“Lovely, Still” - day 25

I’ve been so busy with festival stuff lately that I haven’t had a chance to visit the set of the latest feature film that’s being shot here in Omaha until Tuesday night. “Lovely, Still” is the first feature film by writer/director Nik Fackler, a local filmmaker who’s been writing and shooting short films and music videos over the last several years and with the help of producer Dana Altman of North Sea Films, they’ve finally put all of the pieces together to get the film produced locally.

I arrived on set down at the Gene Lahey mall at 5:00pm and was greeted by an army of large production vehicles, so you could immediately tell this was a larger budget film than most of the locally produced independent films. After most of the crew arrived and started work for the day, it was great to see that I recognized (and have worked with) most of them. After a couple of hours of setup, it was finally time to start shooting for the day.

Mr. Martin Landau and Ms. Ellen Burstyn are the two leads for the film and they were treated to an evening of outdoor scenes in beautiful (and ridiculously cold) downtown Omaha. It was a real treat for me watching them work and you could certainly tell that they had countless years of experience behind what they were doing. It was also cool seeing two Oscar winners being directed by our own Nik. From what I saw, it’s going to be a great film and the scene that they shot while I was visiting will be sure to cause goose bumps and tears in the theater. That’s all I can say about that.

And I left the set after 1:30am. And had to be at work by 7:00am. And it’s now after midnight. I plan on getting some sleep sometime very soon. At least that’s the plan.

Congrats Nik and Dana. Principal photography wraps this week and it’s on to post production. Anyone that knows me and my projects knows how much I LOVE post productions. Ugh.