After a solid 4 seasons of our supernatural thriller. Our cast member who plays the monster developed a latex allergy before the final episodes closing out the show. We needed to recast and have the 100k costume reworked to fit the new cast member. It didn’t affect me too much, but barely was solved in time and almost pushed back production.
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Oh yeah, and COVID. I was on a tech scout for a cbs pilot. The scout went well and we stayed at the office until late that night going over notes. This was on a Wednesday. The next day we got the checks out to the locations, and all went well in the logistics meeting. I went to scout a park for a pickup in manhattan when my wife called and told me my dog had just passed away. I finally found a parking spot and as I was walking to the park I got a call from the office. An exec on the tech scout tested positive and we were shutting down. I returned to the office to find a mass exodus of cbs and nbc shows.
Since the check’s hadn’t been cashed, and we shut down 3 days before principle photography started, I figured the project was dead. Then after quarantine was over and jobs started up again, I got a call to work on a pilot. The same pilot. Same execs, but different team for my department, and instead of shooting predominantly in nyc and li, we’d be doing New Jersey instead. So I joined the team and we did it all over again, but with social distancing and a h&s team.
We prepped and filmed for about a month until one of the principles tested positive and we shut down for another 1.5 months forcing us into the next calendar year. We eventually finished it as I joked about working on the third season of this pilot, but ended up with a quality product approximately 10m later that nobody saw.
Thanks for sharing these stories, I think we need to have more people candidly share the chaotic experiences that happen on set so beginners filmmakers feel less alone when things go wrong. Stuff like this goes all the way from the indies to the biggest studios in the world. We have to just persevere & push through when we face these things.
After a solid 4 seasons of our supernatural thriller. Our cast member who plays the monster developed a latex allergy before the final episodes closing out the show. We needed to recast and have the 100k costume reworked to fit the new cast member. It didn’t affect me too much, but barely was solved in time and almost pushed back production.
——————
Oh yeah, and COVID. I was on a tech scout for a cbs pilot. The scout went well and we stayed at the office until late that night going over notes. This was on a Wednesday. The next day we got the checks out to the locations, and all went well in the logistics meeting. I went to scout a park for a pickup in manhattan when my wife called and told me my dog had just passed away. I finally found a parking spot and as I was walking to the park I got a call from the office. An exec on the tech scout tested positive and we were shutting down. I returned to the office to find a mass exodus of cbs and nbc shows.
Since the check’s hadn’t been cashed, and we shut down 3 days before principle photography started, I figured the project was dead. Then after quarantine was over and jobs started up again, I got a call to work on a pilot. The same pilot. Same execs, but different team for my department, and instead of shooting predominantly in nyc and li, we’d be doing New Jersey instead. So I joined the team and we did it all over again, but with social distancing and a h&s team.
We prepped and filmed for about a month until one of the principles tested positive and we shut down for another 1.5 months forcing us into the next calendar year. We eventually finished it as I joked about working on the third season of this pilot, but ended up with a quality product approximately 10m later that nobody saw.
Because it didn’t get picked up after all that.
Thanks for sharing these stories, I think we need to have more people candidly share the chaotic experiences that happen on set so beginners filmmakers feel less alone when things go wrong. Stuff like this goes all the way from the indies to the biggest studios in the world. We have to just persevere & push through when we face these things.