two of the longest days of my life...

So it's 5:00 on Saturday morning and I'm standing shoulder-deep in a lake in Michigan underneath an inflatable trampoline and I turn to Adele and say, "How did I get here?" It was the end of a very long day. A very very long day. This was the fourth day of the third week of American Sleepover, the movie I'm production coordinating outside of Detroit. The day started normally enough. I woke up at 2pm and spent a few hours working before Adele, James and I left for set at six. We arrived at a beautiful lakehouse in Waterford, Michigan whose owners are some of the nicest people to ever let their home be overtaken by a film crew. Before we could shoot anything that day we had to wait for the sun to set and before that happened Adele and I had to brave the lake to reposition boats and move the giant floating trampoline that belonged to the neighbor. Not as easy as it sounds. Its impossibly heavy anchor made it necessary for us to go underneath and tie an extra length of rope to it and then move it blindly through the lake. In and of it self, not so bad.

Our first shot was a wide shot from the water of two characters swimming to a floating platform in the lake. The camera was on a pontoon boat secured in a splashbag to protect it from the water. During the rehearsal of the scene it became obvious that the platform was inclined to gradually rotate so we decided that someone would have to be in the water holding it in place. At 9:47 the sun set and we were ready for our first shot. And I was underneath a spider-infested floating platform in a lake in Michigan.

That only lasted about 45 minutes and the night continued with the frenzied momentum of a hugely ambitious, tightly scheduled independent film set. Our next obstacle came around midnight in the form of a pontoon boat full of drunken woman who decided to "park" in front of our set and sing along to the music they were blaring. We continued shooting as much as we could in their quiet moments and decided to break early for lunch in hopes that they would get bored and leave if we turned off our lights and went away.

And it worked. Kind of. We came back from lunch at about 1:45 and they came back from who knows where at around 2:00. It looked like we were going to have to take some kind of aversive action. My first thought was to simply go to the end of the dock and ask them to leave. As I walked the length of the dock though I realized that they were further away than I had originally thought. Yelling wasn't really an option due to the agreement we'd made with the neighbors to be as quiet as possible on threat of not being able to return to shoot the next day. I walked back to the expectant crew trying to formulate a new plan. Adele and I spent what felt like several minutes looking out at the boat and then looking back at our options on shore. It came down to choosing between a rowboat and a paddle boat.

Halfway between our crew on the shore and the drunken party on the pontoon boat I think it occurred to both of us that what we were doing was absolutely ridiculous. How on earth were we going to approach a boat full of drunk women and ask them to move their party further down the lake. It was absurd at best. And then we looked up from our laughter and saw that the boat was moving. Adele and I turned to each other with disbelief. "Are they running away from us?" she asked me. "I think so. Should we stop?" We looked at the boat slowly moving away from us. "No". And then we chased those women away. On a paddle boat. On a lake. In Michigan.

We couldn't come back right away because they started shooting as soon as the boat was out of the shot. So we sat there in that paddle boat and we both thought about what would happen if we just paddled away and let the set run itself. The thoughts were fleeting and we paddled back to shore and pressed on through the day.

Sometime around 3:30 I was standing near the water when Amy walked up to me and said under her breath, "Bad things are happening." I looked up towards the house and saw Adele standing with her hand on her mouth and the camera team huddled on the deck. I stood next to Adele trying to assess the situation. It seemed like the camera had gotten wet. Confusing since it was housed in a waterproof splashbag. Somehow though something like two cups of water ended up inside of the waterproof housing. RED cameras, as it turn out, don't like water. After a stressful debate about what our next move should be we decided to call it a day and hope that the camera wasn't broken. We had to let it dry out for a few hours before we could safely check, though.

So at 5:00 am I was back in the water almost hoping that I'd have be there again the next day.

And I was. When we tested the camera hours later it was working fine and we proceeded with the shoot on schedule. Saturday night was less eventful but longer and no less stressful. We were dealing with twenty extras, scattered downpours, and a scene involving choreographed dancing with an actress who threw her back out while prepping for the first shot. Not to mention mosquitoes. Endless mosquitoes.

