2009 Production Log Entry 22: Elwood Sings

Saturday, January 2, 2010 (2 hours)

Every time I think we’re done shooting, there’s more quick pickups to do.  As I was planning out the music, I noticed that Elwood’s original speeches in “Everybody Needs Somebody” would need to be removed and replaced.  So we got Frank back into his costume hopefully for the last time and brought him over to the studio.  Since we didn’t have a backing band, I set it up to look like a single spotlight on Frank over a black background.  It actually looked really good in the end.

We shot about 13-15 takes of the first speech, some with Frank bouncing to the (imagined) beat, some with him standing still.  We used a teleprompter so he wouldn’t have to memorize the whole thing, but there were still plenty of outtakes.  When we watched the footage back, the tape had some kind of problem and none of it turned out.  So we had to go back and repeat everything we had done, plus do the second speech.  It was very frustrating.  It was especially frustrating because Frank had plenty of great outtakes that we lost, but his performance was also better.

When I got home with the tape, it played just fine, so that was good, but that was a lot of time wasted and overall frustration.