Well, mercifully, this post shouldn't be as long as the last couple. Sorry 'bout that. Suffice it to say, there's a lot that goes into these goofy little films we make. What I posted yesterday? That was about a fraction of the hijinx that happened on the set of good ol' FutureSand.
SUNDAY
When we last left our heroes...
I got up bright and early after a couple hours of sleep. (Total sleep for the weekend? 5 HOURS) I headed back to Jason's work to be with the core group, which includes Dirty, Brian, Jason and me. We needed to get the edit tip-top and have it all ready for Jason who was in charge of putting all the sound effects and what-not together.
The other cool thing? Michael Heagle, who did our visual effects stuff, was going to bring us the green screen stuff and also do some cool stuff with the 2 pound sandwich (forgot about that, didn't ya?). Also, my favorite thing...he was going to add some little muzzle flashes to the guns our heroes use. Dang. If I could figure out how to do that, I'd be making movies every weekend.
But, alas. I'm only useful for stories and for getting actors to do cool stuff on film.
So, by now we're all beat, slow-moving and Jason looks like he's fallen off a truck. He hasn't showered, slept much, and we're really starting to feel the crunch. He played some of the music Sherbetty (the band) recorded for us and I'm FLOORED.
I'll admit to not being too blown away when I left the night before. Again, I was cranky and I sort of thought the music was a little too sci-fi. But, I'll eat my words. These dudes made High School Drifter sing and they delivered the goods for FutureSand. The boys recorded a THEME SONG for the movie, complete with lyrics. We heard it and all of were instantly like:
"Man, I want this for my ring-tone."
"I need this on my iPod!"
I couldn't wait to see where it fit in. I already knew that we needed a piece of it for our opening sequence, which (if I may say so) worked PERFECTLY. The end credits begged to fit all the corny lyrics in as the insanely cool 'sandy' effects rolled by.
Dirty whipped up a quality edit and I was able to sit in with a list of things I hoped to tweak before we turned it in at 7:30pm. The clock was ticking. At 7:30, we all turned into pumpkins, our film isn't eligible to compete and it's sort of a bummer. Alas, it's never happened to us, but many a team has fallen in the last hour or two. Computers crash, footage is lost, you name it.
I found a couple continuity errors and some things that didn't work. Dirty did an insane job with the fight scene and we were pretty dang close to 'picture lock.' That means, we're not going to mess with it anymore and we give it to Jason, who will do his sound stuff to it. Add music, sound effects, clean up stuff like (ahem) the director yelling: "Oh, that's BAD-ASS!" over a take. You know. He was stressed, as some of his time was eaten away. The rest of us got to sit and wait.
Now you may be wondering: Thomas, what the heck are you doing there? Your part is over, right? You directed it and wrote the dumb thing. Now it's up to post-production to deliver the goods.
Nah. I like to be there for as much of it as I can. I need to still sort of direct, even if I'm not directly in charge of the different aspects of post-production. I gotta be the 2nd set of eyes and ears on something. We're all sort of part of this big ol' mess and it's up to all of us to make sure the thing makes sense, and most importantly, comes in at 7 minutes or less. Anything over that, and we're disqualified.
Well, to cut to the chase, Jason had us come in and watch the film with the music, sound effects and everything else added. To say I nearly watered the front of my pants is an understatement. I was laughing so hard I thought I was going to be hoarse. Now, I must warn you, I find it incredibly funny to see something as dumb as the script I wrote go through all these hoops and end up being a servicable movie. I'm laughing more at how well it all came together and how great some of the shots turned out. Plus, the fight scene? I just love that crap. It's campy, over-the-top and our actors were BRILLIANT. Also, hats off to Michael Anderson for putting together a rockin' fight with little time to prepare.
So...I know I'm setting myself up for people to go 'Eh...' but I was REALLY pleased with how it turned out. I think we all sort of thought we'd outdone ourselves from last year's High School Drifter. And remember kids, HSD won the audience favorite for our night. Essentially landing us in the top 13 of almost 90 films. Not bad for a group that doesn't do this ALL the time.
