Exigencies of Production

You know what this says?

Okay, I'll tell you.  It says that we're a short bit behind schedule and that now the last day of principal photography will be on November 7th.

Whose fault is this?

It's yours.  You didn't believe.  You didn't clap hard enough and now you've killed Tinkerbell.  There.  You happy now?

Changing Dawn

Another Kiev dawn.

You may be asking, "David, what're you doing up so early?"  But it's not early.  I took the above photo at 7:15am.

Actually, I was just waking up and could see the amber and maroon glow through the curtains.  Without even looking I knew I was obligated to get the camera.  I stumbled to the closet in which I keep the camera bag and tore the camera out of its velcro straps.

In order to take the picture I would have to step out onto the apartment balcony.  But it's freezing here now and so the prospect of a rude transition from bed toasty to dawn chilly wasn't appealing.  Still, I'm a martyr to my uncompromising devotion to the lively arts, and so out I went.

What's true is that the hand-over of Summer to Fall is undeniable.  The leaves are all going.  A lot of the time they're gone.

But as I've noted before, I like seasons.  And getting to see all the beautiful Ukrainian girls in the first  wave of cold-weather clothes is a genuine treat.

Today I spent most of the day in a visual effects meeting.  I moderated a review of every single scene in the movie in order to ferret out any green screen shots we need that may have been hiding.  In other words, we need to make sure that we shoot everything we need for all the VFX shots now, rather than discovering four months from now that we don't have a certain thing.  By then it will be too late.

After that, I turned my attention to cutting scene 42.  This is a Yalta-shot scene that had a wholesale change of dialogue at the end.  But I didn't know it.  I was watching the dailies and following along in my English script, comparing what I was hearing with the translated dialogue on the page.  But by the time I got to the last third of the scene I could tell something was off.

I broke out the Russian script and followed along.  This is the page:

...but it was clear that what was on the page was not what was being spoken in the dailies.  So I called Ksusha and asked for her line script. A line script is something the script supervisor generates after a scene is shot detailing how much and what part of a scene each take covers. And it's also where the script supervisor notes any changes in dialogue or action.

So this is what she sent me:

As I suspected, a lot had changed.  So I had the new lines.  Now I could start cutting.

Round Trip

The unit is on its way back from Yalta.  Having wrapped nearly three weeks of shooting in Crimea, one lucky train, several flights, and a convoy of trucks are at this writing surging north for a re-assault on Kiev. It's been said that armies march on their stomachs.  This one tends to march on its vodka.

Today we feature more fine work by our beloved script supervisor, Ksusha Petrova, presenting a small collection of photos taken in Yalta. Having a unique way with color, Ksusha takes a different road to capturing the spirit of a time and place.

I tend to take overly journalistic photos I think.  But Ksusha's way seems more directly emotional, less formal.  Color can often be such a mainline to emotion.  I wish I could do that.

Anyway, who wants to talk about process when you've got photos like the one above?

The Crimean shoot can be declared a success.  I give you the face of success!

I think this might be, too.

A day of shooting at Livadia Palace, the place that put the conference in "Yalta Conference", had to be scrubbed due to Sveta's coddled cranium.

A new location will be found in Kiev and the scene will be done here. As for le tete de Sveta, it and the rest of the girl are doing fine...

While I was there, I wish I had spent more time checking out the town.

Of course, that's a pretty standard complaint.  The truth is I spent exactly as much time as I had.

Of course some people were able to spend a little more.

Damp

As I was just a day or two from leaving Yalta and returning to Kiev I started getting the distinct feeling that the weather was about to get a lot different.  When the sun was out it just seemed more...confident.

Since the call times had been slipping until the unit was now working "splits" (half day, half night), you had a bit of time to enjoy the daylight before heading off to the dank coal mine that a wet night on set can often resemble.

That's not a dank coal mine.  But maybe the ship's carrying coal.  Or maybe it's on its way to get pirated.  I don't know.  No, the dank coal mine effect was most effectively felt on several occasions at Vorontsovsky at lunch.  I won't go into the whole scandal but I don't mind saying that Production had a hard time providing a lunch experience that was, well...appropriate.

Don't get me wrong, the food itself was great.  I say that with absolutely no equivocation at all.  But on a wet, cold, rainy night, where you eat that delicious food is kind of the whole thing.  One night I wondered where everyone was only to find several of the American crew huddled under a mean tent in the parking lot.  And it was raining.  I mean raining.

There's no question this project has been a great challenge for everyone. We're making a lot of movie on not a lot of money.  Anyway, I'm not complaining.  Really, I'm just remembering.  Because somehow I feel like I've won the great lottery of Life, and even these rough patches seem like worthy remembrances.

Before lunch, Marius & Co. finished shooting a scene that we decided would make David Lynch say, "Dude, that's weird even for me."

Stereoscopic Supervisor Jim Carbonetti doesn't like it when people curse, so I don't know what he was thinking about this one.

Richie and Topaz seemed to think this was all pretty mild stuff.

We can assume their life back in Bangkok is very interesting.

Lunch was called but first Sveta and a just-arrived Pasha needed to conduct rehearsal of the scene to be done after the meal.

This meant that Sveta needed to endure just a bit more of the velvet handcuffs she spent most of the pre-lunch work in.

But god knows Sveta's a trooper.

Not long after the unit broke for lunch I decided I'd had a belly full of the set.  It can be awfully boring if you're not working.  So Natalia was good enough to arrange a car for me and I went back to the hotel.

The Shark Is Not Working

It should be a simple thing.  The guillotine has to work.

All you have to have is a blade that will fall when you pull a cord and chop off the head of a toy soldier.  It's that simple.  Ah, but is it ever easy to fake kill a fake man?

Threatening a subordinate while playing with his toy guillotine, Vladimir Zelensky needs to be able to make the blade come down and slice the heads off of pre-scored toy soldiers.

But no.  The contraption was balky to say the least.  Which is bad because Vladimir (as Napoleon) has all this rapid fire dialogue that is timed to the guillotine chops.  But if every time you pull the cord, the blade either creaks down slowly or it lands on the soldiers' neck and doesn't cut or if you pull the cord and nothing happens at all... well then you've got a problem.

There was a lot of waiting around for this thing.

I think our very own MacGyver even had a look at it.  Of course, I've got a ton of great outtakes.

But that's not the point!  The point is you've got a limited amount of time to do something and all the specialized props need to work.

Of course they don't call me the editor for nothing.  In fact, I cut this scene yesterday and I made it look like it worked and worked well.  Plus the scene is funny.  Which is the goal.

Having put in our time with the guillotine and decapitated a great many Russian soldiers, Marius moved on to the next part of the scene.

Sveta missed her plane in London so a stand-in had to be used until she got to Yalta.

I don't think this poor girl was an actress because she had a perpetual deer-in-the-headlights look.  She was hired for her proximal resemblance to Sveta in height and build.  She would be shot only from the back but had to be charged and tackled by the actress playing Zhu-Zhu.

I'm not sure what Marius told the stand-in, maybe nothing, but in the first take when Zhu-Zhu explodes with this terrifying scream and rushes her from across the room, the girl just froze.

In the next second she was flat on her back on the stunt pads behind her.

It was actually kind of funny.

Sometime around midnight Sveta finally made it to Yalta and took over getting trampled.  Professionalism is important.