Friday - Getting Ready, Part 2

After my second near death experience from the Starbucks employee prank, I was very happy to get the Uhaul and get to the furniture store, so our burly helper crew men, could start loading it up.

El Paso Imports furniture store, was absolutely awesome in loaning us all the furniture we needed to dress our set. It was darkly stained, deeply carved, gorgeous wood pieces, that all together may have easily weighed 1200 pounds. Really. I'm not exaggerating. These were massive pieces. MASSIVE! and the guys had to load and unload the van and then bring them up a narrow flight of stairs - All within a few hours.

While they broke their backs, Kat and I picked up more production gear and headed over to the school where we would film tomorrow morning.

For the look of the film, we really needed to use a school for our location. It just wasn't something that would look good if you tried to fake it. Fortunately, we got into one that looked great, and the admin and teachers were helpful and gracious. Thank you for opening your school to us!!

The idea was to clean out the classroom, bring up the furniture, and dress the set, while Kat rehearsed with the actors and Costume could finalize the clothing for the actors.

My third stab of panic came, when I realized we were going to totally clean out the classroom. Like as in - Everything was coming out. These are 2 (out of 90) pictures I took to help us know where to put stuff back.

Fortunately, the crew on this detail was fantastic. I had devised a system to get everything out of the room and Wonderful Associate Producer Alicia found a great way to organize the shelf detritus, so that it would go back the exact way it came off.

This is what the hallway looked like after we got everything out of the classroom. The stuff goes to the end of the building.

Then because of the hard work and keen eye of our Set Designer Extraordinaire Alexis, the room miraculously began to transform itself from a Super Hero themed 4th grade classroom, to polished, imposing, prep school headmistress' office. It looked fantastic! I'm sorry I don't have a better picture of the finished product, (there are two more huge bookcases you don't see in the picture), but we were all pretty busy.

It took us from 3:30 to 7pm to dress the set. It was exhausting, hurried and we were hustling! But we totally kicked it out. and tomorrow, with a call time of 5am, I know we will be ready to do some serious movie making! Saturday Part 1, coming soon!