Director of Photography Donavan Sell, actor Brian Levy (who plays Junior) and I are in La Roche Sur Foron, France, near Geneva.
It's a gorgeous medieval French village, just at the base of the Alps. We're shooting one of the sections of the film here and then we move on to Dublin, Ireland where we have nearly ten pages of script to film (about 8% of the movie, if you can believe that).
I got married at the end of August and we did our honeymoon in Europe. My lovely (and supportive) new wife went home to Oakland and I stayed here for these scenes, flying out Donavan and Brian via cheap online tickets.
In both Dublin and La Roche, we filmed scenes for the film three years ago when I was backpacking around Europe (read some of the original blog posts about that). The script was more of an outline and I wrote each scene a couple days before each shoot. We gathered actors through friends and scrambled on the day of each shoot to fill out the roles and locations.
But that bare-bones backpacking-verite production got the ball rolling on IN-WORLD WAR (then under its working title of GAMEPLAY).
Now that we have a full, edited script and a real crew (including an amazing DP), we have returned to reshoot these scenes.
We're even using the same actors to play Mary, though thankfully we have a professional (Brian) to play Junior. I had originally played the role since I was the only one traveling between me and my then-girlfriend (now wife) that was willing to be in front of the camera. Believe me, Brian is much better than me.
And we're actually shooting in the same bar we shot in three years ago. Deja vu.
We're sharing a cheap apartment at a local family's small B&B while in La Roche. It's kinda like a big road-trip movie with the three of us. More than once we've wandered around town trying to find some semi-vegan food I can eat, long after most restaurants have closed.
We're being very well-supported here (and in Dublin too -- more on that in a later post).
A digital media school based in Geneva has come on board with equipment and crew (thank you SAE!). A friend of a friend helped with producing, hooked us up with the school as well as a couple of the students that have a Sony EX3 that we can shoot with. Turns out, we cannot use the RED, since there are only three in Geneva and they are extremely expensive to rent. The EX3 (shooting in 1080p) should be fine.
We are also shooting some low light and public/street scenes with a Canon 5D. The video it takes is amazing. And it is shaped like a standard still (photo) camera so we look like tourists.
Thanks to Benjamin, Mikael, Alex, Noemie, Silvere, Laure and of course Nicole for their help with all this, plus all the rest of the amazing SAE team of course.
One of the things we stumbled across in La Roche was what we call the "Pizza ATM". You put in your money, select a pizza and it cooks it up and spits it out a slot in less than four minutes. We haven't tried it (8 euros is a lot to pay for questionable robot-made food) but we did take a couple pictures (see below). Brilliant those French people. Just brilliant.
The exchange rate sucks right now, so if you're looking for an end-year tax deduction, please consider a tax deductible donation to help us out.
We're traveling VERY cheaply and are using mostly volunteer labor and donated gear. But the food is not cheap. Even the non-vegan food.
Please donate today if you can!
Check out our snaps of the French Pizza ATM (withdrawals only, hopefully)...click for full-size:
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