-poms.  I promise.  And we get a little naughty.

Coming Soon: Love Among the Pom Poms

Vamping

Fresh from the happy resolution of my oatmeal crisis, I now stumble into another.  The battery charger for my camera has crapped out.

My treasured Nikon D700 is many things.  But it is nothing without electrical current.  I have a few potential snaps left in the battery power that remains so I'm conserving them.  But without a new MH-18a Nikon EN-ENL3 Lithium battery fast charger I'm dead in the water.

Mark has been good enough to make an emergency run in Los Angeles to Samy's Camera and has purchased two new chargers for immediate dispatch to me here in Ukraine.  And producer Eugene Efuni has been good enough to be the mule.  But Eugene won't be back here till sometime in the opening days of October and so till then I'm like one of those guys on a life raft full of people but with only one Hershey Bar.

I know, you're probably thinking, 'What, they don't have Nikon parts in Kiev?'  Trust me, I've tried.  Simon has been good enough to do the legwork on this crisis.  It turns out the answer is a conclusive no. At least insofar as the MH-18a fast charger is concerned.

So here's a photo of the back of my apartment building.  I go in the blue doors nearest to camera around which those people are loitering.

I then take the elevator up to the fifth floor to my apartment.  I already showed you the elevator.  Stereoscopic Supervisor Jim Carbonetti and camera operator Richie Moore live in the same building but farther down.  They go in doors farther back in the photo.  You would think I'd run into them back here every once in a while but I never do.  I mean I never do.  Of course, we keep wildly different hours.

So then just to the right in this photo is the tunnel to the street.

Just outside there is Tolstoy Square.  I make a hard right to walk towards the editing room.

Here's a photo of a couple of female body builders painted gold and wearing Crocs.

They were in the scene at the health club.

Man, my battery charger can't get here fast enough.

Common Knowledge

Everyone knows that Stitch comes with me on every show, right?

I know, it's a little junior high girl -- hell, it's a little nursery school -- but I'm not gonna argue with success.

I'm Flush!

One of my most favorite people on the whole entire planet who shall remain nameless Ann Cummings has taken it upon herself to rescue me from Oat Deprivation Syndrome.  Ann is a senior design producer for a popular American television show that shall also remain nameless.

Consequently, this is a woman who knows how to by God get things done.  Taking pity on my withering frame from lack of essential maple and brown sugar, Ann resolved to do the merciful thing, the humane thing and not let this tragedy become a full blown catastrophe.  Or vice versa.

Ann sent eight boxes.  Each box has eight packets.  That's 64 oatmeals!  64!

I think I'm gonna cry...

Dinner For Two

The night before I got sick I had gone up to the set with Simon and the lovely Natalya Papach (seen below sporting the latest in 3D eyewear...)

Packed into a tiny set, cast and crew worked on a scene involving Napoleon and Rzhevskaya enjoying a peaceful dinner.

It's here that I believe my germy fate was sealed.  Not a whole lot of room to move around in.  But that doesn't seem to bother Irek, space hogger, he.

In truth, Simon had been sick for a few days before this particular visit to the set, so it's entirely possible the chain of contagion came from him.  But of course, he could have gotten it from a previous visit to the set which means we're right back where we started.

Obviously, blame is pointless.  Simon.

That's not Simon.  That's Vladimir Zelensky.

On set there was this kind of house band.  More like a folk combo.  Or maybe an ethnic trio.  I wonder if they've been to the House of Writers?

I'm sitting in an armchair doing this posting but I'm feeling really drowsy.  Drowsy and a little hungry.

See how after mentioning I was a little hungry I put a photo with a fork in it?  Trust me, you're not gonna get that kind of thematic unity on the other 'Napoleon' blogs.  Believe me.

It just occurred to me that I'm out of butter.  In Russian, maslo.  In Ukrainian, I don't know.

Hey, remember that time when I first went to Moscow and I didn't know the word for butter and so I bought this stuff I thought was butter but then it turned out to be sour cream?

(actual archival photo of sour cream thought to be butter)

You know why?  Because the label had a picture of a cow on it.  That seemed promising.

I really, really really want to cut the scene I'm talking about here.  It's hilarious and has a fun fight beat.  I don't have photos of that.

But you can tell people think it's funny:

Uh... Mike may be thinking about something else just then.  But these guys think it's funny!

As for Pasha, a hair person just jabbed his scalp something fierce.

Later in the trailer, I showed the guys a new scene and Pasha doffed his coif.

Finally here, I just want to conclude with -- hold on...  Wait a minute. Ksusha, what're you -- are you checking Moose out?

Guess It's Safe Now

I finally unpacked.  Well, that's not technically true.  Actually, it's completely true.

