How to survive night shoots and the unwanted advances of stingrays

The night shoots were hard.  I personally drank my weight in coffee. Everybody had his or her own way of staying up.  There were jokers, singers, dancers, cursers, but everyone put their shoulder to it and it was generally not just bearable, but pretty fun.  Then we hit the beach.

We had hoped to schedule our beach nights for the very last days of our shoot, that way everybody could sleep indefinitely afterwards.  We knew just looking at them in the script that they would be a challenge for the crew, not to mention our poor cast who would be jumping into the pacific and then performing wet in their underwear in the middle of the night. It's Southern California, sure, but that ocean is never really warm and at night, well, it's really cold.  It has always been my filmmaking philosophy that you make things as comfortable as possible for the people who show up to help you create your vision.

Well it didn't work to out to shoot at the end. Because of the beach location availability, it was right smack in the middle of the shoot.  I was worried about our team becoming exhausted.  We tried our best to prep.  We had warming tents, we had soup, and we had coffee.  We had people with bathrobes standing at the edge of frame that could run in and engulf our poor actors as soon as we yelled cut.  We had a state lifeguard and state park rangers on hand.  But there was no denying once the camera started rolling that the shoot looked unbalanced.   There was everyone, including me, in wooly coats and our cast in skivvies. 

But the worst came right before all four of our main cast were supposed to jump into the ocean.  We had a huddle with the lifeguard to talk about safety and he started talking about STINGRAYS.  Apparently there was an unusually abundant population happening, a once in a lifetime super population and they had been known to gather around the beach we were shooting at.  Our lifeguard suggested splashing and making a lot of noise when entering the water to scare these guys away.  He didn't see any real danger, but wanted our cast to know this.  The five of us just stared at him.  

When the time came, I could see everybody was a little nervous.  But there was also this charge mentality, like lets get this done!  I double-checked with the lifeguard to make sure it was just irksome and not dangerous and he reassured me.

We shot the initial run in a wide with two cameras rolling.  It was kind of crazy and exhilarating seeing the four, Kyle, Demetri, Eliza and Mary Elizabeth, charge into that water. They ran in, they splashed about, they ran out.  We shot the whole scene, with them in the water and then their dialogue at the edge of the water with the beach ranger.  They were amazing.  When we cut, Mary Elizabeth turned to me and said "Um, I rolled around under the water with a stingray".  Apparently she had encountered one, tripped and then continued with the scene because she knew we could only do it so many times.  It was amazing and also emblematic of the type of commitment I got from everybody on this film.  It became a joke, the rest of the cast teasing Mary Elizabeth about her tumble with ‘Ray’ and then her doing the most hilarious stingray impression I have ever seen.  The shot where she meets the stingray is actually in the film.  It's a wide, but you can kind of see where she stumbles and then comes back shouting with ‘joy’.

That’s the kind of shoot this was, hard, crazy and at the end of the day, a really good time!