With my work done and a family who missed having me around, I left around 6:00pm. entrusting the delivery of the movie to Jason, Brian and Dirty. We high-fived, (not really) and talked about doing something again soon and I was off.
Cut to 7:32pm...
I get a phone call from Jason. He says we might be screwed. Apparently as they were burning the DVD, the picture got all screwy. We shot it in letterbox (because that's awesome) and it made our picture look squished and unwatchable. He said they were at the drop off point and made it there with 2 minutes to spare(!!!). On the way, Dirty had to burn a new DVD with some different settings and were playing it on the laptop while they were in line to turn it in.
I was literally ready to weep openly like a little baby. Jason gave me the play-by-play.
"Okay, it's loading up...okay, it's...it's..."
I closed my eyes tight like this was a bad dream.
"It's all good. It's working."
With that, they turned it in and we were set. We made the deadline and FutureSand was in the competition!!!
TUESDAY NIGHT 7:00pm
FutureSand was set to screen on the first night of the festival @ 7:00pm along with 12 other films. We all met up at the theater and I can't say I wasn't just a little nervous. Heck, my parents were actually coming out to see this thing. I looked at the voting sheet and was pleased to see we were the last film of the group. Not a bad place to be. You definitely don't want to be first, and last sort of lingers with people longer.
The movies began after a lot of er, crap, at the beginning. The guy who runs it sort of doesn't know when to just get on with it. He explained how all the movies had to have the same prop (sandwich), character (Kathleen or Kevin Schnaebel: Expert) and the same line of dialogue ("I hope they decide soon.") I looked around and was pretty well blown away by how many people were there. Probably 250, maybe 300 peeps.
There were some decent ones at the start, along with some that were, um, not so good. I know our early stuff wasn't spectacular and it's just great to see people getting out there and getting behind the camera. Still, I can't help but wonder what stories they would tell about what happened. I saw one film that had almost 8 people as the writer of the script. I'm not sure how that works. I think that's 7 people too many. I've never been good at writing with someone sitting in the shotgun seat, so hats off to people who can do it.
Anyway, we were all feeling pretty good about our chances when the movie right before ours, called 'Fragile' played. It was a Ghost Story and it had two little kids as the stars. And you know what? The kids were REALLY good. The story was dark and really pretty sad. It was about a little girl who finds a gun and she and her brother are grab-assing with it and the guns goes off. It's tricky because you think someone got killed, but both kids are still there.
SPOILER ALERT: The little girl got killed and we see her ghost.
Needless to say, we weren't thrilled having to follow that movie. Our is/was a buddy movie and sort of funny and a little over-the-top. It played and got a pretty favorable reaction, but there were parts (especially toward the end) where people didn't laugh. I don't want to blame the movie before ours, but it's pretty hard to laugh when you just watched a little girl eat a bullet.
We all voted, put in our ballots and hoped for the best.
Afterwards, in front of the theater and stood in the rain and talked about how the screening went. My parents got to meet most of the actors and they took some pictures (which I'm too lazy to post tonight). A big ol' group of us went to a bar called 'Busters' and tipped a few back. It was great. Everyone told us how much fun they had working on it, especially the actors. They all said they'd love to work on something with us again in the near future.
I gotta say, that's a huge deal to me. Maybe it's just me, but I want to make sure everyone is having fun when we're working on this kind of stuff. Seriously. No one is getting paid, the day is long, and we put them through some crazy antics. Heck, Kathy had to lay on the floor for like 3 hours. Still, she was a trooper, as were the rest of the gang and they all told me what a great experience it was. Not to say High School Drifter wasn't fun, but this group really gelled. Everyone got along and there were no attitudes or anything to deal with. The whole thing rocked. I decided then and there that I didn't care if we won or lost. The important thing was this: We made a pretty cool little film and that's all that mattered.
We'd find out our fate the next day.
Sadly...we were beaten by 'Fragile' for Audience Favorite by 19 votes. So, they're going on to the 'Best of' show and we have to wait until tomorrow to see if the judges (who pick seperately) liked ours enough to have us in the running.
Soo...it's not over until the morbidly obese female busts out a showtune.