It's not as though I hadn't taken things out of my luggage.  Because I had.  And more often than not, things that required a hanger got one. But it's also accurate to say that I had not yet fully transferred the contents of my suitcases to shelves and drawers as one might expect one to do when living in a place for three months.

Against all reason, what would happen is that once an item came out of the washing machine and subsequently dried, I would fold it and... wait for it... place it back in the luggage.

Why, you ask.  Well, I'll tell you.  I don't know.

But I'm home sick today and I don't do idle very well.  Even slogging around the apartment with a Kleenex tucked in my nostrils, I have to find something to do.  So I had a look at my luggage and decided to have a go at it.

I transferred the luggage's remaining contents into shelves.  This led me to posit a theorem that I may have brought too many socks.  No matter.  The result of all this shuffling is that I ended up with a bunch of stuff that I had no idea whether it was clean or not.

What're you gonna do in a situation like this?  You can roll the dice and fold these items as if they are clean or you can make a preemptory strike and wash everything.

So that's what I'm doing.  I'm washing everything about which there is even a thin sliver of doubt.  Of course, this is putting extra pressure on the drying rack...

House of Writers

I'm sick.

I woke up yesterday with a runny nose.  By the afternoon I was actually sick.  It's not like it's a mystery, of course.  Half the crew is sick.  So you go to the set and there's 140 people standing around in a tiny space bumping, rubbing, grinding, grabbing.  Some girl gives you a kiss hello. Some dude with sweaty palms gives you a hearty handshake.  It's a freakin' nightmare, man.  I'm like Lady Macbeth in the bathroom, scrubbing away.  Alas, to no avail.

Unfortunately,  I used up my Buzz Lightyear tissues a few weeks ago so the only Kleenexes I have are these low-grade things that have the consistency of an armadillo butt.  (Did I mention the charming way that Ukrainians use the word scotch for any kind of tape?  Kind of like how we say 'kleenex' when asking for any kind of tissue.  But to them, tape is scotch.) Anyway, when you pull a tissue out of the ones I have, they come out alternating red then white then red then white, etc.  They obviously spent their R&D money in the wrong place.

So I'm home today.  Which is anathema to me.  I could go quite mad you know hanging out at home when there is so much work to be done. Mad you know!  Thankfully, I had gone shopping and so I have a good supply of emergency crackers, which is really the most important thing.

Alright, where are we here...?  Ah, yes, the House of Writers!

So Natasha Rostova's bedroom is being shot in a room in Kiev's House of Writers.

Needless to say, it's quite a thing.

The thing I've yet to get a real answer to, however, is exactly what the House of Writers is.  Is it a club?  Is it a society?  Is it a museum?  A conservatory?  A think tank?  No one I asked could say with any confidence.  I mean, let's say I wanted to go in and write a poem about a bonny lake.  Could I walk into the House of Writers, pick up a quill and parchment, find a desk and get to work?

Anyway, remember how yesterday I said that Natasha goes to the window to see Pablo serenading her below?  Remember that?  Well, this is the room and window part.

It's all so elegant and lovely.  But of course there's the mechanics of moviemaking just out of view.

There are also some really fun VFX in this scene.  This means that a lot of important information has to be collected.  The VFX people have to notate exact measurements relative to camera and action.  They have to factor in distance from lens, lens height, focal length, nearest object, farthest object and a whole host of things.  Scripty Ksusha helps coordinate all this.

For example, when Sveta performs the stunt, it's vital to know with precise specificity where she lands and how far from camera.

Of course, judging from Pepe's face above, it would appear to be quite dangerous.  But I don't know, Sveta looks pretty much none the worse for wear.

Right, Pepe?

Well, that's okay.  You don't have to say anything if you don't want to.

So who else we got here.  You know Irek...

Irek's really a remarkable DP.  Of course, every artist works differently. But for me, one of the ways you know how good a DP is, is that they can make beautiful pictures without a ton of lights.  Obviously, sometimes it takes a lot of lights depending on the physical space and the particular set-up.  But Irek knows how to get amazing shots with just a modest application of just the right equipment.  Great fun to watch.

This is Irek's gaffer, Yvgeny.  I think this is Irek's gaffer, Yvgeny.  If I'm right then he's Ukrainian.  If I'm wrong then he's a guy who works directly with Irek to execute the lighting.  And that would take us right back to him being the gaffer.

You know Ksusha.  I think she has a cool sense of style.  Prekoylna!

And you know Marius.

He wants to make sure he gets Natasha's close-up looking back from the window.

Lunch was served around the house.  Some people ate in one of the rooms.

I'm telling you, I could write a poem about a bonny lake at that little desk on the left there.

Oh, lake so bonny,

Oh, waters so fair,

Your lillies doth float like those

Coasters you get from Bed Bath & Beyond

Because those things are madeth of cork

Sometimes!

I like to think that's what Natasha is reading.

Yes, I know it is.