Note: Dailies are prints made from the film shot that day to be viewed by the director and/or actor that night or the next morning.
“What’s going on? What happened to yesterday’s dailies?”
“There’s a problem with the negative.”
“Don’t tell me there’s a problem with the negative. Are you sure it’s not just the workprint?”
“I had a second print made and it’s the same.”
“So what are we talking about? Out of focus? Vibration?”
“Here take a look.”
“Ok what is that? Is that a smudge on the lens?!”
“No, I had the camera checked. Just watch.”
“Wait, it moved. What is that?”
“Watch this one. Jenny moves in front of it for a second. And here you can see it ‘walking’ in the background.”
“Is… is that a ghost?”
“I’m not saying that. So, what do we do?”
“Have you told Jefferies?”
“No but he’s going to get a kick out of this. You know he wanted to shoot on location because of the rumors.”
“Is it in every shot?”
“Every shot.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. We can’t just crop it out cause it moves through center frame a lot. We could paint it out in post production but that’s going to blow up the budget if it’s every shot.”
“Yeah yeah. So we can’t get rid of it and Jefferies knew this could happen. He wanted this to happen. Call PR and tell them- scratch that. Get one of them to see this and convince them it’s real and tell them to spin it. ‘Period film haunted by ghosts of the real people.’ Or something. It’s what we pay them for.”
“We don’t know it’s real.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s good press no matter what. If it keeps up, we may have to change locations.”
“That’s going to blow up the budget too.”
“Have we got today’s dailies?”
“Should be here soon.”
“We could leave it in. ‘The first truly haunted film.’ Or something.”
“Here they are. Let me load the print and here we go.”
“There it is.”
“Yep.”
“World’s First Haunted Film.”
“Yep.”