(editor’s note: Jasper loves it when the work of local artists takes them away from Columbia–as long as they come back home and are generous enough to share their adventures with us while we’re waiting on them. Local filmmaker Wade Sellers’ newest project has taken him to Japan where he’ll be working for the next ten days. Lucky for us, Wade has agreed to post a series of blogs detailing his journey and his work while away. This is the second post in that series.)
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Today was the day off. We did have a pre-production meeting with our PR representative from the Army where we refined our production schedule. There is a lot of tension between the US military and the local population. This is easy to understand as there are F-18s flying over our hotel quite a bit. They are not quiet planes. To us this is relevant because we will be filming some at some residential areas that were battle sites during Ted Bell's time here during WW2.
Anyone who tells you that food doesn't play a big part when traveling for a production is lying. Jeff and I chose not to travel far from the hotel and visited what's called “American Village”. It's basically Broadway at the Beach. It has all the american fare you can imagine and caters mainly to the soldiers and their families based here. Arcades, clothing stores and souvenir stands also crowd the area. By no means however does this mean that the local mom and pop food stands are of any less quality. We had lunch at a small Japanese food stand that had a great teriyaki chicken salad with just chicken, rice, lettuce and an amazing mayonaise sauce. For dinner we joined our Army rep and the Bell's and Jeff and I shared a knock out seafood stew.
Riding in the van, back to the hotel, Ted noticed a giant ferris wheel in the area. We asked him if he wanted to give it a try. His response- “I didn't travel all this way just to die on a ferris wheel.”
We begin production tomorrow and have a busy few days ahead of us. MW.