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When it rains, it pours…
October 19, 2004
Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these production journals. Not from any lack of prodding on Brad’s part, nor for any lack of beginnings on mine. I’ve probably got five pages of first paragraphs cluttering up my computer. The fact is, I’m finding reflection at this point in the game extremely difficult, as there is still so much work to do. It feels like trying to cram a strategy session into the middle of a championship soccer match. It’s a great idea, but the timing could probably be better. At the same time, though, how do I make sure I don’t forget something if I don’t record it while it’s fresh in my mind?
So, I find myself sitting here at Rob’s computer, an hour before a production meeting, trying yet again to create something that gives a little insight into this project. I’m tempted to write about the rather strange experience of watching Shaun of the Dead develop over the past year, at the same time as our own similarly-original series took shape, but I think if anyone tackles that it should be our resident connoisseur of the undead, Jay.
I could write about the rather harsh mental switch involved in working corporate retail for eight hours and then stepping directly into a creative, not-for-profit job which I love infinitely more. But, honestly, my day job isn’t interesting enough to waste bandwidth on.
So, I think instead I will take it upon myself to reveal to you the mystery behind ‘Special Edition Number One’, and what exactly inspired this small fragment of lunacy.
On the Monday after an average shoot weekend, the DED crew will gather around a TV screen and run through the mass of footage we’ve shot. Considering the fact that each episode has roughly an hour of footage, and we shoot on average four episodes in a weekend, and the entire thing is very halting as time codes and subject matter have to be meticulously, laboriously recorded, this can turn into a very long night.
On the weekend we shot the upcoming episode, number 45, people’s schedules were tighter than normal, and there were commitments we couldn’t get out of. So we only got through one hour on the Monday, and postponed the rest until Thursday. At the same time we were cutting the shoot close with actors, as they were very busy, and one in particular would be leaving for Ireland on Wednesday. That meant that by the time we realized something was wrong, a key piece of our cast was flying over the Atlantic.
It took us about an hour to really admit to ourselves that something was wrong. Watching through the second tape of the weekend, we came to a twenty minute gap at the end. Thinking we had simply forgotten to fill the tape, we moved on to the next, and found ourselves directly in the middle of episode 45, no opening shot, half of a conversation gone.
After a few moments of stunned silence, we began exploring the possibilities. Maybe we had recorded onto the end of a previous tape instead of that one. But no, none of the previous tapes had the footage. Maybe we had somehow forgotten to hit record. But if we did, why would we have switched the tape out in the middle of the shoot? It would have remained at that twenty-minutes-remaining point throughout the shoot, until we wised up and started recording onto it. Maybe it was damaged by a magnet or something else… But then why was the rest of the tape perfectly fine?
After an hour of searching and wild theorizing, the only conclusion we could come to was that it had vanished into some digital Bermuda Triangle, never too return. (For reference, this was the night episode 42 went up, which is marked by a rather brief, exhausted post from Brad because of this discovery.) Considering the fact that this episode was intended to be #43 in the original timeline, this was quite a blow.
As much as we hated to admit it, the hard truth we had to accept was that there was no way we could fix this in time for posting the next Friday. The next episode, which is now 43, was not yet done filming, so we couldn’t move on and come back to it once we had re-shot. As we did on the week of the press conference, we squared our jaws and took our lumps, and put our creative integrity in the capable hands of Brad Fox and his ability to write brief comedy segments very quickly.
Over the next week we organized re-shoots (which went as late as this past Sunday, again due to busy actor schedules) and on Thursday we called up Erin to be the voice of the first DED clip show. Thus was born ‘Special Edition Number One’.
Running at such a tight pace, it’s always crippling when something comes up to disrupt our schedule. 99% of the time we can sidestep the problem before it arrives, but this one blindsided us. At this point, I’m happy to say that everything is running on schedule to the end. To make sure we go out with a bang, we’ve scheduled a dark week between 46 and 47 to perfect the final two episodes, but everything else is running well.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go knock on the largest block of wood I can find.
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