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Production Diary - Eidolon, Part 2

Production Diary – Eidolon, Part 2

The First Half of Production

Once a month (or every few months, you know, whenever I feel like it) I’m going to talk about a specific production, what it was like to film it, and what was involved in making it happen.  This month I’m going to talk about Eidolon. However, since Eidolon is the biggest production in SFF history, in many ways, and broke a lot of records before it was completed, it would make for one seriously long ass post. So I’m going to split this into three posts.

Previously on ProductionDiary – Eidolon we learned that 2015 celebrates the 10^th Anniversary of Eidolon.  We also found out where the idea for Eidolon came from, met the co-producers, learned a little bit about the main characters, and about the multiple alternate versions of the show before it became what it is now. If you survived reading fourteen pages of Yibble-babble (or Yabble, as I like to call it), then you are either a very good friend, have an unusual amount of spare time, or you’re a masochist.  If you are all three, then you have more than likely filmed with me already.

THE FILMING

Because of the long distances many of the actors had to travel to film, and since we all had jobs and were often busy adulting, we were only able to film once a month.  Each section about filming will be separated by those months. I probably didn’t need to explain that. I’m not even sure it made sense.  I could erase all of this, but I don’t feel like it.  Besides, now you have an idea of what it’s like to read one of the Eidolon scripts. Seriously, dude, I tended to Yabble in the setting descriptions. It’s pretty sad.

The Memorial Weekend Shoot

Anywho, the first weekend of filming was set for Memorial Day Weekend in 2004 – four glorious days and three glorious nights of filming fun. And yes, I made everyone work nights.  Actually that first weekend, despite it’s many curveballs, was a little more laid back than some of the others.  I think we spent almost as much time hanging out as we did filming.

Because I knew that I would be moving into a new filming location house with roommates (who were both main actors) in August, I planned for that to be Maria’s house.  We couldn’t film any scenes that took place in Maria’s house, so that pretty much dictated what and where we could film.  I tried not to schedule too much to shoot that first weekend since I knew we would all want to hang out more than work, and it would take me a while to get back into “director” mode (and “sane director mode” which was totally new to me) after a year and a half without filming.  That was actually the longest I had gone without filming even a short movie since I started filming in 1996. 

The day people were supposed to arrive to film brought an unexpected casting change.  A frantic call from Brittany revealed that Mike D – who was set to play Mordecai – was suddenly not going to be able to film that weekend, or even do the show at all.  Noooooo!  I had really been looking forward to working with him again, but things happen – like actually having a life – and I understand that.  Well, medicated me understands that.  There are more important things in life then filming an amateur movie (and that sentence is how you know I’m medicated!)

I had no back up, no alternate casting, and no options.  I tried to figure out how much we could film without Mordecai and came up with about half of one episode and a few other scenes, so not much, but something.  Brittany, who had thankfully not yet left the Chicago area yet, was desperately trying to find someone else to play Mordecai.  Luckily, Adam Herriks - an old college friend we all knew - was willing to play the part at the last minute.  Naturally, he had no idea what he was getting into and how much of a commitment it would really be, and of course I had no intention of telling him until it was too late to back out.  I mean…I told him all about it before he accepted the part.   Also, I told him we would be done filming by the end of the summer.  That wasn’t exactly correct.  Not even a little.  Okay I lied, I admit it - but to be fair I told everyone the same lie so they were equally screwed. 

With our new Mordecai, on board, we all managed to get together in Champaign and began filming on Saturday (only 1 day late, which is really good considering the circumstances!).  The first scene we filmed only involved Zelda and Namtaru, so Brittany, Bryan, and I headed off to Lake of the Woods while everyone else woke up and got ready to film when we get back.  You could tell I hadn’t been on a film shoot in a long time because I forgot to charge the battery before we left so we ended up not able to film that scene.  That was a bummer.  After charging the battery back at home we went out again and finally managed to film it.  The cast was happy to have more time to get ready, so it actually worked out okay.

We decided to try a new approach to filming, which involved multiple cameras filming the same scene to speed up the shooting process.  That works great in theory, but it required the cast to memorize the whole scene before filming it, and that ended up taking more time then just shooting it with one camera.  Still, there were a few scenes that ended up with multiple angles, which was pretty awesome in the edit bay.  Yay for cutaways!

