Siren Productions Media, LLC

Playing Well With Others

2012-02-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

Many of us at Siren Productions have been busy working with other Florida independent film productions for the past year.

Our next project is "in talks" and an announcement will be made here as soon as it's official.

PCA Theatrical Showing in Daytona Beach, FL

2011-05-21T19:49:00.001-07:00

Psycho Chicks Anonymous will be playing at Cinematique of Daytona Beach (Florida) On Saturday, May 28th, at 10p.m.

Cast Your Vote

2010-12-02T02:12:00.000-08:00

The trailer for Psycho Chicks Anonymous is up on FUNNY OR DIE

Movie now available!

2010-11-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

Psycho Chicks Anonymous the movie is now available. It's streaming in glorious HD and best of all, it's free! All we ask is that you invite your friends to come see it.

The movie can be seen here.

For more great Psycho Chick goodness, the DVD will be available on Valentines day, 2011, chock full of commentary and bonus features!

Director interviewed on Glory Is Noise web radio show.

2010-10-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

Duckie Rodriguez will be on the special Day of the Dead episode of Glory Is Noise to talk about the upcoming release of Psycho Chicks Anonymous and what's next for Siren Productions.

Also on the episode: Former Misfits guitarist Bobby Steele gives a history of the legendary punk band, and they will be playing an unreleased Misfits album.

See the DVD cover art for Psycho Chicks Anonymous

2010-10-26T02:24:00.000-07:00

Visit our Donation Drive Page and see the cover art for the PCA DVD in the Updates section! Artwork by Daniel Byrd, Photography by Melissa Byrd.

Psycho Chicks Anonymous on DVD

2010-10-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

We've just started our first-ever donation drive on kickstarter.com to help raise funds for the DVD release of Psycho Chicks Anonymous. Donations will go toward helping with the marketing as well as getting the DVD with special features ready in time for a Valentine's Day release in 2011.

Central Florida webshow goes Psycho

2010-10-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

Duckie, Garith, and Shiva go on the air with The JB WeBB Show to talk about Psycho Chicks Anonymous and upcoming projects for Siren Productions.

Psycho Chicks Anonymous Screening

2010-09-27T10:07:00.000-07:00

On Sept. 25th the cast, crew, and select guests attended the first screening of Psycho Chicks Anonymous.

The film is currently scheduled to be released to the public in mid-November. For all the details, see the official website at www.PsychoChicksAnonymous.com.

Vote for "Intervention" at Funny or Die

2010-09-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

Our latest short film is facing the public firing squad at Funny or Die. Please feel free to cast your vote!

VOTE AT FUNNY OR DIE

Intervention

2010-09-04T14:19:00.000-07:00

Garith Pettibone directs this short film about a man with a serious addiction. Starring Steven Cardona, Mike Cornell, Jinny Jasper, and Justine Greene.

Psycho Chicks Anonymous Trailer

2010-08-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

The PCA trailer is now available for viewing.

Psycho Chicks Anonymous website is online.

2010-08-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

PSYCHO CHICKS ANONYMOUS OFFICIAL WEBSITE

The official website for our film Psycho Chicks Anonymous is now online for your viewing pleasure. Done in the style of an ARG, the site gives you some insight into the history of the fictional support group and its members.

Carl the Cameraman has his own section where actual updates on the film, such as festival entries and DVD release dates, will be posted as they happen.

You can also get official PCA merchandise on the website. T-shirts, beer mugs, and more.

"Intervention" now in Post-Production

2010-08-04T02:59:00.000-07:00

What? Submit a three minute film for the Universal Studios/Rob Zombie film contest? We're all over it!

"Intervention" marks Garith Pettibone's first time as the sole director of a film, and it's a fun little bloodbath starring Steven Cardona, Justine Greene, Mike Cornell, and Jinny Jasper.

Now in the editing room, we'll announce when the film is available for public consumption.

Psycho Chicks Anonymous is out of Post!

2010-08-04T02:55:00.000-07:00

Our first feature-length film, Psycho Chicks Anonymous, came out of the editing room last week and is now being submitted to several Florida film festivals.

