Beauty From the Mess

Given the sleep-deprived ranting of my previous post, I felt a follow-up was in order. 🙂

If you read that post and were praying–thank you. I realize that complaining about troubles on a film shoot might seem a bit trivial, but it was of great importance to us because we feel like this film could really help to launch The Director’s career–so we had a lot of emotion invested in it. That being said, beauty came from the mess, and I’d like to share a little about that with you.

I’ve seen it happen multiple times in my experience, but I still get amazed and wonderstruck at the infinite ways God can take a bad situation and bring good out of it. At the time of my last post, we had just come off of a late-night film shoot for The Director’s short film, which had culminated in the cinematographer breaking a camera worth well over $2000. After my post, we spent the early part of Sunday afternoon in a high-stress situation trying to find the funds for a replacement camera, then trying to actually GET those funds to the retailer. We did manage to do it, and got back a half hour before call time for the NEXT film shoot, which was in a coffee shop that lacked air conditioning and was way busier and noisier than the management had told us it would be. Sunday was definitely our most difficult day, due in part to fatigue, in part to stress, and in part to difficult shooting circumstances. By the time we got home, we were completely spent, and got to bed as soon as we could.

What I’ve described is stressful enough, but the truth is, we dealt with a whole set of adverse situations throughout the shoot. Let me give you a few examples:

• Pre-production: Two scheduled locations denying us permission to shoot at the last minute, causing us to scramble to find a “plan B.”
• Day One: Being accosted by building security on our first location for shooting on what we thought was public property, going upstairs to ask permission, being stonewalled, then unceremoniously escorted off property.
• Day Two: Broken camera (described already in detail).
• Day Three: Spending the day trying to replace broken camera.
• Day Four: Lead actress gets into a car wreck on the way to the shoot. She was not hurt, but it delayed filming for three hours.
• Day Five: The only day of the shoot where everything happened pretty much as expected.

But even with all this, we wound up feeling like this was one of the best experiences we’d ever had.

A week before shooting began, we had a production meeting in our home, and we didn’t even know half the people who showed up–and even more people we didn’t know happened to show up as extras at different points during the shoot. This was because The Director had been working with three of his friends, all of whom had gotten their friends and acquaintances involved. So all these people we didn’t know were watching how our family handled the production, including all of the pitfalls and shortcomings, and how we continued to press through the adversity and find solutions on the fly. (This is one thing I can confidently say we learned from the ministry.) And all through the experience, there were these moments of magic. When our two main characters were on a “date” in downtown Denver, we all felt like we were on the date with them. When the extras were costumed and choreographed for the “long take” in the theater location we’d secured, they totally got into their parts. Even during the times of delay and waiting around, everyone was talking, getting to know each other, and generally having a good time. We ate together on breaks, and we carried gear together to and from the cars. We became a team. And by the time shooting wrapped, as tired as we all were, people were sad that it was over. A community had formed–just like it had done the last time we did one of these film shoots.

In the days since the filming concluded, we’ve watched these people connect with each other on Facebook, sharing hundreds of pictures and tagging one another on them. And I do not know how many people have told us with no uncertainty that they want to be involved the next time The Director does a film. With all that went wrong, something obviously had gone right. Beauty had come from the mess.

By far the greatest sense of blessing we felt personally was in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts–one of our “plan B” locations, which we’d secured for the last two days of filming. From the moment I spoke with our contact there, we were made to feel welcome. We reserved their largest theater and a couple of dressing rooms downstairs as shooting locations, and they waived the rental fees (a savings of nearly $2000). All we had to pay for was the stage hand’s hourly wage. When we arrived that first morning, he greeted us warmly, offered us anything we needed (including lighting, props and equipment), and generally facilitated and looked out for us.

I almost cried. We had gotten so used to being met with resistance and being told “no” that for someone to be so accommodating was almost difficult to believe. In my mind, it absolutely made up for what we’d gone through prior to that moment. Beauty from the mess.

So…the film shoot is over, we went way over budget, and we came out of it so exhausted that we have done very little since then, just trying to recover. And it was completely worth it.