A day of weather ironies. At 7am I find myself scouting a location in the dark and in the pouring rain for a scene that will be shot in daylight and with the sun up (I hope)…Then in the afternoon we go outside (where at last the sun has appeared) throw a tent over The Indian and pretend the boys are driving down the highway at night! Go figure…
This last gag is called “Poor man’s process” or PMP for short. What we do is cover the band’s van with huge and heavy black drapes provided by Dean and his merry bunch of grips, then light the van as if it were travelling down a highway at night. Finally we put the actors in their seats and film a scene as we rock the van to and fro. ‘Why not drive the van down the road and shoot?’ I hear you ask. Well you can do that but you get lots of road noise, you don’t get the same angles, it takes up loads of time and it’s not always sensible to ask an actor to drive and act at the same time. (No offence Doug). There is another way which is to put the vehicle on a huge trailer and drag it down the road with the crew riding on the trailer and shooting inside the van. This is called a Process Trailer shot but is much more costly and also very time consuming. I used a process trailer on the C-Note video I shot earlier this year and the Cadillac the band were riding in fell through the trailer: waste of an afternoon!
This morning we dressed up teams of innocent extras to represent the three decades of Buss’s remarkable career: The Fifth Unit (60’s), The Johnson 5 (70’s) and 2 Kool 4 Skool (80’s). The wardrobe, hair and make-up departments (Lorraine, Monique and Adina) excelled themselves with mutton chops, fros, wide lapels and instant tans.