Late February 2004
Pre-production is in full swing. Aaron and I are firing off lengthy emails, sometimes as many as five a day. I'm sending them to Paul, who has bought a home editing system; he's agreed to be our editor and director of photography. I had dinner at Aaron's house and met his partner Angela. They are both fantastic cooks and will probably cater most of the show. We agreed that Angela will make up the last member of the crew. Four actors, four crew. We'll shoot the whole thing in my parents' house, hopefully finishing by the time they get back. Now we are only waiting for one thing: snow.
I find myself looking at all the Guest movies, like Best In Show, and realized that the movie was going to be almost all hand-held.
I do a detailed scene breakdown, asking questions, clarifying, shot possibilities, as there are some tough challenges even in this 13-page script. I make props lists, costume stuff, logistic notes, whatever each scene requires. I also strongly question anything in the script that costs money. DV tape is cheap, but Aaron has decided to build a shovel shrine mentioned and featured in the script, and we will ask friends if we can borrow their shovels for one day's shooting. Aaron produces a great poster, which gets me really charged up. We resolve to begin shooting on March 7, and tape all interior scenes, as we have no snow on the ground in the forecast. Aaron and I find ourselves checking three different forecasts several times a day just to be sure. The actors are coming to my house downtown for a script reading tomorrow night.

March 1, 2004
Because one of the actors was a little hesitant about the show, I actually thought we might use some of the reading time to "block" or walk through certain scenes. Of course, we are going for a documentary look where action is "found" rather than staged, I want the actors to be comfortable.
Aaron's friend has done a really terrific mock-up of an "Endless Winter" poster, and so Aaron brought rewrites in with posters enclosed in the scripts. He and Angela also brought two pizzas. After some chat to the cast about the style and the schedule - three days, including one for exteriors with lots of snow - we agree: It's a big gamble, but we decide to go for it.
The read-through goes very well. It's so neat to hear the words, and Aaron seems very happy.

March 4, 2004
Picked up tons of gear at PEGASYS, two X10 DV cams, light kits, extension cables, boom mike, fishpole. Even with that, most of the stuff still fit in the trunk of my car. No trucks or Teamsters on this show. Dropped off Paul and packed the gear into the garage for Sunday. Aaron has taken on the job of shovel wrangler, and between donated shovels from Agway and friends and neighbors, we have a huge pile of shovels in the garage.

March 6, 2004
It's the night before Day One of principal photography.
I picked up Paul at the downtown place; he'll be bunking at the house here so we'll both be ready to roll when folks show up. Aaron and Angela show up at 7:00 to help dress the set, my folks' garage. We take reference photos with Paul's new digital camera so we'll be able to replace all my dad's tools when we're done tomorrow. We line the walls with shovels; they're everywhere, including some really cute kiddie shovels that I want to add to the script as Nate shows off his "collection". It looks good, and we've even taken the time to pre-light, so when the cast shows up, we can start right in. After Aaron & Angela split, Paul and I ordered a pizza and settled in upstairs to watch a bunch of extra features on Spy Kids 3-D and Once Upon A Time In Mexico. Paul is blown away by the quality of the 3-D, and also enjoyed the new "10-minute Cooking School" on the Mexico DVD. While we eat pizza, we watch "Looney Tunes: Back In Action". I had just watched it again the night before with Jamie Lewis. Paul loved it, and wanted to see all the same gags that Jamie and I had rewound! We go to bed around 1:00 AM for a 9:00 AM start: George for an hour, then Melanie and Abel show up at 10:00 and we shoot all the interiors we can...