After a long day of filming in various places we grabbed some grub and headed back to the Homestead (my parents house, or as I called it “base camp”).  We’d travelled all around CU and beyond filming at multiple parks including Allerton in Monticello.  We were lucky to be able to film with the fabulous Annamarie MacLeod when we shot the Baste scenes from Episode 5 (which actually became Episode 6 in the edit bay). 

Happily exhausted, we were ready to chillax before calling it a night.  That’s when we discovered a serious problem.  Adam was very allergic to cats - seriously allergic – and my parents’ house currently had four living there and had hosted over eight at one time, so cat hair was EVERYWHERE!  It rapidly became clear that there was NO WAY Adam could stay there, even for an hour let alone overnight.  The only thing we could do at that point was to get a hotel.  Every time our “base camp” was a house that included cats (ie mine), we had to get a hotel room for Adam so that he would live long enough to film again.  I do require actors to be breathing, it’s really the only requirement I have. 

The bad news is that this tripled the budget literally overnight, since I was planning on saving money by having the actors stay at my place. The good news is that, depending on which hotel we stayed at, we had access to a pool and a hot tub! It’s just what we needed after a long day of filming. Staying in a hotel in general was pretty sweet, although obviously only Adam and a few of the other actors actually spent the night there (Morgan was also allergic, but it was more mild for her and not likely to end in death).  The rest of us non-allergic-to-cats people stayed at the Homestead.

Sunday’s filming included a trek out to the MacLeod farm to film several scenes from Episode 2, which starred Margaret Olson and Ryan Davis as a psychotic pair of siblings.  We did some filming in the morning then took a break to get some food.  I don’t know where we ate or what Ryan had, but he ended up getting sick – most likely food poisoning, and we ended up having to cut the day short.  I felt so bad for him – being sick on set is never fun.  After Ryan had left, we filmed what we could without him then hung out for a while at the MacLeod’s place because they’re awesome.

I’m not sure what all we filmed on Monday, the last day of filming, but I’m pretty sure it included filming the dream sequence from (what is now) Episode 7 that takes place at a playground and involves muffins.  Or did we film the Allerton stuff that day and shoot the muffins on Saturday?  Or did we film the dream sequences where the characters get stuck in hallway loop while trying to figure out how they got there, which led to the running joke of the production "who drugged us?"  Why is that funny? Getting stuck messing up the same line for 10 takes can lead to some frustrating but funny bloopers, but honestly, as with all running jokes, you had to be there.  When did we film that?  Oh wait! The "who drugged us" scene was filmed at night, so it couldn't have been filmed on monday.  So did we shoot the muffin scene then?  I can’t remember.  Oh well.

What I do remember is that it rained off and on while we were shooting the muffin scene, which resulted in damp actors and soggy muffins.  We had to take cover in a nearby pavilion for quite a while when it started pouring.  That gave the actors time to read the script and memorize the scene, which meant more time to play with muffins afterwards!  

The script calls for shots of the muffins playing on the playground – on swinging on swings, sliding on slides, flying off the merry-go-round, etc. – and the actors had a blast setting up the shots and thinking up new to abuse soggy muffins.

After filming was all over for the weekend, we were not ready to say goodbye yet, so we had dinner at a Chinese buffet and hung out until it was long past time to part. Finally everyone went their separate ways and I collapsed.

The June Shoot

There was only one day of filming in June – actually just one afternoon.  I needed to film the scenes between Skyler and his late wife, Elise, before the July shoot since I needed photos of the characters as important props in Skyler’s apartment.  James drove up from Carbondale for the weekend and Virginia McCreary met up with us at Allerton to film the scenes, then we did the photo shoots for the prop pictures and ended the day with dinner at Hot Wok.  It was fun to work with Virginia again, and I know James – who is a huge fan of both her and her character Zarc from Pandora’s Box – enjoyed working with her too.

The July Shoot

We weren’t able to film again until the middle of July, which was actually a good thing since I still had several scripts to write in order to finish the series.  It was supposed to be only eight episodes (since both the Curse and Dream Chasers ended up with eight episodes), but I wasn’t able to stick to that.  It took eleven scripts to wrap it all up and in the end 11 scripts turned into 13 episodes due to the length of some of them.  I surprised the actors with the last five scripts at the July shoot and the news that we would definitely not be done shooting by the end of the summer.  They took the news pretty well, but there was much drinking that night (which I don’t think was a coincidence) and some hangovers the next day.