Near the end of that day I was exhausted. All but two of our extras had bailed and we needed to shoot a scene where one of the actors swims in the water with an unspecified number of friends. I asked the director how many we needed. "Six," he said. "I can get you four." So Adele and I waded in the cold, pre-sunrise water, backs to the camera, and dreaded moving that trampoline.

After the scene was over we trudged out to the floating monolith. "Do you feel kind of like you're walking to your death?" I nodded and took the short plunge to get to the inside cavern of the trampoline. Alone for a minute I thought about the frequent absurdity of what it is that I'm doing with my life right now. Adele came up from the water and we started moving the trampoline. "You know," I said, "it occurs to me that this isn't really a two person job...but I'm glad we're doing this together."

This is not nearly as informative as it should be.

(all photos in this post courtesy of Anthony Levi Kho, our production photographer)

I considered apologizing for my absenteeism from this blog but decided it was justified as I've been enormously busy. The film is finished now and I have some time on my hands before I leave in ten days. My list of things to do before I leave is not diminishing as quickly as I'd like. I still have yet to ride the elephants at the zoo, visit Malaysia, go to the bird park or go back to Chinatown now that Chinese New Year decorations are up. Chinatown is scheduled for Wednesday. Alan, the sound guy from the film, promised to take Kaini and I. Although he doesn't know about our plan to buy cheongsams (traditional Chinese dresses). Kaini says she can get away with wearing one if I wear one too. I can already picture the look on Alan's face right before he abandons us in Chinatown. It's very similar to the look he makes when refrigerators come on in the middle of takes when we're shooting in restaurants or when drunk aunties at hawker centers start yelling loudly to each other. The list of people Kaini asked to be quiet during our shoot boggles my mind. Aside from all the hawker center workers she shushed repeatedly she managed to convince construction workers to stop drilling, forestry workers to come back later to cut down a tree, airport officials to wait an hour to print their tickets. I stand by the fact that movies are magic. Maybe not in the way that people typically perceive, but magic all the same. In what other situation could a girl walk up to a construction foreman and say, "I'm sorry could you please move your 5 storey crane, it's in my way".

This film has been an amazing experience. Exhausting and at times brutal, but I'm getting to a point where I realize that things are almost never worth doing if there isn't some suffering involved. I've definitely learned a lot of valuable things in my time here. Like, I can now say "vegetarian food, no eggs, no milk" in Chinese. Seriously though, an amazing teacher I had once that told me that while I am very creative I could save myself a lot of stress by working on my organizational skills. Turns out she might have been right. It's really too bad I didn't take that advice when she gave it to me at thirteen. It is decidedly something I'm working on now, though. If and when I come back here in a year to work on Michael's next film maybe I won't have to send a production assistant out everyday to pick up things that I forgot. But I honestly think that lack of sleep and lack of an art director were huge factors in my diminished mental clarity. Lesson number two: don't ever production design a feature film without an art director. Fortunately our two PA's were amazing ladies and not only ran errands for me, but also helped me hang Christmas decorations, labeled everything I could eat as "vegan safe", and tried to teach me Chinese.

I'm convinced that the best possible way to experience a place is to shoot a film there. I like that I can look at the guide books Matt bought and know that I didn't just eat at Newton Hawker Center, I cooked in a stall there. And while I didn't exactly go shopping on Orchard Road, I did install a snow machine outside of a mall. I spent the night in the airport, I slept in an executive suite on the 59th floor of the Swissotel (only for three hours, but it still counts), I changed the sheets in a sketchy hotel in Chinatown, I wandered into a half finished house looking for power and found construction workers sleeping there, I hung Christmas decorations in yet another hotel, I spent at least 4 hours in the security checkpoint of Robinson's department store. Actually, I might have passed on that last one, given the chance. But I am infinitely grateful to have been given the opportunity to see this place in this way. And to have met the people that I've been working with. I think I'll definitely come back. Hopefully for the local premier in October. I'm signing up for a beginner's conversational Mandarin class at the Chinese Cultural Center when I get back to San Francisco. It would be kind of a waste to learn Chinese and not come back. We'll see. I think for now I'll walk to the kopi tiam down the street and have some tao hui and kopi-o.