On Location for Coyote Girl: Thursday 01.08.15

January has been an amazing month for Outcast Café! We have spent the past two and a half weeks officially entering the production phase of making our second short film, Coyote Girl, the poetic version of the 90 minute play script Riley Ann Visits the Outcast Cafe. After spending about two weeks on location in Westfield, Illinois the team has dispersed and continues to work on post-production for the film as well as upcoming projects for the company. Here is the next installment of our adventures on location from the perspective of company member Gail Shalan (Riley Ann, Coyote:

Thursday 01.08.15

8:01 a.m.- This morning, at the Home Place, the cast and crew meets with the make-up and costume consultant for the film, Karen Eisenhour. Karen is a professor in the theatre department at Eastern Illinois University (in Charleston) teaching make-up and costume design as well as building puppets herself! Karen brings along a bright and eager student named Jason, who is an actor, writer and director,  looking to produce his first feature film soon. For the next couple hours Karen and Jason teach Biggs and myself how to properly apply a makeup base and then age/ exhaust ourselves appropriately using shadowing techniques, exaggerated heavily for black and white film. In color we sort of look like a zombie-horror flick, but in color, we are spectacular! After consulting with Rick and Terry on our various progressions (or regressions), we move on to costumes.

11:48 a.m.-  We break quickly for lunch. Chatting with Karen and Jason about their work and time at the University is a blast. Rick grills Karen on her film syllabus, and Jason grills Rick on making a movie. Turns out Karen is a bit of a neighbor to us Berkshire folk as she hails from our neighbor, Connecticut.

12:40 p.m.- Biggs and I change in and out of our many costume options and with the help of all our useful eyes (Rick, Terry, Karen, Jason, and Sims), we narrow down our costumes, scene by scene.

2:15 p.m.- Having made it through all of our looks, Karen makes an organized list and closet set-up. We move on to beginning a camera rehearsal with Rick (scenes 2/3, 5, 7, and 10) for blocking of the various shots in a more particular sense than our rehearsal yesterday. It’s been a long day. Make-up mysteriously takes an aggressive toll, but we feel good about powering through the first half of the film rehearsal and then finishing the rest up another day.

6:11 p.m.-  The five of us head out to an amazing smokehouse in Charelston for dinner. This little recovering vegetarian is officially on a Chicken kick these two weeks. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

The lovely Jason and Karen. Thanks for the help!
The lovely Jason and Karen. Thanks for the help!
We settle on jewelry for RILEY ANN. Kind of crazy what ends up looking good in greyscale.
We settle on jewelry for RILEY ANN. Kind of crazy what ends up looking good in greyscale.
Biggs applies the OLD MAN make-up.
Biggs applies the OLD MAN make-up.
An utterly exhausted RILEY ANN. What looks like a black eye in color actually comes across as extremely weary in black and white.
An utterly exhausted RILEY ANN. What looks like a black eye in color actually comes across as extremely weary in black and white.
RILEY ANN for scene 7. Here we see her fully made up, but having trouble hiding the bags of exhaustion.
RILEY ANN for scene 7. Here we see her fully made up, but having trouble hiding the bags of exhaustion.