Mondo Beacho update Monday Jan 20

Ahren Buhmann and Sarah Winsor on set
photo by Mel Cafe

I'm working on the movie theater scene and accompanying bookends, hoping to finish them up tonight.

We originally shot a different version of the theater scene inside the mighty Grand Illusion, but unfortunately that didn't work out. We reshot one scene another day back in the theater, but ended up doing the rest outside further down the Ave.

At the time, I was wondering if we'd run into trouble with the the Rat and Raven, whose establishment abutted the creepy stairwell we were commandeering for the shoot. I'd done a drive-by of the location a day earlier and it looked like they were painting outside. We were working fairly early in the day, but the local reprobates were already queuing up outside the bar across the street. A few potential problems here, and kinda/sorta no backup plan, nor desire to figure out how to do it the official way at this point.  But,  bon chance!  It turned out the painters had been painting over the signage; the Rat n' Raven had gone belly-up. (The actual rats and ravens, however, remained on site.)

Drunk on good luck, we also tried running across the street to ask the vegan restaurant next to the bar if we maybe set up our camera on their their roof, to get a production-values-friendly aerial shot. But they were in the middle of brunch and didn't want to talk to us. We ended up parking Kat's truck in the middle of the street and shooting from the back. Worked just as well.

I also spent a lot of time last week editing the band practice scene.

That was a complicated one, because the scene needs to do several things at once: show the relationships between a bunch of new characters, be cool as a band practice, and also fit in with the look/feel of the rest of the film.

For most of the previous scenes, (including the movie theater scenes) I've just been eyeballing all the footage at once and assembling it intuitively. But the band practice scene just had too much going on for that to work.

(L-R) Kenna Kettrick, Amanda Keogh, Alyssa Kay,
Zach Sanders,and Brian Wolbert on set.
photo by Mel Cafe

I ended up going back to look at how I'd diagrammed it in the screenplay for the actual shoot (go figure), and pretty much started over, but it went well after that.

It was sorta like when you're trying to figure out a technical problem and you finally decide to look at the manual.

And continuing my practice of doing everything the hard way.

But -- with the accumulated knowledge from doing it the hard way!

"Hard: my calling card"

     -- Chuck D