The day we filmed the battle in the woods was a model day, the kind of day I’d envisioned when I first decided to shoot the film. This was how it should have been from the start. First I assembled my cast – Jonathan, Jim, Rob, Colin Nicolle, and Cliff Lee – with the intent to film for about four hours. It was a Saturday afternoon, and everyone had the day off.  Everyone, that was, except Gabe Purcell. I’d hoped to get him out to play Renard, but as a plumber’s apprentice he was too busy. Next time, he said.

By now it was early September. I’d been filming for over a month and had maybe one tenth of the film “in the can.” This was too slow. I knew I had to step it up if I was ever to finish the project before the leaves started to turn and I lost the look of summer. This weekend, I hoped, would provide me with about fifty percent of what was left. I could then complete the rest on another weekend.

I met the cast at the Citadel and we piled into my van. The back of the van was filled with our “wardrobe,” enough historic clothing to outfit everyone, plus a few muskets, plus my knapsack. Inside the knapsack was my script, shot lists, storyboards, camera, a wide angle lens attachment I had borrowed, tripod, and  a little shotgun microphone. The knapsack was the closest thing I had to a crew.

Half an hour later we were on location. It was a perfect September day, clear and sunny and hot. This was not the first time I’d had luck with the weather, and it wouldn’t be the last. Our first shot was a repeat of the speech scene in which Noble addresses his troops. Rob repeated some of his lines in front of Colin, Jonathan and Cliff, though mostly he just walked back and forth. We got through the scene in about ten minutes. I started crossing shot after shot from my list, most done in a single take. There’s just no time for multiple takes in a no-budget movie, and I stuck to this principal as much as possible.

Next we marched into the woods, passing some of the same landmarks that Tom Cromwell had marched past a few days earlier. One of those landmarks was a small pine tree that I filmed almost everyone passing.

Our march brought us to the section of trail below the bluff, and here we started shooting the battle scene. Jim supplied the black powder, and we used tiny loads of about twenty grains. This produced a nice flash and some smoke, but almost no noise. There were houses in the vicinity and I didn’t want to attract unwanted attention with gun shots.

The musket firing clips took some time, since I filmed everyone separately with a clear zone of fire. Some of the muskets were finicky and kept misfiring, but eventually I got all I needed. Next on my shot list were two brief hand-to-hand fights, but the first I couldn’t do because it involved Renard. The next scene required another Acadian character, Marguerite, a woman partisan, but I couldn’t do that one either because I had no Marguerite. Everyone I’d asked had turned me down. Though I was reluctant to do away with the character, in the end that was my only option. The scene called for her to leap out of the brush behind the Rangers and crack one of them on the head with a tomahawk. I decided to play the part myself as a male partisan. I donned a French hunting shirt and cocked hat and had Colin film me jumping up and whacking Cliff on the skull with my sponge rubber tomahawk. Like Steve Mosher, I was wearing sneakers, but they didn’t make it into the shot.

The second hand-to-hand combat scene was much more complicated. It involved Cliff, now dressed as an Acadian, in an attempt to ambush Rob, who fights him off with his hangar (short sword). Here I applied the principles I’d learned from Mohicans, and shot each blow of the fight as a separate clip. I did several takes of the first few blows, encouraging the guys to resist pulling their punches. It worked and the results were pretty good.

A few more scenes followed, all of them involving conversation and character interaction. By about five o’clock I hadn’t managed to get through my entire shot list, but it was late, we were hot and dead tired. I knew not to push it, so we agreed to come back the next Saturday and finish the job. It had been a good day. I hoped for more like it.

A week passed. Saturday came again, another day off, and another perfect day for making cheap movies. The weather was beautiful and a match for the footage I’d shot the previous week. I also managed to drum up the exact same group of volunteers.

This time I chose to start the day off at a different location. This was a section of recently burned forest across the road from York Redoubt National Historic Site, and a perfect place, I thought, to shoot some of my “Rangers walking through different landscapes” scenes, those scenes directly inspired by Northwest Passage. As shooting commenced, however, I ran into more screenplay problems. Some of my ideas looked okay on paper but didn’t really work, or weren’t quite fleshed out. I had to modify my story on the fly, and luckily the lighting and the interesting terrain worked to my advantage.

After an hour we returned to the Purcell’s Cove trail location, this time climbing to the top of the bluff and working our way back, shooting scene after scene, at last completing my shot list from the previous week and then some. Everyone was tired, sweaty, and a little exasperated, but it improved their acting. They were supposed to look tired, sweaty, and exasperated.

When the day was over, I returned home and again uploaded and edited as much of the footage as I could. The film was really taking shape. In two weekends I’d reached my goal and now about two thirds of the script had been committed to DV. With the exception of the climactic battle, all of the primary scenes were done. I just had some little character bits to fill in.

With luck, I thought, I’d be finished in about two more weeks.

Next: Losing Steam