Sweet Recognition

http://www.mvvfest.org/

Our little movie has made it into the Mid-Valley Video Fest!

It will be screened on Friday, February 23, at 4PM with other "family friendly" shorts (at this time, I'd like to thank S.H. for nixing the "fuck" in one of the lines of dialogue).

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070201/LIFE/702010310/1059

According to the above article, there were 102 entries, and we still made the cut. Cool.

m

It's done!

Hooray!

The film is done!

We are scheduling screenings, so watch for times here!

We are entering contests!

Yippee!

m

Rough Cut v2

It's been a while since the final day of shooting...actually, it's been an entire month!

Plenty has happened to the film since then, but most of it has been Shaun's work, not mine. He has put together two rough cuts of the film. Since then. He put the last one in my box two or three weeks ago, and I hadn't looked at it until today. In my own defense, we had a baby alpaca born (2 weeks early) the day of the final shoot who took up a lot of time and TLC. That excuse works for about a week. I also have two online classes that have started in the last few days which required some time to prepare for.

The rest of the time the film was just at the bottom of the pile of things to do.

ANYWAY, I have now viewed the latest rough cut. I must say, it is fun to watch! The film runs about 10:30 as it stands now, which is about what we figured it would run. I love watching it in order, since before we were only watching scenes as we filmed them. The story actually makes sense on film; I was a little afraid that there would be continuity issues. There aren't. Hooray!

Shaun and I disagree on how the opening of the film should be structured, but that's our biggest disagreement (of the whole shoot, actually). At the moment, the film opens with scenes from the film intercut with the titles. I think that interspercing the titles with the opening scene (a long-duration shot of a plant in the window with "morning sounds" in the background) would be better.

Originally, we had thought of using a montage of scenes from the movie that had been interpreted by an artist somehow for the opening/titles. We decided that we were too impatient to do this.

I'm thinking about the opening, and I'm going to make my husband, Charles, watch it to see what he thinks of it.

Shaun is probably right, anyway. :)

m

Final shoot

**I have come back to this post to add some details about the shoot 8/29/6**

I will re-edit this with more info about the final day of shooting, but I am tired because I got home at noon after shooting since seven and then spent the rest of the day delivering an alpaca baby (see him at my alpaca blog). I'm pooped.

Here are some pictures of the shoot to amuse you while I'm recovering:

**This is David, Shaun and Katie in the "Pam's" apartment (actually Doug Smith and family's house).

**Kerry, Shaun and Katie in the kitchen of Doug's house. They are setting up the sound for the phone/answering machine scene in Pam's apartment. The kitchen appears very briefly in the film.

**Shaun, David, Kerry and Doug's daughter (whose name I never remember) in the "dirty" apartment. Shaun's wife Anne-Marie (our artistic director) and I made the room messy with 90's era magazines, books and stuff. It was fun.

** One shot of the mess poor Ashley has to pick up in the film. The idea was to make it look like Jeff had been sleeping on the couch without making it screamingly obvious that was what he was doing. I really like the shots of the mess that are included in the film. We even had Doug's family skip doing dishes from the night before so that we could include the dirty dishes in the film. We borrowed Doug's boots, too (lower right corner). They were too perfect.

I was supposed to go to Shaun's after lunch to watch the raw footage from the day, but that was when little Willie (the alpaca) decided to arrive, so I joined Shaun later that week to see the footage and his first rough cut of the whole film. I like watching the film, so I hope that means it will be entertaining for other people. :)

That's all for now.
m

Locations finalized

Katey's place = Ashley's place

We have finalized our locations: Ashley's apartment will be our actor Katey's apartment, and Pam's house is our friend Doug Smith's place. We finalized this the day before we needed to shoot scenes in Ashley's place. (rolls eyes)

Doug's Place = Pam's place

We shot the evening scene at Ashley's apartment on Wednesday.

opening shot on plant in widow

Kerry and David setting up the shot at Ashley's

Shooting on Wednesday went well except that it was wickedly hot in Katey's apartment. Here in Oregon, we can usually count the above-ninety degree days on one hand per summer, but this year it's been warm for a long time. We had to close up the apartment to keep the noise down, and turn on the halogen light, so we were cooking by the time we were done. I felt sorry for Katey who has a curtain of black hair, which I know from experience is hot.

Saturday, we are going to shoot the morning scene at Ashley's and the scene at Pam's place. I am going to miss this shoot because I will be at "Pam's" place setting up the props, etc. with Anne-Marie.

We are nearing the end!

Final week of filming

This is going to be a busy week, although we don't have a very firm schedule yet. I think this kind of scheduling would drive more A-type people crazy, but our crew is really mellow and seems to be fine with it.

Today (Tuesday), we are going to look at a couple of different locations for the apartment shoots this weekend. That's right, last weekend of shooting, and we have yet to decide on locations. Funny, huh?

Anyway, we're going to look at two places today, and, I assume, make a decision. We are probably going to rely on friends' and actor's apartments for Pam and Ashley's places. We have such understanding friends and actors!

Tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, we are probably going to shoot something involving the apartments. The day and shooting schedule are tentative, relying on a number of things, but we need some evening footage.

Finally, on Saturday and/or Sunday, we are filming Ashley in her and Pam's apartments.

Boy, this is a loose schedule. It's a good thing I have basically nothing else going on.

Oh, and I bought two plants as candidates for the opening shot of the film. This shot frames the plant in a morning window, and the shot is repeated later in the film.

In a day or so, I'll have a list of things I need to remember for the final shoot, but I haven't even started one yet. I will begin to worry soon, I suppose. Until then I go blithely along.

Sound

Last Saturday, we collected all the actors together to record the answering machine tracks for 5 Cups of Coffee. This took place at my house, which is way out in the country at the end of two miles of gravel road. It is always a challenge for people to get here, even though my husband has the directions down to the odometer click. Two of the actors and our sound guy got lost along the way.

This at least gave me some time to play with the answering machines I bought for a total of $8 at Goodwill. One of them never did work right, even though I downloaded the manual off of the Internet (God bless Google).

Once we finally had everyone assembled, we were able to lay down the tracks. First, we left the greetings which consisted of mostly, "Hi, this is Pam. Leave a message."

Then we left messages. My house has three phone lines, so we were able to attach the machine to one line and call from another. We recorded the whole thing onto Shaun's computer from clicks, whirs, and messages. Actually, we all agreed that the machine sounds were pretty darned cool. You don't get that with voicemail!

One kinda weird thing was that I had to direct my mother, Mij Bradley, who is playing, oddly enough, the mother. My mother is very expressive and dramatic, even though she's never done much on stage. However, we had to wean her from landing on her lines and projecting like a stage actress. And, like I said, it's weird directing your mother.

Everything came out sounding great, and Shaun has lots to work with when he pieces this together. Somehow we are going to use the recordings during the shoot this weekend so that Katey (Ashley) has something to react to during the scenes.

We also watched the first edits that Shaun has put together. It's very exciting to see all my little characters brought to life in such an ultra-cool way. I like this script-writing thing!

An answering machine

Much of the plot development of the script for 5 Cups relies on the answering machines. I thought I had two answering machines. I can only find one that doesn't look like it was made last week (the aesthetic of the film is circa 1988-93 or so, so the wireless phone/answering machine combo in my kitchen isn't going to cut it). My mother thinks she has one in her house, but she can't remember. If worst comes to worst, I'm going to Goodwill on a quest to find a 15 year old working answering machine.

Film is such a funny business.

maren