How I spent my weekend.

Steve Delahoyde has posted a rough rough rough cut of the video we shot this weekend.

On Saturday and Sunday I had the pleasure of working with my favorite person next to all of you reading, Steve Delahoyde. Not only working with but also producing in some ways (or should I say Schadenfreude's infrastructure produced for Steve). Steve likes to work with small groups, preferably him and a long-time friend who won't get mad because it's taking too long. He's shooting this short for a film festival that would be run before each presentation at the festival. The idea is, this filmmaker (me) wakes up in the middle of the night and gets this idea. He wrangles a crew, does a casting call, storyboards, lights, dolly, camera, big production value and then in the end, all it is is a guy slipping on a banana.

So on Saturday we shot the audition scene at the Schadenfreude offices. Justin and Stephe put out a casting call to all of our current students: Baskerville and Cold November AIDS (those are tentative names while they get on their feet, no calls, please) that we were shooting a short at the office.

Getting people to help is such a pain in the ass and I never expect much except the worst. Needless to say I was SHOCKED when ten of them showed up. AMAZING! I warned Steve the night before that there may only be a couple and put calls into a couple other friends like Aaron from a previous class and Ryan from BODC labs (the guy I walk with at the beginning) and Charley & Steve who round out the crew, so that the thing wouldn't be a complete fiasco, and then was just SHOCKED as they all piled in. The joke of the short became SO much better in that the director went to THIS much trouble to shoot a guy slipping on a banana peel. Now he has a HUGE casting call. I can't thank the classes enough for showing up and being great classes on top of it (I really need to blog about them individually, the classes have been so amazing and the students twice that).

Oh, and ON TOP of that they all did so great as actors. Each one of them brought something completely different to each auditioner, there was the overzealous guy, the nervous guy, the shellshocked girl, the guy who was super upset because he fucked it up, the giggly girl, the guy who got the ONE line wrong, etc. Really top notch work. I smell more productions. I smell FEATURE.

Actually this weekend was particularly good because I did smell feature as well. Somehow Charley and I convinced the powers that be at our production company to step hard enough on the glass ceiling for us to fit a finger through and make a first step to perhaps maybe possibly starting a legitimate Development Department by letting us rewrite one of the properties the company holds which hasn't been seriously considered for development in six years. I love rewriting. I love adapting. I've only got like 100 things I can bring to a project that I'm interested in or have experience writing, and yet I've spent 8 years combining my vision with four other people's visions. So adapting feels very comfortable. Charley and I knocked out a four page treatment over the weekend (much to the shock of the President). It wasn't exactly what he was looking for (we really took the concept and RAN with it) but he gave us big props on figuring out the first act in a way he'd always envisioned.

Fun. Good weekend.