During the month of June I did two projects as first AD. The first one was for a company based on New York. They hired me to arrange the schedule and  budget before start of production.  After this project, I was hired again to work for a friend. His film is called Forever Yours.

My friend Parlav Chaudhary invited me to work on his project. It was a short film with students from the New York Film Academy. We shot this film in one day at an amazing location in Reseda. When I say amazing I don’t mean that it was a fancy mansion or something like that. The place was almost like a farm house in the middle of the city.

I always get to the location 30 minutes to one hour before call time just because I am the First AD, and usually I work a lot. So when I got there, there was at least 15 dogs inside of the location. I entered the place and I thought: “okay, cool. All these dogs are going to mess the shoot. Awesome!” I thought of that because at first the house seemed pretty small for that amount of dogs, but I started to find my way to the back of the house and I was amazed by how big that place was. The house in the front was big enough to keep all the dogs inside, then the backyard, where  we set up the stage area and the shooting location, was triple the size of the front house.

Two things that were unbelievable in the backyard: first an artist called Alex Atman, lived there in a cabin kind of house where his atelier, his jawbreaking 3d metal artwork, were exposed to everyone to see. This guy was also pretty cool with us, because he let us use his place for the actors change clothes, and he pretty much cleaned the only bathroom before everyone started using it. The second unbelievable part of the backyard was the animals. There was at least 4 hogs there in the backyard. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were the most cute thing I could ever imagine seeing on a set. People have the tendency to think that hogs and pigs are filthy, disgusting animals, and they are kind of filthy and disgusting. But at the same time they are very funny and cute. The noises they make, they way they walk, and how sneaky they are.

There was a moment that one of the hogs were getting close to the craft table to eat what was in the trash can, and I had to scare him off. The hog literally complained with me making noises similar to a man growling. And then slowly he backed away. Everybody laughed at that scene.

The shoot went fine. We were using the RED Camera with a set of very beautiful PL prime lenses as the first camera and we had a rigged 7D as well as the second. The DP was Sanket Dolas and he is one of the most talented DPs I had the pleasure to work lately. We had a crew that were very efficient and everybody was really laid back. I mean, there was no people bitching about anything, and no complains. Even with a 19 hours shoot day. It took us 19 hours to start and wrap the whole thing. By the fact that it was only one day, the overall mood of the crew was good even with the long hours.

I took some pictures of this day and also the still photographer Fred Tapia gave me some frames. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.