Several of the actors lived in the Chicago area, which is why we decided to film several scenes there, so it was a different group that had to travel to the set.  James drove up from Southern Illinois, picked up Morgan on the way, and then stopped by CU to grab Jen and I, then head up to Chicago. That was the plan at least.  It didn’t work out that way, of course.  I don’t remember how, but I twisted my ankle that morning while getting ready for the shoot.  It slowed us down because I had to figure out what to do about it.  Ice and an ace-bandage, obviously, but I kind of needed to do a lot of standing to direct the shoot and that was going to be tricky, and probably painful.

In the end we were late meeting up with the rest of the cast at the graveyard we were set to film in, but the shoot went well and I just hobbled as best I could.  Cancelling the shoot was not an option, because getting something like that set up takes way too long and is very complicated.  I would rather film with 102 degree fever, a third degree sunburn, and a severed leg than cancel a shoot. 

It was raining at the cemetery when we got there, and drizzled off an on while we filmed, but we made it through with only lightly watered actors and a partially soaked script. No one ended up with pneumonia, so it was all good in the end. Given the fact that one of the scenes was a funeral, the rainy weather was actually pretty perfect, although a bit inconvenient.

I think we also filmed the scenes at Skyler’s apartment that day too.  What I remember most about that part, is that the place we were filming in was the apartment of a friend of Brittany’s boyfriend at the time, so it was the home of a guy I didn’t know who was friends with a guy I barely knew.  It was kind of weird, but awesome that he would let us film there.  I remember feeling very self conscious about not messing anything up.  It was a great place to film Skyler’s scenes and we had a lot of laughs.  Many thanks to you, oh man who let total strangers invade your apartment for four hours.

After that we went back to base camp and filmed several scenes there.  Brittany hosted the film shoot at her/her parents place, which was built as a multiple family house and was big enough to fit all the actors.  Most of the house was also cat free, so there was no need for a hotel for Adam.  One of the rooms in the house had a hospital bed, which was perfect for the scenes with Terri in the hospital. The character has rich parents, so we dressed it up a private hospital room, which worked pretty well in my opinion. 

That night the actors all hung out together, read through the five new scripts, and promptly got drunk.  The next day we filmed the rest of the Terri-in-the-hospital scenes in the morning.  During the lunch break, we celebrated Jen’s birthday, then headed out to the beach to film the…um…well, the beach scenes. 

I have to confess that this shooting day – at the beach – is my favorite day of filming for all of Eidolon and one of my top five filming days of all time.  I had not been to a beach in years, and although I have wanted to film at a beach ever since I wrote one into several scenes in Destiny III (in 1997), I never managed to make it there.  So filming at a beach was a dream come true, and was a lot of fun for everyone.  Between filming dream sequences, nightmares, and the characters on a holiday, everyone got to goof off and go swimming (those who wanted to, I don’t think everyone did). 

The only bad thing that happened was that I had taken Horatio (my camera) into the lake to film close ups for one of the scenes.  Although I was trying my best to be careful, a wave came and wiped out both Horatio and I.  Luckily James had his camera there, so we were able to finish filming. 

It was a nice, laidback shoot.  There weren’t a lot of scenes to film there, so we took out time and had fun.  The beach was the last location for the weekend, so after we wrapped filming we went to get some dinner at Panera.  We chatted until dusk when someone mentioned that we had a long drive and should probably head home. 

The August Shoot

Bryan, Jen, and I all moved in together as roommates into a house we dubbed “the Villa”.  I’m sure I came up with that name, but I don’t remember why.  It stuck, so that’s what I still call it (even though I haven’t lived there for over ten years).  We moved into the house on August 1^st, and I had the brilliant idea to have the August film shoot for Eidolon the first weekend in August – literally just after we moved in.  In retrospect, it wasn’t a good idea – it made things hectic and we were not fully set up yet, however there was a reason. 

I had two cats that I wanted to have live with me, but since Adam as super allergic to cats I had to wait until after we filmed in the new house at least once before they could join me.  It just now occurs to me (as I’m writing this) that I could have let the kitties stay with my parents for another week or two and waited to film until we were settled in, but clearly I’m not that bright. Clearly.