The official website is due to go online later this month.

No release date yet, but we'll be sure to post it here as soon as it happens.

Interviewed About Interview

2010-08-04T02:36:00.000-07:00

(Originally published March 2009)

Interview was originally written as a stage play, but it never got produced. I had gone through a marathon vampire session watching some of the more creative vampire movies and I noticed a common thread.

Most vampire movies have some kind of variant of the Renfield character, and this character is almost always portrayed as a bumbling fool of some kind. Many times, the vampire will ultimately loose the conflict because of this character. He’s a little more then a red-shirt, but less than a major character and his flaws often greatly affect the undead guy.

So, why is this guy always around screwing things up?

Well, my job description at the time entailed me interviewing new prospects and it’s a tough job weeding out all the people who are telling me lies just to get a crappy job. I had certainly let some really embarrassingly bad people slip through the cracks, maybe vampires are just much worse.

Several vampire books and movies would refer to these ‘day-servants’ as ‘Renfield’s’, why not make that literal? A whole family line of incompetent vampire slaves?

So, Interview was born.

The premise is simple, though I did attempt to include some depth to it. For all the great juvenile sight gags, the part I love the most is the fact that Terry makes the exact same mistake that his father did. “We always learn…”. For a long time I agonized over how daddy would kill his vamp and I realized that the method I chose was just the funniest.

The epilogue wasn’t in the original script. I wrote that in a furiously fast writing session just before filming began. It just came to me one day that if the Renfield family was so incompetent, why couldn’t a Van Helsing capitalize upon that. The very day I wrote that, Garith approached me asking if the script was not obvious enough, maybe people might mistakenly think that the Renfield family did these things on purpose. I immediately handed him the script and looked like a genius. Heh heh, boy do I have everybody fooled!

So Jinny became our Mrs. Van Helsing. She was so great at character work, there was very little debate about that. Shiva thought it would be funny if I played Eugene, especially after I already played another Van Helsing. Hopefully, this won’t become a long standing tradition ;)

We got Jim in for an evening to play the Master. I have long respected Jim and he has a lot of character experience. He’s never been a straight forward actor, but we were pretty confident, and he really did play through very well. We gave him a lot of leeway to work out how he could present the character and he seemed to have a lot of fun. I gotta tell you, he is definitely a natural and I can’t wait to work with him again.

We dragged Steve in for the most difficult part, the entire Renfield family. Steve is one of those guys who pretends that he is incompetent, but honestly, he is the most calculating member of our team. He is so aware of every action he takes and it often took me a couple takes before I would pick up on so many of his acting decisions. He really knows what drives his character. The whole part was bred for slap stick and yet his work was so subtle that he would go ‘over the top’ from the most unexpected directions. He is a perfect example for demonstrating the actors role in the creative process. Aside from the acting, he also endured extreme discomfort and humiliation to get a lot of our effect shots and he got his first dancing gig, choreographed by Jinny. There were so many occasions that I was sure we ‘broke’ Steve and yet he still kept coming back, pushing himself and inadvertently pushing all the rest of us to work harder to make everything perfect.

Garith got thrown in again as yet another vampire. He doesn’t have experience with the acting process and yet he has a level of trust that is so gratifying. I ask him to go all out and he goes all out. I know he prefers to work behind the scenes, but I derive great comfort from the fact that I can ask him to get in front of the camera and he will give it everything he has. I could be really evil and feature him one day…

Heather got to play the Countess. A bit role, and non speaking. She was in fact the fourth woman we approached, and I am so glad we went with her. Remember my earlier rants about trust? Well, this poor girl was in a non speaking role doing things that would seem to be very humiliating. ESPECIALLY since she did not know how the rest of the film would turn out. Heather asked lots of intelligent questions and just went with it. She was fabulous and the fact that she never let an ego get in her way really makes her look beautiful in such a strange and disturbing scene. Heather darlin’, I definitely would like to use you in something more then just a bit part and see where you go with it.

