 "Photo: Elizabeth Miller / UCD Advocate")
Before the lights, before the camera, even before actors assemble and the scene number is chalked up and read off, there is plenty of action on a film set.
While filming the Denver Film Society sponsor video, which plays before every screening during the Starz Denver Film Festival to acknowledge festival sponsors, the cast and crew moved into a train at a railyard near downtown Denver.
The art director spread tablecloths over the tables in the old train dining car, then placed fresh roses, plates carrying the remains of slices of cake, silverware, glasses of water, half-empty cups of coffee, bottles of wine, and even a trumpet.
Actors were called to the railyard hours before filming began and passed through wardrobe
and makeup. Clothing was adjusted, hair primped, and faces entirely made-up if the actor
had a speaking role—just dusted in powder if they were extras.
Makeup artists squeezed into a train car, stacking chairs on one side and loading tables up with their makeup kits, which put eight colors of foundation, 12 shades of blush, and plenty of hairspray and bobby pins in arm’s reach.
When filming began, anyone who wasn’t prepped to be in front of the camera crammed into the back corners of the train cars. Makeup artists waited in the narrow hallway of the kitchen
car to be called back in to powder noses and touch up lipstick. Other crew members and the scriptwriter watched from a monitor in the train kitchen, their film equipment sprawled over the countertops.
“My idea was really to show the connectedness that we all have,” said Eric Altman, the film’s director. “We all have our various human experiences, but the truth is, if you wide-lens it, it’ll show we’re all very much the same.”
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