Hey everybody, I made a music video!

It's been nearly three years since my last production, but I've finally got something new to show. This is a music video for "Everything I Never Had," a song by a friend of mine who I can't name in searchable text (like this), because she has other plans for rolling out the video online and doesn't want me jumping the gun on her. But if you want to know the name, and the address of the myspace page where you can find out (slightly) more about her, it's at the end of the video.

So without further ado, here's the video:

Everything I Never Had from Brian Omura on Vimeo.

500, Baby!

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention (which I later determined to be Monday), Peephole crossed the big 5-0-0 mark on Vimeo. I think I can safely say that Peephole has been viewed by more people than anything else I've ever made in my life.

I can also say that it has been viewed by more people than anything that anyone has ever made. It would just be a lie, is all.

And don't worry, I won't keep harping on this. You won't hear another word from me about Peephole unless it makes it to the 1K mark one of these days. Then you will hear a lot more words, many of which will probably be made up.

300, Baby!

As of today, Peephole has been viewed 302 times. This took approximately two months, and pleases me to no end. It also surpassed Intuition as my most viewed movie on Vimeo. Intuition has been sitting at 298 views for nearly a year now, but also, oddly enough, passed 300 today, with a grand total of 301 views.

It's a real horse race.

Movie Saturday Memories Volume 8

I meant to write this up a week or two ago, but you know how the holidays can be. Anyway, when last I left you, Movie Saturday had just died an ignoble death, born of our own hubris. This was early 2005. A few months after that, the core group of participants who lived together (Luke, Shawn, Me, and Jeff, if you still want to count him at this stage) moved out of the Superhouse and spread across the Denver Metro area. I think this was probably the main reason why the post-Movie Saturday projects didn’t materialize like I expected – life was marching on for everyone and getting in the way.

All was not lost, though. The next summer, Luke and Rose announced their plans to move out of state, and this provided the catalyst we needed to make one last project with them before they were gone. This turned out to be “A Month, and Change,” which I may talk about in more detail somewhere down the line. It was a forty-minute (give or take) project starring Bruce, Trevor, and Cate, a new addition. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how snide you’re feeling), it’s not available online, so I can’t link to it.

“A Month, and Change” fell victim to the same post-production failings as my previous full-length movie, “The Unwritten Rule.” As a result, it took nearly an entire year before it was completed and screened. This meant that no one was willing to spend time on another movie during that entire period, so there were no more projects throughout 2007.

In early 2008, Rachel and I began discussing the idea of putting together another short, something a bit less ambitious than “A Month, and Change.” This was our first ground-up screenwriting collaboration, and, to my amazement, it worked out pretty well. The project came together very quickly, and we wound up with Intuition (which is available online).




That was eleven months ago, now, and was the last movie production I’ve been involved with. Rachel and I did put together another script afterward, a longer one, which we didn’t manage to get into production. I’m still hopeful that something might come of it, though. Also, over the holiday, I met with some old friends (including Movie Saturday veteran Mavi Graves) who reignited that creative spark, and we’ve started tentatively discussing a new project for this summer. Will it materialize? Who knows. History suggests it won’t, but I’ve always found history to be kind of a condescending jackass. There are always possibilities.

-----

Now that I’ve gone back through all of Movie Saturday, and seen just how wide a range of quality we had, I’d like to identify my favorites. If you haven’t checked out Movie Saturday yet, and don’t want to commit the time to watching the whole thing, you’d be safe with any of the following:

THE TOP FIVE MOVIE SATURDAYS, IN REVERSE ORDER

5. Peephole
When I first started writing about Movie Saturday, I would not have expected Peephole to make the top five (I probably would have picked “The Lamp” in its place). The years have softened my disappointments with it, however, and the things I like are just as good, so in it goes. As an interesting side note, since I put these movies up on Vimeo, Peephole has had more than fifteen times as many views as any other Movie Saturday, and shows no signs of slowing down.

4. Because it was Dead
This one is near and dear to my heart because it was the first, and it proved to me that we were capable of doing something worthwhile. There are some technical issues, particularly with the sound, that keep it from placing higher, but it’s still a wonderful way to spend four minutes.

3. Try Again
As I explained in the original write-up, this is the one where I felt every department contributed something vital, and the one with the strongest vibe. Watching it just feels good.

2. Shadow
It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s simple. Maybe we work better without a script.

1. Safety in Numbers
This is our most professional looking production, and certainly my strongest script. Everything just came together on this one. And how can you miss out on the movie so good it killed Movie Saturday?

I know, I know, clearly I have some sort of bias, since three of my top five are movies that I directed, and one of the other two is one that I wrote. Well, if anyone has a better list, I’d like to see it. Hell, if anyone has a worse list, I’d like to see it.

Seriously, though. I really do want to hear what anyone else out there thinks is the best (or worst, if you prefer) of our movies. Especially any of you who helped make them.

