My weekend as a P.A.

So this past weekend I had the interesting opportunity to be a Production Assistant (P.A.) for a short film titled "Daren & Si." The intention is for this 15 minute movie to be shown at various film festivals, with the hopes that somebody within the industry will fund it to become a full length feature. Aside from one of the actors continually calling me "Mark," it was an excellent and worthwhile experience.

Probably the first thing I realized is how spot-on The Simpsons "Radioactive Man Movie" episode is. When the director says "Perfect! Lets shoot it again! And again and again!" -- that's really true to life. Even when a scene is shot perfectly, they do it countless more times from different perspectives and camera angles. To give you perspective, a 15 minute film took four days to shoot.

My job was basically to be a "gofer" by picking up breakfast and coffee every morning, picking up lunch, going to stores to pick up any necessary items, and taking care of any errands. As such, I wasn't able to view the entire production, but it was really, really interesting watching a film -- even a very short one -- being made.

While it is common knowledge that movies and television shows aren't filmed in sequence, it's quite an experience actually seeing this process in action. For example, much of the end of the film was shot on the first day of filming (Friday). As such, the lead actress was severely in emotional distress. Actually, she did such a wonderful job getting "into character" that the entire first day that I worked with her, I thought she was a bit cold and stand offish. It wasn't until the next day, when we started filming the "lighter" scenes, that I realized she was an extremely friendly and warm person.

I first realized how nice she was when she quite kindly handled the hamburger situation for the BBQ scene. Basically, I was asked to BBQ some burgers for a scene that would be shot later in the day (so that they wouldn't lose time preparing the burgers for the ACTUAL scene). If I may say so myself, I barbied these babies up to perfection. Unfortunately, we didn't get to that scene until, like, two hours later. So by the time her and her "father" had to eat them, they were really cold, really dry, and really hard. I attempted to reheat them, which ultimately made them really dry, really hard, and really overcooked. And because of numerous takes, she had to eat, like, three of them.

I learned a couple of other things about filming a movie as well. I'm not quite sure how to phrase this without coming off as offensive, but one thing I noticed is that when you're filming in a lower-class area, people REALLY don't want to appear on camera. This happened on two occasions. One day we filmed in a thrift store, and while we're clearly filming, one women starts asking -- quite loudly, and from a distance -- "What are you filming?" We're ignoring her, because we can't talk while we're filming. She then starts yelling "Hello? Hello? What are you filming?" Finally the producer walked over to her to quietly explain the scenario.

Similarly, Monday afternoon we shot at this really, really skeezy dive of a bar (incidentally, another thing I learned is that a fair amount of people drink at sketchy bars in the middle of the day). One of my assignments that day was to stand outside to tell people who were about to enter that we're filming. They were allowed to go inside, they just had to sign a release and were instructed to act natural and not look at the camera when they walk in. They were even told that we'd buy them a beer for their trouble. But even then, a lot of people were very turned off by appearing on camera. Humorously, though, one of the people who was about to go to the bar (at about 3:00 in the afternoon on a Monday) was this kid I went to high school with.

After seeing the "making of" process, I look really forward to seeing the finished product. I worked with some really talented, friendly, and patient people, and it really could not have gone better. And hey, maybe my next assignment will be a Rachel Bilson production!