With only some of our stuff unpacked, we set up the “set” as best we could, and filmed scenes that took place outside or in rooms that were ready.  There was a back patio, so we took a table and chairs out there for one of the scenes in which the characters have dinner.  I like to have breakfast or dinner scenes – food consumption scenes in general – because then I can feed the actors without having to take a break.  I am all about efficiency – at least when it comes to filming.

Since there was no need for a hotel this time, the actors camped out in the finished basement where there was plenty of room.  No beds or comfy couches, but plenty of room for sleeping bags on the cold, hard floor.  Then, after a night of very little sleep, I wake them up early to start filming.  I’m so mean. 

Even though there were no cats, and we had just moved in, there was still cat hair to deal with, which I hadn’t realized.  Having lived with cats, and my stuff having been in a cat hair covered house for years, the cat hair naturally hitched a ride on my clothes and general items.  So even though he wasn’t in danger of dying, Adam’s allergies were still bad.  We filmed outside whenever possible, and he pretty much only come inside to sleep.  

At this point, Jen mentioned something she had heard about a shot of vodka helping a person deal with their allergies or something like that.  I’m pretty sure the cast just heard “vodka” and went with it.  Adam drank way more than one shot that night.  Between him and the rest of the cast they finished off at least half the bottle.  When questioned on camera by Brittany about whether or not the vodka was working, he said that the he didn’t know if it was actually helping his allergies, but he felt really good. There has never been more alcohol on an SFF set then there was on Eidolon.  Let’s keep it that way.

We filmed all of Adam's scenes scheduled for that weekend then he headed home.  The next day we filmed the rest of the scenes with the psychopathic siblings from Episode 2 that we were originally scheduled to film during the Memorial Weekend Shoot.  We started off with the scenes in the parking lot by the woods.  After those were filmed, we did the scene where Maria runs after the car with the people who just kidnapped Terri.  In the scene Maria frantically chases them, but ends up ass over teakettle at the bottom of the gravel hill she was running down, bloody and bruised with a face full of gravel.  It’s a very dramatic, tense, and realistic scene.

 It looks so realistic because it was.  The lesson we all learned that day was that running down hill on gravel is bad, and that not only is gravity not your friend, it will screw you over the first chance it gets.  Poor Morgan was banged up, bloody, and bruised for real in an epic fall that still makes me cringe when I see it.  But she was such a trouper that instead of freaking out and demanding we stop filming, she insisted on close up shots of the wounds to make it clear that Maria really got hurt trying to save Terri.  She wins a Golden Band-Aid for that one! 

While Morgan recovered, Brittany filmed the last scene with the two guys in the woods, then we headed out to the MacLeod Farm.  Despite her injuries, Morgan was more than happy to continue filming after getting patched up from our on-set nurse, Michelle MacLeod.  The rest of the shoot was uneventful in comparison.  If anyone needed vodka after a day of filming, it was Morgan, although I don’t think she did any drinking that night.

My favorite of the scenes we got to film in August were actually the ones where Zelda and Skyler had to take a paddleboat to the Spirit World and kept fighting on the way there.  Mostly I liked filming it because paddleboats are fun.  Also my father did a great guest appearance as Urshanabi, the ferryman of the dead who rents out the boats, and kept making the actors crack up. 

The Labor Day Shoot

As with Memorial Day, Labor Day was a great weekend to film because the actors had a day off of work and/or school and would be able to film for longer then the typical two and a half day weekend shoot.  It also heralded the return of Russell Martin, who I hadn’t worked with since The Gift Bearer and is one of the most awesome (and hilarious) actors ever, and Syndi Eller who was reprising her role as Atropos from Dream Chasers. 

The Villa was now fully set up and ready for shooting.  We had a lot of filming to do that weekend, so we had a second unit with Brittany or James directing (switching off whenever the other one wasn’t being filmed) and Adam or Russell filming.  I ended up having to be in a few scenes since I wasn’t able to find an actress to play Zora, Mordecai’s sister, so Brittany directed those scenes as well.  

