*WARNING*
If you have not watched True Blood, season 3, episode 33 don’t read this. It contains spoilers. *END WARNING*
If you haven’t seen True Blood or listened to The Heavy, you should do both immediately. If you watch Episode 33, for a short amount of time, you could do both. How often do you find two awesome performances working so well together? You can imagine my excitement when I heard a song by The Heavy playing in the background of a scene in Episode 33 of True Blood. It was in the scene where Russel kills the male prostitute. Granted it was just background music, but still. It worked with the scene and it’s exciting to see The Heavy getting some much needed exposure in the US. I love it when that happens. When two of your favorite things at the time mix.
I’m not going to go too much in to detail about True Blood. I could write 4 pages on it easy. All I’ll say is that it’s a damn entertaining show. Plus I think I’m in love with Deborah Ann Woll. Allow me to explain this. I used to be in love with Milla Jovovich. I thought she was an awesome actress and she’s gorgeous. But, then I saw .45. Milla Jovovich is naked for probably about 30% of that movie. Well, that sort of killed it for me. The mystery was gone. I had seen it all. What else was there to wonder about? It wasn’t her fault, we just grew apart. For the longest time, I’ve been searching for a replacement for Milla Jovovich. Selma Blaire sort of pinch hit for about 3 months there. I’m sort of picky about which actress gets my love. It has to be a combination of amazing acting skill and sort of flying under the radar. I can’t love an actress that’s in the center of the hollywood stage, what the hells the point of admiring someone if they are surrounded by admiration twenty four hours a day anyway? That would be like donating a nickle to Bill Gates. I’m sure he would put up a front of appreciation, but really, he would be thinking you could go fuck yourself for wasting his time. And who could blame him? Deborah Ann Woll fits my strict standards. She’s amazing on True Blood and if you said “Deborah Ann Woll” at a party you would probably get a “Who the fuck is Deborah Ann Woll?” look from at least 8 out of 10 people. Then you would say “Jessica….. From True Blood.” And everyone would say “Ooooooooo.” So, Deborah Ann Woll gets my love. However, I’m not sure how long our love can last. Her popularity will skyrocket and then she’ll Bill Gates the fuck out of me if I see her in person and tell her I thought she was great on True Blood. Such a cruel world. Lets just try to enjoy our time together while it’s still here.
Switching gears here, I saw The Expendables. It’s pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. There’s some crazy ass fight scenes, shit explodes, hundreds of bad guys get shot, and there are tons of cheesy one liners. It’s pretty awesome. It’s the only movie that has the most terrible story line but is somehow still an amazing movie. Which doesn’t really make sense to me. How the hell do you go right by going left? Whatever, it works. Entertaining flick.
Caine Crockett will now be posting here. I’ve pretty much given him the freedom to talk about whatever he wants to. You may have seen him in some of the shorts on the website (Censored, Not Walter, Bad Girlfriend, etc…). He’s mostly an actor. So, it should be interesting to get experiences from an actors perspective on shoots.
Sometimes, as a little treat to myself, I enjoy wallowing in the pits of human existence. Where would I go to do that? YouTube of course. YouTube in this case is sort of like the dealer and sometimes, I need a fix badly. So, I start my search for street fights in the basement of human civilization. Once you wade through the crap where middle schoolers are just trying to get views by staging an obvious fake fight, you get to the good stuff.
“Hmmmm, Skater vs Rollerblader? OK. Punk vs Gangster? Yes please. Two Drunk Girls Fighting?! Hello subscribe button!”
I’m not really looking to see someone get hurt. Well, maybe a little, but really what I’m looking for is awkward situations that I can laugh at. During one of my kicks I came across this gem:
I’m not sure if this is staged or not, I pray that it’s not, because I would really like to believe that life really is this awesome. I don’t know what’s funnier, the fact that a fight breaks out right in the middle of a wedding or the fact that all of the other wedding guests just stand around watching as the bride gets what appears to be sexually assaulted. Of course, I can’t blame them. The only thing I would probably be able to do was lean to the person closest to me and say “Holy shit! This is awesome!” I love how the groom just kind of stands there with a not so bright look on his face as this biker chick just grabs his bride and pulls her off stage to kick the crap out of her. Then there’s the photographer snapping pictures in the background. Because that’s something you would want to remember on your wedding day.
“Hey honey, you remember when that butch chick dragged me off stage and beat the shit out of me in the middle of the ceremony?”
“No, I don’t remember that. Was that our wedding?”
