148 scenes, 117 characters, a 101 page script, 86 cans of film, 53 Locations, a 24 day shoot, four weeks, and more prayers than a Baptist church on Easter Sunday… all in the can kids.I’m not going to lie, this last week was the hardest. We had hog roping, a hanging, two fight scenes (one in front of a twenty foot fire), a shootout, a night shoot with 50+ extras, an 18-wheeler, and rain. Thursday - day 24 - was originally scheduled to begin at noon because that day was a split.A split basically means the day is split between day and night. Splits are great because you get to sleep late and go to bed before the sun rises. Night shoots are tough because you wake up when the sun is setting and work until sunrise. It’s fun for two or three days but after a week of night shoots you start to feel like a vampire. Why the 101 you ask? Because our last day WAS scheduled to be a split. At noon we would begin shooting our hog roping scene, break for lunch, then wait for night to shoot a scene where we see Mexican Immigrants offloading from an 18-wheeler. The day before I was told we had to shoot the hog roping scene first thing in the morning. Come to find out, hogs don’t like the heat, cannot take it. It kills them, makes them cripple, doesn’t matter… what does is that we had to shoot at first light. This of course would mess up our schedule and the crew would have to break mid-day and meet back up around seven to shoot the night scene.

Did I mention we shot a hog roping scene. I had never seen a wild hog before Thursday let alone know how to direct the scene. So… I deferred to Fagan, who has roped two wild hogs, and basically had him tell me what type of coverage we would need. We started tight on the cowboys roping the hog, getting standard coverage to insure that I would have something to work with in the editing room. Next, we set the camera up in the back of a pickup truck and shot some wide angles of the cowboys galloping after the hogs, lasso in the air, all good stuff. Finally, we decided to mount the camera on a four-wheeler and chase the hog with the camera. I had Steve, our DP, over-crank the camera to 72 frames per second in an effort to smooth out the shot. I was driving, Steve operated from the front of the four-wheeler, while our camera was firmly secured to the front by a car mount. We finished up around noon and then spent about three hours shooting pickups from the previous day.

We broke for lunch around 3pm and the cast and crew was given a four hour break to sleep. Around 7:30pm we regrouped well rested and ready to go… but facing a new problem. A front was blowing through the area and we were guaranteed rain but had no idea what time the rain would come or how long it would last. So it was a race against time and with 50+ extras it wasn’t going to be easy. Around 9:30pm lighting and thunder on the horizon alerted us that the storm was near. We shot for another hour and amazingly enough, got everything we needed. Not five minutes after I called wrap it began to rain. And hard. The local paper wrote that the front was as bad as a tropical storm.

Over the next couple days I will be wrapping things up by mailing off equipment, cleaning up the ranch houses, catching up on my emails and what not. I should begin editing sometime next week. Stay tuned.

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