The biggest and most elaborate scene we filmed that weekend was, of course, the wedding scene at the end. We took time to do hair and make up and make sure that everyone looked good.  I made a multi-tiered wedding cake that was…okay…and made bouquets and all that other stuff you need to fake a wedding for film.  Of course, it ended up being hot as hell that day, and to make matters worse I forgot to switch tapes before we left so we couldn’t even film until someone ran back and got more (thanks Jen!).  While she was off saving the day, Syndi helped me set up and the actors tried their best not to die of heat stroke.

Needless to say it wasn’t the best situation, but we suffered through and actually had some fun.  Some, not a lot.  Geez, it was so freaking hot and most of us were in clothes not well suited to boiling summer sunshine. By the time we actually started filming the wedding the actors had wilted and the cake was rapidly melting. 

Three of the actors had birthdays on or around that weekend, so the wedding cake doubled as a birthday cake.  I had envisioned us all partying at the park for a little bit after filming was over, but then again I had also envisioned a cool day with a gentle breeze.  Neither of those happened, and we ended up hurrying home to cool off and had a nice swim in the hotel pool. 

I’m not sure what else we filmed that weekend, but I’m pretty sure we shot the nightmare scenes from Episode 7, which involved most of the cast getting bloodied up and pretending to be dead.  We filmed the fight scene between Zelda and Morpheus too, I think, and Brittany and Bryan did a great job with the choreography.

That weekend I also hit my limit at one point and stalked off to my room after yelling at the cast.  Seriously, I just up and yelled at them. I have no idea what made me upset, but I'm about 95% certain it had more to do with me being stupid and less with them doing something wrong.  I had an epiphany that day while I was cooling off in my room.  

Filming isn’t fun for anyone if I take it too seriously and let little things bother me.  There’s a fine line between keeping everyone focused long enough to film and yelling at the cast and crew to shut the hell up and just shoot.  I could be a director or a dictator, and since I was now medicated and still getting used to being sane, I made the active decision to be more of a director and less of a dictator. You have to let people goof off once in a while and let silliness be part of the experience, because otherwise what's the point?  It's not like I'm Spielburg and this production was going to be nationally broadcast.  I mean, that would be cool but it would require a lot more time, equipment, and an actual budget.

That was also the day I decided never to film another TV show because it was just a lot of work and way too stressful.  Ever since Eidolon I have focused on short films rather that can be filmed in a single weekend (or even an afternoon) so everyone (including me) can have less stressful fun.

The September Shoot

This was the only month where we had two shoots.  Toward the end of the month we were able to schedule another weekend of filming and that’s the weekend that broke a lot of records.  

I made a conscious effort to schedule things so that each of the main characters would have one month where they didn’t need to film, except for Morgan who was in so many scenes that it wasn’t possible to have a filming weekend she wasn’t involved in.  In July, Bryan didn’t need to film.  In October neither James nor Jen had to be there, and although Brittany didn’t either, she joined in because she wanted to be on the crew (for which I was very grateful).  The September shoot was the one that Adam could skip, which made things much easier on my budget for that shoot since I did not need a hotel. 

Several of the later episodes had scenes that didn’t include Mordecai and we filmed the vast majority of those scenes that weekend.  This was where we really a second unit in order to maximize filming time, and we were able to get through a huge number of scenes because of that.  In fact, one of the records broken that day – that has never been and probably never will be beaten – was the Most Number of Scenes Filmed in a Single Day.  The total?  31.  We filmed 31 scenes in one day.  Dude, that’s a lot of filming. The previous record, set in 2001 on the first big weekend of filming for Episode 3 of The Curse, was 23 scenes in a day, so we beat that record by quite a bit. 

Unsurprisingly, the second record we broke that weekend was for the Longest Day of Filming. Before Eidolon, that record was held by Mind Games for a shoot that lasted about 12-14 hours (depending on whether or not you count the time it took get home from the cursed one-way street laden town of Bloomington-Normal). The September Shoot for Eidolon whooped that record’s ass with an incredible 18 hours of filming!

That's right - 18 hours of straight filming, all day, with very few breaks. 18 hours.  Dear lord, that’s a lot of filming!  That’s normal for Hollywood, but insane for an SFF production. By the end of the day everyone was getting pretty silly - then eventually irritable, and finally we all just sort of collapsed.  I’m surprised they were able to get up the next day, let alone film some more.  I am such a sadist.

