Madman’s Mutterings

We took the cast and crew of Popup Chinese out into the field on a day when the weather was being particularly kind and we had the warmth of more than just the sun. I had to leave my camera bag in Shanghai, so we took turns carrying the heavy rig across the city, through the streets, into cabs, by the Drum Tower and to the bridge at Houhai.

Everywhere we went, people stopped to watch the filming in progress. They gather around, respectful in their silence, and we got great footage. I had my still camera with me, the Rebel, and I handed it to the cast and took pictures of them taking pictures of each other. One of them snuck a photo of me when I wasn’t looking (seen above). She wasn’t the only one, though…

The paparazzi caught us at the bridge and at one point there were so many photographers snapping away that they had created a wall between myself and my cast. They literally had them surrounded! They were good sports about it, though, and I think everyone went home happy. The actors are still new to one another, but they really gelled on location and they mugged it up pretty well. They’re an absurdly good-looking bunch of people. Of course, even in a group of attractive people, there’s going to be one that stands out a bit more than the others.

This is Apple. A mob of shutterbugs descended on her almost from the moment we arrived and we nearly had to exert some crowd control to keep the cops from shutting us down. We had just come to get some b-roll by the winding river and the stone streets. We had no idea that it would be like Elvis in Memphis, or the Beatles at Heathrow. They just went nuts.

There’s a whole gallery just of her on the Flickr site. The camera just loves her, and she’s the most natural talent I’ve seen in a long time. Everything you see over there is almost literally point and shoot. A blind mollusk could have taken these pictures.

Speaking of pictures, you can meet the rest of the cast and crew in the Week 4 photos on the site by clicking here. Or, if you’re new to the blog and you want to see all the China photos so far, you’ll want to click here.

It’s been a hell of a week here. I fly back to Shanghai on Wednesday, but I’ll be back in Beijing early next week for a top-secret project that I’m just dying to tell you about.

Stay tuned. I mean it. Don’t go far. I’ve only been here a month. I’m just getting warmed up.

Current Mood:  accomplished