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| Although you can't see him, I was lying in front of a very large lion in this shot. |
Anyway, at the time I had fully recovered from the EB Virus infection I wrote about earlier, but I lost a ton of weight and was the skinniest I've been in sometime. Needless to say when they told me I'd be shooting with my shirt off (and with a cow skull on my head) I was a bit self conscious about it. Particularly since I'd be shooting opposite my Jamaican friend Ricky, who's massive and tends to make me look skinny anyway. I was also a bit worried that it would be freezing as well, and might re-trigger my symptoms all over again.
It turned out though that the shoot was actually in a studio in front of a green screen, so while it was a bit chilly (particularly since I was "oiled up"), they gave me a set jacket (a long nylon coat with thick cotton/wool-ish lining for actors to wear in-between takes) so I was more or less fine.
There was one other massive surprise to be had however, once I arrived, I found out that I would be doing the shoot in front of a live lion. His name was Natsu (summer) and he was friggin massive. For most of the shoot, I just had to lay down in the grass in front of him. While he did have a chain around his neck that secured him to the floor, having him just a few feet away from me, while I had to lay there in the grass facing away was unnerving in the beginning.
As is typical with a lot of shoots in Japan (particularly reinactment dramas, and music videos) it started at 6am, and ran until midnight, and by the end of the shoot, I actually had a fairly good sense of the lion's character...and he was as gentle as a newborn puppy. The only exception was that he really hated it when the camera tracked in...and you can actually see him snarle at it in the video. Probably the funniest part of the ordeal was the fact that in nature, lions generally sleep about 20 hours a day, so after he was accustomed to the set, he went straight to sleep and it was a constant challenge for the staff to wake him up (without pissing him off) and then keep him up and alert long enough to take the scene. They would throw balls at each other, run around yelling his name while shaking half full water bottles and things like that. (Funny how you forget that lions are just big cats, so they are responsive to the same kinds of things regular cats are).
As for the rest of the staff, I lucked out in that I feel like I had the easiest job. They brought real grass onto the studio and it was a bit cold and itchy, but my mask was relatively light, and easy to breathe in. Ricky's on the other hand was massive and heavy, and was giving him a serious neckache by the end. The African American woman playing the owl also had a light mask, but she had to remain "perched" in a precarious position for pretty much the whole day. As for the two "rabbit women", I felt the worst for them, because the nose pieces made it nearly impossible for them to breath through their nose, and once they were put on at 7am, they couldn't be removed until the end at Midnight. Watching them trying to eat was pretty funny but you really had to feel for them at the same time. This was my first shoot after recovering, so Im very very thankful that it was an easy one.
Anyway, here is a link to the short form of the video... Have yet to find the long one. When I do, I will most certainly let ya know!
http://v.ku6.com/show/
And the making of the video... http://www.56.com/u41/v_ODkyOTczMjY.html
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