For this scene, Marelac and Emcracy are practicing sword fighting with sticks. Malfhok (a character who is added later) is coaching them. Since he’s not there, I stand off camera and read his lines for filler. Rebekah directs us with her sweeping arm motions that occasionally distract actors from what they’re doing. (Sorry, Rebekah!)

One of the sticks breaks, so everybody takes a rest. Ruth and I head off into the neighboring woods to find another one. In the meantime, Sarah finds a gun-looking stick and poses. When we get back, the cast and crew are in stitches from laughing.

Aside from being plagued with wind, cars keep going by. Frequently, Ruth, Rebekah, or I will yell “Cut, the wind is too strong!”, or “Cut, here comes a car!” As a funny side note, we were shooting near a road, and I can testify that traffic slowed down quite a bit.

Not much else to say, other than, after shooting some backgrounds to plant Malfhok on for close-ups, we put away all the equipment (to get an idea of this, read the part about setting up in reverse) and then pile into the car amid the handing out of peppermints. On to another location!

Well, before we can even leave to get to the shooting location, we have to pack. On this particular shoot, we put everything together in the front room and then went to bed. The next morning we got up, ate breakfast, went over our checklist, and then piled in the cars.

Once we got to the park where we were shooting, we had to unload, drag everything over to location and unpack. Ruth and I get started setting up.

We never gave anybody on the crew any particular jobs, except that Ruth is the camera person. Now this begins to show as Ruth and I bustle around and generally try to set up the same things at the same time, and then finally figure out that we can’t. Of course, things would go a little faster if Rebekah would stop playing with the microphone.

Everything is set up. Time to look at the storyboards. I’ll let somebody else tell you about making storyboards. For now, I’ll just say that they are drawings of the scene. We study the storyboards, get a basic idea of the way the shoot will go, and then tell the actors to get into position.

To be continued in Part 2…