And speaking of the worst, if anyone was wondering, my pick for the worst Movie Saturday is “What You Want!!”, which I also directed. Hmmph. Bias my sine function.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 7

SAFETY IN NUMBERS

This was a new script I had written on a whim the night before Rachel selected her three preferred scripts for Movie Saturday 2.08. My inspiration came from Philip K. Dick, who claimed that he never actually wrote science fiction, but rather that all of his work was fantasy in which something non-literal was made literal. In this case I chose the idea of security vs. spontaneity in mate selection, coupled with the desire that people sometimes have to change one another. Then I literalized it, with the creation of a robot duplicate.

I don’t remember what the other choices were, but obviously, since I’m writing about it now, this was the selection. I then prepared myself for some brutal rewriting, since a) I had forced Trevor to spend a lot of time working on Peephole the last time I directed and b) Rachel was in charge of this one. If you’ve read any of the previous Movie Saturday Memories, you’ll know why that filled me with dread. So when I asked her what sort of changes she wanted and she replied with “no, I like it as it is,” I was pretty surprised. And a tad disappointed, admittedly.

Rachel’s intention, production design-wise, was to give it a sort of retro-future look. None of our usual locations really fit the bill, so we shot for the first time in Denver proper, at an old duplex rented out by several of our friends. This looked pretty good on camera, and I think having a new and appropriate location added a lot to the movie. However, we did wind up riling the natives a bit, as they were upset by the condition we left the place in. My understanding is that everything the other housemates were upset about was unrelated to anything we did, though – except the French Press. We did break the French Press. Yowch.

This was also the Movie Saturday debut of Beth Reed (now Beth Bean), who I had unsuccessfully tried to get into a Movie Saturday for two years. She was an old high school friend, who had appeared in my early German movies that kind of started this whole thing off. She brought along her boyfriend, who was also making his MS debut as 1/3 of the robot research team. The rest of the cast was filled out by regulars Trevor and Bruce, as well as Ben, who I suppose deserves some sort of mention for appearing in the first and last Movie Saturdays, and no others. (EDIT: I forgot that Ben was also in The Fortunate Ones. So he was in the first and the middlest and the last, I guess.)

This was one of the few movies that required props and costumes, since not every character could be best categorized as “this one guy” or “this one girl”. The scanning equipment was thrift store junk, plus part of a Transformer. The shirts were also thrift store material (explaining the awkward fit) with homemade patches sewn on. It was a bit frightening to watch Rachel sew the patch on to Ben’s shirt while he was wearing it, but everyone escaped intact.

You may have also noticed a bit more camera movement than we usually have. This was the debut of the Movie Saturday dolly, aka some cart we got at Home Depot. Inspired by our makeshift dolly from The Economy, we purchased something that we could rig up more permanently. This was meant to take us to the next level of production, which it kind of did. Unfortunately, that next level started with a Kill Screen. But that’s a story for another time (and that time will occur just a few paragraphs down).

Unfortunately, I have no stories about post-production. Rachel and Mavi staged a mini-gynocratic takeover, so I and the rest of the guys (save for Luke) went and had a long lunch at Casa Bonita instead. Mmm. Casa Bonita. We got kind of sick.

I’m kind of glad I did miss post, however, because it was exceedingly rare for me to see a final movie without watching it come together, bit by bit. Sometimes it can be kind of nice just to watch, especially when the final movie is as good as this. To me, it really did feel like a step up, on a technical level, from what we had been doing previously. This, coupled with the fact that we were beginning to bristle more and more under the single day time constraints, led me to make a fateful decision. I floated it by the rest of the major players, and they all agreed.

Movie Saturday would be no more.

-----

MOVIE SATURDAY: THE DOCUMENTARY

Our intention in killing Movie Saturday was not to stop making movies. We just decided that we had grown as much as we could in the single-day format, and that maybe we could start making slightly longer productions, or spending more time on productions of the same length. It was exciting to think about. I couldn’t wait to get moving on it. We did decide to make one more Movie Saturday first, a big finale that would pay tribute to our past, force us to work in a new, unfamiliar format, and provide us with two movies in one.

The plan was to remake Because it was Dead. It would be rewritten and Hollywood-ed up. More intense drama drama, a fight scene, etc. Maybe we'd even throw in a fart joke. Part of our team would be involved in that. But it wouldn’t be the real Movie Saturday. The real production would be a documentary/mockumentary about the filming of the new Because it was Dead (which was possibly going to be retitled as Dead Reason, by the way). We’d film the filming, interview everyone involved, it was going to be great.

“But Brian,” you’re probably thinking now, “I never saw a Movie Saturday 2.09. What happened to the documentary? And why were you speaking so subjunctively in that last paragraph?”

Well, here’s what happened. We were, for the most part, correct in thinking that we had outgrown Movie Saturday. But there was one thing we overlooked. The most important thing. Movie Saturday provided us with momentum. As long as we had Movie Saturday, we made movies. Once we killed it, we were no longer able to marshal our forces and muster up the manpower to get a movie made. So that’s what happened to the documentary. It never got made. It lives in a magical, imaginary world where it pals around with unicorns and Captain Kirk.

So ended Movie Saturday. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a bang followed in short order by protracted whimpering.

-----

Next Time:

A wrap-up/overview of the whole shebang, and where we go from here.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 6

PEEPHOLE

Pull up a seat, kiddies, this is gonna be a long’n.

