Production Diary, Day 16A: Seven Takes, No Slate

Today does not even get its own whole number. The continuity log calls it Day 16A, it shared camera roll A031 with the Scene 15 reshoot, and the insert run produced all of seven takes. No slates. Just a tiny unit, our director Nick Barr, and Dean Stanfield walking through Austin streets while the camera watched.

This was the insert run, the collection pass for montage material, and it might be my favorite kind of filmmaking to watch, because it is the movie at its most stripped down. No company. No basecamp sprawl. None of the beautiful heavy machinery of a full crew day. Just the essential transaction of the whole art form: an actor, a lens, and light.

The material itself is connective tissue, the walking shots that will stitch passages of Odie's journey together in the edit. Nobody buys a ticket for connective tissue, but every movie you have ever loved is full of it, and when it is missing you feel the absence without knowing what you are feeling. Our editor Jay Trautman starts assembling this film in the coming weeks, and runs like this are essentially a care package addressed to him: here, we got you the pieces between the pieces.

Seven takes

I keep coming back to the number. Seven. Day one of this shoot logged eighty-five takes. The insert run logged seven, and there is a whole story of a production's maturation in that gap. By this point, three weeks in, Nick and our DP know this character's walk, this city's light, and this film's rhythm so thoroughly that a shot either is the movie or is not, usually within one take, occasionally two.

Watching Dean do these walks was quietly moving in a way I did not expect from a technical run. No dialogue, no scene partners, just Odie in motion through a city that has been the film's true second lead all along. Somewhere around the last setup it occurred to me that this was probably the simplest footage of the entire production, and that some of it may end up being the footage people remember.

Tomorrow is the real last day. The dream sequences, saved for the very end, and after twenty-two days of Odie's hardest day, the camera finally gets to visit his happiest ones. Bring tissues. I am.