The Third Age

Partying the Third Age Way

With the new release of the show, I thought I’d reflect on what was one of my favorite shoots for The Third Age. It happened only a couple months ago – August 12, 2009.

As with most scenes for The Third Age, it took us a long time to schedule this shoot. The particular difficulty for this scene, was that it was a party scene. The scene happens later in the series, and we needed most of our main characters plus a handful of extras to pull it off. It can be very difficult scheduling our actors, since creative types very rarely have a 9-5. In this situation, one of our actors was only available on weeknights, and another wasn’t. So it took a lot of work to eventually make things line up. But finally we had a date!

We decided to shoot the party scene at my apartment in Brooklyn. I’ve got a pretty large living room and kitchen, and roommates who don’t mind having a lot of people over. Also, our living room is always full of strange “found art” – including a manikin (if you look very closely in the background of the party scene, you’ll see him!). It seemed like a good fit.

The week leading up to the shoot, Patrick, Jordan and I all invited as many people as we could to come be extras for the shoot. Unfortunately since we were shooting on a weeknight, it wasn’t easy to convince people to come all the way out to Brooklyn. We kind of had no idea who exactly would show up.

Patrick and Jordan showed up around 7ish, and we started setting up lights and planning out the shots. I made a run to the liquor store to get drinks and pick up some pizza, and by the time I got back, most of our actors had arrived. In total we had around 7 extras, including one or two of my roommates. Not a huge party, but enough to make it look realistic on camera. Being the middle of August, the apartment started to heat up very quickly with so many people in it (not to mention the lights). I have a window unit AC in my room, so I powered that on, and encouraged people to wait in there while we got everything set up and ready to shoot.

Finally, we were ready to roll. People got into their places, Jordan grabbed the camera, I turned on the lights, and BAM…darkness. In the midst of all the setting up, I had forgotten that the AC was running in my room. Apparently the AC on top of all our lighting was too much power for the apartment to handle. My roommate and I attempted to rectify the situation, but even after we flipped the circuit breakers multiple times, we still didn’t have power.

I promptly went downstairs to find my super. I live in a very large building, and our super and management can be lax…to say the least. Needless to say, no one was home at the super’s apartment. So I started calling the management and leaving voicemails every 2 minutes. 45 minutes later they finally turned our power back on.

Back on track, we shot the meat of the party scene pretty quickly. It was an intense scene, and the actors nailed it. We then moved things into my room to shoot a scene between two of our main characters. Without the AC, things quickly got very hot in the room, but our actors never complained once. It seemed like they were able to channel that energy into their performances.

Once we finally got filming on this shoot, things moved along really smoothly. The acting was spot on, and the lighting turned out really great thanks to a couple well placed Respect lights. When we finished, everyone stuck around for a little while to mingle and finish off the drinks..er, props….and a good time was had by all. So although we got off to a rather rocky start, we ended up wrapping on time, getting some solid footage, and crossing yet another epic day off the Third Age shooting list.

~Amber

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