Mr. JQP himself has opened up the forum for me to ramble off on whatever comes to mind. Humbly accepted of course. Then I wondered what to write about. I realized that often when I write, I skip around from thought to thought and idea to idea until the start and end are unrecognizable to each other. Sort of like all the parts of an engine each working faster individually than as a whole. I call it a Cainestorm. Usually it happens when I have too much to say. I do the same thing when I’m telling a story. I want to fit in all the little details and side notes so i end up bouncing all over the place. Hard to keep peoples attention with that sort of format. I’m sure everyone knows someone like that. I’m that guy… Until the next
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.
Do Nice Guys Finish Last is a mockumentary. We really wanted it to have that documentary feel. Thus why there is no tripod in any of these shots. I usually hate it when short films don’t use a tripod, but in this case, I think it calls for it. These are some out takes from a scene we had to re shoot. We had so much fun on this shoot. We all have a laugh when someone messes up. There’s also just some messing around. When we have the shots we want sometimes I’ll just tell the actors to do whatever and have a good time. This is the result.
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.
Ever since I figured out that you can make two shots look like one, I’ve had sort of a hard on about the idea. This short actually consists of 4 shots total. This is just something we thought up on the spot. I like stories that don’t really have an explanation because they don’t need one. This is the shoot where God damn Chris moved the beer and made us shoot the entire thing all over again. Bastard. It actually wasn’t that bad. Everyone knew what to do at this point, so all the shots went extremely fast. We shot a little extra where Caine is screaming at Chris about moving the beer while doing an impression of Christian Bale yelling at that DP on the set of the new Terminator flick. I might post that a little bit later.