(TO BE CONCLUDED...TOMORROW)
The conclusion??? I'll have FutureSand available for you to see both here at Tappity Tappity and on my dumb ol' Facebook page on Tuesday, one week after it screened at the Riverview Theater.
Thanks for reading and cross your fingers for us!!!
Greetings! (echo, echo...)
Well, it's hard to believe it's already been a year since High School Drifter was shot and shown at the Riverview Theater, but it's true! I've been busy this last month getting ready for this year's showdown and last night with about 4 minutes to spare, we got our newest film completed and turned in to compete with the 90+ other teams in Minneapolis/St. Paul.
This year, we ended up pulling Buddy Film out of the hat. I wasn't entirely pleased. We were hoping for horror, sci-fi, comedy...something other than a sort of pigeon-holed genre like Buddy Film.
Ugh.
When I think of Buddy Films, the movie Lethal Weapon immediately pops into my head. The idea that two guys hate each other in the beginning of the flick and end up pals by the end. Jason (my producer) and I figured out the buddy angle, but I sort of wanted to flip the idea on its end. So, when I post the film up here (hopefully later this week) you'll see what I did with it.
In the interest of keeping this somewhat brief, I'll give you some details about what was required to appear in our film and in every other Minneapolis/St. Paul 48 Hour Film.
Character: Kevin or Kathleen Schnabel - Expert
Prop: A sandwich.
Line of dialogue: "I hope they decide soon."
The title of our film is FutureSand. It's got kind of a sci-fi ring to it, but we wanted to utilize some of the resources we had access to. A fellow by the name of Michael Heagle was good enough to help us with costumes and some visual effects that brought our movie to a whole new level.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself...
Friday night was the night we pulled our genre out of the hat. On the 30 minute ride back to the Music Box Theater (which was our location for the shoot) Jason and I concocted an idea of what we could do with the 'buddy' thing. We tossed ideas back and forth and literally, by the time we turned the corner to our destination, it was pretty well planned out.
The hard part? Standing in front of crew and most of our cast and letting them know what our plan of attack was. Let me get this out: As a writer/director I'm really open to ideas, but it's really difficult to present an idea that is about 10 minutes old to a group. It's not their fault, but it's almost like being a stand-up comedian and getting on stage for the first time. You feel like you're bombing. Maybe it's the way I pitched it, I don't know. But both years, I've gone up there and explained what I wanted to do and I swear you could hear crickets and see a tumbleweed blow by. You sort of get this feeling that the actors are thinking: Great. What have I signed on to?
Then, I say: "Any questions or comments on that?"
It never fails, but the floor is opened up and the ideas from our cast n' crew start coming. Which is good. But I think the hard thing is, immediately after this meeting, I'm going to sit in front of my laptop and pound out a 7 page script within a couple hours. That's all the time I've got.
People throw out ideas (some good, some bad) and I listen to every one. Though it may not seem like it, I internalize that stuff and sort of sift it around in my headspace. One actor thought our 'buddies' didn't seem likable enough the way I described them, another was concerned that the women in the film would seem weak or whatever, someone else thought the sandwich could actually be a sand witch.
Like I said, I listened to them all but I know that we only have 48 hours and I've only got 2 hours to basically write out the blueprint of what we'll be doing. All the equipment and all the gear and everything is sort of hinging on the words I put on a page. It's one part unnerving and one part exhilarating.
Long story short? I was down in the basement of this theater, sitting in a dressing room by myself pounding out the words like it was the last thing I'd ever write. I kept watch of the page count.
FUN FACT: Did you know 1 page of a script = 1 minute of a movie?
When I got to page 3, I got worried. How was I going to get things moving to plan? I had characters to kill off, backstories to fill in, etc, etc... Friends, 7 minutes is not a lot of time to tell a story, especially formatted like a script. 7 pages of straight up prose? No problem. 7 pages of script? Challenging.
I ended up hammering out the script and I wasn't in love with it. I hadn't seen any of our actors (besides Riki Robinson, who played Perk in High School Drifter) act before. I didn't know what they'd bring to the role.
