Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Blame it on Rodriguez

So, we have decided to make a film, and granted that we have no experience, but we do have what the Cylons on Battlestar Gallactica have; a plan, sort of. Being a big fan of the first half of Desperado, I read up on the young director. He had said that (and I'm paraphrasing) to fake a big budget film when you have a small budget, shoot from many different angles with one camera. So, a few years pass and then with digital cameras and editing systems being so cheap, we decide to enter into the film forest. We decide to do a genre film, a horror film, because you don't need stars. You don't do it for the Oscar. And then we decide just before shooting that we should use green screen to control the lighting and the backgrounds, and a turntable to fake panning shots. And also, I hated the idea of doing a story board so we canned that. I'm lazy. As we have a theatre, we turned the space into a studio. Problem was the actors hated the green screen, and nothing seemed as real, so we ended up doing a lot of location shots. We filmed for three weeks and probably as of now have thirty percent of our film shot. The scheduling was awful, trying to get the actors together, because of real paying jobs or vacations or school in other cities, but in our hiatus we discovered Rodriguez's ten minute film school which I think is much longer than his five minute film school. This gem was on youtube.He was saying that you don't need a story board, and green screen can cover up for impossible schedules, Even if the actors never meet each other, they can be edited into the same scene via green screen. With Sin City and Terror Planet, it was primarily green screen. He also had a cheap looking turntable which inspired us to build one. Where once Hollywood would use big studios, big stages, they then moved toward locations, and now we have come full circle. You can do fantastic work in tiny stages with green walls. The studio is back. We're not the brightest light bulbs because we can't think of a name for our horror classic. It has something to do with Satan and claustrophobia and madness, oh yeah and blood and gore, but we can't think of a name for our film. From Dusk til Dawn is already taken, but it would be appropriate because it is during the night shift when things start to claw at our characters' sanity. So if anyone out there can come up with a name for our film we would be very grateful, and we would even put your name in the film as the person that thought of the title. We have lots of room. Our crew is very small. No one stands over five foot six.

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