Production Diary, Day 17: The Dream World, and That's a Wrap

That's a wrap on ODIE. For real this time.

We saved the dreams for last, and today they finally got shot: Scenes 1, 24 and 53, twenty-one takes on rolls A032 and A033, closing out the camera report at the same Zilker parkland where this whole production started on May 18. The Grand Lawn for the opening image, Nick's own house for the flashback material, and a stretch of nearby road for a sequence that required the most safety planning of the entire shoot and about which I will say nothing else at all.

The dream world of ODIE is a different film, technically and emotionally, from the waking one, and today the camera department got to prove it. Our DP Lester Platt shot this material MOS, meaning silent, no sound recorded, at 60 frames per second, so these memories will float at a different speed than the hard, real-time Austin of Odie's present. One continuity note from today's sheets, which I am quoting because it is accidentally a poem: "whole family on top of the rocks."

Monica

Today also introduced the last principal face of the production, except you will never see her face, which is the point. Kenzie Klem joined us as Monica, the woman in the white sundress who lives in Odie's memory. The camera holds her the way memory holds people we have lost: present, luminous, and always turned just away. Kenzie had one day to build a character out of posture, light and implication, and she did it. And playing the Small Boy, a very young Austin actor whose family has been part of this production's story since before cameras rolled, sharing the frame with an inner tube nearly his own size.

Then Michelle called the martini, and then the wrap, and the numbers are final. Seventeen shoot days, May 18 through June 10. Camera rolls A002 through A033. Six hundred seventy-four logged takes, distilled by our script supervisor Melisa Balderrama Siles into the continuity record the edit will live by. One hundred twenty-four circled selects, now headed to our editor Jay Trautman.

Somewhere in a park in Austin tonight, there is a patch of grass where a fictional man woke up 294 days into the worst stretch of his life, and a real crew spent a month making sure his story got told with dignity.

Post-production starts now. This diary will be here for it. Thank you for reading, Austin.