Today we were shooting Backslash here at the treehouse. No really big, elaborate scenes this time, which was a good thing because we were down to a few short ends of the kind of film stock we needed.

In this case, we were using tungsten-balanced Kodak film, so the first thing we had to do was to gel the windows with a color-correcting film, both to tame the brightness and to match the color temperature of the indoor lighting.

I think the neighbors are used to seeing the treehouse covered with plastic by now. They may just assume that I'm an artist who is heavily influenced by Christo.

Which is really not a bad idea at all. Maybe, if I encouraged this particular misapprehension, I could get a grant to do it. That wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit. Suitable-for-film-use gels are a lot more expensive than you might think.

Here we have director Kevin Campbell getting one of the actresses ready for the next shot.

One of the things you may not realize about filmmaking is that, if you were looking at a cut that showed, for example, me talking to someone else...but didn't have that someone else in frame...that someone else very likely wasn't in the room or even on the set at all at the time. I've done scenes where my "side" of the set was in a completely different location than the "side" with the person I was interacting with, but as long as it's cut together right, nobody would ever guess. In one case, the person I was talking to hadn't even been cast yet and her lines hadn't actually been written when I did my side of the scene. All in a day's work when you're in this business.

Because of the aforementioned film stock issue, we only made it through the shots that took place in the bedroom. That's okay, though. The original plan had been to do a few other scenes in other parts of the house, and while this will stretch the shooting schedule some, it won't break it, and it leaves us some more time to dress the other sets before the rest of the film stock gets in and we can resume shooting.

I finally got to see a completed script for Covenant of Shadows...just in time to do a read-through with the rest of the cast.

As you can see, it's not quite the "cast of thousands," but it's certainly not small. And, of course, the extras weren't here, either.

Besides the cast, the wardrobe department came out for the reading and managed to get measurements of all of us. That'll be nice for me--this way I don't end up doing yet another performance in clothing that's designed to fit someone much shorter and much wider than I.

For whatever reason, a goodly percentage of the movies I've been involved in lately are at least partially narrated by one of the characters. Sometimes that works pretty well dramatically, sometimes it doesn't. In Covenant of Shadows I'm the one doing it, so this time, at least, I'm sure it'll work great. :)

Though my first time reading the script was reading my parts out loud, one thing that made it easier than a lot of cold readings is that the character's "voice" was fairly consistent. I've read others where the sense that I'd gotten at the beginning didn't match the sense of who the character was that I developed later on in the script. It's nice not to have the problem of shifting mental gears in mid-script, trying to keep my own mental image of who this person was and how he thinks consistent with what I'm reading.

In this case, it's a couple of scenes that are supposed to take place in a secret room hidden somewhere in an ordinary residence.

...and, gosh, I just happen to live in an ordinary residence that has a couple of secret rooms.

Not, unfortunately, particularly glamorous secret rooms, as you can see from the picture on the left which shows one end of such a room. Not that it's even much of a room, either, but it's bigger than it looks from the picture.

Yeah. Really. I'm sure you've heard that before, but in this case it's true.

I've gotten used to quick changes when it comes to filming, too, whether in March or any other time of the year. I'd been working on scrounging up a bunch of displays for a set that's supposed to feature several operating security monitors that'll be visible on camera. One difference between the camera's eye and your own is that you don't blink twenty-four times per second and even then only hold your eyes open for a fraction of that.

That's not so much of a problem when it comes to filming actors, most of whom don't move a whole lot during that fractional second, but when you're filming a TV set, you end up capturing a moving band of colored light where the electron gun has just finished exciting the appropriate phosphors. Your eye doesn't notice that the whole screen isn't even lit up at once, but if you started blinking every small fraction of a second, you probably would.

You can get around this problem with conventional TV displays, but not easily. You have to sync all the video sources together and then sync the camera shutter to that. Certainly that's doable when you have the equipment, the budget, and the people to do it. When what you've got is me, you run the risk that I'll decide that the whole thing sounds like too much trouble...and, besides, you wouldn't be sure that it all worked until the film was developed and transferred, which means you might have to rebuild the set and reshoot everything, messing up the rest of the shooting schedule in the process.

Fortunately, I just happen to have a dozen or two old LCD projection panels--the type you'd put on an overhead projector...the type nobody uses any more now that video projectors are commonplace. LCD displays--whether standalone monitors, laptop displays, or these things--don't have the banding problem, because the pixels stay lit longer than it takes to redraw them, so no part of the screen never has time to get dark between passes.

Somewhere green, perhaps, though looks can be deceiving.

Which, I think, is just another sign of technological progress: who needs to have the actors and sets anywhere near each other when you can just green-screen everything?

I'm not sure this is entirely good technological progress, but I can certainly understand the logistical advantages: "hey, here's a gun. Do something. Okay, that was great. Now do something in that direction. Pretend there's something over there somewhere."

In any event, whatever did happen, I think I won. As long as it looks good when it all comes together, I suppose that's all that matters.

Weird weather out there today. Out here at the treehouse, it was just a soft, silent snowfall with big, fat flakes drifting down. Really quite lovely.

But I had to make a run into town, and looking to the north it looked like there was a solid wall stretching from the mountains out to the plains with most of the city locked behind it. It started out at the mountains all white and dark blue-grey as clouds usually do, but a short distance east of there, it abruptly turned a bizarre uniform brown color.

Driving north, I drew closer and closer to where the city disappeared into brownness, and a few miles north of here, I finally drove into it--and abruptly found the car buffeted in high winds with a mixture of hail, rain, falling slush, and what would have been called "mist" if it had been made of water instead of thin, runny mud.

I suppose you could think of it as lying somewhere between what the English and the Germans would call "mist," but it was pretty unusual to have something like that pouring off my windshield unless it's being sprayed upwards from the wheels of a dumptruck. I don't know how wide a swath it cut across the city; miles at the very least.

I'm guessing it was being blown up from some large construction site close to the mountains, but it was an amazing amount of flying dirt.

Back here, though, the wind and the flying dirt never did stop by, just the silent snow.