People say working with children can be the hardest thing. You ask them to come here and they would readily go in the opposite direction. You ask them to keep quiet and they would shriek at the top of their voices. You ask them to say something and they would go mum as if they never learnt how to speak. In other words, the unpredictability is tremendous. So working with babies, who don't even understand what we are trying to achieve with them, leads the unpredictability to a different level altogether.
Today, for the first time ever, I had to work with a baby for the film. This 5-month old is the youngest member of the team and today he debuted in front of the camera. The scene required the mom-character to hold him for a while first and then the dad-character to hold him as well.
Needless to say, the baby found the whole bunch of us absolutely unworthy of his smiles and the other cute things babies do, and instead cried his way through the shoot. At one point the dad-character said "Man...he is crying!! I mean, there are like tears and all!" I told him my best guess is that babies do produce tears when they cry, much like us adults.
But interestingly, the dad-character was the one who better handle the baby while the mom-character almost looked as if she is gonna drop him at any point, leaving me biting my lips in tense anticipation. And on top the shoot that was meant to be wrapped up in an hour went on for about 3 hours or so... mainly because the baby needed some food or his nanny or his mummy or his beauty sleep or all of the above.
Anyway, am glad to let you know that I managed to get all the shots that I wanted and it was as successful a shoot as it could have been. We got some excellent shots whenever the baby decided to take a break from crying. At other times when the baby kept on crying, the pressure fell on the mom and dad characters to act really well so we could distract the audience from the crying baby. That strategy seemed to have worked and we got some excellent shots then too. So all in all, we worked well with the unpredictability of babies.
So here is to the baby and the interesting experience he gave the team today!
772 more to go.
"leaving me biting my lips in tense anticipation"
ReplyDeleteI hope for the sake of the baby that you meant tense apprehension, rather than anticipation :P
Ref meaning 1(b) in http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anticipation
Ya I have always wondered how one can direct a baby to act in a particular way...apparently, one can't eh? You just wait for the right moment and the right output from the baby...