Day 34 and The Joneses keeps plugging along.  I thought we weren't going to have much crew for the day, given that Frank and Rajah were MIA for the weekend, and I hadn't gotten an RSVP from Mike, but indeed we had Maura (on camera), Max (on sound), Michael (on slate), the return of Mark, and the even more momentous return of Lou "The Bert" Ottaviani.  And his crazy crutches.  We far outnumbered the cast, which was solely Stacey & Tony for the day.  The location was very generously loaned to us by Cheryl Curtin & Stanley Cruwys (Stacey's dad), and they did a wonderful job clearing out his office area to make it Paul's home office for the day.

The first thing we did was take a breakfast break, because it's one of the most important meals of the day.  We all met in Arlington and had delicious scrobbled eggs (I think that's what the waitress called them) and other hard-to-decipher dishes.  It was a good start to the day, and then we were ready for a nap.

We made our way to the location and spent a good chunk of time filling the office with the appropriate amount of photography gear--largely brought by Maura--with tripods, albums, slides, camera, mattes, printers, a light table, and photos placed very specifically by Stacey & Maura so that the room would look like the appropriate mix of organized chaos.  It looked really amazing.  I especially liked the photos hanging across one wall in front of the long light: the effect was really authentic.  We also spent a good amount of time prepping the first shot so we could do a dramatic pan from some antique cameras on the mantle to Paul at his desk.  Maura and I wanted to make Rajah proud, and I believe we did.  We even white balanced!  I know, I was as impressed as you are.

So we began the first scene which had a recent rewrite to it that Stacey & I came up with, making the scene nine times better than it had been a week before.  I actually can list the nine reasons the new lines are better than the two we replaced, but nobody in the world is that bored to hear them.  Although that didn't stop me from telling many, many people.  What can I say?  Smart rewrites are very exciting to me.  What was even funnier was we were able to work in the name Katarzyna (yes, from America's Next Top Model) which was just "playing with danger" given that Stacey & Tony get the sillies everytime they act in a scene together, and having her name was just blooper-bait.  Indeed, they did laugh through a couple takes, but overall the two of them were simply excellent.  It's the very first scene in the movie with just Paul & Suzanne at home, so it was extremely important (I know, I know, I say that about every scene) that the dynamic of their relationship be established perfectly, and these two were just so on that day.  Suzanne has to be bitchy and Paul has to give it right back to her, but it all has to have a real love behind it--and Stacey and Tony nailed it.  When they weren't laughing.

We did have an eyeline problem in that first scene.  Rajah's always talking about eyelines, and I'm of a mind that it's not that big a deal as long as you stick with the 180 rule, but my God he was right.  It was just weird how off everything looked until we made a drastic repositioning of Stacey on the other side of the camera, and then it all worked great.  Also, that forced us to set her up with the stone fireplace as her backdrop (or "wood stones," as I kept weirdly calling them), which looked equally terrific.  Anyway, the scene was awesome, although all of a sudden it was like 3:00.  So I started moving a bit quicker.

A quick wardrobe change for the actors and we set up for the second scene which is the second half of the montage part where Mitch has posted Suzanne's picture on a dating web site.  This part was the moment when Paul discovers it, shows it to Suzanne, and instead of her getting angry about it, she just uploads a sexier picture of herself.  I find that funny just because it's very much in character--I think/hope we pulled it off.  I can never tell with these non-dialogue, ten-second, largely visual moments how well they'll come off since so much of the joke is in the editing.  But we did enjoy watching all of the online men wanting to IM my wife.

Then it was time for a field trip, so we drove to a playground, walked across the weird spongy blacktop, and set up for the "Space Invaders" interview segment with Paul & Suzanne very not candidly explaining to the camera what they want out of their room renovation.  Aside from some wind problems (which Michael did his best to block), the bit was so much fun to shoot.  Paul was sitting on a slide, Suzanne standing next to him--dressed for business--it was funny to look at and even better when they said their lines.  This part always killed in rehearsal because Tony has a knack for doing the "bad acting" that the lines called for, and Stacey was right there with him.  Then we added at the end the funny business of having him being cued offcamera to slide down the slide, which worked out so well.  On the last take, we also tried having Paul mouthing out a few of Suzanne's words as she said them, making it look very scripted, and I loved it.  The whole thing took about 15 minutes to shoot, we were in and out.  And we then took photos by signs for no apparent reason.

Tony took off then, we stopped by the local Starbucks and Trader Joe's, and headed back for the last two scenes.  The first of these was a shot of the empty office, with just the light table glowing.  Stacey liked the idea of having a screensaver appear on Paul's laptop that showed lots of pictures of them, so she and Maura worked on setting that up.  I started getting a little pouty because I think I wanted to knock that scene out quicker, and everyone's energy was beginning to run low.  We got the screensaver up and running and I did a few quick shots with and without it going in the scene.  Basically we did ten different mini-versions of the scene and we'll see which works best in editing.

We rearranged (very methodically and anal-retentively) for the final scene, which sees Suzanne on the floor of the office.  It was a very simple bit that I probably also made more complicated than it needed to be.  I think it came off very well, and again we overshot it so we can have lots of choices later.  And again, the energy was fading on the group.  We finished up and headed out.  We needed margaritas, so we went to a Mexican restaurant in Arlington that only served wine and beer, then traveled to Somerville and Michael introduced us to an excellent Mexican restaurant.  And, yes, please do not worry--they had margaritas. 

It was a very fruitful day, and our 12-shooting-days-remaining countdown has officially begun!  It is very exciting/sad for us.