Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 2

The weekly upload limit on Vimeo resets every Saturday night at midnight, so here is the second batch of Movie Saturday productions, even though it hasn't been an entire week. This time we're going to talk about Aware, The Fallen Ninja, What You Want!!, and Sustain.

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AWARE




One of the things I was most concerned about early in the life of Movie Saturday was the idea of “pet projects,” which basically meant movies that were written and directed by one person. I was concerned that the whole thing would devolve into “Brian’s Movies” and “Jeff’s Movies” and “Rachel’s Movies” and so on. I was much more interested in having a more collaborative setting, which I thought would also increase participation overall.

Nonetheless, here we are with our second pet project in a row. This happened because a number of participants, including myself and Jeff, had plans to play in a tournament that shall not be named that afternoon (here’s a hint, though – it started with Mech and ended with Warrior. Crap, did I just give it away?). Given our diminished level of involvement, it seemed like the best possible time to let Rachel make her arty Asian culture pet project.

The human actor in this piece was one Mavourneen Graves, a friend from high school who was brought in by Rachel specifically to play this role, and had no other involvement in year one of Movie Saturday. She would eventually return a few times in year two, where she would stage a temporary gynocratic takeover (more on that in a few weeks).

The other actor is Kuro, a shelter cat adopted by my roommates at the time, Luke and Rose. Kuro was a fun, playful cat whose farts smelled like fermenting beer hops. Everyone loved her and I secretly suspect that Rachel wrote this whole script just for the sake of putting Kuro in a movie. Actually, I guess now I openly suspect it. Anyway, while I loved Kuro in real life, on set she was a total diva, refusing to hit her marks and even breaking continuity by forcing her way into scenes she shouldn’t have been in, just to get a few more seconds of on-screen face-time.

Ultimately, I’m not a huge fan of this movie, mostly owing to a script that never appealed to me. As Rachel would be the first to tell you, I’ve never really clicked with her writing. On the other hand, I do think this is one of the more visually accomplished Movie Saturday productions, and demonstrates why Rachel (or, perhaps more saliently, Rachel’s pre-production notebook) eventually emerged as one of the strongest, if not the very strongest, director that we had.
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THE FALLEN NINJA

This was probably the most unpleasant Movie Saturday experience for me, filled with arguments, disagreements, shouting, hair pulling, eye gouging, trepanation, biological warfare, mutually assured destruction (MAD), death-ray lasers, and tears. Actually, when I describe it that way, it sounds like a lot of fun.

I wound up directing this one by default. We all showed up to make a movie and no one felt like directing. Since no director=no movie (and since I do enjoy the process), I volunteered. The next step was choosing a script, none of which I really liked. We wound up settling on The Fallen Ninja, a Rachel script which was not all that bad, but was almost absurdly short. It was written as a joke/tribute for our friend Trevor, for some reason or another that I don’t recall. Don’t worry, though, despite the dedication at the end, he’s still alive and kicking.

The first thing we shot was the mountainside fight scene flashbacks. Jeff and Luke choreographed a rather nice fight scene, which was, like the “Because it was Dead” music, just a bit too difficult to pull off in one take. This was not a problem for me, because I only intended to use short flashes of the fight anyway. So after spending way more time than we should have on that mountain doing take after take after take, I declared the scene over.

This led to argument one, because Luke and Jeff wanted one good whole take of the entire fight scene. I can certainly understand this, since they spent so much time and effort on it. But at the same time, we still had a movie to shoot, and I had given them several chances to pull it off. Argument one quickly transmogrified into the similar but distinct argument two, when Luke and Jeff realized that I never intended to show the fight in its entirety in the movie. Cue argument 1 again, rinse, and repeat.

Eventually we got everyone off the mountain and started into shooting the meat of the movie. The main action of the script took place on a street and in an alley, but someone suggested a bridge on the Colorado School of Mines campus. It meant re-working the action of the scene, but was completely worth it. The location was a lot more visually dynamic than any given street corner would be, and having Jeff jump off a bridge was way cooler than having him run around a corner.

This did not sit well with Rachel, who was unhappy with having her script rewritten. In an attempt to make peace, I left the dialogue sequence largely in her hands while I shot the action material. All told, this part went pretty smoothly, and I was pretty pleased with most of the footage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t that much of it. Turns out a page of action script does not equal a minute of screentime.

Once we finished, Rachel started editing while Luke and I discussed music. Luke wanted to use an oboe, which I approved. What I didn’t know is that Luke had never played the oboe before, and was really just interested in trying it out. This didn’t work out as well as planned and eventually, after hours of false starts, he wound up recording himself playing various notes and mapping those notes onto his keyboard so he could play it that way. I think this may be part of the reason that music always took so long. Luke composed the scores for the vast majority of our productions, and he tended to be pretty ambitious with his plans. Invariably things would go awry, but fortunately for us, Luke is also great at finding ways to make things work against all odds. Eventually.

While Luke played with his oboe, I was working on gathering the last few bits of material we needed, including the opening voiceover. When it came time to record this, I realized I didn’t really like the monologue at all, and wrote a replacement. I decided to show it to Rachel for approval before shooting it. I figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since she had mentioned being somewhat unhappy with the script back when we first selected it.

I figured wrong.

She was already angry about having her action rewritten, and felt that if the monologue was also rewritten, nothing of her script would remain. She started talking about just wanting to take her name off of the movie and leave, which I took to also potentially mean abandoning Movie Saturday entirely. This would be a pretty big blow, as she was one of the big four most actively involved people (the others were Luke, Jeff, and me). Thus began the long, hard road to compromise. We ultimately made a few changes to address my biggest concerns, while leaving the vast majority of her text unchanged. I don’t think anyone came away happy, though since A) I still had a number of smaller problems with the monologue and B) It wasn’t the original monologue that she had written.