March 7, 2004
Day One of principal photography, and I didn't sleep, just sort of vibrated under the covers. Up at 8:30 or so, very sluggish at first. This is going to be a long slog.
Aaron and Angela appeared with food (the homemade glass case and Excalibur -- Nate's "prize" shovel as we have dubbed it -- are in place in the garage). After we warmed up and chatted, everything seemed to start flowing. We spent the first hour doing solo stuff with George. We couldn't find the fishpole boom, so Paul lashes the microphone to a broom handle. We shot with two cameras, Paul on one and me on another. Paul insisted on bringing tripods, but after he shot the first scene on sticks, I convinced him to take the camera in his hands and shoot, which he did. We shot George with two DV cameras for an hour and a half, knocking off all the garage scenes. Abel showed up at 10 and Mel a little later, but we were able to start shooting with them by 10:30 or so. Shot the garage door opening and the family reaction, but we hope to shoot again when we shoot the snow stuff. Everyone made comments and jokes about "if" we'll have snow or not, not knowing that Aaron and I have both been watching the weather reports all of our waking hours for weeks. Of course, we're making some of those comments, too, so...
We took about a half hour to eat in, and everyone started suggesting shovel titles for the movie. Here's a partial list; maybe we can run some of them in the credits.
Shovels of Fire
Shoveling Tall
Seven Years Shoveling In Tibet
Thundershovel
Goldshovel
You Only Shovel Twice
The Man With The Golden Shovel
The Spy Who Shoveled Me
The Good, The Spade and The Shovel
Pale Shoveler
They Shovel By Night
The Man Who Came To Shovel
Shovel Me, Boys
The Sound of Shovels
Little Shop of Shovels
The Spade Who Came In From Shoveling

We then set up in the living room for the ending scene, which is set in summertime, and then call wrap for the day. I am so tired, but we have to pack everything up and I'll have to give Paul a lift home. Plus, we still couldn't find the fishpole boom, which could mean we're out $30. Apart from the glass case, Excalibur, food, gas and $20 for DV tape, I think we've still spent a pitiful sum. I got Paul home, got home myself and crashed pretty quickly by 4 PM or so. I woke up at 10:00 and figured, hey, I never got to see our tapes, and they need to be logged. I spend the night and most of the next day charged up as I log Paul's camera and my camera. I also started a third tape, which will consist of B-roll and 2nd unit. I sent copies of the logs to Aaron and Paul, and everyone is tired but elated with the day's work. We shot something like five or six pages of material in about five hours - awesome. We averaged a lot of takes - eight, nine - but in the case of scenes like Kate's intro, which took awhile for us to capture, it was great to watch it back and see the takes evolve from almost line-throughs to a more nuanced performance and camera work. Cool.

March 8, 2004
Still pumped, I fall asleep sometime in the afternoon.

March 15, 2004
Aaron woke me up with great news! After weeks of having the Weather Channel on for eight hours at a time for weeks and no snow in the forecast, we're supposed to get real snow on Wednesday - anywhere from four to eight inches. Even though I knew it's an impossible situation, I contacted all the actors, and somehow, they're all available. Unbelievable. Looks like we're actually going to be able to finish principal photography this season.

March 16, 2004
Aaron came over for tea and we went over the material, making sure we're as planned as can possibly be. Miraculously, we've managed to get three out of four actors for a three-and-a-half to four-hour period on Wednesday! We're not happy about figuring out how to shoot around Abel, but we'll just plan on having over-the-shoulder "body doubles" or "Fake Shemps" in those scenes. In about an hour, we've talked through the day enough that I'm mostly happy. If the weather comes through without knocking out transportation and communication, we should be able to get what we need. In lieu of the snow plow, we'll use my dad's snow blower and leaf blower for Bear. I planned on talking to the Shreves, our neighbors at dinner time about using their driveway, but first, I called my dad about his gear. After those questions - which I didn't really understand - I asked him about the guy who plows our driveway, which Aaron and I staked out earlier. He said it's the same guy who plows the Shreves', and they are out of town, too. So, the one guerilla part of this whole thing will be manipulating the driveway of a relative stranger and then plowing it for arts' sake.