“Yeah, hold on, let me pull out the wedding book, I’ll show you. Better yet, go get your lap top, fire up YouTube.”
Absolutely amazing.
I said there would be some new footage by now. As you can see there isn’t any. I lie a lot. I did write something though that I’m pretty pleased with.
I just got done watching the finale of Dexter. Ho-ly shit. Words cannot describe how good it was. I’m going to bring this up, because I love Jennifer Carpenter, but that scene with her and Michael C. Hall where they are talking was one of many absolutely amazing scenes. I know I seem to kiss her ass a lot on this blog, but she is fucking phenomenal. I read a tweet by SHO_Dexter that they should just give John Lithgow the Emmy right now. They really should. Everyone who’s seen that show would probably be absolutely fine with that. OK, I’m going to stop. I hate the fact that I have to wait so long for a new season. That ending was an absolute shock. OK, I’m stopping. While I could write a whole page just on Jennifer Carpenter, I think this is enough.
It’s tough for me to concentrate after that show but I’ll do my best. My new script still needs to be revised, but I like it so far. I’m going to try and commit some time to it every day. I hold on to projects for way too long. Or I lose interest or something and start working on something else. See, I’m OCD and ADD at the same time. I’m OCD about film making and stuff and I’m obsessed with it. But my ADD makes it so I constantly get really excited about the next idea. Only I’m not done with the first idea, so it doesn’t really work. I need to focus on one project from now on. Or maybe I just need to write constantly to keep up with myself. I suppose that couldn’t be a bad thing.
In other news, Do Nice Guys Finish Last got a fully operational IMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1561452/
They listed me as a stunt coordinator. OK, whatever, sure, I’m a stunt coordinator. It’s also listed as being in Post production. Nope, it’s done. Chris is on there and so is Caine. If you go to my IMDB page, I now have two films listed there. I’ve hit the big time now people. It’s all smooth sailing from here. In all seriousness, it’s kind of cool, but that’s about it. It does sort of add to my legitimacy though. I’ve had conversations like this before:
“So, you do short films?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of short films?”
“Mostly comedies.”
“really?”
“Yeah, I’m on IMDB and everything.”
“O my God! Really?!”
I don’t know why, but that’s sort of how it is. Almost like they thought I lied to them or something. I’m not a liar, it’s bullshit. Note: See title of blog.
Still plugging away at the festivals. I’ve sent it out to five so far. The last one was sent to Australia. I thought that was kind of exciting. I sent it to something called The Sexy International Film Festival. A festival that focuses around sex and relationships. I swear to God, they have a festival for every thing. I’ve seen festivals focused around dogs, cats, homosexuality, ethnicity, religion, the environment, racism, sexism, and many other isms. At least a sex theme festival is something that’s generally loved by the public. Who doesn’t like sex of some sort? Since DNGFL had to make a long trek to Australia, that required a visit to the local US Post Office. Could there be a worse run organization without it just completely collapsing on itself? There was this lady there who said they were holding a package for her. Apparently they keep all of the packages in a giant disorganized pile in the back room. Brilliant idea during the holidays by the way. So, the attendant had to go to the back like 4 times to look through everything. Each time she came back she told the lady “It’s not back there.” After the fourth time, she found it and gave it to her, so the line could move forward. I laughed out loud when I saw this. Here’s the scary part about this though. These are all government employees. Essentially these are the same brand of people that RUN OUR COUNTRY. You know how when you walk up to a postal worker behind that little window and they look like they should have committed suicide like a week ago? Just how miserable they are and how much they don’t give shit if you get what you want or not? It’s kind of funny if you really think about it. Despite all of that DNGFL is on it’s way to Australia. The reason I bring this up is that while in the post office I started thinking of a comedy revolving around the Post Office, but it quickly turned in to a drama involving suicide and drug abuse. I bet I could turn that in to a comedy. Overdosing can be funny if you shoot it right. The movie Dear God has kind of an up beat theme to it, but after my experience yesterday I can assure you that it was %100 fiction. It’s about a con man turned postal worker that decides to try and scam people that have written letters to God. He inadvertently ends up helping them and when the other postal employees catch wind of this, they decide they want to help people too. Hilarity ensues from this point on. It’s kind of indication that the post office sucks based on the fact that they need the power of almighty God, just to turn it in to a feel good environment.
