Film Day 5 -- Chess!

Date: Saturday, April 25, 2009
Location: Interior -- Bunker
Film: Under Jakob's Ladder

The final day of our first week of filming. Yet another location change. Which means packing everything up once again.

This whole day pretty much concentrated on this one scene, which involves a chess match. Back in January, we were looking for someone to create a chess end-game for this very scene. We sent an email off to chess grandmaster (and former world champion) Susan Polgar... Not knowing if she'd even get back to us.

But, guess what! She did and it's a pretty cool end-game that she gave us, too. (Details of which we can't give away, of course, since that would be giving away too much of the movie! But we can tell you that it does involve some kings, and queens, and pawns, and rooks, etc.)

The empty set, complete with tripod, and camera/lighting equipment. Okay, we're ready to starting filming here!

The prisoners come together behind Jakob (played by Jeff Stewart).

And on the opposite end of the room are the NKVD guards behind Nikolai (played by Christopher Elliott)... (Plus a whole bunch of equipment that we need to keep out of frame when we shoot this angle. You can even see the boom mic in the shot.)