We had an ex-wrestler, 2 renaissance festival actors, and 2 theater/stage actresses, one of which used to date my brother back in the day. I thought FutureSand was going to be my Waterworld. As in...BOMB. Who knows, it still might be...
The script was done and it was time for unnerving part number 2. Having Jason (my friend and producer) read it. Last year, he read HSD with me right there. This time, I left the room and got a delicious soft drink. It's hard for any writer (I don't care who you are) to sit and watch someone read your work without having a chance to fine-tune it or anything. Again, time is money. The clock is always ticking...
As it turns out, Jason though the script was 'good.' Last year, it was 'alright.' Improvement? Maybe!
Another crazy thing about this year? We had an old photographer friend of mine come and shoot pictures of us during various stages of the project. Just about anywhere I went, Greg was cracking off shots. Thankfully, he took pictures of the other folks, too. But dang. The dude's camera was like a machine gun. It took some getting used to, no doubt.
We sent everyone else home, made copies of the script and planned out a rough shooting schedule (breaking down the script set-up by set-up). It was around 2am when I was on my way home to grab a few hours of sleep.
The problem? I got home at 2:30-ish and couldn't sleep. Call it nervous energy, anxiety or a sense of oh-my-god-what-have-I-got-myself-into but I didn't end up falling asleep until close to 4:00am. I needed to be up by 5:30am. I beat my alarm and was up at 5:20.
Apparently, I was ready to go.
(TO BE CONTINUED!)
So, it's Tuesday night here in ol' Woodbury, Minnesota and I'm about as excited as a fella can get. I'm completely rested up from our mad-dash weekend of filmmaking and I'm so pumped about how things turned out, I just can't stand it.
My new film (written and directed by yours truly) is called High School Drifter and it turned out 800x better than I ever expected. Seriously. We raised the bar on this one and I feel like I'm ready to do another one next month if I have to.
We had all the right gear and everything. I have a bad haircut.So...if you've been following the rules and stuff about the 48 Hour Film Project, you'll know this about the movies:
1. We didn't know the genre until Friday night.
2. It had to contain 3 elements that will be present in all of the other entries as well.
3. We had exactly 48 hours to get it done.
Here's what we knew beforehand and what we had lined up to work with:
1. A location: In this case, a high school in St. Paul.
2. 13 actors. Seriously. I think we overdid it on the talent front. 13 actors in a 7 minute film? Crazy.
3. I wanted there to be ninjas in my movie.
4. One of our actors REALLY wanted to do action-y stuff. Plus, he can crack a bullwhip.
5. Somehow, I wanted to have a custodian in the movie who could kick some butt.
Sounds like recipe for an absolutely terrible movie, doesn't it?
Big J, Lo-Ol, and I went to the kick-off event which, ironically enough, was in the same building I used to work at before taking my new job. On our way there, we stopped at Ragstock, which is a 2nd hand clothing store. It's where all the cool alternative kids buy their clothes. We wanted to find a jumpsuit for our custodian. We spotted one and not really knowing what size he wore, held it up to me. It looked like it might be a bit long, but we bought it anyway. $5.
A new breed of action hero. Riki is Mr. Perkinson. Call him 'Perk.'At the event, we learned that there were 89 other teams competing. Imagine that. 89 other crews were out burning the midnight oil and slaving over their little films the same time we were. How friggin' cool is that? At one point, Big J (my producer) looked around and said to me:
"I don't like filmmakers."
I can't help but agree to a certain point. A lot of filmmakers in Minnesota act like they've gotta have a gimmick or something to make them stand out. We saw all sorts of goofballs in really dumb sunglasses, 'arty' t-shirts and piercings that just looked awful.
All I cared about was picking a good genre. We got stuck with 'Romance' a couple years ago and I just didn't want that one again. Yuck.
Well, after what seemed like forever, I got in line to pick my genre out of a hat. I pulled out the piece of paper and unfolded it.
Musical/WesternI was heartbroken. The category is forgiving in that you can pick one or the other, but still. A western in a highschool? What were we going to do? I trudged back to our seat and showed J and Lo-Ol what I picked. Their faces sank.
