A short narrative about a short narrative

This is a blog in two parts:

This is our new priority list. I am going to get a huge poster of it made and hang it where ever we are shooting so that we can remember what we are here for.

1) We are here to learn first and foremost. We are here to make mistakes, take responsibility for our mistakes, figure out how we made them, write them down so we don't have to make them in the future.
2) We are here to have fun. What in this script is not fun? How can you not have fun with unicorns and mongeese and strippers and angst?
3) We are here to finish the movie. Not half of the movie, not a few scenes. We need to finish the whole thing one way or another.
4) We are here to make a good movie. This is going to require your best. Your very best. None of us has ever done anything this big before, none of us could do it alone. Give it everything.


I want to give you all a short recap of what has been happening with us. Sorry it has been a long time since I have written, but it has been hectic beyond belief.
So, Brad, Jed and I had storyboarded the whole script, thought up shots, figured out how to visually piece the whole thing together, made a format map for our multiple format conceit. We were worried about the length of the piece since it seemed that it was going to end up at an awkward length, about 45 minutes. So we decided to do an anamtic. This is a device where you basically scan the storyboards, or make small simple animations into a timeline – insert some scratch dialog – and boom, you have a sketch of your movie. But our storyboards were drawn so poorly that this would seem incomprehensible to any audience. We decided that it would be advantageous to do our anamtic with a motion picture camera, incorporate a series of test (format, color, blocking etc.) into it and we would have a clear picture of how long our movie would be.
This is where our major troubles began. First, during the production of our sketch, one of our major actors quit (the antagonist). And then our Production Manager quit. Then we made our sketch and were embarrassed to watch it. We knew that even without performances and production design there were some major flaws in our plan, in the script, in the cinematography, everything. One of the main probles was that we were interested in one dimensional characters - playing with how memory compresses people into stereotypes, explorations of serious material colliding with flippant metaphors and childish interpretation. Instead of coming off as a twisted children’s show, we realized that our main character was just an asshole, our antagonist was just a lonely, worthless person, and our love interest was a drug addict whore with no personality. Indeed we knew this before we began to shoot our sketch. But it was hubris to think that we could do the exact opposite of what a “good” narrative was supposed to do and make it engaging. Indeed our scathing critique seemed like bargin basement student rubbish.
So this is where it started to get intense. Brad, Jed and I started rewriting the script. Our unholy optimism made us think that we could do this in a weekend, but the first 20 hours were required for brainstorming and note taking. We didn’t even write a single change into the script!
And then it crossed our minds that we could write the script and storyboard the movie at the same time. It didn’t work at all. We got two pages in after 8 hours and decided to quit before we killed each other.
So we have been locking ourselves in a room, typing and typing, expanding ideas, moving things around, suggesting character changes etc. And it has been working. This script is good! Really good! But it has been slow. And we aren’t even completely done yet. And we think it needs three more scenes to make sense. And that is probably going to make it a feature.
Now, this whole time we have been preparing for the shoot that was supposed to take place this weekend. But Ashley, our Art Director was away in Thailand for a month and has just gotten back two weeks ago, and Geerah, our other art director has just gotten back from a month in Texas. It turns out that a few days is not long enough to prepare for a shoot (this project is art design intensive, it being a kids show and all).
So we pushed the shoot, no doubt freaking out our actors even more. We sat down today and agreed that we were going to make this movie, against all odds, and that we were going to work ourselves ragged to do so, because the only other option is to quit, and we aren’t going to quit.
We still don’t have a PM, we still don’t have a locked down schedule, we still don’t have a lot of locations down, and we still don’t have a full script. But I have heard a rumor that this is not the first movie to have things go wrong with the production.
I don’t want to make it sound like there is no hope. I have nothing in my heart but hope for The Trouble With Unicorns. It is crucially important to get this out into the world. There are 6 dedicated talented and smart people working on this day and night and at this point we don’t have any option but to make it happen and make it happen the best that we can. We are not prepared to compromise anymore. We are shooting for the moon.

Morgan - writer / director

DIY Steadicam

Here lies a short videoblog about the DIY steadicam Brad and myself constructed from parts from Ace Hardware a sporting goods store. The pipes and fittings are from the former, the weights are from the latter. It contains an explanation of what the parts do, and a visual demonstration of what effect it has on footage shot with it.

