We had a really great shoot the other day. We were filming a scene from our upcoming movie, “Celluloid Soul,” where our lead actress Ida Beswick (Lauren Baldwin) was performing in a movie supposedly produced in 1939. The challenge, of course, was to recreate that time period. That’s tough enough to do with a budget, but not having a budget creates some problems. For example, we had to find an area with older looking houses, which we did. By the way, a shout out should go to Pirromount alumnus Joyce Mordoh, for letting us film in front of her house.
Then there was trying to come up with vintage clothes (which our actors provided themselves (thanks guys). Of course, there were the expected issues that we had to contend with: planes flying overhead, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, cars driving by, etc. However, it came out wonderfully.
Of course, the biggest challenge was to try and fill the frame with vintage cars.
So far, production has been going quite smoothly, and I’ve only had one actor completely flake out on me (she called me an hour and a half before we were set to shoot to inform me that she wasn’t going to do the movie). We managed to replace her. You don’t make films with no budget for as long as we have if you don’t anticipate these kind of situations. Fortunately, I know how to work around flakes, and even more fortunately, in over 30 years of filmmaking, I’ve gotten so very few of them (only three to date).