Well hello my good friends,
Thanks again for stopping by our little corner of the internet.  Well some of you may know this is coming but I bring good news!  Brotherhood Pictures LLC along with our good friends at Purpose Pictures, have completed day one of production on the brand new feature, Before the Lights Come Up.  And surprise of all surprises….were on schedule.  Now don’t get me wrong, its not like its impossible for Brotherhood to shoot on schedule, in fact Small Town was an incredibly packed schedule and we made it.  It’s just usually we run into a few hiccups on the first day of shooting a project and we play make-up the next few days.  Not to mention we have decently ambitious schedules we set ourselves in the first place.  Ambitious means slightly suicidal right?  That one is always on my list of words to look up.
But I digress, the important thing is no hiccups!!!  Well we had one slight complication, a road bump if you will.  Computer trouble this morning held me and Marc up.  Well computer troubles and the miserable traffic from Orange County to LA (or should I say the ambitious traffic from Orange County to LA?).  The point is we were set to show up an hour before shooting but showed up just by the skin of our teeth.   Ok ok, you got me, we were two minutes late.  Two lousy minutes, like I say just a small speed bump.  And whats one lousy speedbump when your cruisin’ down the highway of independent film making?  From there on out it was smooth sailing!
Well… We ran into another problem a little farther down the road.  We had set the stage to shoot the big scene of the day.  Probably one of the most dramatic and certainly the loudest scenes in the move.  Marc is walking the beutiful and lovely Jenica Swartzman and the equally beautiful and lovely Vanessa Parker through their placements.  The room became tense as if the sound a piano darting up and down scales was lightly echoing in all our skulls.  This was mainly due to the fact the sound of a piano darting up and down scales was lightly echoing through the walls of our set.  You see,  The wonderful Jenica and Ryan Swartzman were so kind as to lend us their brand new apartment for the filming of a good brunt of the movie, and as it turns out, their downstairs neighbor was a musician.  And form what I could hear (which was too much to shoot anything with sound) a pretty damn good one.  His grand piano located directly underneath us didn’t hurt his skills I’m sure.
So we take care of some inserts, shoot some of the shots that don’t need sound and by that time the piano had stopped and it was time for us to keep on rockin’.  We re-setup the shot and knocked the whole scene out.  This time the notes of the piano didn’t come until Marc yelled cut on the last take.  So with audible music in the living room we made our way to the bedroom to do the bedroom scene of all things.  Actually in this room the piano was completely inaudible, and you can trust me on that because I’m a sound guy.  So we setup for the scene and let ‘er roll.  Well we let it roll for a couple of seconds before from outside we heard the loud clank of refrigerator movers doing what they do best, moving refrigerators.  Aparently also not a company known for doing it quickly or quietly.  So now we had to wait it out and time it so when they were inside moving/installing we were filming.  And would you believe it, it worked, Another scene down.
Ok, so a rough first half of the day.  But the second half has got to go smoothly.  And by go smoothly I mean the camera overheating 3 times, the battery dying twice, and a Brotherhood first…waiting for the sun to go down so we could shoot our night stuff, as opposed to desperately hoping it stays up just a little while longer so we can get that last shot.  Ok so maybe smooth wasn’t the ideal candidate for leading descriptive word of the days events.  But…. We knocked it all out and we are on schedule.  Take that hiccups, road bumps and all other bad forms of luck looking to make us not make our movie!  One day down, 13 more to go.

Your friendly neighborhood sound guy,
Ronnie