"We're screwed," I said, envious of the people who picked Comedy or Action/Adventure.
We then waited for the 3 elements that all 90 films must contain. They were:
Character: Mr. or Mrs. Perkinson, a subsitute teacher. (we got lucky with that one!)
Prop: A fish. (great.)
Line of Dialogue: "You look very familiar."
Mr. Saucy yells at Jenny who just wants to be a princess.With that info, we took off for our meeting at our location, the school.
There, almost all of our actors were waiting in earnest to hear what genre we picked and to hear what kind of movie we were going to make. It was a little intimidating. I'm not a shy guy, but standing in front of about 20 people (cast and crew) and telling them what my plan was made me kind of nervous. Plus, the A/C was off.
"So, hi everyone," I said. "I'm Thomas and I'm going to be directing this mess."
(a couple cheap laughs)
I introduced everyone in my crew and we went around and had the actors introduce themselves, too. After that, it was all eyes on me.
"So, we picked musical/western," I began. "And I'm pretty sure musical is out the door. I don't think it's possible to write and score a bunch of goofy songs and make it good. Plus, I'm not sure how many of you want to sing."
I looked around at the expectant faces and I felt like a general about to lead his troops into a deadly and brutal skirmish. I took a deep breath and said:
"So, I think we should do a movie about a janitor who fights an elite ninja death squad and he can do all kinds of cool moves and say funny things."
The looks on the actor's faces were priceless. I was almost positive that a few people would leave and even more would refuse to show up the next day for filming. Their jaws dropped. Someone cleared their throat. One girl raised her eyebrows like it was going out of style.
A member of the elite ninja death squad rides a small bike."How is that a western?"
I explained to them that they didn't expect us to build a wild west set and bring in some horses. We would include elements of a western into the mix. There would be a showdown. The main character would say western-y things. Also, there might be a cowboy hat in there.
Anyway, we waded through other suggestions and ideas and some of them were downright impossible. I told them that I had a plan and that as ridiculous as it sounded, I wouldn't just make a big pile of crap for a film. I sort of had a vision.
I think.
After we came up with some very vague character ideas and stuff, we told them what to bring to wear. We assigned our big actress a the part of Ninja Death Squad leader and our action-guy was to be our hero, the custodian named Mr. Perkinson. We sent them home and Big J turned to me.
"Write, Troupe," he said. "You have like 2 hours."
I sat down and was looking over all my elements. Fish, students, ninjas, school... Good lord, what was I doing???
After 2 and a half hours, I had a script. I printed it off and handed it to my crew and they sat down and read it. It was quiet. Too quiet. No one was laughing at first. All of a sudden, a woman who was married to our camera guy and our go-to person for the location laughed. I was sure everyone else thought it sucked.
The ever patient 'students' prepare for music class.Big J looked up after he finished it.
"It's too long."
He did this to me before, when I wrote the script for our film from a couple years ago. He didn't say he liked it or hated it, simply that it was too long.
I told him he backed me into a corner, having 13 actors/actresses to work with. I said that if we planned it out right we'd be able to do it. For some reason I was completely confident about the whole thing.
At about 1am, I e-mailed the script to our actors and we prepared for what would be a long weekend.
Saturday was an early morning. We had about 4 hours of sleep and had to do some grocery shopping before getting to the set. We bought all kinds of crap to feed our talent and keep 'em happy. We had our main star try on his jumpsuit and...
It fit like a glove!We got cracking with filming and literally went from 8am until almost 9pm. All of this for a 7 minute film. I won't bore you with the details, but here are some exciting things that happened during the shoot:
- A girl who played a student was locked into one of the lockers. She was claustrophobic and I had to calm her down so I could direct in how to get herself out.
- I invented a way to launch fake fish guts against a wall.
- Only one actress proved difficult to work with.
- Our grip got his car stereo stolen from his van during the shoot.
- A toilet mysteriously started flushing and wouldn't stop for 15 minutes.
- We had the guy who did the voice of the HOM Furniture commercials play the principal.
