John Q. Phats Entertainment

You may have noticed by now, but I posted some out takes from the re shoot on Do Nice Guys Finish Last in the Shorts sections.  The Shorts section has now sort of become the Videos section.  Whatever works.  Really, who doesn’t like out takes?  One of my favorites ever is from a short film I did a long time ago called The Wake Up.  It was about two women who wake up in bed together.  One is straight and one is gay and they are both naked.  Of course I don’t show anything, but it’s implied.  Anyway, at one point both of the characters say “I’ve got a handcuff key in my bag” at the same time.  So, Kristen says it but the other actress, Jessica missed her line and didn’t say it.  Kristen without missing a beat says
“I’ve got a handcuff key in my bag and you didn’t say it, you God damned bitch!  I know you got one!”
I still have that footage somewhere.
The Wake Up isn’t posted here.  It’s not that I don’t like it.  It’s just that it was a very early short film in my film making “career.”  It was shot on a shitty little camcorder that I got on the Internet for like $200, the lighting, and color balance in each shot changes.  My directing skills weren’t quite there yet.  This was a really tough film for me.  I was a straight male writing about gay women.  I didn’t want to be offensive at all.  I wanted to tell a funny, kind of weird story.  Plus, finding actresses was tough.  It was a tough sell.
“Hey, I need you to appear to be naked, kiss another girl and fondle her a little bit.  Then I’m going to film it on a crappy little camcorder and possibly post it on the Internet.  O yeah, and I can’t pay you.”
After I did The Wake Up though, I realized that I could pull people together for anything.  The Wake Up has a lot of negatives, but there are some positives as well.  I think the beginning sequence is fantastic, some of the acting is great (I messed up directing wise a couple of times), and I actually really did like some of the cinematography.  I also think the story is pretty decent.  If I had written some better dialogue I think it would have been great.  This was only my second short film, so I think all is forgiven.  Here is the short film if you want to check out some of my early work.  You’ll also get a look at my very crappy 1st logo:
The Wake Up
Watching it again, I’ve actually changed quite a bit.  I wasn’t so biased about hand held camera work at the time and I actually kind of like it.  Maybe it will change my mind on how I feel about handheld stuff in the future.
 I started off talking about the out takes of Do Nice Guys Finish Last and ended up on a totally different topic all together.  That’s pretty typical for me.  Check out the Shorts section if you want to see the Do Nice Guys Finish Last out takes.

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.

I entered Censored in to a film festival that makes it IMDB appropriate.  I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to actually be accepted in to the festival, I just had to submit my short film.  So, I get the E-Mail that tells me I can fill out the form to create an IMDB page.  I go to IMDB and start the process of filling this thing out.  It was the most unnecessarily complicated thing in the history of unnecessarily complicated things I’ve ever seen.  First off, every section (even the title) has it’s own guidelines page that’s roughly a page long.  Really IMDB?  Seriously?  We need an entire page explaining how to type in the title?  Are they explaining this from the point of your computer being off or what?
“OK, there should be a big power button on your computer, push it and wait for your computer to load.  Once it’s loaded, open up Internet Explorer, or Firefox, perhaps Opera, any Internet browser will do.  If you’re accessing this site on a cell phone, there may not be a big power button on the front of it.  That’s ok, just load up the browser.”
That’s what I pictured when I first saw it.  I found it hilarious, because if you were reading that, clearly your computer was already on and the browser was already open.  You see what I did there?  Jesus, I’m such a clever bastard.  Anyway, it’s actually rules and regulations behind each section.  It’s somewhat mind numbing.  By the end of it your like
“What the fuck?!  Am I disarming a nuke?!  I just wanted to type in the title!”
It makes you question everything about what you are doing.
“Did I type in the title correctly?  Does it meet all the guidelines?  It looks good.  Can I move on?  Is everything ok?  Where am I?!  What the fuck is going on?!  Who am I?!”
It makes you kind of afraid of the next section.  And when you get something wrong it like highlights it in red.  Which is just as effective as having a person stand there yelling
“You got that wrong you stupid asshole!”
So, after you fill everything out, it gets sent to a representative at IMDB to check over.  So I’ll probably get an E-Mail in 2 weeks regarding all the crap I filled out wrong. 
Currently, I’m waiting for responses from The Action On Film International Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival.

So, we shot some scenes for Nice Guys Finish Last last night.  It feels weird doing things like this.  Normally, I plan and plan and then just shoot the entire short film in one day.  It’s odd for me to break it up like this.  It’s a huge script so I guess I should have expected that.  Shooting anything is such a strange process.  You spend half an hour setting up the lights, 10 minutes testing the boom mic and getting it in the right position, another 10 making sure the camera settings are just right, 10 clearing crap from the background of the scene, and 30 – 40 going over the scene with the actors to make sure they are delivering it how you want it.  So, after about an hour and a half of tooling around with shit, you finally hit record and do 20 takes in roughly 20 minutes.  Then you’re done.  This is an actual quote from last night:
“What?!  What do you mean we’re done?!  We spent an hour and a half setting up all of that shit!”  That’s the way it goes though.  It’s a lot like setting up dominos to fall down.  Or like sex, with a high maintenance chick. 
I used to really feel bad about making everyone wait around while I made adjustments with actors.  Not so much anymore.  First off, recently I’ve been told that most people enjoy watching that process.  It’s interesting to see.  Second of all, it all doesn’t really matter.  You have to get a good scene out of it.  If you don’t get a good scene, you have to either re shoot it or live with it.  Reshooting it means going through that hour and a half long setup process again.  Living with it means putting up with the fact that you could have made something that a lot of people have put a lot of time in to much better.
I’m not really sure how to transition in to this next paragraph, so whatever.  Last night was a lot of fun.  We had a makeup artist.  Like a real makeup artist, not just some girl that’s a friend of mine that I call a makeup artist.  She had a makeup holster.  It was kind of awesome.  I even got you yell “Makeup!” once or twice.  You should have seen how pretty Caine was.  I never really thought about makeup, but it really did make a big difference.  We also had a clapper.  Which will be insanely useful for editing.  I’m using two cameras for this one, so linking up the footage is vital.  The clapper, which I think I will name “Clacky” also looks pretty damn professional.  We are moving in that direction, so it fits.   

P.S. The Censored showing at the Los Angeles United Film Festival is tonight.  Hopefully, I’ll see you guys there.