Bill… Oh my dear Bill. Remember the cute little kid? He’s the son of one of our friends and he gets a story. His mother had worked with us many times before and when we mentioned needing a child, she volunteered him. Now, she never told Bill what was going on, but he had previously expressed interest in acting. Once he got on the set and I explained what we were doing…

Have you heard the expression about a face lighting up the room? It really happens.

The kid was so young and had no experience acting, but I remember a funny thing. I put a pencil down on the floor as his mark, and every time we cut and reset, he goes to look for the mark. I never told him to do it, he just figured out that this is what the pencil was for. I’m just sorry he had to watch Steve hang himself…

NO HE DIDN’T! Come on people! We’re not complete idiots! The only actor on set was Bill when we shot him and he was so great. Since we were going with farce, that lovely smile of his was too perfect, but Shiva suggested we get some ’sad’ faces as well…

That sad face can make anyone cry (except his mom, she knows how good an actor he is). This kid WILL be in more shows. I really want to challenge this kid to be a great actor.

Ronnie stepped in as the manservant, and what a surprise he was! He is another one of those understated guys, content to work furiously behind the scenes. Get him in front of a camera though and look out. Again, he has less experience and more trust, but he really shines so well, and the facial hair was real. This guy is so tough to work with because on the one hand he is such a dependable addition to our tech crew, but he is also so visually stunning in front of the camera. I need about three more Ronny’s and we’ll be able to really roll out the videos.

Now, for the past several weeks I have been on ‘vacation’. While ‘Interview’ was editing, I have been holding down my day job. I haven’t been completely off the take though. We have been organizing for our next several projects. Up next is a short entitled ‘Intervention’ written by Shiva. Originally written for a contest, we were already shooting something else but now we’re gonna break it out. The feature length film ‘The Haunt’ is getting some nibbles from investors and we are preparing for dropping our ‘normal’ lives to get that shot, plus we finished writing for ‘UBKiller’ which is a feature length film we are considering doing self-financing and / or micro-financing. It would be a long, slow shoot as we’d still be holding down our regular, mundane jobs.

Hope you enjoyed that bit of insight into the creative process folks!

-Duckie

The Tricky Interview

2010-08-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

(Originally published March 2009)

Interview was the first film we’ve done with multiple built sets on the same location, which meant I was switching out paint and decor every week in our barn (aka ‘The Poor Man’s Soundstage’) during production.

Because most of the action of Interview takes place in darkened environments or is shown with a great reduction of color, it did get a little tricky to decide how detailed to get with each set.

The only set I knew for certain was going to be flooded in light was Hildegard’s Room, which also had to take on the look of an old musical film set. Hunting down all the wallpaper, fabrics, and kinky little knick-knacks for the set was fun, but building the fireplace and painting the floor was particularly painful. You see, this was all being put together during the coldest week in January and after we?d had quite a bit of rain, which meant that plaster and paint was refusing to dry properly. I lost count of how many plaster bricks I had to replace on the fireplace during the week. However, I do recall praying to the Gods of Set Design to allow the floor to dry when I realised it was still tacky 3 hours before Steve was scheduled to start tap-dancing on it.

Planning out the makeup and effects for Interview was quite the task as well. Since Steve was playing five different characters, I had to figure out how to alter his appearance just enough to distinguish one from the other but still keep the family resemblance intact.

The Father character was the most difficult of the five, simply because Steve is one of those enviable folks who just don’t age. My original plan was to just accentuate pre-existing wrinkles on his face until I discovered that he really didn’t have any I could work with. So out came the rigid collodian in order to force his skin to indent enough for me to slap at least twenty more years on him. But he wasn’t the only one. I soon found out that Ron’s flesh doesn’t take traditional aging makeup very well either. I thought he was playing a joke on me by wiping off the wrinkles I drew on him whenever my back was turned. But no, the wrinkles just disappeared after being applied. I really need to find out what kind of whacky DNA mutation these guys have, bottle and market it, and use the proceeds to finance our next 80 films.

Steve got very familiar with spirit gum and crepe hair over the course of the month. We added a beard for Henry, long hair for Hildegard, and crazy facial hair for Father. Unfortunately, with all the physical activity that he endured combined with some pretty warm lights, he was constantly losing these press-on hair plugs during shooting. Yes, it wasn’t uncommon to fish tufts of hair out of bushes or props and glue them back on to his face.

