There are a lot of days when we film in bad weather - days so hot your
eyeballs feel like they're frying, days so cold your hands might fall off, and
rain pouring so hard you could almost drown on set. Each month we'll remember
one of those horrible weather days and celebrate the survivors who braved the
elements in order to film. Why would we want to remember those days?
Because going through hell on set has a way of bringing everyone closer
together when they can say they survived mother nature AND filming on a Yibble
set.
A Bad Day to Die:
Filming Fight Scenes on a Hot Summer Day.
The end of June in central Illinois is often pretty hot, so of course I
like to film the last weekend of that month! One of the top three hottest days of filming was for the big
fight scenes in the final episode of Pandora’s Box. We were filming all day at
Allerton Park in layered costumes.
I’m surprised – and glad of course – that no one died of heat stroke. 
Shooting began around 9am, and the morning wasn’t too bad. However we shot most of the dialogue
scenes then and waited to film the fighting until the afternoon – when it was
really hot. No one has ever
accused me of being smart – sadistic yes, but not smart. 
“My least favorite day of filming was…without a doubt the
day we were filming things from the final episode at Allerton,” Chris Hutchens
recalled. “It was really really hot. I was probably wearing the Black Shirt of
Death at some point. If you haven’t heard about the black shirt yet it is one
of most uncomfortable things I have ever worn in my life. It amplifies heat
somehow and it’s scratchy.” 
Chris was not actually wearing the Black Shirt of Death that
day – Margaret Olson was. However,
Chris was wearing a heavy leather patched vest which was almost as bad. Boots,
vests, cloaks -everyone was dressed to be miserable on a sweltering day,
especially the extras who were dressed all in black. We only had three extras to make up both a rebel army and
the soldiers (which is why I had to introduce a cloning machine), so they had
to keep running out, fighting, dying, and then do it over again.
I can’t remember exactly when we took the lunch break, but I
think it was just before filming the main sword fights. We went into town – Monticello – and
had lunch at the air-conditioned McDonald’s. We took a longer lunch then usual so the actors could cool
off and get plenty of water to combat dehydration. Then it was back out to
Allerton to kill everyone off.
“My favorite day is the one where we all died just cause it
was really funny,” said Margaret Olson, “and it was a lot of fun knowing that
at the end of the day I’m gonna die!”
However, dying not only involved a lot of running around clashing (and
breaking) plastic swords, it also involved a big tub of fake blood. Each of the main actors had to have
their hands and faces covered in blood, spitting blood from their mouths as
they died, etc. The blood was made
from red cool-aid mix and chocolate syrup – which looks pretty good if you can
get the right consistency.
Unfortunately we were filming at a place with a river and some ponds
nearby so there were a lot of mosquitoes.
Combine sugary fake blood with mosquitoes on a hot day and you get
several suffering actors. 
As soon as the main characters in the Sunken Garden had been
“killed” and the battle concluded, we hiked over to the meadow to film the
massively awesome marital arts inspired duel between Turlo and Alban aka Jacob
MacLeod and Chris Lamb. Jacob had spent weeks choreographing the fight and
practicing it with Chris. It was a
long sequence that had to be shot from multiple angles – and of course we
filmed in a meadow with no shade.
The clothes Jacob was wearing did not breathe well. Luckily Chris was in a t-shirt and thin
vest, so he wasn’t in quite as bad a shape for the fight.
“I think both my favorite and my least favorite day would
have to be the fight scene,” Jacob remembers, “because it was fun to film that
but it was sooo hot that day! I
remember we had that big McDonald’s cup and I drank like three of those full of
water. It was so hot – it was just miserable.” But the boys persevered and
created one of the best fight scenes in Sine Fine history. 
The final scene of the day was a tender love scene between Cat
and De Carlo. Unfortunately I
chose the worst place possible to film it – Mosquito Heaven. It was nice looking spot, but I didn’t
realize how close we were to a pond that was apparently a mosquito
metropolis. It’s hard to do a love
scene at the end of a hot day when you’re covered in sweat - and possibly the
residuals of sugary fake blood – surrounded by a swarm of blood-sucking
fiends. To Chris and Margaret’s
credit they did a great job, and the scene turned out to be very sweet and
tender, despite the fact that every time I stopped recording both actors
immediately waved their hands around frantically to get the damn bugs away from
their face. After filming that we called it a day at long last and went home to
collapse.
To those who survived the heat, fighting, bugs and blood, I thank you
and salute you:
Mike Baym
Chris
Hutchens
Chris Lamb
Jacob
MacLeod
Virginia
McCreary
Diana
Neatrour
Margaret
Olson
Sam
Schumacher
Brian
Smith
Kali Smith
Here’s a fan, aloe, some After Bite, and gallon of Gatorade. Now, go
find some air-conditioning…and you might want to take a shower – I think I see
some fake blood in your hair.
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