Let's Wrap

The end is just the beginning.  The shooting may be over but the work is about to start.

Every department has its own way to end the show.  The camera guys have to perform final alignment tests on the 3D cameras and all the lenses (and we have to get those shots and hold them for work back in LA).  Other departments such as Props, Wardrobe, Art, they all have to sort through what's theirs and what isn't, get things returned, get things ready for storage.

In Editorial, our principal job at the moment is safety.  Not in the hard hat sense, but in the back-up sense.  To shoot modern 3D is to shoot using digital cameras.  That means there's no actual film.  Nothing to sit in a can in a vault somewhere, untouched by human hands, as your ultimate treasure and back up.  No, it's all bits and bytes.  It's data. That's your movie.  That means that multiple back-ups of all that computer data is the rule.

In our case, we have it on large RAIDs that will be cargo'd back to Los Angeles, we have it all on LTO tape that Simon and I will divvy up and hand-carry to the US, we have it on another RAID that will stay here in Kiev.  And then there's the Avid media, which will also have three discreet back-ups and travel separately back home.

Today was the first day of this somewhat elaborate process.  Principal players: Simon and Damien.  I mostly just stood around and said things like, "So you think, uh, we got enough bubble wrap...?"

Ksusha came by the office because she needed to finish the last of her script supervisor duties.  She had the last line scripts to prepare and to double check all continuity logs.  I'll need these in Los Angeles. Understandably, Ksusha is feeling sad and weird.  It's all an overwhelming experience and especially so if you're new to it.

Damien had some last-minute work to do on some of the 3D files. Simon mostly focussed on back-ups and having a rummage with the goal of finding the assorted boxes and crates needed for packing.  But eventually came the moment in which we would have no choice but to Turn Off the RAID!

What you need to understand is that the RAID basically stands for Redundant Array of Independent Discs, and what that means is that you've got all these hard drives working together to provide high-speed, redundant storage.  But they're still computer discs after all, and computer discs fail.  All the time. A RAID system is designed to protect you from single failures.  And I'm not going to describe how it does that because who cares.  But it does.

Once we fired up the RAID back in August, we never once turned it off. Even when we went down to Yalta we never turned it off.  It stayed here in Kiev with strict instructions to the security guard to never turn off the A/C and for god's sake, don't touch the RAID.  I mean, we've got terrabytes and terrabytes of material on the cursed thing.  It is the movie.

It's a little bit like what happened on Apollo 13.  They knew they needed to shut down the Command Module to preserve what little power they had left.  But no one had ever contemplated doing this before so no one knew whether or not it would turn back on.  Computer drives are a little like that.  Turning off a large system like a RAID offers surprising little comfort in the way of will-it-come-back-on.

But we have to ship all our data back to LA and to do that we have to turn the damned thing off so it can be broken down, crated, and put back on a plane.  Simon and Damien assumed positions behind the thing and got set.  On the count of three, they flipped their respective switches.

The room went quiet.  The RAID was asleep.  Oddly, as we turned it off, it started singing "Daisy".

We will try to wake it up again back in Los Angeles.

When I first saw my Avid editing system it had arrived from London in crates and been dumped in the soundstage in which the Camera Dept. was sorting through all their stuff (see above).  Some of my gear had just been used in Italy on the Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp movie, The Tourist:

Eventually all this stuff was trucked over to the office on Tarasovskaya street, unpacked and set up as my system.  I've done five movies using Avids supplied by Pivotal Post.  These guys supply more feature films than you can shake a RAID at.  Everything from the biggest of the big, such as the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies to indies to TV, everything. They have the best-maintained, serviced, and logistically supplied gear in the business.  Sound like a commercial?  Fine.  They deserve it.  A special shout out to Jeff and Kit in LA and to Matt in London for taking care of me -- as always.

Okay, so where were we...?  So now it was time to break down my system and get it all crated back up for its journey home to London.  It didn't take too long before my room was functionally empty.

I'll miss the fish tank.  To paraphrase Robert Redford, I had 'many fine times' in it.

There's a Russian tradition that before a long trip you must sit on your luggage.

Day 58

The night that everyone dreaded and couldn't wait for is here. The night that contained both endings and beginnings.  For most, their Napoleonic journey is over.  They can move on to a new campaign.  For a few others of us the war is only just starting.

The last day of shooting was to be spent on a soundstage.  I won't even begin to attempt to explain what the above contraption is all about but I think it promises to be one of the funniest gags in the movie.

We had the news...

A brass ensemble...

Some Irish step dancers themed country/western...

A little soft core action...

And a goat.

I wasn't able to determine with any real certitude whether or not it was the same goat from a couple nights before but I think it was.  He kept eating the grass against the back wall of the set thus providing us with a flagrante view of his posterior, which I think was intentional.  Soon though, they were pitching him apple chunks in order to lure him around to the front.

After that we shot the color announcer for the big soccer game sequence in the movie.

The announcer's name is Viktor Gusev, apparently an internationally known soccer announcer.  He was paired up with a bona fide soccer star whose name I can't remember.  Apparently he's married to Sylvio Berlusconi's daughter and is in the world football hall of fame.  There were many starry-eyed male crew members ogling their hero.

The soccer star's acting skills weren't exactly, well, good.  So after he left, Marius had Gusev repeat most of his lines just in case we couldn't edit our way out of the guy's stumbling.

That's Pepe lurking in the shadow above.

The last day of shooting on a movie can feel a lot of different ways. Obviously, it's subjective, based on what kind of time you had.  If the shoot was a living hell and the people were worse then there's nothing but relief on the last day.  But...

