DRY BONES Days 5 and 6
DRY BONES Days 5 & 6
Shooting on weekends only is weird. On the one hand, you have five days to prepare for each two days of filming; on the other, your body has to get used to getting tired all over. This was our third weekend of filming, at the second entirely in my house. My daughter – recuperated from the flu and strep – and our cats are now accustomed to having the equivalent of a special forces team in our home.
It was sunny on Saturday, when we shot some exteriors out front and on my back deck, so it was nice to get out of the confined rooms for a few hours. Among the scenes we filmed in my living room was one between Michael O’Hear and John Renna. Michael is the lead: Drew, a troubled man who returns home thirty-five years after being traumatized by a monster under his bed. John plays his police chief brother in law, who’s upset because Drew’s sister has divorced him. In the scene, Drew believes Carl has paid him a visit to discuss all of the people who have been disappearing, but Carl is more upset about his divorce and breaks down. It’s a comical scene, but John was able to summon real tears for three takes. We were in stitches and mesmerized at the same time.
Throughout the film, the bodies of people who are sucked under the bed by the succubus turn up as emaciated husks. In one scene, Drew discovers the husk of a woman he picked up in a bar. Snap! Crackle! Pop! The husks roll up like sleeping bags. Our effects gurus, Rod Durick and Arick Szymecki worked around the clock (I think three times around the clock) to deliver our first husk. Drew rolls the husk up with trembling fingers. It’s a surreal moment, and Michael played it for all the pathos it was worth. We pushed a similar scene involving two additional husks to Sunday, but otherwise we made our day, and over the course of the weekend we picked up some shots we missed last weekend, so we’re all caught up except for a couple of pickups.
On Sunday, we shot the scene where Drew finds two additional husks, and this time when he rolls them up he sings the title song. I was pleased with the result. That was his only scene, which we shot at the end of the day. The rest of the day was spent on a sequence in which Paul McGinnis, as Tom, brings home Cindy/Mindy (a running gag), played by Jessica Zwolak, and they encounter the succubus. Tom is Drew’s best friend, a slob type who provides a lot of comic relief. All of his scenes with Cindy/Mindy were played for laughs, including his demise, for which we swapped out my bed with an elevated platforms so it was easier for Sam Qualiana to shoot Tom getting sucked under the bed. In a twist, Drew actually pulls himself out from under the bed, which leads to a bigger payoff. We made our day again.
The only drag about shooting in my house is the two hours of cleaning up after we’ve wrapped, but that’s primarily on Sunday since we’ve been leaving stuff up Saturday. On Sunday we moved out of my daughter’s small, confined room and into my larger bedroom…which was somehow more confined and harder to shoot in. We spent most of the day in there, and I think we were all glad we wrapped on that particular location. I held the boom pole for most of Sunday, something I haven’t done since I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE back in 1984. Boom poles have gotten a lot nicer.
We’re almost one third of the way through the shoot, which is hard to believe, but we’ve got some weekends off coming up because I have some convention appearances. Debbie Rochon has joined the cast as the female lead.