I finally got the chance to direct a project, completely and fully, from pre-production onward, thanks to a fortuitous once in a year event. That even was, of course, Halloween. We decided that, in the spirit of the season, we ought to do make a horror movie for the October Movie Saturday. And of course, if we’re making a horror movie, it simply wouldn’t make sense for anyone but me to direct it.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any horror scripts, so we had to solicit new ones. There were three that we ultimately took under consideration. One was a Vincent Price-esque monologue written by Shawn that was okay, but didn’t have any spark. Nothing much to say about it. The second was one that I wrote, about a man who, after the death of his wife, took over for the ailing boogeyman as a way of finding new meaning to life. I was very pleased with how it came out and was very excited about getting to shoot it. Obviously, that didn’t happen. No one really thought it made sense and it was especially criticized for a stretch in the middle where the chronology broke down and several different time points co-existed in the same scene. This stretch happened to be my favorite part of the script. Ah well, c’est la vie. Maybe someday.

The third script, which we wound up shooting, was written by Trevor PinBlackJamesCockFord. I really didn’t like it much early on. Some of the dialogue was clunky, the pacing was kind of weird, and most of all, it just made me uncomfortable. But then a funny thing happened. When I submitted my top three picks for voting, I also wrote up a little description of what I intended to do with them, directorially speaking. That was when the potential of Peephole became clear to me. Earlier that day I had watched What Have They Done to Solange?, which coincidentally had a scene where a couple of perverts looked through a peephole into the girls’ shower room. This brought a single word to my mind, which solved all of my problems. That word was Giallo. Go ahead, look it up. I even provided a handy link.

Now, one could argue that, strictly speaking, Peephole is not a Giallo. In fact, you could argue that, in any sense of the word, it is not a Giallo. I wouldn’t disagree with you if you chose to do so. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give it the same sort of feel and atmosphere. The sleazy discomfort I felt upon reading the script could be an asset, not a detriment. This could be a whole lot of fun.

Thus, by the time I had finished posting the voting choices, I had already switched my vote in my mind from my script to Peephole. Everyone else was on board with the choice, and Trevor and I dove into what was probably the most comprehensive re-writing process of any of the Movie Saturdays. Looking back through old emails, it looks like I had Trevor do two rewrites based on my notes, then I did one, then back to him for a Final.

Before re-reading things for this article, I mostly remembered the big changes I requested – primarily the addition of a new opening. The original script began with the guys already in the secret room, looking through the hole. I also toned down the profanity (again! What’s the matter with me?) and de-contemporized and de-Americanized the names and dialogue. John, Kevin, and Valerie became John, Mark, and Eve. After looking back over the old emails between Trevor and myself, however, I see that we spent a massive amount of time discussing character motivations as well, and made a lot of little changes to the action and dialogue as a result. The major actions remain the same, but the rest of the script is pretty dramatically different from the first draft.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that I swept in and fixed up a broken script. Trevor was responsible for many of the changes made, and some of my suggestions would have hurt rather than helped, had he not fought them. But I think that I made him think a lot harder about his characters than he would have otherwise, and I know that he made me think harder about them than I would have. Also, now that the memories are flooding back, I’m starting to remember how positively giddy I was that someone was willing to have these kinds of conversations with me. This was the sort of process I was hoping for when I suggested that scripts be chosen ahead of time in order to allow for rewrites. Ultimately, the script was much stronger for it.

That said, looking back over the old emails, I see that Rachel seems to have thought the original script was better. Gah.

This brings us to production, which was a bit difficult. The main issue was casting the role of Eve. Although we did not intend to show any actual nudity on-screen, we still needed someone who was comfortable undressing in front of the crew. This is a subset of society that does not include any of the women who had previously been involved with Movie Saturday. I left the task of finding our Eve up to Trevor, since he was a college student living in Boulder. He pulled it off, and we were all set to go – until the actress cancelled out on us early Saturday morning. Back to the drawing board.

After a few irritable hours, he found a replacement, Brandi (last name withheld by request, as well as by my own poor memory). Unfortunately, she couldn’t make it until four or five pm. We shot around her as best we could, and ultimately had every shot that did not include her taken care of before her arrival. Even Luke’s blood-spattered appearance opposite her in the climax was filmed ahead of time. I have to say, Brandi was a real trooper. She hung around for hours, naked or in a towel for most of the time, covered in blood for part of the time, wet (and therefore cold) most of the time, but still soldiered through it. We did reach a point at the end of the shoot, when we were shooting the afore-mentioned climactic confrontation, where she clearly didn’t want to be there anymore. I just kept shooting, requesting take after take, trying to get it exactly the way I wanted, because I’m kind of an asshole that way. Fortunately, Trevor is not that kind of asshole, and he talked me down. I’m still a little disappointed with the scene – I think it plays way too fast – but sometimes you have to take your actors into consideration too.

I guess.

