Saturday highlights

just a couple little things from the two shoots over the weekend.

We had a very productive reshoot, correcting a bunch of mistakes I made on the first run through of the scene several months ago. The whole thing looks much more coherent and natural thanks in part to Barry's eye and a bunch of people who didnt mind waking up early and being background actors.

Afterwards, we fed an injured sparrow donuts for like twenty minutes, Kyle went to work, and the rest of us went to grab lunch back in dorchester. It was a pretty typical time at Gerard's, with us musing over highlights from the day's shoot, a couple worries about the upcoming night shoot, and talking way too much about the police academy movies, mexican wrestling, and debating the merits of fart jokes. On the way out Tommy spotted Kevin McBride, a local boxer who defeated Mike Tyson a couple years ago, sitting by the door, playing Keno. We spent 2-3 minutes debating whether to ask him to be a generic bad guy in a fight with lawson in the weeks to come. We ended up just walking by him and saying "hey, how's it goin?" Then we all split up to crash/recharge for a couple hours.

At dusk, we showed up at the location, spent some time setting up shots, figuring out the schedule and waiting for actors. The shoot went pretty smoothly, other than a couple problems finding the best lighting, and some of our effects not working as well on set as they had throughout testing. At one point, while we were shooting this very intense speech by the chief, behind this warehouse, somewhat in the middle of nowhere, at about 11pm, the real cops drive through, but dont even give us a second glance. Later, after a few hours, we see the flashing lights at the end of a very long driveway, and start to worry that perhaps now, after all this time, they are coming to yell at us. To tell us to wrap it up and go home. Paranoia sets in. So we all walk over to the front of the building, just to chat and diffuse any situation that's about to happen. We talk to a very cool cop, who tells us they were just arresting some drunk off the street, and as long as someone doesnt call in to complain, he wasn't worried about us. We didnt finish everything we'd hoped that night, because our plan going in was fairly ambitious, but we got a ton of great footage, and though it was a long night (I think we got back to Boston around 4am), I think we all had fun.

thanks to Doug, Abdi and Debruyn for waking up too early to not get paid.
and thanks to Bill, Al, Eli, Gomer, and A.D. for staying up too late to not be partying.

LAWSON: the ending begins
-johnk