March 17, 2004
The "EW" exterior shoot. Once again, I didn't sleep very well, as this is all pretty new, and we have something like six and a half pages to shoot, all of it outdoors. We weren't supposed to get Abel until 2:30, which was a day killer, but we were going to try to cope. Most of my sleepless night, I was frantically trying to figure out how we were going to cover Abel in his scenes, which should be done in docu "masters". In fact, there are entire pages we're shooting as one continuous take, then resetting at the top of the next page and so on. But the good news is that Abel called at 7:30 AM: school was called on account of the snow, and he can join us for the whole day. Someone will pick him up at the Sciencenter at 10 AM.
People showed up, food showed up and we started grinding. Paul got ADR (Additonal Dialogue Recording) on Melanie's off-camera lines while Aaron, George and I worked out the blocking of the first scene. Aaron ended up getting Melanie to the set and also picked up Abel. As usual, we start with George stuff. By the time Abel shows up, we re-stage the opening of the garage door (before everyone showed up, I taped it from the inside, revealing virgin powder). Right then, our extras showed up for their scene, just when we were ready for them. We got a very tough shot with a mom and kids in just three takes. Things were popping fast. I had to go inside and sit down, munch part of a bagel to keep going. When I came back out, Aaron turned to me and said something like, "This is so intense." Later, he told me, "This is the last time we write something that's weather dependent."
Our neighbor could be heard plowing his driveway during one scene, but he let us take pictures of his snow blower, and Paul let the snow hit the camera lens. As George's departure time neared, we were really hustling, shooting those page scenes. But the good news is, we were getting them in three takes as opposed to the eight or nine takes of the interior shoot.
We wrapped George, Abel and Melanie by the time George had to leave. I took Melanie home, buzzed about the day, but also confiding that this year, I have found the house and neighborhood less than inviting. I can't wait to get home and start cutting this movie. When I get back, Aaron and Paul were taping second unit material: pick-up shots with Bob and the snow blower, leaf blower, even an attempt at a process shot. We wrap Bob, pack up the gear and take everything back to PEGASYS. I forgot a tripod and a power source, and have to come back again. Once again, I crash out, wake up late and log all the exterior footage. While we were making the process shot, I suggested a Postcard pan to a snowy window as an alternative. We also realized that once again, we forgot to shoot a Nate scene: "more to love". With the two tapes representing the simultaneous taping on Sunday, interviews, b-roll and the exterior material, we've filled up five out of six of our DV tapes. The whole footage cost $20, an we still have one blank tape.

March 18, 2004
Grabbed a camcorder and cables so that we can start digitizing the footage back at my place. But there's something wrong, and Paul didn't have the right connections. So, no editing anytime soon. So I logged all the exterior stuff, which is mostly very good - and in fewer takes - and emailed logs to Aaron and Paul.

March 19, 2004
Aaron had an idea about the opening sunset shot being a picture belonging to Junior, with a pan over to a green screen window and then onward. I book George for a reshoot at the SPCA at 1 PM on Monday, but it gets cancelled
I happen to see "Dinner for Five" with the cast of "Pieces of April", which was also shot on DV. Patricia Clarkson said there were no trailers. Katie Holmes said it forced her to hang out with the crew and get to know them. And Oliver Platt had the best line, he said that if the crew ever ran out of film they would just go to the Korean deli down the street, and did that more than once!

March 22, 2004
Woke up around 9:30, finished cleaning and packing up, took bottles back to Tops for the deposit and had the folks' car washed. Was home by 11:00 AM or so. Gee, it feels great to be home. Paul told me that the editing system is working, so Aaron and I agreed to commence work on the rough edit of "Endless Winter" tomorrow. Paul has to work on Robin Palmer's TV show tonight, and with him gone, I sleep like a dead thing on the couch for three or four hours. I kept working on digitizing the footage, with just over half the DV cassettes done by the time I call it quits for the night. Aaron and I can start in the middle of the show, thanks to the magic of digital.

March 23, 2004
The first day of editing "Endless Winter"; after two hours of playing with the footage, we have a chunk of the middle done. We couldn't find the "hooters" shot, so we pressed ahead; I redid it later and dumped it in. Even rough, without sound effects, it looks pretty good, and Aaron and I both heave big sighs of relief. Later, as I walk him out talking about music cues, we both admit how scared we were, worried that the scenes wouldn't cut together or be funny. Who ever knows when they set out on a journey like this? But the stuff is making all three of us laugh. The only thing I'm bummed about is that we won't be doing any cutting for another week. I'd work every day, and so would Aaron, but I need Paul around to be the tech guy. I must learn to be creative and technical in order to be free to work at my own pace. I think by waiting so long, the energy dilutes and we don't gain the momentum we need. In the meantime, I am keeping a list of sounds and other tweaks we'll need to put the finishing touches on the show.

