Production Diary, Day 2: Thirty-Three Takes at the Shelter

Some shoot days are sprints. Today was a scalpel.

We spent the whole day inside our Manchaca Shelter set in South Austin, working Scenes 12 through 15. On paper that is six and five eighths pages, which is a lot of talking for one day, and the continuity log shows just thirty-three takes. That is not a slow crew. That is a crew that knew what it wanted and got it without thrashing.

The shelter in the film is fictional, but the walls around us today were real ones: You Drive Auto, a working business off East Stassney that handed a film crew the keys to its building for the day, while the CVS across South Congress lent its lot for crew parking. Austin businesses keep doing this for us, and it never stops feeling like a small miracle. Our friends in the city's homeless-services community enter this diary soon, because those partnerships are the reason this movie gets to be what it is.

Two arrivals

Today put two new faces in front of camera. Roderick McDaniel had his first day as Mr. Anderson, and there is a stillness to what he does that changes the air in a room. He shoots a handful of days spread across the whole schedule, so today was a taste of material he will not finish for another two weeks. That is the strange arithmetic of film acting: you start a relationship on day two and complete it on day fourteen.

And Mathew Mitchell arrived as Gerald. Shoeless, slurping from a styrofoam cup, fully formed from the first rehearsal. Dean Stanfield has carried the picture more or less alone through the opening scenes, and you could feel him enjoy having scene partners to push against for a full day.

Dialogue days live and die in the sound department, so a tip of the cap to our production sound mixer Xzavyor J. March and sound assistant Jon Grant, who spent the day threading clean audio through a building that was not designed as a soundstage.

Two days down. Rolls A004 and A005 are with our DIT Danny Keinarth tonight. Tomorrow the company parks at a neighborhood park and walks the rest of the way. More on that when we get there.