Anniversary

At the exact time this blog is published it will be exactly one year since we began principal photography on END. I am decidedly calmer as I am writing this than I was the night before we shot.

The night before we shot I discovered we were shorted by one light kit, which would severely limit our lighting situation. We also discovered the heat would melt the adhesive for the Velcro right off our barricade so we had to nail the wood into the walls of my friend’s house to barricade the door and window.

On our first day of shooting my make-up hero Daniella had to get ten actors though make-up for the first time. This along with normal first day issues meant that we were supposed to start shooting at ten a.m. but ended up starting after noon. Insanely, on a schedule that required us to shoot ten to fourteen pages a day we only ended up behind by one short scene, and needed to pick-up the reverse of a shot.

On day two we started on time but had perhaps our most shocking moment on set – Ashton & Dave had their game-changing argument in the film and while shooting the scene the boys accidently put Ashton through the dry wall of our key set. As you can imagine, I thought we were done for then and there. I immediately had to make the phone call I thought would kill my movie – I had to call Susan and tell her that we’d killed a wall in her house, and send cell phone pictures to David. Somehow, they decided a broken wall wasn’t a big deal, and they let us continue. Let no one call the Dunacheck’s anything less than amazing. Miraculously, we made it through the first weekend of shooting and somehow got completely back on schedule by the end of the second day – broken wall and all.

There were three more life-changing weekends of shooting after that and somehow I managed to come out the other end without hurting an actor, crew member or any more walls.

END refined my directorial skills in a way that I don’t think any other experience could have and I must say that the relationships, memories and final product that those eight shooting days gave me were worth any stress or eventual gray hair that may come my way. I can’t wait to see where END goes next.