March 25, 2004
The amazing Laura Bilodeau came over today, and after I played her Booker T and the MGs' version of "Green Onions" (and suggesting the bom-bom beat from "Pipeline"), I picked up my beloved red Bronco Squier bass, Laura parked it behind her drum kit which stays in the dining room/ office, and by God, we got my goofy little three-chord surf song - the theme for Endless Winter - done in something like six takes. Laura and Paul overdubbed drums on a friend's song while I drove up to FedEx to pick up the screener copy of Bubba Ho-Tep for my interview with Don Coscarelli (Phantasm). Later, I took a crack at overdubbing a guitar part on my Telecaster, but my amp sounds lousy, breaking up, and not sounding at all well. Finally, we plugged in direct with my yellow tremolo pedal and some extreme Dick Dale reverb dialed in on the multitrack. Since I've had time to perfect the part with the crap amp sound, we nail the guitar track in about three or four takes, I think. Then Paul dialed up a nice rinky-tinky organ sound on one of the keyboards, and I add a simple, but cool little part. That's it! The theme from "Endless Winter" is done. Paul mixed it and dumped it into the computer. He then spent some time playing with what we've put together, including brightening one shot and removing the microphone boom.

March 27, 2004
Aaron and Angela came over at 2:00 to edit. At first, we tried to make cuts in the shoveling/plowing competition, but I suggest we keep "chunking" away, pulling out story pieces and making a rough cut. We agreed, and the work picked up more momentum. So we're "chunking", jumping around and filling up the story. Things are rough, but now they're mostly chronological, and the stuff is still making us laugh.

March 30, 2004
Aaron and I are making slow progress. Huge chunks of our rough cut are still a mess, but we consider the day well spent if one section gets polished or improved. Later, after our regular edit session - we're working almost every day this week - I put down an acoustic guitar, folky version of "Dixie" for a quick Civil War memory scene in the show. It ended up being an acoustic guitar strumming the changes, an guitar overdub of the song melody, a bass part and a simple tambourine percussion cut. Since the song is so short, we nail it in a half-hour. Paul imports it into Adobe premiere, and we are done.

March 31, 2004
Editing continues, but Paul joins us at the controls. It takes us more time than we'd care to admit synching up the two camera from Day One of photography, but once it's done, we are able to "intercut" that scene and make it look great. Aaron likes the "Dixie" cue.
I also took a crack at some lyrics for a bogus James Bond style theme song for the end credits. The DV club at Cornell has welcomed us for their screening on May 10th, so now we have a deadline to work for.

April 1, 2004
No one played any pranks on anybody today. Just good hard work from about 1 till 7 PM, with me heading out with cash for a food run. Aaron, Paul and I (ahem) plowed away at the rough cut, junking stuff, working on sequences, adding sound effects. I recorded Granddaddy Wannemaker as a temp track, but we all like it, so it'll probably stay in. We also recorded Aaron's cell phone and grabbed a glass crash off of one of Paul's FX CDs. Didn't sound too "library", my big fear with stock sound. As usual, with Paul's expertise and those two guys' sheer ability to hang in there, two or three sequences improved dramatically, and the overall shape of the thing just gets better and better.
For the first time, I feel like I can work on the show when Aaron isn't around, so later, after running some errands, Paul and I sat down, me with the script, and we go through the current cut. There's yards of crap, long takes and repeat junk that has to come out, and massive amounts of footage that needs to be compressed to almost nothing. The titles need work, and there are questions and notes for about 40%. Thankfully, I'd say 60% of the show works and still has the proper balance between humor and pathos that Aaron talked about at the script read. I even read his description of the opening images/titles to Paul in order to remind us of what he wanted in the first place.
Though I must say, Aaron hasn't been whining with a copy of the script. He's been great, and I'm sure he's learning a lot. I showed him my faux-Bond lyrics, and he liked the essence of it, e-mailed them to himself, and I guess he'll take a pass at adding some stuff. He suggested I change it from second person to first, "you" to "me"; doesn't matter, they both rhyme!
The more I think about it, the more I want to keep guitar out of this thing. The surf and Civil War cues have plenty. I will probably write on guitar, then change the lines to horn lines, string lines, etc. Give myself a little challenge.
Paul suggests that we move the "Kate/butter" scene until later in the cut, so maybe tomorrow we'll try that. Also, while going through the cut, we tightened here and there, stuff that needed to be tightened.

