So for those of you just tuning in, I’m in the Central Valley area of California (Patterson to be exact – it’s by Modesto) to work on an independent film called George Biddle, CPA. The director, Nick Walker, is a friend of a friend and I volunteered my help on the film. After all, the last film I worked on was a lot of fun and this one is no exception.  He has two IMDB pages, but trust me it’s the same guy. So the movie is an independent film, which means it’s low budget but also means it’s a lot more fun to work on. Okay I haven’t been on a professional Hollywood set, but from what I hear about them it sounds like it’s a lot more fun to work on an independent film. With the film industry hopefully making a move to Michigan, some of you will get to experience this process.

This post is chronologically out of order with the others, but I felt it was a better idea to update the current events rather than happenings of last week. But I will be catching up this post, taco truckers scene, and the Nemean Diner scene this weekend or by next week hopefully. It’s been a long and crazy trip, but I’m glad I came.

This particular day of shooting we did the Geryon house, followed by his escape from the records room. The Geryon house was shot at a very very very very very old house in Patterson. Did I mention that house was ancient? At one point most of the crew had to leave the house because there was concern that the house would sustain damage from all the people tromping around. And by sustain damage I in fact mean that we were afraid the house might collapse on us. It was a beautiful house though. It wasn’t too hot that day, but at one point the owner of the house had killed a snake and put it on the porch while he figured out what to do with it. It was kind of weird…cool but weird. Overall, I didn’t see much of the shoot because I wasn’t part of essential crew, so I spent a lot of the time outside. But refer to the pictures in the gallery if you wish to see our version of the six-armed, six-eyed beast known as Geryon – spoiler, we made him a siamese triplet.

 Next we headed to the basement of a church in Patterson and set up the records room, where our hero makes a valiant search and escape plan. We carried file cabinet after file cabinet into that place, as well as rearranging a few of the existing ones there. After all was said and done we ended up with a pretty dark and believable records room in the basement of Geryon’s estate. I really enjoyed creating the fake newspaper articles for this part of the movie. The shoot went pretty well, including the shot where Biddle has to break a light bulb with his calculator. That was pretty much a one-take. I really had a lot of fun during my first day of shooting for the movie.