Happy birthday to Gedde Watanabe, Paul Thomas Anderson, Chris Isaak and Sean Hayes. And happy birthday to gay marriage!
I'm back in the studio (and back to the long commute), now working on interior sets to match our lovely neighborhood exteriors up here in the barrio.
But after a day spent endlessly tweaking the precise degree of aged-plaster texture on the interior walls of our hero's beloved bodega (trying our best to follow verbal instructions that somehow managed to seem both vague and over-specific -- just one of those days), I decided to stop by the location on the way home to snap a few pics of the real walls. But when I arrived, lo and behold:
Magic hour (evening playing as morning, I'm guessing)! Throngs of colorful characters dancing in the streets with superhuman grace and energy! The title song, on playback, audible half a block in every direction from our pivotal intersection! Camera crew everywhere, with the camera itself on a sizable crane! PAs at each corner wrangling crowds of background players and a smattering of curious onlookers!
When the take was done, one of those PAs let me into the bodega (which seemed to still be doing business, between takes!) to check out the plaster; his words, in between exhorting extras to clear the street for traffic: "paint clothes get you through". (Verbatim, I shit you not).
I was right when I surmised, earlier in the day, that the reason I had no memory of the actual bodega walls (despite having patronized it daily while working up here on-location for several weeks) was because -- as in most such establishments -- it's so crammed with shelves and refrigerator cases, etc., that almost no actual wallspace was visible. I did get one pic showing a square foot or two of crumbling plaster -- literally the only visible sample I could find, and I did explore every corner. But that one pic persuades me that our interior-set walls are basically in the right visual world.
Granted, I don't actually know that we're even trying to duplicate the real walls; despite ample glass facing the street, the signage and other visual masking is such that you hardly see any of the interior from outside (again, typical of many such mom-and-pop storefronts in the neighborhood). So the real interior doesn't actually have to be perfectly matched for continuity; indeed, the designer has taken other liberties with our interior set, cleverly manipulating the apparent size and shape of the space, which suggest that exact duplication isn't what he's after.
Even so, it happens that that one small visible sample I was able to photograph -- on a load-bearing pillar near the (glass) door -- might just be slightly visible from outside, so its (reasonable) resemblance to what we're doing in the studio makes me feel better.
Movie magic...
I celebrated Wild Wednesday by getting a haircut and trying a pizza place for lunch to which I've never been before. Whew! I nearly needed a nap after all that!~ :D