Crouching Figure: Shoot Day

Shoot day has come and gone! The week between having the films assigned and our shooting date was an absolute whirlwind, and even though things were touch and go for a bit it all came together quite beautifully in the end. 

Wednesday night before shooting I was starting to really feel the pressure, we hadn't had an actor the entire time and we had only just booked one for sure in the early evening. We  were scheduled to shoot the next day and I had no measurements, the only kind of solid information I really had to go off of was the actors published height and weight on his Spotlight profile, but I had already pulled as many options as I possibly could in variety of sizes and hired the Ringleaders jacket from Hierarchy so there really wasn't anything I could do with out more information. I was just going to have to make it work, and make it work we did!

My lovely life saving assistant Grace and I began our day at 10 a.m. (quite a luxurious call time compared to the other shoots) to fit our actor as we didn't begin shooting until 2 p.m. (A piece of our filming equipment (a jib arm) wasn't available until 2:30) in a stroke of luck most of my first choice options fit or were just a little bit big and big is better than too small. It worked out so that we didn't even have to try on most of the other options I had pulled. 

Option 1: This was the first outfit we tried on, everything worked out pretty well, we needed to swap the shirt out for one with a smaller chest size and larger neck, and the director wanted to see what the outfit would look like with a cream waistcoat, so off we ran to pull a cream waistcoat and swap out shirts.

Option 2: Tried the outfit again only this time with a cream waistcoat instead of a black one. Every one agreed that the black helped break up the color a bit and add a bit of definition. I worried that on camera the cream trousers and waistcoat would be too similar in color and would look very flat on camera as neither were really patterned fabrics. We switched back to black.

After we had settled on the ringleaders outfit we headed back to the costume workroom to take care of a few repairs and source a pair of black cotton boxers the director had added in our 10 a.m. meeting, we split up and Grace The Lifesaver ran into town to buy the boxers while I stayed behind and did repairs, Natalie also hopped in and gave me a massive hand with pressing our new shirt from the costume store.

Two thirty finally rolled around and filming began! It was very well organized and went pretty smoothly. Final checks were going well and the only real costume problem we had we were able to solve relatively quickly; the problem were the breeches that kept untucking from the boots, since they were missing the two bottom buttons on both legs they kept rising off and falling open over the tops of the boots. We fixed this by pinning elastic to the hems of the trousers and looping in down around the foot and that immediately solved our problem.

The rest of the shoot went well for costumes. It was shot in sequence and we rarely did more than one take so continuity was pretty simple. The only continuous problem was the mustache. I adhered the mustache using spirit gum however the actor was not completely clean shaven which proved problematic- if we brought a razor and shaved him completely the spirit gum adhesive would have burned and the process of removing it would have been even more painful as spirit gum is incredibly irritating to skin. The other option was to apply the mustache over the stubble- this wouldn't be very secure however it would hold and would save the actor a great deal of pain. As I predicted the mustache was a constant problem and did need constant re-positioning and re-application, but under the circumstances I think it was the best that could be done- this is a situation that could have been easily avoided by having an actor even 24 hours ahead of time to properly notify them of the requirements of the role.

Other than minor mustache alterations there was little to do other than sit behind the camera crew and stay out of the way. There were a few camera problems but those were resolved quickly by the very capable film students. We finally wrapped around 9:30 and costume had a very quick get-out.