This was probably the most unpleasant part of the production, as this single argument dragged on for over an hour and we still both walked away angry, just as Jeff and Luke were still pissed at me for shutting down their fight scene and I was still mad at them for trying to make it more important than the movie as a whole.

Oddly enough, I kind of like the result, although it’s awfully short. The process took its toll, though, and I was less than thrilled at the prospect of making another movie. I took some comfort in the fact that next time someone else would get to direct, and they would therefore get to be the bad guy for a day.

Oops.
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WHAT YOU WANT!!

Once again we gathered and once again no one wanted to direct, so I wound up with the job. I had already picked the best of a bad lot of scripts the week before, so the pickings were even slimmer this time. Actually, there was one script I wanted to shoot, but I had written it, making it off-limits.

Please note that I am not in any way claiming that my script was better than the rest. It was, in fact, quite terrible (in addition to being nearly as long as “Weekend Warriors”). At the time, however, I was blinded by my love for the sound of my own keyboard.

Still suffering from a lack of enthusiasm thanks to the “Fallen Ninja” debacle, I picked a script based on how easy it would be to shoot and edit. The lucky winner was “Untitled,” a Shawn M. Hubbard script which was designed to be a parody of sitcoms, laugh track and all. I figured it would be an easy process because sitcoms are typically shot live with three cameras, which would eliminate the need for a lot of different camera set-ups. Sure, it would be murder on the actors, who would have to run the whole scene without stopping. But since when have I cared about the comfort of actors?

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a suitably stage-y location to shoot this. I was hoping to do a really bright, vibrant, unrealistic lighting and décor scheme, but this quickly proved unfeasible. We only had three small work lights, and an entire room that needed lighting. Instead, we wound up going verite, shooting in a living room that had a large front window which gave us access to the largest floodlight available. I am speaking, of course, of the sun. Bounced off of clouds. Because it was a cloudy day. Which was better than direct sunlight anyway.

Our other departure from sitcom norms was our pioneering use of the two-camera system, which we developed because we only had two cameras. This system was not unworkable, but it put a lot more pressure on the camera operators to pull it off – which they didn’t, really. This isn’t so much their fault as it is mine, since I was rushing things along and trying to get it over with. Had I explained what I wanted more fully, and had we done a few more run-throughs, I suspect it would have been much better. As it was, we did one dry run and two recorded takes, and that was that.

A funny thing happened during those takes, though. I started having fun. By the time we were done shooting I was completely back on board with the spirit of the whole thing, and I found myself very excited by the idea of creating an opening credits sequence for the sitcom. My favorite part of that process was designing a hideous background graphic, which I named “Whack.” It was inspired by one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. No points for guessing, because it’s just so obvious.

This was also the point where I came up with a title for the piece. “What you want” was a phrase thrown around the now-defunct Warren Ellis forum, generally used when someone would complain about how terrible a given comic book series was. The argument was that if you really hate cliché storytelling, cheesecake art, shitty dialogue, etc, you would just stop buying it. Since you continue to buy it, it must be what you want. This seemed like a very appropriate title for our horrible little faux-sitcom.

My other favorite part of this production was recording the laugh track. We all gathered in Luke’s bedroom with a microphone pointed in our faces and, well, laughed on command. We did short laughs, long laughs, belly laughs, chuckles, whoooos, groans, awwwws, and maybe even sang The Star-Spangled Banner*.

Looking back, this was sort of the inverse of “The Fallen Ninja.” That was a horrible experience that yielded a decent final product. This was a very fun project that yielded a. . . less than optimal final product. There’s probably a moral or lesson in that, I guess.

*There is an 89% chance that I am making this up.
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SUSTAIN

This was the quickest production in Movie Saturday history, running approximately 2 ½ hours from the time we put pen to paper to the time we watched the movie. Despite this truncated schedule, it is still slightly longer than “The Fallen Ninja” if you don’t count the credits.

The project came together at the absolute last minute. We had a Movie Saturday planned, but then, overnight, came the snows. When meeting time rolled around, none of us who lived at the meeting place wanted to get out of bed and we figured that anyone who had to actually leave the house would be even less likely to show up. We quickly declared that there would be no Movie Saturday this week.

That’s when Shawn burst through the door, swaddled in snowgear and huffing and puffing as if he had just returned from Everest. We tried to explain that we were cold and tired and it hurt, but he made it clear that if there was no Movie Saturday after he had gone to all the trouble of getting out of bed and driving over, it would hurt all the more. So Movie Saturday was back on.

At this point, I want to mention that Rachel called me shortly before Shawn arrived and asked me if we were still going to make a movie. I told her no, and that is the only reason she wasn’t involved in this project. It wasn’t a lack of interest or motivation, it was my bad information. I think it’s important to clear this up. And when I say “I think it’s important to,” I mean “I expect to be killed in my sleep if I don’t.”

Anyway, we were still very lethargic and didn’t want to go through with the usual day-long production. Given that post-production was the lengthiest part of the process, we realized that we had to make something that had only one shot (no editing) and had no music. The question was, how to make it remotely interesting? The answer was clearly to do horrible, torturous things to Jeff on camera. Once that was decided, all we had to do was come up with a brief monologue he could recite while we threw water on him in the snow.

For the record, the water was nice and warm. Someone lobbied to use cold water so that the steam wouldn’t show. That someone might have been me. I’m really not sure. All I can say for certain is that I came down on one side of the issue or the other. Which is not saying much at all.

As it turns out, collaborative scriptwriting works a lot smoother when you don’t have annoying things like “character” or “plot” to argue about. The script was finished in about fifteen minutes, and before we knew it we had another movie under our belts.
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Next week:
We finish off Year One with The Cold Grey Light and Modern Cowboys.