3

Well, that was painless. We filmed Glinda's guards this morning, and it was totally hitchless. Went without a hitch. We were a little nervous, to be perfectly honest. Madeline Lovegrove, who plays the lead guard in Glinda's palace and also voices the stork, had come in to audition in summer 2009. We'd met her for ten minutes then, and had not seen her since.

On top of that, she was bringing two friends with her to fill in as background guards, and we'd never met either of them. So we had three people coming in who we basically didn't know, and we didn't know if we'd work well together or even get along. They might be awful people. It happens. Plus, we'd never gotten the chance to do a fitting of the costume, so we weren't even sure if it would fit on any of the girls. Or... y'know... look good all put-together.

Turns out we needn't have worried. Madeline was perfectly lovely, her friends (Taylor and Viv) equally so, and the costume ended up fitting all of them quite well. Since Madeline was with the having of the line and all, and the costume was made specifically based on her sizing information, we started with her. We got to shoot a cool little piece with Madeline standing guard and experiencing the perplexity caused by a horde of monkeys with wings swooping in and dropping a little girl and her wacky pals.

I feel as though my training left me unprepared for flying primates...

After that, it was all boring stuff, getting her to stand very still from various angles, or walk in various directions. Stuff we can composite into other shots, or cut away to if need be. When all her stuff was in the (strictly metaphorical) can, it was time for Viv and Taylor to share the pain.

The only thing more Spartan than her costume is the set...

While they helped Madeline out of the cumbersome armor, and then helped Taylor into it, Sean and I removed the horse-hair plume from the helmet. Because only the captain gets a horse-hair plume. That's one of the perks of captaining. Plume removed, we set out and filmed Taylor's stuff. She got her own little moment of close-up, and then it was back to the boring background kind of stuff, stand-still, rotate, walk forward, etc.

One can tell from her manner that this guard is suffering from plume envy. Y'hate to see it.

Then it was back inside for another armor swap. Despite each of the three of them helping get whoever into the armor, it never seemed to get any easier for them. As has been the case with... well... EVERY costume... I'm glad it's not me who has to wear it. We made our way outside with an armored-up Viv, and same deal as before. A brief close-up to cut into the sequence, and then background guard sort of... standing. Standing at attention. Like a guard.

Does it count as a close-up if none face is visible?

Guard duty over for the day, our last act was to record some dialogue with Madeline. I picked out the best take of her line as Glinda's Guard, and she ADR'ed the heck out of that. Then we recorded her dialogue as the stork. If you've read the book, you know the stork to which I refer, and if you HAVEN'T read the book... Why not? Go and do that, or something.

It's nice to write an entry about a day that went exactly as it should have... I won't let myself get used to it.