- I wanted breakfast sausages to fall out of a character's mortal wound during a pivotal scene. It worked.
- There were tornado sirens going off as we packed up at the end of the shoot.
Playing an insane science teacher is hard work. Just ask Clint.
All things considered, our shoot went amazingly well. We did our best not to waste anyone's time and no one got too angry with each other. There was no yelling really at all. That's a rare thing for people who are tired, cranky and stuck in the same place with each other for a long time.
But...that was only half of it.
At 11pm or so, we arrived at Big J's work to edit the thing down. We had 3 guys sitting around me so I could tell 'em what to cut and where. It was surreal. For so many of the projects I've worked on, I had to wear so many hats. Writer/director/camera guy/special effects/craft services... To be sort of the guy everyone was asking was pretty cool. Not that I like to be bossy or anything, but it's like they knew it was my movie and my vision and wanted to make sure I was down with what they were doing.
We worked around the clock. A couple of us had to sleep for a bit. I stole a 2 hour nap. I literally walked into one of the offices in the building, sat in a chair, put my Nintendo hat over my eyes and didn't wake up until my arm fell asleep....2 hours later.
A couple dudes working with us didn't sleep at all.
Oh...the really cool thing? A local band called
Sherbetty came in to see some of the footage and they sat in another room and recorded a soundtrack to the movie. How sweet is that? They asked what we were looking for and I described our main character and the western feel the whole thing should have. After about 4 hours, they laid down a bunch of tracks and took the movie to a whole different level.
Anyway...we had an edit put together sometime around 3am and we all wanted to cry. The movie clocked in at around 11 minutes. It could only be 7 minutes in length. 8 minutes with the credits. I was ready to jump out the window.
One of our editors didn't even flinch. He sat back and clipped off little chunks that were unneccesary. We were convinced that he was only chipping away seconds that wouldn't amount to much. After a couple hours, he had it trimmed down to a lean and mean 6 minutes and 56 seconds.
"Yes!" I yelled, all punchy and delirious from lack of sleep. "We did it!"
We spent the rest of the time plugging the music and sound effects into the movie. I sat in the sound studio and picked which licks from Sherbetty we wanted to use and where. We selected over-the-top sound effects for the fight scenes, really gross noises for the gratuitous violence, and just had a blast doing it. Of course, I could barely keep my eyes open come Sunday afternoon, but I managed to see it though to the end.
Big J delivered the movie to the drop off with about 5 minutes to spare. We all agreed that we were going to do something like this again and soon...maybe not in just 48 hours, though.
So...that's that. My new film
High School Drifter (get it? it's sort of like High Plains Drifter, except it's in high school) is going to premiere at the
Riverview Theatre on
Thursday, June 19th at 6:30pm. It's stuck in there with a bunch of other entries in the festival. I think HSD will play 3rd from the end.
If you live in the area and want to see it, totally come on down. The judges will pick their top 3 and the audience gets to vote for their 3 favorites as well. Call me optimistic, but I think we're gonna give them a run for their money.
I made a western. Who woulda thunk it?Man...if only my work consisted of writing books and making films. How sweet would that be?
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My fingers are crossed for you!
Wow, those tense moments around the 7:30 deadline. I'm so glad you guys made it, and now I really can't wait to see the film. Congrats!!
I've been reading your posts with great interest--PLEASE let us know if you make it in the running, and good luck! I can't wait to watch your movie!
You are so cool--is there anything you can't do?! I think it would be a BLAST to do a movie like you did.
Late to this entry! Dangit! But oh my God, I am imagining getting so far into the 48 hour Film Project and having a computer crash or something. I'd never considered that. HORRIFYING. Glad that wasn't the case here (although acck and oh em gee, standing in line to see if the DVD worked!!!), but I did have to take a minute of silence for the poor participants who have befallen that fate, past, present and future. Also, now that I have seen the amazingness of FS, I totes revisited your initial entries about making it and it was even COOLER. Sucks about having to follow up such a heavy film, but as I said--you think people would appreciate a little levity after watching Fragile! Congrats on all the accolades FS got--they def. deserved 'em.