There were a lot of practical effects in Interview, and what I thought would be the easiest of all turned out to be the most difficult… the sneeze hits. Who knew that sprays of goop don’t take direction well?

Originally I had a small squeeze ball filled with my special snot formula that would be aimed at Steve’s face and fired on cue. Now, here at Siren Productions we have always been firm in our resolve that we would NEVER do pornography, but 99.9% of the sneeze fires looked suspiciously like money shots. Finally, after exploring several unsuccessful methods of getting the goop to land on Steve’s face properly, Ronnie pulled out one of his home-made gadgets and the problem was solved.

The juicy explosion at the end was another nightmare, but for different reasons. As a courtesy to actors who generally wind up getting drenched in blood during filming, I use a gelatin-based blood formula that peels off easily after it cools. However, on the second night we shot the explosion the temperature was near-freezing and the warm blood cooled down at record speed. On the first take we ended up hurling a big chunk of solidified gel blood at Steve’s head.

Did I mention how much I love Steve for being such a sport during filming?

The four smoking effects were also carefully plotted out scenes that ended up being improvised at the last minute. With a crew of just seven people doing seventy different things at once, something is bound to be over-looked. Like, say, the smoke machine. Twice.

So for Father’s vampire demise, we broke out a chunk of dry ice and a pan of water, which Duckie waved around just out of camera range while Jinny fanned it with a bounce card. I believe the motto of the day was ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ CG!’.

Hildegard’s vampire was a little more inventive. During our first attempt Gwen and I hid in the coffin with a pack of cigarettes and literally blew smoke up the corpse’s ass, but it wasn’t showing up well on camera and we were hacking our lungs out to boot. Out came the dry ice again.

To create the puff of smoke called for in the script in the Hildegard scene, we just loaded the Snot Gun with tinted baby powder and aimed it at Steve. This was a nightmare to reset with two misfires, but the third time was a charm and the set looked like a Brazilian cocaine operation.

The bubbling pot in Rene’s kitchen was what prompted us into looking for dry ice for future concentrated smoke effects. The scene was shot on a whim, we had some spare time and Steve was ready to go so we literally threw the set together in a moment’s notice. To create the smoke so it would be visible to our camera, we ended up burning about 4 packages of incense simultaneously. Our closed set quickly became reminiscent of Auschwitz and our backyard smelt fabulous for about two days.

A special thanks goes out to Ronnie for building the compressed air device that will forever be known as ‘The Snot Gun’ no matter what sort of stuff we are blowing out of it.

-Shiva

A Director's view from the wrong side of the camera.

2010-08-04T02:30:00.000-07:00

(Originally published March 2009)

That’s about the best way to describe my experiences with ‘Monster Safari’ or Vampire Hunter.

After ‘Scene’ and ‘Coffee’ were in the can, we found that they were effectively going nowhere. Time and knowledge simply were not on our side. For a while, we were really beginning to question how well the video thing might be working for us. Siren Productions had done well with photography, stage plays, musicals, and performance art, but it looked like video just wasn’t going to cut it.

So Shiva pulls out an old script for a performance art piece and polishes it up. We had already learned about many things NOT to do with the two previous videos, and this looked like a good possibility. Rather than aiming for high production values, without having the skills yet, we worked on something that would be acceptible for an amateur film maker’s work. So Jake Helsing was born.

In the original piece, Jake was actually Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Back when he was still alive we would watch him with glee. His personality was so huge, he could be talking about new methods of financial analysis and we’d still be entertained. Our friends would come over every Sunday to watch Oz or the Sopranos, but we would always gather early, and Steve Irwin was a certain source of fun when that happened. Over time I would adopt his accent and mannerisms and have him hunting for all manner of things, school children, domesticated ferrets, automobiles, drug dealers… and vampires.

Shooting this so many years later was tough. Since Steve Irwin died, I hadn’t watched the show for quite a while. Trying to project his excitement while applying an aussie twang to words like ’strigoi’ and ‘nosferatu’ was a real chore, and any efforts as a director while being in front of the camera were about impossible. You could say I learned a lot about checking the dalies immediately from this shoot.

