Update

We are working hardly upon the final edit of the Trouble With Unicorns, and it will be screening at the Evergreen State College COM Building Recital Hall on Wed. June 13th at 7:00 pm, with other productions of the Student Originated Studies: Media program.

A Flickr Photo-Place of Production Stills

I would bring to the attention of all esteemed readers of this blog that indeed, The Trouble with Unicorns now has a Flickr account, whereupon you can view multitudes of glorious production stills.

Before And After: Mark's Station

A great deal of time was devoted to the production design of Mark's station, relative to Morgan's station. There is necessarily a lot more going on there than at Morgan's station. The idea behind Mark's job is that he is the man in charge of monitoring the Melting Pit, and for adding more plastic when it gets too low on plastic to process. The monitoring station consists of a desk and a computer console, and various dials and knobs and technical manuals. And then of course there is the unfathomable melting pit operating nearby.

Here is a video detailing the location before production design had occurred.



Here are some pictures detailing the set after a good amount of production design had occurred.

This is the melting pit. You can see light spilling out behind it from two Mickey Mole lights connected to a DIY dimmer switch box, which enabled the lights to be slowly cycled in brightness to create an undulating glow effect.


Brad Makes some adjustments to the Melting Pit.


Morgan directs.


The DVX100A shows what it sees.


Morgan laughs with resolution.


The Panasonic DVX100A is unphased and resolute in its superiority, realizing that we are subservient to it and require it to capture the things we have created for our movie: sets, actors, performances, story, believability, et cetera.


Morgan realizes this and is afraid.


The melting pit monitor is not worried, and continues to pump out its numbers indicative of temperature.


Suddenly the DVX100 goes mad and shoots Brad autonomously.


Thankfully Dan the unicorn has the presence of mind and fortuitous will to save the day. Dan is a unicorn who came to factoryland a long time ago, and has been altered in the way that this place affects all who come here. He wears a flimsy disguise around and grinds his horn down so as to not be detected by his mongoosian fellows. Little does Morgan know, Dan has a secret weapon for him.


Morgan the director and Ron the Mongoose (a.k.a. Phillip Roebuck) comment on the hilarity of this situation.

Production Design Documentation: Morgan's Factory Station

One of my official roles on the shoot this last weekend was "Oobleck Wrangler". The premise of this fantastical factory in factoryland, is that it manufactures widgets and widget manufacturing accessories. This is slightly ironic, as the term 'widget' is actually loosely a meta-syntactic variable for a manufactured object or device. As a formic manifestation of this somewhat central metaphor of the story, we resolved to have the widgets born of melted plastic.

Morgan's job at the factory is to inspect the widgets as they are spit out by the unfathomable machine that performs this task, and to maintain the correct mix of melted plastic so that they are not malformed. Because Morgan is largely indifferent in regard to his job, he often throws malformed widgets into the accepted tube, and correctly formed widgets into the rejected bucket, the latter of which is periodically taken down to the 'Melting Pit' to be melted back down and continue the unending and inane process. The Melting Pit is where Morgan's friend Mark works.

The following video shows a little bit of the methods we used to create the 'melted plastic squirting out of nozzles' effect.



There are 3 tubes, two with colored oobleck (of a slightly more liquidy mix, in order to facilitate its travel through small plastic tubes) tubes, and one larger one filled with the normative white oobleck. Though just a simple combination of corn starch and water, oobleck is quite the otherworldly substance. Brad can be seen resolutely providing the air pressure for the squirting of the oobleck out of the nozzles, and Morgan can be heard and seen operating the camera. Jed can also be seen occasionally overseeing the goodness of the oobleck.

While our production design may be slightly less than Hollywood, created on essentially zero budget, I think that we have achieved a sufficient level to get our ideas across to a viewer in an interesting way, and that is the important issue to us as student filmmakers.

A Short Videoblog and an Update on Progress

From Wed. March 14th to Sunday March 18th the Trouble With Unicorns crew have been very busy doing production design and shooting the majority of all scenes that occur in the factory, between Mark Morgan and Ron. There was a good amount of videoblog footage shot, and production stills taken, and as we decompress from this rather intense experience, they will begin to trickle onto this blog.

For now, here is a videoblog shot with a Vidster, showing a glimpse into a shoot at Morgan's station, after our actors had left, and we were shooting closeups and cutaways long into the night.



~ written by Jed Smith

Wanted to shout about the Unicorn Crew's talent and working-their-ass-off-ism, and single out a special thanks to the make up Divas Geerah and Ashley, who's attention to detail is nothing less than sexy.


Sumner

The point (part 2)

Why I love making movies... Everyday that I make movies is a day that I don't have to be a security guard in downtown Seattle, finding junkies overdosed in the bathroom. Everyday that I make movies is a day that I don't have to clean up chlorine in an unventalated room and change dirty sheets in a motel that streams porno in all the rooms and charges by the hour. Everyday that I make movies is a day that I don't have to lift boxes of useless stuff, wait on rich people that want me to please them, sell tools for minimum wage, or put up with a bunch of bullshit paperwork that covers the collective asses of the obsenley rich people I work for. Everyday that I make a movie is a day that I start with zero... Just an idea in my head, and some friends to help, and I end up with something that can hopefully make someone think, or make someone happy, or make someone relate, or something that is beautiful. If I start a day with nothing and I end that day with one more small thing, then it was a great day...

Morgan writer/director

PS here is a quote from Alfonso Cuaron "The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one." Thank god someone else thinks that...

The point

When is a movie about specific people, people in general, or types of people? Is my movie about the characters? Or is it about types of people? When a character makes a decision, am I saying that this person made this decision, or am I saying that all people make these types of decisions? Where is that line drawn?

Morgan

What we did today...

As Brad and Jed were chasing after Venu, who posed in front of rubble and Nordstrom's storefronts, I felt that I had realized what we were doing and how beautiful it was. I saw my friends and my collaborators doing their work, making the movie happen. I saw them trying their hardest, expanding, doing uncharacteristic things, learning to work together, changing to work better within the group. I saw the unbelievable level of permission we were giving each other, and how amazing it was that we were letting each other work, and try to create something beautiful together. I think this is a rare thing. Today wasn't about the movie. Today was about us being ourselves, finding a place in ourselves and in the group were we could truly let our insides show to the world. We found room to create today. We found a place where we were OK with who we were and what we were doing, no matter how ridiculous it seems. And this incredible thing made me happy.

Morgan