Recently I’ve done several poll on the SFF Facebook group to determine the Top 5 of lots of different things. For the 24 days leading up to the 25th Anniversary (and the day itself, of course) I will be posting a new Top 5 list each day, using the highly scientific and unbiased results from those FB polls. I’ll try to make these posts short but I’m pretty long winded and like to talk so…they’re probably all going to be pretty long. Enjoy?
Top 5 Worst Weather Film Shoots
The #1 thing people hate most about filming the weather, which is no surprise when you think about the kinds of weather I’ve forced people to film in. The fact that there is such a thing as the SFF Survivor’s Club which is mostly due to bad weather should tell you something about what the actors have to go through. In the poll I asked people which kind of weather they hated to film in the most. Some said rain, some said heat, but the majority said they hated to film in the cold. I ranked these terrible days of weather according to those results.
#5 – Together Again in Misery
I’ve made actors film in the rain many times before. Sometimes it’s just a drizzle, sometimes it’s a steady rain. However no thunderstorm has ever been as bad as the day we filmed scene for Episode 22 (Together Again) of Pandora’s Box. It was pouring rain, constant massive amounts of rain deluged the woods where we were filming and all the actors got drenched.
#4 – The Great Blizzard
Have you ever filmed in a blizzard? We have! I’m not talking about a few snowflakes either, I mean a full on blizzard – wind and snow tossing the actors around and making it hard to even see anything. Although it was cold while it was snowing it actually became colder once it stopped. Even the sun shining didn’t warm things up much.
#3 – The Hottest Day of Filming
Being over 400 lbs I have plenty of natural insulation so the cold doesn’t bother me as much as it does for other actors. I also am willing to take my coat off and suffer with them, just as long as my hands are warm enough not to shake the camera. However, I suffer just as much if not more in the heat. Hot days are the worst for and the hottest day of filming was when we shot scenes for The Gift Bearer movie, Time After Time, in the summer of 2012. I had often joked about making the actors dress up in hot Victorian costumes in the middle of summer but I never really meant for it to happen. But it did. You can see the actors sweating and I swear everyone had pretty much melted by the end.
#2 – A Bad Day to Die
What’s worse then being hot? How about being in hot costumes? Not bad enough? Okay, try wearing hot costumes on a day where the temperature is around 98 degrees and you have to do sword fights, karate fights, and run around in the blazing sun. Still not bad enough? Throw in lots of mosquitos and you have on hell of a terrible film shoot. The place we were filming in for Episode 24, The Final Fight, of Pandora’s Box was the beautiful Allerton park, but Allerton has a river running through it, it was the middle of summer, and I made half the actors lie on the ground covered in sticky sweet fake blood which just turned them into dessert buffets for all the mosquitos. Margaret Olson, Chris Hutchens, and Virginia McCreary had to film in a special kind of hell when I chose a location near a still and shallow pond in a place we nicknamed Mosquito Island.
#1 – The Coldest Day of Filming
The actors have had to film in a LOT of cold weather over the years but no set was as cold as Fort De Chartres on a frosty day in December of 2002. There was snow on the ground and although the sun was shining it was a watery winter sun that doesn’t really provide much warmth. It wasn’t even melting the snow. I don’t know what the temperature was outside but it was probably in the upper 20s or low 30s. That was the outside temperature which was bad enough, but inside the Fort it much worse. Possibly single digits. I shocked no one ended up with frostbite. You see Fort De Chartres is built out of stone, and stone holds in the cold. It holds it really well and had been sitting in the sitting in the snow soaking up the cold for several weeks. It was so much colder inside the building then outside of it that the actors actually went outside by the snow to warm up.
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