As far as how things went, it seems the stars really aligned for all of us. Gwen and Garith both stepped up to the challenges of both acting and camera. I overcame the bone weariness of my own job and actually got productive. Shiva… well, she is just madly productive no matter what.

So, I stole Gwen from Shiva. She started out just doing tech, and I really needed an assistant director. Gwen definitely has an eye for detail and an enthusiasm that puts me to shame. You’ll see a lot more camera work and directing from her.

Garith has the unenviable positions of being the sound tech, the producer, and the encyclopedia. As a sound tech he has to make our very reasonably priced equipment sound like very reasonably working equipment. As a producer he essentially becomes a go-boy with a ridiculously huge list of responsibilities. He’s got a real knack for reading something and remembering it too so whenever I need to set a mood with the lights or drive up the composition, he can quote the industry standard verbatim. He’ll also jump into any needed supporting roles too… that’s pretty unenviable also.

Shiva still remains sort of the art director, sort of the tech director, sort of the editor… but mostly she is the slave driver.

SHIVA : I don’t see myself as a slave driver, I see myself as GOD!

I bring those points up because this film is the one that really got us to discover just what our roles are. All three shoots had driven up our skills by some measurable amount, but until this short came along we still did not know how to put our skills together as a working whole.

Overall, ‘Monster Safari’ was exactly what we needed. A short that we can be proud of, and the first glimpses of where our skills could take us. By now we have experienced the good and the bad of directing films and now we are better prepared. I’m writing this just as ‘Interview’ is in the can, and I’m getting excited. I hope you are too!

-Duckie

Shiva's Safari

2010-08-04T02:22:00.000-07:00

(Originally written February 2009)

The making of “Monster Safari” boils down to being a classic example of what you can do when you are bored and have very little pocket change. While waiting around for “Coffee” and “Scene” to come out of a stalled post-production process, Duckie, Garith, Gwen, and I decided that we really just needed to get out there and do something completely in-house utilizing whatever we had on-hand. The result was “Monster Safari”.

The parody nature show script was a modified version of an old stage show that our Steel Beauties combat team performed about eight years ago. Since we live on 2 acres of beautiful Florida property, much of it left un-manicured and to the whim of Mother Nature, we felt we could pull off convincing location switches without actually leaving the comforts of home.

We like to brag about how the motto of the film is “Four days, four people, and fourteen dollars”. While we do not lie about this, it does deserve a mention that we used an awful lot of props and costumes from previous productions. Otherwise the budget would have been much higher and it would have taken us twice as long to prepare.

Our four shooting days were a delicate balance of working around everyone’s schedules and the natural kill-film phenomenon known as “night time”. This generally meant that I would spend all morning preparing the props, effects, and costumes and then literally throw people into them as soon as they pulled up in the driveway.

The first thing you see in the film are clips of Action Jake on various misadventures while the introduction music plays. These were literally pulled out of thin air as we looked around for a few square feet of land that wasn’t slated for use in any of the other segments. At one point it was just me following Duckie around with a camera while he hunted for real wildlife to catch and release. (Apparently every raccoon, deer, opossum, snake, mouse, turtle, and lizard in Ormond Beach came down with a severe case of camera shy that day.) We ended up with 20 minutes of footage of Duckie diving into bushes and coming up empty-handed.

Realizing that using actual wildlife was not an option, we staged two hat-tips to other film critters. Action Jake ends up having a close encounter with a “Tremors” Graboid-type creature and tripping over artifacts left by the Blair Witch.

Since Garith plays three different characters, the challenge was to make him look as different as possible for each of them. For the Nosfuratu segment, I changed the shape of his nose with putty, sunk in his eyes a bit, plopped a ragged black wig on his head and then doused him with gelatin slime. I whipped up two fake rats (one fresh and one bitten into) for Jake to use to use as bait.

The Goth Grrrl scene was my shining moment in the film, where I slapped on some too-white makeup and let my hair down. Duckie made some grossly exaggerated fangs for me and then crammed me into an old dog crate. There’s a reason why I don’t like being in front of the camera.

