I can’t fit inside the Lamborghini, but I can still say I own one. I could have wiped off the dust and tried to pass it off as the real thing, but where’s the fun in that? Keeping it dusty gives me a chance to say “Can you imagine if I took care of a real Lamborghini as poorly as I do my scale model? I’d be a Hollywood celebrity!”

That’s more fun to say.

Plus I almost forgot to post today and I had to slap something together in a big hurry.

Anyway, on with yesterday’s show!

Behind the Scenes on NURF Wars, Part 2:

So we walked over to the Carl’s Jr. in the same parking lot, warmed up and starting re-thinking how to approach what was quickly turning into a disaster.

I decided that it might work to finish the shoot in a completely different parking lot within the same area. We would have to keep from exposing in the shots that we were elsewhere and we’d have to move quickly if we were to get remotely close to finishing the scene.

Fortunately, a friend of my actress had shown up with a truck just before we stopped to eat. I didn’t realize how crucial his truck would be until I remembered that I had written somewhere that I should tell my actors to follow me down to the parking lot from the initial location with their own cars. Why? So I could have a couple extra cars should I need to fill up a parking lot that would surely and quickly empty out as the night wore on. I forgot to remind my actors of that and we all came down in just my car… Big mistake.

Every parking lot in sight emptied out fast, including the one we settled on.

Tic, toc, tic, toc.

We settled on shooting at the 24 Hour Fitness parking lot. So we shot as quickly as we could with the cars that were there. Any new car that parked near us was golden and we assumed that it would give us access to the new car or truck for maybe 15 to 20 minutes, depending on how serious that person was about working out that late at night.

Inevitably though, the parking lot got emptier… and emptier… and emptier… And we still weren’t close enough to finishing the scene we needed.

So we started improvising.

Depending on the angle of the shot we needed, we would move my actress’s friend’s truck around to a new parking spot. Sometimes facing it forward, sometimes backwards. The assumption was that if I cut from one shot to the next fast enough, nobody would notice that we were filling a parking lot with the same truck over and over again.

But we still needed other people’s cars and they were slowly trickling out. So we kept re-thinking the action to match how many cars we had left.

Fssshhhhh… The doors to the gym would slide open… and we’d all stop and stare at the person casually strolling out… and we would plead quietly… “Oh please don’t take this car… We still need this one…”

Tic, toc, tic, toc.

To be continued…