Merry Christmas from Everyone here at Filmweavers!!!!  May you and all yours be blessed as we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior!!

Each of the crew members from "The Penny" is enjoying this special day back home with each of their families, since principal photography is now WRAPPED on the film!  After a long and sometimes hard 5+ week shoot, the majority of "The Penny" is now "in the can" (or on the hard drives as it were).

The final week of shooting was full of twists and turns, including a 20+ hour night/day shoot (necessitated by a scene we had to reschedule due to weather), another cancelled day on Friday due to weather (which we took advantage of by braving the snowy roads for pizza and bowling as our "almost" wrap party!), and yet another shoot postponed due to an issue with a piece of equipment not being delivered on time (apparently God wanted those scenes shot later).  Despite these setbacks we were still able to complete all but a few of the scenes scheduled for the principal shoot.  There are still a couple days of pick-up shooting scheduled for January, and a couple more pick-up days in the Spring once the snow clears out.

All the hard work of the last month and a half seems so worth it as we review the raw footage from the shoot!  Thanks to our wonderful cast and crew we have some GREAT material to work with over the coming months as we enter the editing and post-production phase of "The Penny".  As another slight taste of what's to come we've included a few more still frames from the film.  Enjoy!

Week four of the penny shoot is accomplished! Fraught with many a peril and hardship but none the less these things are expected by anyone who has ever done this before.

Some days it seems as though every major piece of equipment has some sort of malfunction. The 35mm adapter has actually been rather cantankerous this week which is quite surprising since it was reported to be one of the more reliable ones out there. This has caused some long waits right in the middle of shooting as it had to be taken apart, prayed for and tinkered with until it started working again. This has been incredibly frustrating. I guess this is part of the trials you have to deal with when it is an extremely low budget production. I think I will do a full write up review on the adapter after the shoot is complete for everyone's benefit. On the switch side I am very happy with the visual quality it produces and the level of light loss isn't as bad as I had feared it would be compared to non 35mm adapter shooting. So that's kind of offsetting the difficulties.

We had a fairly miraculous shooting day Saturday. It was more scheduled to shoot than we had ever shot previously in a day and we had generally shot far into the night to get anywhere near that much done. Additionally we had to be out of the location by 10 in the evening! The Lord really accelerated our efforts! It was amazing! Throughout the day as we were going Nathan and I would look at each other... are we going to make this? There weren't any options if we didn't. Things were flowing pretty smoothly and we didn't skip a single shot. As the final take rolled, and the wonderful words "that's a wrap" echoed through the room. Nathan and I whipped out our cell phones. 9:02! We still had to pack all the gear and clean up the location which was Dan Bell's Graciously provided house. We worked sprightly, and all hoped into our vehicles after loading up. 10:00 on the nose! Praise the Lord for his help and goodness! It also was the first day yet where it felt like some major hold up problem item didn't surface. It was a big encouragement to the team.

Only one week to go and the penny is in the can!

AD (Dustin Ledden) and Director (Nathan Webster) Ready and watching for the next take.

AD and Director going over the shot list for the next scene.

Just a few more positioning tweaks...

The family dinner table all set for the scene.

The third week of filming on Penny has wrapped up. It was undoubtedly the hardest week of shoot yet! Several lighting specific lighting setups were beasts on account of technical problems, dollys and a seemingly endless flood of minor problems. We are however extremely glad to have nearly all of the outdoor shooting completed as it's been bitterly cold here in WI. There is still one scene in the cold I believe. One night coming back in it was zero! It still isn't particularly enjoyable to retrieve all the equipment in the artic temperatures but necessary at any rate. We also had a picture wrap on several major characters, which although we were all sad to see them leave it was a nice step toward finishing the movie.

Two weeks left. The home stretch is just peeking over the hill! Here are a couple more stills from shooting.