It started with a question, "You want to be in the 48 hour film festival ?" I was asked by my old editing friend and David Lynch like filmmaker, Steven Escolar. Without even thing about it I blurred out "Fuck yeah, I do." This was Stevens first 48 hour film fest. I had some pervious experience from my film school days at Full Sail. I kinda knew what we were up against in this competition. 48 hours to come up with a script, get actors, get locations, shoot the movie, cut it, and deliver your master piece (or piece of shit) before the clock runs out. In other words " FILM FUCKING MADNESS"
Steven submitted the cash to enter in the festival. There was no turning back. Steven would Directed, while I would do the Cinematography. We later decided to get the most out of it and both shoot, since he owned the Canon T3i and I had the T2i.
I then pulled a favor and asked my friend Alex Alvarez to work sound for us. He had gear for sound, which included a boom mic, mixer and H4n Zoom recorder.The three us were basically the crew. Steven's mind was going a mile a minute once he got the paper work from offices of the festival. They gave us a genre, line to say, and a prop that we had to use. I got the text from Steven saying "We got period piece for the movie...Fuuuk". Fuck indeed I thought. We later spoke over the phone and told me that our prop was a ketchup packet. Our one line that had to be in the movie was "Say it like you mean it" What a line.
While talking over the phone, Steve's mouth was spilling a river of ideas that came at me like waves. Some of his ideas were good ( even cool) but not practical. We had a short amount of time to produce this movie. I told Steven to keep things simple, keep the amount of actors small and keep the location to one or two. Most of all I told him to not complicate the story(laugh).
Steve got started on coming up with ideas. I dont think he slept at all that night. On top of everything, Steven had a 9am call time to shoot some models for a promotional AD. Alex and I woke up early as well to scout locations on a separate project.
Later, we geared up met up around 6. The rondevu point was at the Metro rail out in Hialeah. Steve was there with Anthony Paez, both looking like they came off the Reservoir Dogs set. I was armed with my T2i with a pistol grip handel and View finder.Couple of extra actor arrived to who where friends of Steven and were willing to help out. Our main actor and actress. Amber Blepp was a co work at the at mine and Steven's day job. She and her boyfriend,Matt Ruffini, played the leads. Steve had a rough story written out but no lines. He worked with actors to come up with some sorta dialogue and explained his rough idea. While in the parking lot, I noticed the Metro rail security was already giving us dirty looks as we were working on a plan.
We had no permit to shoot at the location so we kinda needed to be sneaky with filming. We did how ever get caught a couple of time by security, who had nothing better to do but to hassle filmmakers. Our excuses were that we where shooting promo photos for a band. They sorta bought it. Me and Steve were stealing shots left and right. I was mostly shooting extra coverage and B-roll while Steve focused on directing while shooting the main parts of his story.
Steven story was simple yet complex. It was mostly about a guy who was wanting to talk to a girl he saw at a train station. What made it complex and even weird was this "Pig man" character, which I still don't know what his roll in the movie was or what he symbolized.To Steve it all made sense.
Once we finally got pass the train fair (which was a pain in the ass btw) we filmed some moments at the station. It was tough to film inside the train. We had to deal with pedestrians that were coming on and off the train while going over the scenes. Continuity? What continuity? We had no script supervisor (barely a script too). We sorta just winged it and tried to keep everyone besides our actors out of focus or out of frame. The train was shaky and would frequently stop with out warning once it reach a station. I almost fell on my ass plenty of times during shooing and almost mashed my lens.
During one scene in the movie, Matt Ruffini (main actor) used the ketchup packet and squirted it on his wrist. Matt's character does this so he can attract the attention Amber's character into talking to him.Because we all know the best way to impress a girl is to appear suicidal. We took only one take of Matt applying the ketchup to his wrist but in two different angles. Since we didn't think out getting any napkins to wipe the ketchup off, Steve took the sleeve of his black jacket and wiped it off. He had a glob of ketchup on him while shooting. Once we made it to our next stop, Steve stepped out to wiped the glob off on some rail at the station. The doors closed on him moments after. I managed to prie open the door so Steven could slip back in. "We almost lost you there, dude" I said to him.
We kept on shooting till 1am. Our last shot was a car mount shot. Steven had the gear for the set up and we used my camera with a Fish eye lens I had in my bag.The shots came out pretty cool. After a couple of takes driving around the block, we called it a wrap. Steven looked beat but wasn't going home to rest. Instead, Steve went to the office and started processing the footage to pro res. The next day, I met up with him at the office at 12pm. He had stayed up all night and started working on a rough cut on the picture. I sat right next to him at my desk and started making special effects he need for the look. he wanted to make the movie look like it was old VHS tapes. I also got to work on an logo intro for our group, 2880 Films (see blow).
We spent most of the rest of the day rushing thru the final edit. We also shot some more weird "Pig man" shots to splice in to the movie. At the end the rendering is what really killed us. The effect and look we wanted for the film had to be cut out completely. Steve rushed out of the office to deliver the movie to 48 hour film group. We made it in the festival but we weren't satisfied with the final results. If we only had more time to cut. Either way Im glad that we did the movie and had fun doing it. Screening for the movie "Rough Cut" will be August 5th.