The geography of the house is pretty awkward, and it was kind of fun to try and piece it together. There are very few areas that have the same spatial relationship in real life as in the movie. The peephole room was actually in the basement, while the bathroom was on the first floor. The really tough part, and the part where I kind of blew it, was the interior of the bathroom itself. In order to get a proper peephole view, we set the camera up in the doorway and pretended it was the mirror. When Eve initially walks into the room, she’s walking from the actual sink/mirror. So when Trevor rushed in halfway through the movie, we had to fake the angle of the camera and the angle of the bottle being thrown so that everything would look like it was in the right place. This worked well enough to get by, I guess, but it’s not right.

By the time we got to post-production, it was already pretty late, and we came to realize that we would not have the movie done in time. We wound up finishing everything but the music, leaving that for Sunday. I edited the movie while Bruce (a late arrival) and Luke worked on sound. I kind of regret missing out on the sound effects, since they got to play with and dismember all manner of produce. They also created the TV program that Trevor was watching at the beginning, which they titled “Contemplative Bisexual.” Last I heard, VH1 was thinking of picking it up for a mid-season replacement.

Speaking of music, this was my first time behind the keyboard (not counting some minor, uncredited assistance to Bruce on Shadow). There were three reasons for this. One, I had some very specific ideas about the style of music I wanted to emulate. Two, I was using it as a test, to see if I would be able to compose music for my long-delayed feature, The Unwritten Rule. Three, I don’t think anyone else really wanted to. I’m generally pleased with what I came up with, although I think only the last piece, which begins when Eve hears the axing, was fully successful.

So finally, Sunday evening, we gathered for the screening of our first Movie Weekend. I’m very happy with the result – in fact, more so now than I was when I first finished it, despite the pacing of the climax and the crazy bathroom geography. And now, because I just haven’t said enough about this movie, here are some more random facts and stories that I couldn’t fit in above:

--I initially embraced the 70’s Eurotrash aesthetic much more fully. I was thinking of transferring the movie to VHS to give it a crappier look, and I even wanted to dub the dialogue, with different actors portraying the characters. Others (Luke, primarily) talked me out of this, and boy is it a good thing they did.

--I love, love, LOVE the blood spurt when Eve is killed. We watered down some of our blood and put it in a chocolate syrup bottle, which we then placed in her armpit. When Trevor pulled the knife away, she squeezed. I think it only took two takes to get it right. That said, why the hell is there a kitchen knife next to the toilet?

--I had to force Trevor to put the shower door with the towel in front of him. He kept trying to switch them. Not funny.

--As I was walking Brandi through the scene, I commented that she would be naked, but behind frosted glass. When we were actually shooting, she touched the glass and said “This isn’t frosted, it’s just dirty.” I am an idiot.

--For the record, my shower was in the other bathroom, so I am not responsible for the above dirtiness.

--Somehow, we managed to get blood on the ceiling of the bathroom. The vaulted ceiling, fifteen feet up.

--Trevor is watching TV in the exact same place where Shawn was waiting by the phone in Ticking. I really hated using that set again, partly because I hate to do that sort of thing in general, and partly because it’s really just a giant echo chamber, as I’m sure you can hear.

--I caught some flack for the lengthy opening sequence, but I’d do it again if I had the chance. And no one can stop me - BWAHAHAHAHA! Seriously, though, I think it was vital to have a period of peace and mundanity before the chaos began. It really wouldn't feel right without it.

----

THE ECONOMY

Now that I’ve finished my book on Peephole, I figure I’ll keep this one short. We’ll see if that happens.

The most significant thing about The Economy to me is the fact that, for the first time, we were shooting on my brand-new Canon GL-2. It’s fortunate that I had been planning to buy a new camera anyway, because during post-production on Peephole, Luke kinda sorta broke the firewire port on my GL-1, which prevented us from capturing video to the computer, which prevented us from editing at all, which prevented us from making movies. I’m not sure there’s a tremendous improvement in image quality with the new camera, but operating it works much smoother.

As written, this was an oddly paced piece. The main titles came approximately halfway through the movie, at the end of the job application monologue. It’s still a little weird, being divided into two parts that are only somewhat related, but moving the credits to the beginning helped. Speaking of the credits, I take full responsibility for the fact that you can’t read them. It’s all my fault. I was trying to mimic a stock ticker, but side-scrolling text at that speed just doesn’t work. You can see the same problem with the end credits of many, many British TV shows. Well, live and learn. This opening credits sequence also involved our first use of a dolly – and by that, I mean we literally set our tripod on a furniture dolly. It took a bit of doing to make it work right, but a whole new world opened up to us in that moment.

Shooting this movie also required me to do something I swore I would never do again – shoot a dialogue scene in a moving car. You can see how awkward it is to get a shot of either actor without ramming the camera up in their face. In fact, I just went ahead and rammed away. Actually, the angle on Bruce isn’t so bad, since I was able to sit in the passenger seat – but Rachel took the full brunt of the ramming. It almost looks a bit like a fish-eye lens. Also, you can’t really light in a car – so the background is completely blown out. Fortunately, you have Rachel’s strongest, funniest Movie Saturday performance to distract you from the technical issues.

By the way, have I mentioned that I hate shooting in moving cars?

