Some shoots take months of planning, others just happen. If there’s one thing I learnt early on, it’s that however much planning has gone into a shoot, fuck happens; things can and do change, sometimes at the last minute, sometimes several times and you end up shooting something completely different.
Take last week; an American performer we’ve worked with before let us know he’d be in town, so we got to work on finding a shooting partner, a location and planning how we’d like to shoot the scene. There’s a new location we’d had in mind for a while, I suspected it might be a bitch to shoot in on a technical level, but it’s interesting and unique, so we booked it.
Then we had the offer to work with another really good performer who was only available briefly, so grabbing that opportunity, we booked another couple of guys to shoot with him in the same location later the same day.
Cool. Two good scenes in a great location, we were sorted for a good day’s work.
So the original guy drops out; he can’t make it after all. We can roll with that, a quick re-suffle of performers and that’s sorted out. Then a few hours before the shoot, we find that the cool location we’d booked has had a facelift, there’s a shiny coat of fresh paint on the floor – which just won’t dry and can’t be walked on for at least 6 hours, so we can’t shoot there. Ok, so we have our guys but no location, are we bothered? Well, yes, but this really isn’t that unusual, so we scramble an old favourite location and go to Plan C (or is it D?) Whatever.
Our trusted location is the bar where Gay Bar or Bust is shot, so as we’re heading there, we’re thinking about a scenario for the guys we;re about to shoot; the obvious solution is to shoot two extra episodes for Series 2 of Gay Bar or Bust, so we find ourselves writing the script in the car on the way to the venue, we don’t finalise it until the lights are set up and we’re about to start filming. So much for preparation. Months of meticulous planning for most of the series and these two episodes devised on the way to the venue.
The day had some more surprises in store, but these were all good; amazingly good; we ended up shooting two fantastic scenes with some of the hottest sex action of the series. I wonder if you’ll be able to spot which scenes took lots of planning and which were last minute add-ons when the series starts on November 26th…