Short Films
January 20th 2003 -
Short Films
I spent most of Saturday helping out “Team” Barry, Mick, Judas and Midori make a series of sketches for a comedy show they’re putting on. It was pretty interesting. The comedy was very obvious, once again, but the acting was pretty good and the pace of shooting was just superb. These guys really don’t muck around. Everyone knows their role, and is focussed on getting things done quickly. We were finished by 4:00pm once again.
The sketches themselves were divided into two lots – one, a series of mother-in-law jokes, and the other, a cranky clown at an Australian backyard BBQ, doing a series of semi-comical interviews. Actually, some of those were rather disappointing. There were a dozen or so genuine interviews with children between the ages of six and ten. None of them went particularly well. The problem was really that the interviewer was trying hard to get cheap laughs, and the kids were pretty quickly realising they were the butts of the joke, and clamming up. There were a couple of kids who were quite open and talkative at the beginning of the interviews, but due to the poor questions (and that he would sometimes ride right over their answers) by the end one of them was near tears. Urgh.
The other big downer about the shoot was that it was so very, very hot. We were all outside, slathered in sunburn cream, and sizzling. I was holding the boom mike. Pretty hard going.
China Doll
Anna and I went to Tara B.’s farewell party, at which she gave a private showing of “China Doll”, the short film I helped out on late last year (it was the film shoot in which we got locked out of the building for three hours). The film was pretty good. Lachlan had edited it very tight, much tighter than the script had suggested, and it worked pretty well. I’m involved in two tropfest entries this year, between “China Doll” and “Single Dad”, although I haven’t had any more creative input than doing the lighting and holding the microphones. People are beginning to ask me when they can help me out with my short films. Gotta get my act together.
Ryan
I found out that Ryan, one of my friends from Baltimore and subsequenty “Society Cookery 2″, was in a car crash recently with Ben and Edwin when they were travelling around south-east asia. The others were fine – wearing seat-belts – but apparently Ryan was sitting in the back seat and had decided not to put his seatbelt on because he had bad sunburn. He was thrown from the passenger window when the car started rolling. Apparently he’s recovering at home now from the operations – they had to remove his spleen (!) and fix up his broken vertibrae (!!). I only found out yesterday, so there’s a bit of catching up to be done there…