Double-shooting did cause a problem when we both teams were filming scenes in the house.  I remember Morgan was directing a scene in the living room while I was filming a scene in the bedroom that involved a lot of screaming and fighting.  That didn’t quite sound right.  Well, it was a scene in a bedroom and there was fighting, just not the sexy kind.  The other team had to stop shooting and wait until were quiet, so that didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.  After that I made sure the have one of the units filming in another location while the other filmed scenes in the house.

Another problem that we often have, but seemed worse that weekend, was people being injured.  There were two big fight scenes.  The first was between Maria and Ford (Morgan and Ryan Homberg).  We definitely needed more choreography for that fight (another problem with trying to film so much in a single day).  The fight could have been epic, but kind of fell flat because we didn’t spend the time on it we should have and because I suck at directing fight scenes.  During the fight Ryan had to jump over a dresser and through what was basically an inside window with no glass that dropped down several feet farther then the floor on the front side of the window.  He managed the stunt several times without injury, but there were some close calls, including a bad fall. 

The worst injury of the weekend actually happened to Morgan during that scene.  While Maria and Ford are struggling at one point, he throws her back into a door before making his escape.  During the filming Ryan missed his mark and Morgan got slammed against the doorknob. Ouch!  Poor Morgan, no one else gets injured half as much as she does and she’s always such a trooper about it.

The second fight was an even bigger, multi-scene fight between Maria, Zelda, and Morpheus (Morgan, Brittany, and Bryan).  It had better choreography and we spent more time on it, but the script called for a literal knock down, drag out fight between the two main characters, with Morpheus getting caught in the middle.  By the end of the scene everyone had sustained some form of injury and both Morgan and Brittany required Band-Aids. Luckily Morgan had the brilliant idea of bringing a first-aid kit to every shoot after her gravity forced pavement hug and gravel snuggle in August.

Now that I think about it, there were two other fight scenes we did that weekend.  One was the outside fight between Zelda and Maria (Brittany and Morgan) that had little choreography, but didn’t need much so it turned out okay.  It was outside in front of some stranger’s house and involved two girls and one knife, then a lady hurling crutches at people and smacking them around.  We wanted to keep that scene short and film it before someone called the cops.  I don’t think anyone was injured, although I did accidentally get hit with a flying crutch.  The fourth fight scene that weekend was the one the one in the bedroom.

Another scene that involved more energy then injury (but still inflicted some bruises I think), was we referred to as the Poltergeist scene in Episode 3 where a ghostly Zelda throws a tantrum and tries to kick Maria’s ass, but gets forcibly ejected from the house with when Maria casts an exorcism spell before Zelda can kill her.  

The scene made a major mess of the house and involved a lot of yelling and screaming from Brittany and some serious acting from both Brittany and Morgan.  It was a lot of fun for me and the others because we got to do tricks with wires pulling pans out of the cupboards, and Brittany got to throw a box of Fruit Loops at Morgan (which went all over, including under the sink, and I never bothered to clean it up with led to mice and I’m pretty sure Jen still hasn’t forgiven me for that).  It was fun, but exhausting and we were all forced to take a break after filming such an intense and physically demanding scene.

The absolute best part of the whole shoot was when we got to film the scenes where Terri, the die-hard fan girl, and (non-ghost) Zelda screw around with a Sorcerer play set.  You do not know what funny is until hand Jen Weber a play set and turn the camera on.  Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard in my life.  I couldn’t even film properly because I was shaking with laughter.  In fact I think I might have peed my pants and I definitely had several bouts where I couldn’t breathe because I was laughing so hard.  It was that funny. Jen is hilarious.

However long it was, however exhausting, and regardless of some of the problems (and injuries) that occurred on set, that shoot had some great moments, and is one of the most memorable Eidolon shoots in my opinion.

Now we have passed the point where we were supposed to have been done with filming. I had originally thought the Labor Day shoot would be the last one, but then I had to go and write three more episodes then I had planned.  Obviously Eidolon was a long way from being done.

Tune in next month for Eidolon, Part 3 – The Second Half of Production, where we’ll travel to Southern Illinois to film in a cave, have the dirtiest film shoot ever, redecorate the basement of the Villa as the home of the primary villain, spend more time in hotels and hot tubs, rock a New Year’s Eve party, and force the actors to film outside on a very cold winter day with no coats on.  So pretty much business as usual on an SFF set, I guess.