If it's like it was on 'Napoleon', if you had an amazing collection of Ukrainians and Russians and Americans and god knows what else, and if every day you were surprised and delighted by the lunacy being shot, and if you got to travel to beautiful places surrounded by people you genuinely liked, some of whom you loved, then... well, you get the idea.

4am, Kiev, Ukraine:

Alex Carr decided to start 10 Gryvna Fridays.  Of course, since this was the last Friday of the shoot, there would only be one 10 Gryvna Friday. What he did was, he made a bucket into which you would put 10 Gryvnas with your name written on the bill.  You could put in as many 10s as you wanted.  And you could write any name you wanted on the bill.  Then, at wrap, someone reaches in the bucket and pulls out a bill and whoever's name is on it wins the money.  So it's kind of a raffle/lottery.

After the champagne was uncorked, Marius reached in and drew out a bill.

And guess who won.

Our very own Ksusha.

It was weird.  When Ksusha won I felt this surge of something that can only be described as fatherly pride.  I mean, it was my idea to get Ksusha on the movie.  And then, having never before script supervised, and for this little 21 year-old thing to do it on a giant and complicated movie like Napoleon and to do it well... well, she was amazing.

After a while, people started to get back to work wrapping out.  But those who didn't have to go, didn't.

The wrap party (or shopka) is tonight at a place called Sorry, Babushka.

TOMORROW: WINDING DOWN

The Long Goodbye

The penultimate night of shooting.  The 57th day.  With the principal cast wrapped, only a few odds and ends remain.  Tonight's end was kind of odd but still a real production.

The location was the Kiev Opera House square in the middle of town. Production had to wait until the actual opera ended before we could start setting up.  Tonight it was the entrance to the big ball that we talked about a couple of days ago.  So we had extras and horses and carriages...

I felt really bad for these two.  They were clearly spooked by the hard, slick stone of the opera house plaza.  They kept pawing at the ground, touching it almost gingerly in an effort to understand it.  Making matters worse, their wrangler kept coming up and kicking their legs and chests -- hard -- with his boot, supposedly in an effort to calm them down.  I don't know, I'm not a horse trainer, but there were more than a few of us ready to pounce on this guy.

Overall, though, the mood seemed to be on a straight continuum with the night before.  The sense of loss is starting to add up, I think.

In wardrobe, the Clothies (alright, I just made that up) were sitting around drinking cognac.  The place seemed a bit end-of-show thrashed, but the mood was happy.

Nastya did such an astonishing job designing and making the costumes.  Her work elevated the show far beyond anything anyone could have anticipated.

Background players were wrangled into position.  It was one of those classic Miserable Extras situations in which the costumes were no match for the cold.  The AD's let them keep their coats on as much as possible.  And there were a few blankets going around but it was doubtless a long, bone-chilling night for these poor souls.  I should know.  I've been them.

Since Pasha had been wrapped, one of the Wardrobe Dept. guys was pressed into service as his double.  Wait a second...  Is that one of the Wardrobe Dept. guys?  I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I'm not completely sure.  Look, I'm not on the set all the time, you know?

This arrival-at-the-ball sequence was always designed to keep Rzhevsky's identity hidden until he/she gets inside, so it's not like this wasn't the plan all along.

It was a little scary what with these horses skittering around the plaza less than sure-footed.  Fortunately, nothing bizarre and tragic occurred.

Jim and Alex in the video village bivouac.  Conrad was the one who picked out this tent before shooting started.  It proved durable, if not a bit cramped.  But I think he made the right choice.

There used to be a time in the history of filmmaking when directors didn't have monitors to watch.  They would sit as close to the camera as possible and watch the scene played out live in front of them.  Today's directors are much more accustomed to sitting at the monitor.

I think there are many of us (myself included, sadly) who find it difficult to evaluate a performance outside the contextual frame of the photographed image, ie. on the monitor.  Don't know if I have anything more cogent to say about this, good or bad.  In all, it's probably a break-even, in terms of this phenomenon's affect on the quality of the movies.

Speaking of technology, I wanted to give a particularly potent shout-out to the sound guys.  They're recording absolutely stellar tracks.  Full-bodied, clean, all the things you want a track to be.  Ben back at Juniper Post in L.A. is going to be very happy mixing this dialogue.  So thank you, Evgeny and Vlad and everyone who worked with you for all your marvelous work.

At some point the shooting schedule got a name.  It became the "Marianna with Love" schedule.  You can see it on tonight's call sheet.  I've circled it below.

So that's what the current governing schedule revision is called.  It's on every call sheet since the last revision.  And this is Marianna:

Marianna is in the AD Department and is, I am reasoning, responsible in some way for the generation and maintenance of the shooting schedule.  But I don't actually know this.  You like how authoritative I am?

Anyway, no time to chat.  Work to do.

Marius loved the last take of the low-angle wide shot of the first carriage pulling up.  It's a beautiful shot and a perfect way into the scene.  But Richie had a slight problem with a camera bump, some soft focus, and a crane shadow.

Richie detailed his concerns but for Marius the shot seemed great.

So after a review back in the tent, it was decided that the critical portions of the shot were great and we didn't need to trundle the horses around the slick plaza again, now running with little rivulets of horse urine.

Richie is a gifted, super-attentive cameraman.  The good ones are artists in their own right and Richie can happily stand tall in this company.  But listen, Rich, take care of the ol' panza, alright?  You only got one.

TOMORROW: IS THE GOAT THE MARTINI?