The Oppie Production Blog

Twenty-one hours of shoot (part 1)

We shot for 21 hours on Monday and finished off about 13 pages of episode 5. It’s a 17 page script. (Fun fact: each script page ends up yielding about a minute of screen time. For each minute of screen time, we probably are shooting about a half hour of footage. I think someone estimates that each page takes about 2 hours to shoot, plus time for montage, action, etc.)

There are often moments where we have shot or are shooting something weird or beautiful or funny and I think, “Wow, this didn’t exist yesterday. We created this.”

That’s particularly the case for episode five. Drafts have existed probably since March, but the whole thing was restructured completely and written from the ground up in the past two days. Filup pulled an all-nighter (following practically an all-dayer, but you don’t really hear about those too much) before we started shooting in order to get the script into condition.

Why were we moving this fast? Usually scripts sit around and leisurely get rewritten quite a bit, but we had to immediately start shooting because this was our “ADJECTIVE dorm” episode (The word ADJECTIVE is in place of a spoiler, kind of. I don’t know.) and the majority of the action needed to take place in the dorm/residence hall which we had to be out of by 8pm Monday (so that they could clean it before someone starts living in that piece of cinema history).

So that meant an early call time at the dorm for a very sleepy cast and crew.

Posted by rymo.