Quickie

On Friday night I went to check out Quickies at Live Girls Theater since it had some of my peeps in it. The show was a fun collection of short pieces. Darian-peeps acted in a couple and directed, her sister-peeps ran the show and Kelly-who's-in-my-movie-peeps also appeared in a couple. Everyone knows I don't exactly get all gushy over most theater(cf. film-though everyone knows movies are the dead art of the new millenium), but I particularly liked the segment "24 Pictures of a Pilot" in which Kelly featured. It's very compelling for short work and written by a local playwright for the show, as I understand it. Live Girls theater is in general pretty cool, so you should head out there if you can. I think there are only a couple of performances left in the run so act quickly.

Last Sunday

As I mentioned, we started both days last weekend with our newswoman. Here she is again, this time with CEO Frederick Moyers.

The nice thing about shooting news interviews is that they move along pretty quickly. So after burning through that sequence, we crossed the mighty Lake Washington for some serious eastside action. First up the intro scenes at Susan's house. It was Mother's Day and we leaned on our families who graciously let us use their homes. Susan took her mother out to brunch and her father rather amazingly managed to nap through our shouting. Yes shouting, not shooting. Okay both. We're Bail Enforcement Agents, people!

And it's time to go to work...

Unfortunately, we were a bit squeezed for time and weren't able to complete the scene. We have to reschedule to finish the van sequences. We did get a fantastic smoker prop from Susan's dad and some other mysterious entity and it looked great.

Next, we ventured even deeper into the east to capture the treehouse material. Perhaps the most amazing feature of this shoot was that we actually had a sit-down dinner.


Not pictured is our child actor for the evening, Weston. He did a great job and didn't even get pummeled by a rifle butt like our last child actor. Perhaps it's not as dramatic but much less stressful for the families. (I think I've mentioned how Piers is now helping on our crew after appearing in "Kingmaker" as a child victim years ago). I like to think we've grown as filmmakers.

I want to give a big thanks to Carol for coming out that night. I mistakenly flipped SE and NE in the address I gave her which sent her to regions beyond comprehension. She admirably stuck with it however and eventually arrived. Karen also came through with some great props for the shoot. She supplied the cigarettes which were so vital to the scene and the substitute crossbow bolts which were so vital to the safety of our actors. Speaking of which, the plant in the post I made earlier couldn't have caught fire. It was raining! Joy.

Despite adverse conditions, we captured some great material around the treehouse.


The substitute crossbow bolts did however contribute to the Lamest Shot Ever Captured and The Thing Of Which We Shall Never Speak, even though I'm mentioning it in a public forum. I only do so because myself, Mike and Nick must answer to ourselves how we let it happen. From now on, we're going to be wearing chain mail and getting back to the days before regulations, PETA et al. What would Apocalypse Now have been without the heart attack? I'm just saying...

Nick hard at work. In a time of not rain. Oh how fun it is to stow wet gear.


Theme of the movie, people!

It will be on your film class quiz. I guarantee it. Extra credit if you can explain how the arrangement of pieces does not fit with the title of the image. No cheating.

Busy weekend

We attempted three different locations each day last weekend. Maybe that's why it's taken me so long to write about it. We've taken the week off, since Mike is out of town this weekend. Today is the first day I've really gotten decent sleep though because work has been busy.

I'll keep the chat short today and mostly go with pictures. We kicked off Saturday and Sunday shooting our rip-roaring newswoman, Adrianna.

Next up were our first driving scenes. Nick and I piled in to capture Adrianna and Thor's chase sequence. Did I mention you don't want to piss this woman off?

From there we loaded up and headed to Tricky's for some hot bbq action. You've been waiting for it, you just didn't know when it would come, but here it is. A beautiful, smoky pork shoulder, courtesy of Patrick, author of one of the greatest songs ever written, "Test Meat Destroyer".

Of course, rather than partaking of his savage, blood-soaked slaughter of innocent creatures, we feasted on ecologically-sensible portabella burgers. Delicious, and as I understand it, a joint production of Sarah and Erin.

While we shot Kristi upstairs ( I was serious about the rifle, people), Paul and Piers fired up a game of ping-pong. Isn't that sweet, cast and crew bonding, trying to Forrest Gump the other's face off?

This man believes.

And another special one.

Image of the Day

"And to help prevent...non-safety."

Come on people, Phil Hartman, Sharon Stone? Anyone? Anyone?

"Where are they now?" Presents...

