This is the first half of a short film I and some of my friends made, and I’m spam posting it to drum up views and feedback. Click link to watch and enjoy!
On the lighting and sound:
I blame large sections of that on the crappy gear we had to use, my buddy the direct-TOR! liberated it from his school film lab and it spent the entire three day shoot trying to committ suicide. We had to throw an entire night sequence out because the lighting was so off…consider the import of that statement in light of the footage we wound up using.
What made it even worse was that our night shoot at the local motel got interrupted by a mentally challenged homeless guy who wandered up and started pestering Brandon’s (the bald guy) girlfriend and the director’s sister. We called the town police to come move him off our set, and kept him pacified with pizza till they showed up. All for nothing.
On the fight choreography:
That’s what I really wish we had more time to work on, I had a long grappling sequence of armlocks, escapes, sweeps, chokes…and it got thrown out in favor of “he throws sand in your eyes and you fall over.”
FEH!
At least the big knee strike didn’t turn out that bad. It was supposed to look like the infamous tooth remover from the Diego Sanchez-Karo Pareysian fight.
It was an intentional choice. Kevin’s low paying job and horrific hours have alienated him from the rest of society to the point that he can barely express basic human emotions…
Actually the big problem for me, since the only thing acting I’d ever done was local stage theatre, was that on stage you play towards the audience, which I translated into playing straight for the camera, which is a big no no in film.
The strain of trying to NOT keep myself turned towards the camera guy left me with very few brain cells free for, say, toning down my natural accent (yes, that is EXACTLY how I sound in real life.)
The knife was supposed to be much better established…Brandon and Jon (the director) came up with a whole series of flips and twirls for me to do with it at the beginning of the movie, but that got cut the 3rd time I hit myself in the face trying it.
(Movie magic: If you wrap enough scotch tape around a knife blade, it makes it almost impossible for your idiot lead actor to cut himself with it, and it’s all but unnoticeable if you’re shooting on low quality film.)
And yes, those were actual products…the people who owned the little store/gas station/motel were nice enough to let us take it over for three days.
[quote=Snake Plissken;2439648]Good work, Vince. I liked it and you could tell you guys were having fun shooting this.
So, what’s next?[/quote]
Well I have a longer script for a full length MMA film that we were going to make but it’s been put on the back burner since I got into law school and Jon started playing with his new band.
Jonathan-the guy who directed, filmed, edited, and posted the movie on youtube-said the views went way up since it was posted on Bullshido, and wanted me to thank everyone who took the time to watch it.
But, yeah, the dialogue sounds fairly forced.
Also: you shoulda been wearing boots, seeing sneakers on the bench top totally threw me off after hearing that accent.