The opening monologue is kind of odd, with the bizarre cutaways to coffee cups and the like. We shot them at Shawn’s behest - he seemed to think he was the director or something – but I never intended to use them. Unfortunately, in the grand tradition of the score from Because it Was Dead, Bruce wrote a monologue he couldn’t recite in one take, so in they went. I guess that was foresight on Shawn’s part. I hate to admit something like that. On the other hand, it still looks weird, so in some strange way, I can say that Shawn was wrong.

I suppose that’s about all I have to say. I’m not a huge fan of The Economy, although it has a lot of really good parts. It’s certainly better than most Season 1 movies, but I think it’s a little below par for Season 2 (The Fortunate Ones excluded)

-----

Next Week:

Safety in Numbers, and the tragic death of Movie Saturday.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 5

Try Again

Rachel was in the director’s seat for the fourth production of Season 2, just like she was for the fourth of Season 1. Funny how that works out. This time, she was working from one of Trevor’s scripts. It was originally structured much more naturalistically – the various encounters between Harold, Kim, and Jim could possibly have been a series of events that occurred over time, as events are wont to do. It was only at the end of the script that the truth is revealed – Harold, an old dying man, is stuck revisiting variations of his greatest regret.

I had initially fought against using this script, because I didn’t like the twist ending. In particular, I didn’t like putting that revelation at the end because it didn’t give you time for the ramifications of what you’re seeing to sink in – just 30 seconds of revelation and you’re out. I also thought the various encounters didn’t flow together very well, especially if the viewer was meant to see them as an objective reality. Still, nothing better was available, so we moved ahead.

Shooting took place inside a sorority house at the Colorado School of Mines. This particular house had bylaws stating that men (or boys, as we were likely called) were not allowed inside. We therefore had the threat of being discovered and thrown out hanging over our heads the whole time, which added to the fun. In fact, the opening scene was shot in one of the bedrooms, which raised the scandal level to heights undreamed of. We were truly rogue filmmakers, venturing into unknown worlds near and far, sacrificing everything on the altar of –

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the cast. This was Rose’s first appearance in Movie Saturday, although she had previously thrown water on Jeff for Sustain. She was uncomfortable and shy about being on camera, but I think it worked well for the character. It would be nice if you could hear her better, though. Bruce was Bruce, playing a character that fit his persona, and Nick was playing against type as the suave, macho asshole. I think he was a little uncomfortable as well, but I can’t imagine anyone else delivering the line “I know. . . let’s go” as well as him.

Following our somewhat successful attempt at lighting in The Lamp, I tried to do the same for this movie. Unfortunately, with only three lamps, my ambitions outstripped my capabilities. I was going for magic-hour sunset light coming in through the window. Instead, I created dingy ambient light in a room with odd floor lights. Ah, well. At least it didn’t look any worse than good old sunlight would have, and maybe the artificiality of it helped enhance the atmosphere of artificial reality in the movie.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Somewhere in the middle of shooting, we found a way to satisfy my script problems without changing what everyone else liked about it. The answer was simple – move the old man Harold scene to the beginning so that the events are framed as being in his mind. Unfortunately, the scene wouldn’t fit at the beginning the way it was written, and Trevor was unavailable for a rewrite. I wound up throwing something together in about five minutes between takes, and we had our opening.

And what do you know, it looks like, despite my claim in the write-up for The Fortunate Ones, this is actually my last on-screen appearance. Hardly counts, since you can only see a bit of my hand in the corner. But I promise, no more after this.

Eventually, we made it out of the sorority house without alerting the authorities. Bruce and I had a blast editing this one, since Rachel gave us a lot of latitude to futz around with the transitions, using a lot of pieces of different takes and footage from before “action” and after “cut.” Luke wrote a great score, which had a real drive to it and did a lot to help tie things together. I think there’s a bit of an Aronofsky vibe to the way the whole movie flows, and the score is a big part of that.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m extremely fond of this one. It’s one of the few Movie Saturdays that really has a vibe, or a feel to it, and I still enjoy watching it now, years later. It was also a really good production experience, where every department added something essential to improve the whole. One could argue that we made better movies, but this was the epitome of what I hoped Movie Saturday could be.

-----

TICKING

This was kind of exciting because we got to shoot on location. The script called for a motel room, which I thought we’d have to fake or pay for– but in actuality, all it took was one phone call and we found ourselves in a real motel room for free. Granted, it was a used motel room, and we had a limited window between the check-out and the arrival of the cleaning crew, but hey – verisimilitude trumps hygiene concerns, right?

This was a very old script that had been passed up multiple times before. It was originally written for Season 1, and was the only Season 2 production for which that was the case. There was always a concern that the plot (man has to call kidnapper at a certain time to negotiate a ransom payment, but loses the number so the hostage is killed) wouldn’t come across. I’m still not sure it does. On the other hand, I think that everything going on in Try Again is completely clear, so take my judgment on this matter with a grain of salt.

Shawn really went all out as an actor in this one. He banged up his head pretty badly hitting it against the table. He cut up his hand tearing apart Tom’s bedroom. On the other hand, he also ad-libbed those lines at the end, which were not scripted. I guess, considering that he wrote the thing, that’s okay, but I think it’s pretty awkward given the lack of any dialogue in the rest of the movie.