Image of the Day!

Bjorn Borg

We struck the set

So it's taken me a few days to resume the thread I started, but what can you do? Last Wednesday we struck the bounty hunter office set. We finished up shooting there Tuesday night and returned to clear out the place the next night. The strike went relatively quickly with Mike, Sarah and Susan lending a hand. Moviemaking is an endeavor that basically requires a large vehicle. Trying to fit all of our supplies along with the various crew who need rides does not work in my hatchback (cf. 4$ gasoline). William's truck helped us load up all the furniture and props. Unfortunately it doesn't fit in my garage, so we had to transfer everything to the lobby of my building, then into the elevator, then out of the elevator and finally into my apartment that is now full.

The Tuesday shoot was interesting. We had three different sequences to shoot, one a reshoot because nine files mysteriously vaporized from Nick's hard disk recorder. We did quick reaction shots of Gina outside, the confrontation with the base guard and Jim and Ted's spat with the lawyers. The guard scene is a quick one but we spent some time playing around to bring out the winging-it vibe we wanted. Elaine and Kelly were great about going with the flow. Improvisation is never easy when the camera rolls. I think we ended up with some good material, and Nick put together an amazing lighting setup. It looked great and was a nice contrast to a lot of the material we'd shot so far.

It's late and we're shooting in the morning. Since we finished at a reasonable hour today I took a nap after watching the end of the Celtics game (how could they lose that badly?). Now my sleep schedule is messed up.

Why not one more?

Sunday we shot three different scenes. Two were fairly quick and one took most of the day, as budgeted. It was one of those mysterious scenes that seems like it should be quick on paper, but when you break it down it has enough details and changes within it to eat up a number of camera setups and that sort of thing.

Yara looked fab in her outfit put together by our costume mavens. Said costume led to one of the more unexpected events of the day, and frankly within my entire film production career. Piers noted that the earrings were making too much noise, forcing us to create an earring silencing solution in order to avoid clanging metal ruining the dialogue. Kelly helpfully did one earring and I did the other. Yes, manual labor is normally far beneath the dignity of a director, but the rest of the crew had either panicked or quit by that point, so what was I to do? (Okay, Mike did have a gun out ready to shoot the earrings, which seemed quite sensible, but Nicholas was concerned it might dull the gold)

Man of the Day?
Jimmy the Pineapple
yeeeaaahhhh


Today marked a minor milestone in the production, but I guess I'll get into that tomorrow.

They do this at parties all the time...

Saturday May 3rd
Everyone say thank you to Will, who let us use his house to film the 'sick guy' scene. We rushed in there on a friday night to take a look at the place and decide what else it needed for set dressing for the next morning. The overall look actually worked well without much help, since Will is trying to move a lot of the decluttering that is often necessary was already done. By the time I arrived in the morning, the house had been surpisingly and convincingly dirtied up for our shut-in.

Rob got some really cool makeup and Patrick and Jim got to wear some of the most rocking and miserable costumes of the shoot. They really hung in there, particularly Jim who had to spend most of the day fighting in his gear. The morning was kind of a mad rush as we had to make sure Patrick made his beerfest. (Dear Broken Lizard, Group B Films solemnly promises not to stand in the way of dudes trying to get to beerfests) Thankfully we had a great post-stunt body double who could stand in for him in some of the later sequences.

Some awesome things about Saturday...
1. Piers came up to help out. He's a moviemaker from Africa and Portland who was brutally murdered in one of our earlier productions, so it's kind of trippy to see him on the set. He really was a big help though.

2. Mike and I invented a new form of improv. The goal is to put people watching to sleep. We are very successful at it.

Playing catch up here

I'm a week behind now. Tuesday a week ago went quickly. We really only shot one sequence of the lawyers walking, along with finishing a closeup of Harold. It was an interesting night because it highlighted some of the aspects of acting that are often ignored. When most of us think of acting, we picture someone delivering lines, but that's only part of the job. The rest is waiting around. I'm only half kidding, but there are many times when you have to perform with your body, or simply just walk somewhere on camera. You think it would be easy since it's just walking, or looking at something. We do those things instinctually off camera, but on camera you're making your body do something instead of simply responding reflexively to what is happening in real life. When you try to think about what you're doing in that regard, or are trying to make yourself do something you wouldn't normally do with your body, it becomes a lot harder. For any of you who've tried acting and found it hard to deliver a line even though it was 'just speaking', it's the same thing with non-verbal acting.