Tricycle Video Shoot (part 2): Morning
I bumble out of bed about a half-hour late. The bathroom is in use. I stagger outside to see Jared Spires, our Director and the gaffer ride up to the house on his black Vespa scooter. The same scooter that I hit with my car the week before when I was backing up out of my driveway. This time he parks across the street. Right on time.
I hop into the car and grab a grocery bag full of bagels and jam back to the house. We want to have craft services ready for when the crew gets here for their 7:45 AM call and I’m already late. I still haven’t gone to the bathroom.
I walk into the house in a good mood singing a little song about bagels. The camera tripod is in the middle of the room and the crew is getting the gear ready for the shoot. As I not-so-deftly move around the gear and tripod I accidentally hook my foot underneath an office chair and before I can stop myself I’m falling towards the coffee table and bagels are flying in the air.
Eric in the makeup chair wondering if there are any bagels left.
To keep myself from breaking the coffee table and looking like Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker (fatty go boom) I roll towards the kitchen. André turns around to see bagels and Eric flying in mid-air and then sees me hit the floor. He’s late to pick up the coffee for the crew so he doesn’t have time for this crap either. He laughs as hard as I’ve heard him laugh. He continues laughing hard as he walks past me. He negotiates the crew and gear better than I did and is crying and laughing as he goes down the hall and out the door.
The crew is stunned by what they saw. They want to laugh along with André, but instead they offer weak concern for my health.
“Are you alright?”
I twisted my knee pretty good and am almost as embarrassed as when I backed my car into Jared’s Vespa. Instead I sheepishly bleat my standard line:
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine”…
…and continue to pick up bagels off of the floor, couch, and coffe table. So much for my happy bagel song.
Brandon, Dmitri, & Diego getting set up for the first shot.
The video calls for three children to play ourselves when we were younger. When we went to bed the night before the kid that would play David wasn’t cast and I had no idea how this was going to work. Jared didn’t seem to be concerned with it so I put it out of my mind (kinda).
After I put out the bagels that were still good and Andre got the coffee going for the crew, I ran and took a shower (and finally got to go to the bathroom). By the time I got out of the shower and dressed all of the kids and their parents were there. Including Brandon, the actor who would play David.
I still have no idea how they found the third kid but there they were – all three kids and they were ready to go. Heather, our producer, somehow made it happen. Thanks again, Heather.
Now that everyone is ready, we head to a city park for our first shot of the day. We have a film permit to shoot from 8 AM until 12 PM on the playground at the park. It’s a good thing we have it, too. At least one angry parent demanded to see it. By the way, for the record, we didn’t dominate the entire playground. We would use half of it, the children could use the other half. We would switch sections between shots so the kids could use the other half of the playground. We moved fast, left early, weren’t rude or condescending, and tried to accommodate all of the kids & parents. We tried to be good citizens and we are sorry if anyone was put out or offended.
When we started shooting Jared had the kids run and play as a group and individually with each of us as well. André along with Diego were on the top of a 21st century jungle gym-type thing that could have only been created using a CAD program (I would have hated to have been the guy to put it together). André had already been 6 cups of coffee into the day when Jared told him to “climb up to the top of that thing”. André jammed up to the top like a caffeinated spider monkey and waited up there until the shot was over.
David rode the space age see-saw with his doppelgänger and I was on the swings with Dmitri, the actor who was representing me at six years old. We got along great right away and he won every race and swing competition that we had. I guess I need to practice more.
There were two more shots with us (one of them was André on one side of the see-saw and all three kids on the other side) and the band was done shooting on the playground. The band left while the production finished at the playground and then moved on to the mini-market for a single scene there. We headed back to the house to change into our costumes and be made up as old men.
Part 3 of the Tricycle Video Shoot continues with more dust, dirt, latex, and Advil.