All of that aside, this Saturday me, Caine, and possibly Chris are going to get together this weekend to shoot something. So, I might just have some new short films up. Nothing super fancy, but they might be funny. Caine is funny, that’s pretty much all I have working for me right now. Neither of us has written a script or thought anything out at all really. All we know is that we’re going to have a camera, it’s going to be day time, and we are going to shoot something. I’m stealing an idea from Six Finger Fist here, but what ever. If anyone wants to give us a title for this new short film, leave it in the comments, and we’ll base our short film off of that title. Why not, right?
I watched 2 episodes of Science of the Movies last night. That show is a big reminder of what I don’t have access to. One episode was all about different moveable camera mounts. There was this gigantic camera mount that had 12 points of axis that you could program to do motions over and over again. It’s basically so you can layer two shots on top of each other. Since the motion of two shots match perfectly, the two shots together look seamless. I honestly had no clue that’s how it was done. All of my split screen shorts were pretty much that, minus the motion. I didn’t realize it, but I kind of stumbled on the early meathod of special effects. That’s kind of cool. I find that I do that a lot actually. It’s kind of weird. I don’t know if I hear about it somewhere else and subconsciously make myself feel like I thought of it, or if I really do come up with concepts that just happen to match what’s already out there.
I am meeting with a script writer today to discuss Project X. By spreading the word through my contacts, I’ve actually got some people interested. Now all I need is a roughly $5000, an HD Camera, locations, equipment, skill, and food. Huh. Anyway, yeah, I’m going to be focusing on that. It’s tough to juggle everything though. Nice Guys Finish Last is almost done. That’s going to need to go out to festivals and Censored is still going. By the way, I submitted to something a while back called the SoCal Film Festival. I really hope I get accepted to that. That would be awesome. Mainly because they would be holding it right near my house. I could probably go to every night of that if I wanted to. It’s literally a 10 minute drive vs an hour+ drive to the festivals Censored has been accepted to. I would really like Censored to screen somewhere outside of California. Don’t ask me why, I just think it would be cool. Every time you get accepted to a festival they send you these little acceptance things:
Like that guy right there. I suppose can put those on the DVD’s that I send out to other festivals as sort of a selling point. Imagine if I get selected for all 4 of the other festivals I entered? That will be 7 total. That will look kind of insane. You also get one if you’ve been nominated for or win an award at a festival. Strictly Background had like a bajillion acceptance ones and 6 Best Documentary Award winners. These things are actually called Laurels. Every festival does them. At least as far as I can tell, every festival does one. I think they are kind of official and regal looking. It’s kind of neat to have these. Sort of like a digital trophy. Hopefully when Nice Guys Finish Last is done it gets it’s own collection of them.
EDIT(7/29/2009- 3:32PM) – I just got an acceptance E-mail from the SoCal Film Festival. That kicks so much ass. I’ll give you guys all the details in tomorrows post.
So, the Pick up shots are done. It was actually pretty painless. We had a very small crew and we knew what we were doing. I went with a little bit of a different workflow this time. Rather then just having the actors memorize the script and then shooting, I went through the dialogue with them a bunch and made the adjustments I wanted before I pressed record. So, they memorized the dialogue and knew how to act it out. It worked out very well. I also really tried to avoid saying things like “I need you to be angrier.” I’m usually pretty good about that, but sometimes I slip up. Instead, I tried to direct through situations that the character would be put in. For example with Caine, I needed him to be more upset so I said
“OK Caine, so this sort of thing always happens to you. Chris always gets the girl and you don’t understand it. He has the girl of your dreams practically throwing herself at him and he’s complaining to you that she’s not the right one. You haven’t been laid in God knows how long.”
Instead of just saying
“I need you to be more angry.”
It worked out really well. Not only was it more of a collaboration between me and the actors, but we both got what we wanted out of it. We actually had a lot of fun doing this. I’m thinking about posting one of the out takes where everyone was just kind of goofing around. What do you guys think? Would that be something you want to see? The only comment I’ll get, is probably an ad for Viagra, but that’s ok, I’ll take that as a cue to post it.
Today is the day for the pick up shots. I’m hoping for a small crew of just me and a boom mic operator. Why? Because, nobody likes pick up shots, I’m doing everyone a favor by keeping it minimal. Plus I think it will make things go faster. It’s not that difficult of a scene really. I’ll head over there after work, go over the new dialogue with the actors, set up the lights, and then shoot. Shouldn’t be too difficult. I think I’ve gone over how much I hate pick up shots, so that’s established. I still don’t think words could ever describe my true hatred for pick up shots.