~Jed: Cameraman, Editor, Postproduction, technological helper monkey.

Screen Tests - Production Stills

The following are some photographic images of the things we have been doing for the last few weeks.


Last week, we did extensive motion and lighting tests with a large variety of different video cameras. Here, we see Brad poking a Fusebox, a small kid's camera, which records in 320x240 highly compressed video onto internal flash memory at 10 frames per second. This may sound like atrocious quality, and that is one way of looking at it. We are of the possibly valid opinion that the artifacts of this format lend it a very interesting aesthetic, which is we think about it right, could be employed to a specific conceptual representational purpose. One must admit that this small camera looks rather formidable on the large fluid-head video tripod that we got from the audio-video equipment checkout facility at Evergreen, Media Loan. These tests are absolutely essential with the large variety of different cameras we are shooting with. Without these tests, Brad and myself could not do our jobs as cinematographers, because we wouldn't intuitively understand how each camera performed under different lighting conditions, and also we wouldn't be exactly certain about what representational purpose is most suited to each format, because we wouldn't be sure of its specific aesthetic properties.




Last week, we scouted some locations. These images are from a hidden alley in downtown Olympia, and is a candidate location for the Alley in front of Morgan's apartment, in which 2 scenes happen.



For the last week and a half, Morgan and Brad and Jed have been working on intensive revisions to the Trouble With Unicorns script and storyboards. We have been using the Animatic we created as a device for making problems with the story more transparent to our eyes, which are tainted with the nearness of creative involvement. This has been going very well, and the revisions we are making to the story is making the movie significantly better in many ways.


Morgan types revisions into CeltX, the free scriptwriting software that we are using.


Morgan has a moment of bursting inspirative ideas


This weekend we have been shooting screen tests with our actors, seeing how their makeup looks under different lighting setups and gels, and seeing if our makeup/costume designs are working as we hope they are.





Ashley, our amazing production designer and makeup artist, delves into her large collection of cosmetic resources. Makeup and costumes are an essential aspect of this production. A few days ago, Ashley made a trip to the Mac store, and spent 300 dollars on some excellent makeup, to bolster her supply of cosmetics that she acquired while in China during the previous month.


Ashley with our actors who play Sarah and Morgan, Julia and Venu.


Here is a closer shot of Venu, who is having a Happyland style makeup job applied by Ashley.


Here is some mongoose style makeup on Julia. This costuming is not quite complete, but we got an idea of how the makeup will look under different lighting setups. Before our first shoot, the Mongoose costumes will include a possibly large amount of Badger fur and faces.


Here is some makeup tentatively being applied to the face of Phillip Roebuck, our actor who is playing Ron. Phillip is one of our more experienced actors, and it is great to be working with him on this production.


Here Phillip talks to Morgan.


Here, Brad takes a brief respite of Nicotine inhalation.

Hopefully this post serves as a somewhat interesting visual proof that indeed, all is not stagnant in the way of progress in Unicorns land.
~Jed: Editor, Cameraman, techno helper monkey

Updates...

So some new developments on the production front. We gained a production manager. That made us all cry collectively out of joy… then we promptly lost them which made us all cry collectively out of pain and anguish. We lost one of our main actors only to have them replaced by what I think will be a much better fit.
We shot the movie. Well we shot a sketch of the movie. Meaning that we went through our script and storyboards and tried to get every shot we could over the span of four horrifically grueling days. This was, of course, all the week before our class came back from break. This sketch has proved to be utterly necessary in understanding the movie that we had planned to make. Parts of this sketch was screened in our Student Orientated Studies: Media class. This was an eye-opening experience in that a lot of our gags fell flat, some of our scenes just didn’t work the way we though they would, and one of our main characters caught a lot of flak during the critique session after the screening. This and many other factors have led us to the conclusion that the script needs one last definitive rewrite. So the rewrites have been mostly about us throwing out ideas on how to spice things up. The rewrite have consisted of Morgan, Jed and me holed up in Jed’s room as he types madly as we all go back and forth. It has been great. Collaborative writing and brainstorming at its best. So… yeah I am going to go over to Jed’s house today at nine o’ clock and cook everybody some blueberry pancakes while we work through the rewrite.

Brad Hutchinson - Producer/Cinematographer