Shooting the main scene (or the production nightmare)

We had the teasers. We had the storyboard. We had the actors (Irene, Robert as the grandfather, our friend Fanos as the son, and me). We had the camera-woman (Laura) and the sound-man (our friend Juan Carlos). We had the attrezzo, which consisted, basically, on some Christmas decoration, a delicious looking roasted chicken, some jacket potatoes, a fake bottle of champagne and a nice table. However, we didn't have the kitchen, not after weeks of production search and thousands of useless calls to every contact I had on my agenda.

When I first started this project I had not realized the huge amount of work that beeing the Producer involves; when using friends as actors, you have to consider their schedules, and also find some...let's say, incentives, to make them feel part of it, be committed with the idea. Well, this time, free food was our main bait. Then again, the location was the only thing missing. Finally, we gave up and decided to try to make our aseptic kitchen (one of the main inconveniences of living in Halls of Residence, that's it) look just a bit more Christimas(ish). Some work with the lights, an expert decoration and a table full of delicatessen had to do. We were finally ready to shoot, after who knows how many re-schedules and lots of stress to bring together all the cast.

Laura did an amazing work with Robert as the make-up expert, making him look at list forty years older without being too fake. Then, we started with our performance of the most uncomfortable Christmas dinner ever.As I had said, the acting was not hard, just a meaningful exchange of gazes among the siblings, the choking (Robert and Juancar did a nice job here), and the girls abandoning the table. The final shooting was not as good as we had expected, or hoped, but at least we had some material to start editing, something that seemed just impossible a few days ago. I was just somehow disappointed because our dismissal of the final scene; I had thought it would be the perfect brooch for our short film to shoot the grandmother showing a photo-album to her dead husband, remembering how "beautiful" and "perfect" their life together had been. after all, ours is a story about hypocrisy and how a guilty silence can destroy the lifes of the ones you love the most.