Tender Threads 2 part 2
A full year has passed since my previous half-finished post. What a funny thing. We had another one of those babies, which probably explains a lot. Babies eat a lot of your time and life force. I like this new guy, though. He’s pretty good. Smiles and laughs a lot. A good healthy size. Fat.
Anyway.
Tender Threads 2. We arranged to shoot it on a Saturday and Sunday. Steven came over on the Saturday morning, we did some prep work. Had lunch. Started shooting some insert shots and little effects sequences. I’m not sure why we thought this was the most critical step. In hindsight, it wasn’t a highly motivational way to start, because there isn’t any way to build momentum, get into character, get a sense of the piece. Just closeups of different bits and bobs. The logistical failing aside, I’m pretty happy with how some of this work turned out, in particular the sequence of a bone saw cutting into a human arm, accomplished by running pink super sculpey through a pasta roller and then wrapping it around a balloon filled with fake blood (which tragically failed to burst, though the squishiness and transluscency still added to the look).
Afternoon became evening. We struggled desperately with the logistical nightmare that is trying to film a puppet that requires at least one operator (but ideally 2), along with a human actor, with a cast and crew totalling… 2 people. We over extended. The dialogue as written was taking too much time and space. The evening wore on into night, we became exhausted. We broke for the evening, and I tore up the script. Removed whole sections of dialogue, two scenes. Aggressive trimming. As they say in the world of startups, I was trying to define the MVP - minimum viable product.
The next day, we reconvened. Steven brought along his girlfriend Lori. Having a single additional teammate made a huge difference (the difference between success and failure, really). We ran through the new script in way less time (reshooting most of the previous day’s dialogue scene as it had been restructured to be shorter and accomplish some beats that had been previously taken on by now excised scenes). All necessary footage in the can, I began editing into the night, and again in the morning.
With a rough cut available, Jennifer started composing the music on the digital piano that sits in the back of our kitchen (3.25” floppy drives and broken keys and all) and started to compose the score for the short and the behind the scenes video while I watched the kids.
A very sleepy day later, and I recorded the behind the scenes video alone in the garage at night (hard to nail the focus flying completely solo – and I didn’t), finished editing the behind the scenes video and final touches of the main video by morning, had Jenny review them, made adjustments, and submitted around 8am. And then I went to sleep for two hours.
After that, Jenny, young James and I went to Rocky Point Park for our annual anniversary walk while I tried not to start hallucinating.