Gabe got me the 2nd cut of Do Nice Guys Finish Last today. I’m looking forward to checking it out. Watching a short film over and over again has always been kind of tough for me. In the book I’m reading (How Not to Make a Short Film), it’s outlined perfectly. When you first look at all of your footage there are times you want to shoot yourself and times you want to celebrate. Not per project, no, this all happens in one project. I was actually very comforted to read that this is all normal. The truth is, that nobody is closer to your project then you are. If you see a flaw, it’s going to scream out at you every time you watch it. That’s the first thing you’re going to see in fact when that flaw comes on screen. Here’s what I do. Upon first seeing all those flaws jump out at me, I let my brain freak out for thirty seconds. This is usually just my brain saying “God damn it” over and over again. Then I take a deep breath and try to think about ways to fix them. If I can’t find a way to fix one, I show the scene to an impartial third party. Sometimes I’ll even ask “Did you see anything wrong with that scene?” If the impartial third party notices the flaw, then I have a potential problem and I possibly have to re shoot something or figure something out. %95 percent of the time though, they don’t even notice it. Sometimes I will run it by 4-5 people and %95 of the time, they all don’t notice it. If they don’t see it, I’m making way too big a deal out of it and it’s passable. Some times I’ll even add “Did you see that X was wrong with it?” Most of the time, the answer is “I didn’t even notice that.” That flaw will always jump out at me when watching the short film but at that point, I can live with it. I never talk about the flaw again. It’s over, it’s there, I’ve dealt with it, and %99 of the population probably isn’t ever going to notice it or care if they do.
Has anyone ever seen Science of the Movies? It’s on the Science Channel every Thursday night. It’s an amazing show. I’ve started DVRing it. The host of the show is named Nar Williams. I want that guys job so badly. All he does is goes to these different companies that offer different technologies in film making and asks them questions about how the technology works and then sees them in action and most of the time he gets to participate. All of that aside for an aspiring film maker it’s an amazing look at new technologies in the industry.
Last night I went through the first cut of Nice Guys Finish Last and made notes on it for Gabe. I was up pretty late last night. I slept right through my alarm this morning, which is pretty amazing. Considering my alarm plays ultra loud metal off of a CD. I have to say, I was pretty harsh on the edit. There’s some stuff that I liked and some that I didn’t. It is what it is. If Gabe disagrees with me on something, we’ll talk about it and figure it out.
It’s been awhile since I’ve uploaded something new hasn’t it? I would really like to try and put something together soon. I have a quote book of random quotes from friends of mine. Sometimes I’ll flip through it for inspiration. For some reason, it always makes me think of quick shorts. Maybe I’ll do that tonight. Actually, the quote book inspired both The Train Wreck and Bad Girlfriend. Caine’s whole speech in Bad Girlfriend about Chris’s girlfriend was something that a friend of mine actually said to someone. I’m not joking. It’s always a lot of fun doing those. It’s just a small crew that usually films something in one night. Often times, what we filmed gets edited that same night. We usually start around 8PM and finish editing around 5AM. It’s always a good time. I should do something like that while Gabe is making the edits on Nice Guys Finish Last. Why not, right?
Last night I went to see Brüno. I thought Borat was hilarious, so I expected the same from Brüno. Brüno is one of those movies that sometimes makes you laugh just because you can’t believe what you’re looking at or because you feel so awkward. I wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen got punched in the face at some point during the filming of this? He really pushes the envelope with this one. Of course that was expected. Going in to this movie, I knew I was going to see at least one thing that I couldn’t believe he did. It’s sort of cheap trick shock humor, but whatever, it made me laugh, so it works. I’m kind of curious what Sacha Baron Cohen would come up with in terms of writing a script. He can be very funny in the moment, but most of his comedy works because it’s done with real people who have no idea what’s going on. I think he’s very funny, so I wonder what kind of a script he would come up with. As far as Brüno goes, I thought it was funny. Maybe I’m crazy, but I kind of picked up on a political undertone in the movie. A person who saw it with me said the same exact thing. Not all the shock comes from Sacha Baron Cohen. We all probably knew that there were people out there who were anti gay to a point of absurdness, but actually seeing something like that play out right before your eyes is almost just as shocking as the Brüno character himself.
This week, I’m going through the always painful process of selling my personal belongings to fund my next short film. One day, I’m probably going to run out of stuff to sell, but for now, this works. I’m also going to be watching Gabe’s first cut of Nice Guys Finish Last about a million times. I’ll try to be ultra critical and in the process will start to doubt the original script, but don’t worry, in the end, it will all work out.
On a side note, did anyone see UFC 100? That falling punch from Dan Handerson on Michael Bisping had to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
