Last night was the shoot for our video, "How to Have an Ideal Date". It was a pretty simple idea. We would shoot most of it in my partner Michael's apartment, and then we were supposed to shoot the rest at Steak n' Shake.  We figured the apartement part wouldn't take too long, maybe an hour or two, and then maybe an hour or less at Steak n' Shake.

But alas, everything feel to pieces quite quickly.

I wish I can remember the sequence in which everything happened, but some of it I think seemed to fall apart all at once. Let's start with our camera...

We have to check out cameras from the school's department, which are really nice so I won't complain. The camera we checked out was not one of my professor's cameras, but one of the other professors' (but that's a whole other story we won't get into). So everything on the camera was set on the wrong thing, which makes things difficult when you are still trying to figure out how to use the camera. That might not have been too huge of a deal, but we did not realize this until after we realized the BOTH of the batteries in the camera kit were COMPLETELY DEAD, which can also be attributed to the fact that it was not one of my professor's kits.

So that delayed us. While I was on the phone with a classmate discussing using one of their batteries from their camera kit (since they would not be shooting until later this weekend), my partner Andy was on the phone with Steak n' Shake. Guess what they had to say?! Sorry, the person who had told us we could shoot there did not have the authority to do so and we absolutely could not shoot there!

Great. So we have dead batteries and one of our locations is completely out of the picture. Now it was time for some major brainstorming. One of our classmates said that she had gotten permission for us to shoot where she works, but unfortunately it was in Franklin and we would not be able to shoot until after midnight (which was when we were going to shoot at Steak n' Shake, but at least it would have been local). We called her and left a voicemail, but brainstormed for better options as one of the batteries charged up.

I decided to call Graham, who then turned me over to his mom, to ask about trying to make a portion of either their deck or part of their house look like a restaurant. They were more than willing to help out and so we breathed a little easier.

Meanwhile, we had to figure out how to shoot in Michael's dang apartment, which had bad lighting and obstacles known as furniture. We also had a problem of not being able to shoot outside for the "pick up" and "drop off" scenes because of how dark it was, and had to come up with creative ways to shoot those scenes from the inside. (And remember, during all this we were still trying to figure out the camera.)

I think we may have finished up with shooting everything at the apartment at 11 something (we arrived at the apartment shortly after 6... we spent about two to three hours trying to figure out how to solve all our problems). Then it was time to head over to Graham's. After a run-in with a rapping thug who wanted our cell phones at the Wal-Mart gas station, we headed over to Graham's.

God bless Trudy. She set up a really nice area that really did look like a restaurant. Granted, Michael Johnson won't be fooled, but we knew it was the best we could do. It was also nice that Graham's house is very well lit. We spent, roughly, about another hour and a half there getting our final shots, and most everything went smoothly there.

I got home at about 1:30 or so and crashed at 2 AM. My sleep was not as sweet as I anticipated, however, as I would wake up and worry about some of the shots we did before falling back to sleep. There is no room for mistakes as we do not have the option to reshoot. We can only hope and pray that in our 40 minutes of footage (after 7 hours madness) that there are two minutes of redeeming video that will keep us from getting too miserable of a grade. Thank goodness our talent was great... we really would have flopped without all their efforts. And now we can also only hope and pray that the editing process goes well. Thankfully Andy has a whole week for that.

So filming is not quite the glamour it appears to be.

And this morning I dropped my psychology class I hated so much. And it feels so freeing...