April 2, 2004
The show just gets better and better, particularly the first half. We've now added interview bits and reordered the beginning of things. Starts with a title card, then "Nate" talking about the Inuits, then shots of shovels, then the first line as stated after "More to love" which is now deleted, what with spring and everything.
We also have "Kate" interview stuff which intro her first scene, and then title cards for Junior and Bear. Pretty cool. Paul also snipped out a whole bunch of accumulated crap that shortened our cut. Even with all the snow blower/plow stuff that's on the timeline, our "running time" is still in the low 30 minutes. All that stuff should be boiled down to about 30 or 45 seconds, a tense competitive montage.
As of now, the first half of "Endless Winter" is in pretty solid shape.

April 8, 2004
George and Melanie saw our near-rough cut today and liked it. I think.
Laura B. came over today and we recorded the basic tracks for our end title theme. Bass, drums, vocals and a synth part. It sounds intense. It sounds good. Best of all, it sounds funny.

April 9, 2004
Today, we're back editing, and we tackled the "competition section" (the last unedited bit of the show). Within one hour or so, we got it roughed out, and it looks good. Final version seems to be running about 14 minutes. Aaron has revised credits ready to go for the end, and he likes the song. Tonight, Paul and I will head to Aaron's and watch the thing on his home theatre set-up. Looking good...
So we ate Chinese food, looked at the rough cut once, then again so that anyone could say stop, and raise a point, suggest a cut here or there. We got through it with about five pages of notes and tweaks.

April 10, 2004
Spent the day watching Paul and Aaron mostly deal with the changes. I had an interview to do with filmmaker Greg Pak in the afternoon, and I must admit, I'm getting a little bored by this refining process. I need to work on my ability to concentrate the way Paul can. He can sit in front of that monitor for hours. Not me. I need to break every once in a while, walk away and clear my head. The good thing is, Aaron can dive in for hours, too, and, hey, if the writer is protecting his vision of the show, I'm not needed. Everything they've shown me looks and sounds good.

April 14, 2004
Even though we have all agreed that we are more or less in picture lock, that doesn’t really exist in the digital world, where you never stop making changes until you abandon the project. So Paul and I were able to "strafe" several seconds of cuts from here and there, enough to make room for an opening Bordella and Ryan DePaul pair of logos. Now this thing feels like a movie, and it’s now eight seconds shy of fifteen minutes.

April 17, 2004
Today’s the day when we had our big party to show "Endless Winter". My production of "Trial By Jury" played at Statler Auditorium, so it was a bit of a mad dash to get the show struck and packed before I could leave, and I was running later than I thought – almost 10 PM by the time I got to the apartment. As I was walking to the fire escape, some young lady carrying a red plastic cup asked, "Are you Bryan?" I said that I was. "Oh," she said, "they’re showing your movie." I sprinted up the escape, JUST as Paul was about to roll the movie. There were at least 20 to 25 people, or so it seemed. I made a brief joke and the movie rolled. It played very well, laughs aplenty, and lots of congrats around at the end. People started suggesting ideas for the next chapter in the Wannemaker saga, so that must mean they are invested in it and like the characters. As I drank a few Coke and whiskies to try and calm down, a whole new wave of
party folks came in, mostly from "Trial", and after about 15 minutes, we showed the film again. Again, good laughs in different places, but the movie seemed to go over. Aaron and Angela took off, saying they had ideas to cut about .2 of the movie. We all agreed that we are SO close. I spent the rest of the evening decompressing after all that ego-boo, and eventually it was just Melanie, her husband Mitch and good ol’ Erik B. who were left, and we shot the breeze until about 3:00 0r 3:30 AM. So nice to hang out with Melanie when there’s no work to do; we really had some serious quality time, and I realized, as I always do when I get to spend lots of time with her, how great she is and how much I enjoy hanging with her. Paul and I cleaned up everything but dishes, and I still didn’t get to sleep until about 6 AM. What a great night.