By Julie Buck
Things are going smoothly. Well, relatively smoothly, as smoothly as shooting entirely daylight exteriors in the middle of August at an amusement park can go. The fact that small children make when you’ve told them that they can’t go on their favorite roller coaster for the next two hours is hopelessness distilled. The pressure to keep everybody happy, from park owners to ride-goers to cast and crew means timing and organization are essential. Luckily, we have a pretty incredible “production office” set up in the Birthday Party Room here at Quassy, which serves as our control center. I spend the majority of my time here, keeping the peace.
Despite all of the challenges built into this location, we’ve got a great project on our hands; something I hope the film community will embrace. It is always amazing to watch a group of people come together and work incredibly hard for each other – with no obvious rewards – to create something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
I’d also like to thank The Movie Gods for delivering Chloe and Maddie to us. You are always taking a chance when working with young actors, but these kids have delivered excellence take after take. Of course, it wasn’t ALL divine intervention. Having a casting director like Jessica Daniels, who shared our passion for the project and understood the direction we wanted, made finding actors with professional qualities possible.
Bottom line, on a short like Loop Planes you really have to be prepared to do anything and everything in order to get things done; you have to be comfortable negotiating with total strangers, contribute to rewrites, cook the food at all.
Julie Buck
Producer