The Attic Door

Danny Daneau
Director

…it was morning.

My first day of production. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the calming conversation that I had with my producers the night before, but I didn’t feel as sick or nervous as I thought I would. After taking a long warm shower, and getting ready in front of the hotel mirror, I grabbed my thick directors notebook and headed out the door.

I arrived to a relaxing and calm atmosphere on set. Because of child labour laws and rules within the Screen Actors Guild, there was a limit to the amount of time I could work a child actor every day. This meant every morning we would have an extra hour or so to get set up and ready for the day ahead before any cast arrived.

When scheduling the interiors of the film, we decided that the best way to get all the scenes in the can was to shoot out each room individually. This is not a new concept as most feature length films are shot out of sequence for the interest of time and money. This meant we would spend a day or two in a room and not move into the next room until most, if not all, the scenes were completed. Today, to my relief, we were starting in the kitchen.

The kitchen scenes were the least demanding on everyone with minimal camera, dialog, performance, and blocking. This meant we could all take the time we needed to find our groove as a film crew. For me it meant I could find the best method of communicating with my actors on the film set.

When Jake and Madison arrived they got into wardrobe and we started shooting our first scene. Simple enough. Then we moved onto a more complicated scene where both children cook breakfast. We moved through four scenes before lunch and I was feeling like a million bucks. The night before I was so scared on whether or not I was going to be able to arrive on set and make it work. And here before my very eyes, it was working.

We went to lunch when I heard a mumbling from the grip table. OUR GENERATOR HAD GONE DOWN. For those of you who don’t know, film and high definition need a ton of light to expose the image you see in the theatre. This light can only be powered by high tech movie generators that are able to pump out the amperage and not all the loud noise typical to most industrial generators. We were in the middle of a small town Utah, three hours from Vegas and four from Salt Lake City. What this meant was we would not be able to shoot for the rest of the day.

Typically this would stress anyone out, however it didn’t affect me much. After working with Jake and Madison all morning I was relieved to know that I had the two most talented child actors I’ve ever seen working on this film. Our set could burn down and I would still feel much comfort in the fact that we had found the perfect Caroline and Darrell. A detail I could not be certain of until the day we started rolling. A detail I was certain with now.

We came back from lunch and I suggested a scene we could shoot using only natural light and some Kinos (a low powered fluorescent-like light). We shot that scene and called an early day.

Our driver, Brian Weeks, would then make a long trip to Las Vegas where a new generator was waiting for us. I went back to my hotel and tried to figure out how we would make up the half a day we lost with this little situation.

All in all, typical opening day jitters. I was excited to begin the next day.

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