I should also give credit to Tom for letting us tear apart his bedroom like that – and it was far worse in real life than it looked on-screen. There was no plan for this segment, we just started the camera and let Shawn go nuts. I wouldn’t have let us do that to my room.

Speaking of rooms, I also want to give props to the set decorator for making the rest of the house look so trashed, which reflected the disorder in our protagonist’s mind. Certainly, the place never looked like that any other time. Ever. Really.

Also, Bruce trying to pretend to smoke is one of the funnier things we’ve ever committed to magnetic tape.

In addition, this write-up is pretty disjointed, and has a lot of uncomfortable transitional clauses.

Finally, I don’t think this is one of the stronger pieces from Season 2, but it’s still a damn sight better than The Fortunate Ones.

PS. When I saw a bit of my old Subaru in the movie, it made me kind of sad and nostalgic. That was my very first car.

PPS. That’s all.

-----

Next Week: I finally direct Peephole, and Bruce teaches us all about The Economy.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 4

THE FORTUNATE ONES



After our lengthy, unplanned hiatus (which I remember as being almost a year, but which research reveals to be about 4 months), things were different for Movie Saturday. In the interim, we moved out of the 14th street Superhouse, which was the setting for . . . with a View, part of Weekend Warriors, Aware, Sustain, and the Cold Grey Light. We made ourselves a sweet new logo, utilizing the stuffed monkey that was viewed so distantly at the end of Because it was Dead. We made some other, unimportant changes.

Okay, okay, the other changes were the most important of all. We basically came to realize that the Movie Saturday format was kind of limited, and decided to expand it so that we could continue to grow as amateur artists. Specifically, we introduced an element of pre-production. One of the most important parts of a director’s job is pre-production – assigning the right people to do the right thing, finding locations, gathering props, etc. Alfred Hitchcock used to plan things out so extensively that even if he never showed up on set, the movie would still turn out exactly as he planned it. In other words, in Season 1 of Movie Saturday, the director wasn’t fully directing.

For Season 2, then, we started picking the director ahead of time, preferably at the screening of the previous project. They would pick the time of the next project and, two weeks before shooting, pick a handful of scripts they were interested in. We would think vote on a script over the subsequent week, and the director would then have one last week to prepare. This was very exciting for me, as it meant I wouldn’t ever get shoehorned into directing a script I didn’t care for, like The Fallen Ninja or What You Want!! Also, and even more importantly, it would allow for rewrites. You see, most of our scripts were hastily written first drafts. In Season 1, we never had time to do any rewriting after the script was chosen, and no one wanted to put the effort into multiple drafts on a script that may or may not be used. Now, not only would we have time for rewrites, but the director would have a chance to affect said rewrites, putting their personal stamp even more fully on the final result. I cannot tell you how stoked I was for this. With these new procedures in place, the quality of Movie Saturday was poised to go through the roof.

Relatively speaking, I think it ultimately did improve dramatically. You’d never tell from watching The Fortunate Ones, however.

Trevor James Pincock Blackford was the chosen director for our inaugural effort. We wound up selecting one of Rachel’s newer scripts, Fortune Cookies, to shoot. It was, like all the others, a quick first draft. I asked Trevor if I could take a crack at a revision, since Rachel doesn’t like rewriting. He agreed, I took a crack, and I was pretty pleased with the result.

Rachel was not.

Boy, and I thought The Fallen Ninja was an uncomfortable situation. She hated every single change I made to her script, bar none. We wound up spending about three hours hashing through the whole thing the night before shooting, with Trevor refereeing and making the final decisions. In retrospect, I probably should have just backed off and let them go with the first draft. Of course, if I had a time machine and could go back and change things in retrospect, I’d be more concerned with the outcome of that diamond heist I was involved in than with avoiding this confrontation.

Oddly enough, since then, Rachel and I have discovered that we work pretty well as a writing team, so long as one of us isn’t revising the other’s pre-existing script. Go figure. At any rate, we wound up using an even mix of my changes, Rachel’s original ideas, and new compromises. I don’t really remember what parts of the final version were mine, except for the new title. I wasn’t really happy with the outcome, and I don’t think Rachel or Trevor were either. Oh, well.

This brings us to shooting and – oh, wait, is that – yes, I think it is – yep, it’s me, on camera again. Fortunately for all of you, this was the last time. Boy, check out my big hammy death scene. It’s probably the second take, too, which is too bad because I spewed up a pretty good blood fountain on the first take. We were using a few spoonfuls of our standard Karo syrup blood mixture combined with a quarter tablet of Alka-Seltzer to make the mouth-spew. I wasn’t paying attention and took a whole tablet of Alka-Seltzer. By the time action was called, my cheeks were about to burst, and I could barely stumble through a few seconds of pre-amble. In addition, I was trying to figure out a way to release in a controlled fashion, so as not to ruin the carpet. At this, I was partly successful.

I think the reason we didn’t use the first take is that the increased proportion of Alka-Seltzer to blood made the final concoction come out light pink.

