Summer film projects

The summer took off to a busy start as I jumped right into filming the movie Bunks for Disney XD in early June. The film was for a teenage demographic based on camp stories that come to life in mildly jarring horror fashion. I realised the golden rule of film continuity to be absolutely true on this film: avoid shooting child actors and animals... at all costs. Many of the child actors had difficulty remembering their exact actions for the "turn around" shots and made it challenging for the script supervisor to maintain continuity—oddly enough she was one of the most pleasant souls on set and was just an absolute sweetheart everyday.

Most of the shooting was on a remote island in Lake Of The Woods about a 30 minute boat ride from the Kenora harbour. The morning boat ride every morning was wonderful; we would hit breakfast catering in the hotel lobby then bring our coffee on the boat and enjoy the morning mist on our faces and the beautiful sunrise. We had a pretty moderate shooting schedule capturing 5 pages of script a day on average with plenty of options for angles and inserts. We were shooting on the Arri Alexa camera with two camera units and one splinter unit, which made my job difficult programming the time code and frame rate synchronisation for 3 cameras shooting simultaneously. There was many out-of-town crew on this show and I met some really great new friends from Vancouver, Toronto and L.A. I really enjoyed the company of director Tibor Takacs who is very Hungarian—if the name didn't give it away—our families are from the same region in Hungary and on top of that he also managed one of my favourite Canadian punk bands, The Viletones. Tibor told me some great stories from his life managing and producing a popular punk rock band in the height of the scene. My favourite story was when Tibor mention that once after booking Johnny Thunders (from the New York Dolls) to headline a show for The Viletones, Johnny pulled a slide of hand move and quickly snagged $100 extra on top of his show payment to buy smack outside of CBGBs and then disappeared for a couple days—what a crazy scene to have financial investments. Lets just clarify that I love Johnny Thunders for of his dirty-blues guitar playing and not his tragic lifestyle choices. There were some chaotic moments during the film, but that's how the business goes sometimes when the marketing vision and the creative vision don't exactly mesh, and do they ever really?

One of the most memorable moments on set was when the special FX department was rigging some weaponry, which the hero's were to shoot at the oncoming ghouls, and they over calibrated the launching device (I can't really give away too much here) suddenly the unit fired the projectiles high into the sky.. Well a couple seconds later, I was calmly programming my audio board and I notice everyone looking up. As I looked up, the projectiles were just about to rain down on me and a couple of the stand-in actresses that were sitting beside me. I ducked for cover under my mobile desk/mixer board but still got pelted by these things as did the actresses! It didn't hurt or anything, but we found it to be just hilarious seeing the shocked look on every ones face as these "things" came raining down. 

During our lunch breaks we had this gorgeous beach with plenty of swimming points to enjoy and suntan on with catering right on the shoreline, it was the best. The special FX department had underwater gear and they were pranking people relentlessly... I guess the crew members from California are always on shark alert. I worked on a couple more films throughout the summer, but this was the most fun.