For film #11, I decided to do a sci-fi thriller called “Skytalkers”. The premise for this film is one that my wife, Christina pitched to me a couple years ago (in fact she’s already got Skytalkers 1, 2, & 3 planned out…) based on a story that she and an old roommate came up with. To give it a big, epic action feel on a very small budget and to break up the style of story-telling and editing that I’d done on my other films, I decided to produce this film in the style of a movie trailer. That way, I could just concentrate on getting moments of action and drama and not have to tie them into one point-by-point narrative. I could use a lot more montage to create the story rather then dialogue and continuity editing.
I shot the footage over three different days (shooting a couple hours a day) with different actors on each day. It started on a Monday, shooting some scenes with Holli Bibler (who was also in Eliza’s Last Day). I shot a lot of close-ups and dramatic takes. We had to find covered areas to shoot all of her scenes because it was raining that day, but it worked out and I got some good shots.
The next day, Tuesday, I had a four hour shoot with Chris Davis and Fox Clark. It was the one day that week that it was not supposed to rain and thankfully, it didn’t. Fox has been in a number of my other films this year and Chris has been part of them, but always behind the camera, never in front of it. I thought it might be fun to put him in front of the camera for a change. We started the shoot in the parking lot of a local church and then went out to UCSD to shoot the majority of the footage. I chose UCSD because I knew that I could get a large variety of architecture and locations within a small area and therefore be able to give the impression of a much larger movie with more expanssive settings.
Finally, this last Saturday, after shooting film #12, I shot a few extra pick-up shots with my brother, Blake for one scene at the beginning of the film.
I uploaded a few pictures from the shoots to Flickr here.