That’s really all I can remember about this one, except that did make a box cover for the Turbid Serbian video game, which is completely invisible in the final movie.

The next one is better, I promise.
-----

THE LAMP



This was the week we coined the term “Gynocracy” which, as it turns out, we didn’t actually coin. It’s a real word. But it applies. We were shooting a script that Adrien (a woman) had written. It was directed by Mavi (another woman). It was edited by Rachel (holy shit! There’s three of them!). The story was about a dominant woman becoming super-dominant (that’s. . .still three of them, but now there’s a theme, man).

Technically, Shawn helped edit as well, but he was more of an assistant editor, trying to learn how to work the software so he could edit in the future. So by the time post-production rolled around, us guys were pretty much cut out of the loop – which was okay, because it gave us more time to drink beer, play video games, and barbecue steaks in the back of our monster truck in the parking lot of the strip club.

There are a lot of things I really like about this movie. It’s the first time we ever tried to light thing a whole movie, instead of relying on ambient light. Jeff (not Weekend Warriors Jeff) and I collaborated on this process, and, while the results were kind of mixed, I like a lot of it, and I enjoyed doing something a little different. The ending is probably our creepiest, and everything comes together to make it very effective. The only real complaint I had was the final showdown, which I thought came across much too broadly. That opinion has softened over the years, and while I still wish it was a little more grounded, I do enjoy what we have.

Turns out them wimmen-folk might maybe kinda know what they’re doin’ after all.
-----

SHADOW



After The Lamp, we lost our momentum again and it was over a month before we made another movie. We decided to do a quick one-off in order to get things rolling again, and the best way to accomplish that was to do another one-take movie, like Sustain. Unlike Sustain, this project was ambitious enough to include an actual story (gosh!). The plot developed pretty organically (“we want a moving background” became “let’s follow someone walking down the street” became “someone is following her” became “no, he’s not really, it’s all paranoia”), and the final inversion was added late in the process because it made the whole thing more psychologically interesting.

We mapped out the route and actions on the white board, then did two run-throughs, and probably five or six takes, sometimes using different cameramen in order to try and get the smoothest image possible. In order to accomplish this, the cameraman had to walk backward and be able to completely ignore the issue of what’s behind him, so we had to have a guide. It was incredibly difficult, and I’m amazed we even pulled it off – but as I may have mentioned before, that’s the sort of thing Luke is good at. I tried running the camera for one take, and didn’t even make it past the first corner.

The dogs you hear barking in the alleyway were a natural part of the ambience. In fact, during the second to last take, some guy came outside to ask us just what the hell we were doing to get his dogs all riled up every ten minutes.

I should also mention that this was the first appearance of Bruce Swihart in a Movie Saturday. He is an old high school friend and had been in both of my longer movie projects from before Movie Saturday. He was with us for the rest of the season and, given the uptick in quality, maybe he was a good luck charm. Or maybe it was a coincidence. Yeah, probably that one.

This is another movie I wound up directing by default. We initially planned that there would be no one director, that it was just a quick group project. About halfway through, we realized that, in the absence of an official director, I was doing all of the directing anyway. So I officially took the job. This makes four times that I had directed, without ever once getting to develop the project. I was starting to wonder if I would ever get the chance to really, fully direct one of these things. Still, at least this was a movie I was proud to have my name on. In fact, it’s still one of my favorites.
-----

Next week:
I don’t direct Try Again and Ticking!

What I've Done

Today I sorted through all of my MiniDV videotapes. And by "all," I mean, "the ones that were in my videotape box." There are still a few here and there, lying around - in fact, I can see three more unlabeled tapes right now that are sitting just down and to the left of the photo - but what you're looking at here is the bulk of it. The stacks are, from left to right:

1 and 2 - The Red King and related material (2001)

3 - Fritz and Franz: Fight the Future (1998, German)

4 - Two Legs at Noon, AKA The Unwritten Rule (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)

5 - Movie Saturday (2003-2005)

6 - Professional work (look how small it is)

7 - A Month and Change (2006)

8 and 9 - Hell if I know. Lots of different miscellaneous stuff. I'm sure Intuition is in there, along with some more Movie Saturday stuff. There's some personal material as well, like my trip to England and a couple years worth of Art Days.

Each of these tapes holds one hour, so that's just under 100 hours of raw footage. This was then condensed down to, by my estimation, just under ten hours of final product. Now that I've typed out the dates above, I see that this actually represents almost ten years exactly. I wish there was more than this; but even still, looking at these stacks of videotapes gives me all sorts of warm fuzzy feelings. There's something very validating about being able to tangibly see your accomplishments, for good or ill. Hrm.

Here's to the next ten years.

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.

-----

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.
-----

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.
-----

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.
-----

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.
-----

Next week:
We finish off Year One with The Cold Grey Light and Modern Cowboys.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 1

BECAUSE IT WAS DEAD




“Because it was Dead” was the first of the Movie Saturday productions, and is one of only three (if memory serves) that were literally, totally, completely, 100%, produced on a single Saturday. After the brutally painful experience of writing this as a committee, we immediately decided to start writing scripts ahead of time to create a bank of ideas that we could select from on the day itself. Eventually we started to stretch that pre-production aspect even farther, although we pretty much stuck to shooting and editing in a single day. While both of these changes were for the better, I can’t help but love this project, a pure Movie Saturday from the days before we knew better.

