12 Films In 12 Months

A little while back, the Sundance Institute asked six influential independent filmmakers to each produce an original short film intended to be viewed on the small screen of a mobile phone. They’ve put them on their website and you can watch them all here.

My favorite is A Slip In Time by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who directed Little Miss Sunshine). It’s an amazing slow-motion study of slapstick comedy. They take a lot of the classic silent-era movie slapstick gags like getting hit in the face with a pie, slipping on a banana peel, etc. and shoot them with a high-speed camera. The results are beautiful and whimsical.

Altogether, I think my order of favorite to least favorite of the five films is:

1. A Slip In Time
2. La Revolucion de Iguodala
3. Reno
4. Learning to Skateboard
5. Los Viajes de King Tiny

So if you get a chance, swing by the Sundance site and check out the shorts.

Sorry about the blog silence over the last couple of weeks.  I realize I haven’t posted much recently, but film #4 is underway and on-track.  Although it will be cutting it a little tight, I’m going to be shooting the film this Sunday afternoon and then editing like crazy during the first half of next week to get it done by the end of the month.

For anyone curious, this month I’m producing the film in the style of a documentary with a story that centers on a professional April Fools Day prankster (’tis the month after all).  It should be a lot of fun.

The people have spoken! A couple of you commented that you wanted more Sven, so I give to you: more Sven. Here’s a deleted portion of his interview from the beginning of the film. Fox Clark did a great job as Sven and ad libbed this entire piece. Enjoy.

At long last, here’s film #3 of the 12 Films in 12 Months. It’s my film for March, “Paper Covers Rock”. Enjoy.

I have the picture edit finished, the music score finished, and I’m working on mixing all of the sound right now. I’ll hopefully have the film finished within a couple of hours. Of course, even though I will soon have Film #3 done, I don’t have much time to slow down. I’m now a week into April and I need to seriously get moving on Film #4.

But for now, one thing at a time: Film #3 first.

The shoot for the third film last week went great. I felt more prepared for this one then I had for either of the prior two films. I had a production schedule, a full storyboard for the whole film, and a shot-list; which all proved to be invaluable as I had more then 100 shots to get over 6 locations during the course of one day. But, thanks to some semblance of organization as well as a great cast and crew, we were able to make the schedule and get the entire film shot in a day.

The film stars Allison Welch, Fox Clark, Todd Tolson, Tom Clement, and Derek Emery. Derek also doubled as crew along with my friend Chris to slate each shot and help me stay on top of the shot-list and storyboard. My wife Christina and I filled in as extras in the crowd scenes.

We got started at 9:30am, shooting a dinner scene between Allison and Derek at my apartment. Fox showed up around the time we finished up that scene and we headed over to Journey Community Church (where Christina works) to shoot the rest of the film. We primarily shot in the middle school room, using the stage and some side rooms to create the different locations. We spent most of the rest of the day in that room shooting the majority of the film. We finished up in there around 6:00pm and went to a back parking lot to shoot the training sequence with Allison and Tom. The shoot was finished and wrapped by 7:30pm. It was a long day, but good!

I posted a few photos from the day on Flickr here. Be sure to check out the one of Fox as “Sven” posing with our Great Dane, Darby. Classic.

If you’ve always wanted to try writing a screenplay but never really felt an incredible amount of stress and deadline-inspired pressure to do so, you might want to join Script Frenzy.  Script Frenzy is an international writing event where the participants attempt to write an entire 100 page, feature-length screenplay in a month.  What it’s about or even whether it’s all that good isn’t as important as just getting writing.  It’s free to join and they have discussion forums and resources to help everyone along.  There aren’t any major prizes if you finish, just the glory of finishing and a first draft of a screenplay in your hands at the end of the month.  It started on Tuesday and goes through the end of April; so if you’re interested, sign up and get writing!

And no, if anyone’s wondering, I’m not participating this year.  I’m not crazy enough to try to produce a short film and write a feature-length screenplay in one month.

I have a full cut of the picture. The editing still needs some tightening before I call it locked and move on to the sound, but it’s looking good. Speaking of sound, it’s going to be really important in this film. There’s a lot of empty space where action is happening with no dialogue or other sounds to hold the tension so I feel like the final sound effects mix along with the musical soundtrack are going to be key in ratcheting up and maintaining the emotion.  More coming soon…

I just wanted to give an update on my film for March (yes, I realize it’s now officially April). I’m in the process of editing it and it may still take a couple days to finish. I got slammed with work over the last few days and didn’t get a chance to do much editing on the film. I’m making some progress now, but there’s still a good amount to do. I’ll keep posting updates on the progress here and in the twitter feed. Stay tuned, new film soon!