So Much More

A Whole New World

Since the first cast and crew dinner a couple of weeks ago, the Flightless Nation family had gotten even closer. Dakota saw that as a blessing since that meant they could work better together. They even had a group chat together where Isaac would send memes of Dad jokes he found on the web, where Naomi would boast of her recent culinary accomplishments and where Shailene would send them pictures from her travels. The rest of them would send out joking replies and keep the conversation going.

With that in mind, hauling herself back to trailer life was not fun. No matter how much fun she was going to have living in close quarters with her new-found friends, she still hated leaving her home. Adding to her sorrow was the fact that she would be leaving Zep with her Dad since her shooting schedules were unforgiving and there was the fact that they would be moving to unknown locations in a few months' time.

As she transitioned back to life in a movie set, her life depended on her trusty personal assistant Elena. She was truly a life-saver as she packed away Dakota's essentials from the little list she had Dakota made, even added a few more that Elena had deemed she would ask for later on. Everything was put and organized inside either Sherman – her personal trailer – or the hotel room provided by the studios. As a birthday gift when she had just started dabbling in acting, her mother had bought a personal trailer for her so that she could decorate it however she wanted. It went with her everywhere from Atlanta to Italy even to Brazil and she used it on every movie that she had ever made. It was not at all fancy, a little bigger than the standard-sized one the studios would provide but lead actors from feature films would sometime receive twice the size of her trailer.

It was her first day back on set and they would be starting out by having her transformation into Peyton. She wasn't shooting any scenes that day but they were shooting something else which she would hopefully have the time to watch. For now, she was sitting in a chair in the costume trailer where the hairstylist would be dying her hair red.

It was safe to say that Dakota was not looking forward to the change.

In her opinion, she looked better as a brunette. The dark hair would contrast nicely against her pale skin which brought out her features more. She had been living most of her formative years as a blonde and while she was considered cute as a blonde, no one was calling her a stunner.

But it was for a job which she signed up for. Aside for the color, she would be getting her bangs trimmed and a shoulder-length blunt cut. Some days it would be loosely curled whenever Peyton needed to look more presentable but the rest of the time, it was going to be mostly pin-straight. Since Peyton Garraway was a book character with a cult-like following, they were trying to get her as close to the book description as possible.

It took exactly three hours and forty-two minutes to get the color in her hair and another half an hour to dry and style it. When she had finished with her hair, the makeup artist decided to do some testing on her face, trying out different looks that would match her hair color. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and almost gasp in surprise at the person staring back at her.

After the makeup artist was finished with the result, the wardrobe department was next. Peyton's usual getup consisted of a striped shirt, dark-wash jeans and an army-green parka. They had to custom-made the parka because of the many pins that were described in the books in great details. Other than that, there was also a few other ensembles they wanted her to try.

When all was finished, the sun was setting. She was absolutely starving so she grabbed some bagels before she headed to the direction where they were shooting some scenes. The director, Mary Kinsley and Ted were huddled together while Jamie and Deborah were laughing to the side.

It looked like they were shooting the scene where Samuel and Ann was having the annual dinner party, before Samuel Stinson was aware of Peyton's existence.