I was selected to direct this one for two reasons.

1. I had actually directed something before, something no one else could claim.
2. It was my damn camera.

The script, as you may have guessed, started with the idea of a man in a suit walking out of the river and interrupting a dramatic scene. After a few false starts, we settled on a final conversation between two former lovers, as they sorted through the last bits of their relationship. After excruciatingly arguing our way through the script line by line, we eventually managed to hammer out something reasonably funny, and maybe even a little bit touching. At that point, it was time for casting, and I discovered that one of my casting decisions had already been made, as Rachel was the only female in the production.

I did not like this one bit. I wanted to pick and choose actors for every part. I was the director, damn it! Then inspiration struck. Why must every relationship include a woman? Thus, Devon and Marcus, the world’s saddest couple, were born.

Shooting itself went smoothly, although there was a lot more background noise than we were anticipating, which led to much more careful location scouting in future productions. Editing also went smoothly, and it was looking like we’d have a nice, early 8pm premiere.

This was not to be.

Music has been the most difficult part of every single Movie Saturday we made (except for “Sustain”, I suppose). What we expect to take three hours inevitably takes five, six, seven, twelve. . . most of the time, it’s worth the wait – but it never felt that way during the wait. There are always different reasons for the extended time frame. In this case, Jeff wrote a guitar piece that was too hard for him to play, so Luke and his magical computer had to splice together a lot of different takes. I think at one point they even played some of it at half speed, then doubled it electronically.

Fortunately, this was one of the less difficult music sessions, and we actually managed to finish the whole thing by around midnight. As we gathered around the TV, basking in our magnificence, a legend was born.
-----

WITH A VIEW




Once it was decided that we should write scripts ahead of time, we took off and never looked back. Between the four of us, Jeff, Shawn, Rachel and I churned out close to a dozen scripts in the first week. Jeff and I in particular kept attempting to top each other, and he managed to pull it off with his magnum opus “Weekend Warriors”, which was, if nothing else, bigger than any of the other scripts.

He also wanted to direct it. This was a little frightening, since it would be a ridiculously ambitious production, and Jeff had never directed anything before. We came close to taking the plunge anyway, but finally we decided that Jeff would direct one of the other, shorter, scripts this week as a warm-up for “Weekend Warriors”. The script we chose was one of mine, “. . . with a View.”

I don’t really remember why we chose it, or even what I was thinking about when I wrote it, other than the fact that one of my inspirations was Phoebe Cates’ Christmas story from Gremlins. So instead of a discussion of plot and theme, here are some random things I remember from shooting.

--Shawn got sunburned on one side of his face while shooting this.
--Rachel had to keep re-arranging the cookies on her plate to make it look full because we kept eating them.
--We lost some good takes because, as it turns out, if you wrap a microphone cord around a metal pole and stick it in the air, it acts like an antenna. Go figure.
--There was a lot of opposition to the ending, with the smile. As the man who wrote the smile, I greatly appreciate Jeff sticking with it.
--Jeff and Luke had a really exciting idea to cut the movie to the beat of the music. I hated this idea and fought tooth and nail against it. Ultimately, however, it was Jeff’s movie and Jeff’s call. Over time, my feelings have mellowed, and I am now lukewarm to it.
-----

WEEKEND WARRIORS




You may regard this as cheating, but this is not the original “Weekend Warriors” which, somehow, we actually managed to finish on a Saturday. This is the director’s cut that Jeff and I put together just before we submitted the first eight movies to the Golden Great Film Festival. The Movie Saturday Collection won the best student film prize, which I like to bring up randomly in conversations, despite the fact that there was only one other student film in competition – and that one won best student documentary.

The changes in the director’s cut are basically the removal of the first third of the final sequence and the replacement of some slow, droning bass notes with some more upbeat music. There may have been a very slight change to the opening as well, but I can’t recall for sure.

This was shot basically as four movies (the president’s opening, Cliff and Jake on the porch, Jared’s slapstick-a-thon, and the three friends sitting around talking about taco houses). I was only actually involved in the shooting of the latter two, since Jeff decided to get an early start with Cliff and Jake, and the President’s stuff was shot while I was editing the rest of the movie. Even with those scheduling concessions, it was still a struggle to get this one done. We may even have had to wait until Sunday afternoon to export and view it. Perhaps someone with a better memory than mine can confirm or deny that.

This was my first acting appearance in Movie Saturday and it turned out. . . well, you can see how it turned out. You may notice that I don’t show up in front of the camera in very many of these; if you were wondering why, here’s exhibit A. Exhibit B would be my difficulty trusting anyone else to run the equipment, which stems from an imaginary incident that occurred when I was two years old. I think my favorite part of making this movie, though, was playing Rose’s old trombone for part of the score and discovering that seven years of middle- and high-school band was not all for naught.

-----

Coming next week:
Aware
The Fallen Ninja
What You Want!
and
Sustain (probably)