Perhaps our most realistic FX scene is the Strigoi segment, where Action Jake discovers a vampire who has been killed for his fangs. To stake Garith to a tree, I used a foam base on his chest and fitted it with a removable stake. Tubing was attached to the base and he operated the blood syringe with his hand concealed by his cape so that it could spurt when the stake was removed on camera. Garith also held a generous amount of thick syrup blood in his mouth which oozed out when Action Jake moved his head.

The last segment involved the Lamia vampire attacking the poacher and then ripping his body in half. Gwen was kind enough to step in as the Lamia and we gave her a body suit with a bunch of random fur pieces sewed on to it. Garith was also playing the poacher, so I had to figure out how to change his appearance yet again. I ended up giving him a full beard, dark glasses, and a sunburn.

The attack happens in two stages. Right after the Lamia knocks him down, she rips into the gut gag that we previously used for “Coffee” and starts pulling out the poacher’s intestines. (Yep, our pet intestine Slinky makes yet another appearance.)

After Jake and his cameraman scramble to safety, we hear a thud and discover the upper half of the poacher’s torso has landed in the foreground while the Lamia continues to munch on his lower half in the background. Originally I wanted to bury Garith standing upright in the sand and then add a huge gash appliance to simulate the torn torso. However, with rain and time constraints against us we ended up laying him on his back and masking his legs with vegetation instead. I put together an apron with a bit of skeletal spine and innards attached to it for him to wear around his waist and poured blood onto that. Gwen had entirely too much fun in the background playing with a pair of jeans stuffed with newspaper and splashed with gelatin blood.

If you’re wondering where the fourteen dollar budget came into play, it was used for purchasing video tapes and a large box of Knox unflavored gelatin. I use gelatin for blood whenever possible because it is much easier to clean up than corn syrup and it can be melted down and re-used as needed.

-Shiva

Shiva's Cuppa Joe

2010-08-04T02:19:00.000-07:00

(Originally written in February 2009)

“Coffee” was a nightmare in the special effects department. The script was written with a lot of juicy death scenes that I looked forward to creating, but I had hoped to have a little more prep time on the set to execute the aforementioned effects. All my careful planning was all for naught when the big FX shooting day was delayed by several hours due to technical difficulties with our cameraman’s car and a late arrival on the cast.

On the first day of shooting we filmed Julian’s death scene, which was simply a matter of attaching blood tubing to pre-cut holes in the victim’s shirt and pumping fake blood through them as the actor slid down the wall.

The second day of shooting was the big day for FX, and we were set to kill off most of the cast. I’d made some of the gags well ahead of time that were ready to strap onto the actors and execute at a moment’s notice, but there were two effects that were going to require a considerable amount of prep time on set. Guess which two effects were affected by the five-hour delay that day!

The simplest of the effects was when Meredith stabs Eddie in the leg, and then walks off as he limps after her. For the stab itself, we just gave the actress a cut-down knife handle to hold in her fist as she bopped the actor on the thigh. This then cut to a shot of the actor wearing the leg gag, which was a harness strapped to the leg worn under his jeans with the knife handle sticking out of a pre-cut hole. A little makeup and gel blood was added to give it a realistic effect.

The other simple gag was using a pillow fitted with a container full of blood and guts. It was strapped to the actor and covered with a flesh-painted skin that the attacker could easily punch through. To help keep everything nice and wet, I added some blood tubing to the rig and pumped the blood over the fake organs while the monster ripped into Eddie’s stomach.

By the way, that intestine’s name is “Slinky”, and we’ve used it in almost every film we’ve done to date. It’s basically a nylon stocking stuffed with dry rice and painted with several coats of latex. Slinky has been through an awful lot in the last year but has been holding up incredibly well. I’m thinking that such a hard-working prop deserves a nice new silicone skin this year.

The script calls for “Scoots” to get her throat torn out, and I had a lot of elaborate plans for building this effect right up until the late-arriving actress ran onto the set and I was told she had to be ready in about twenty minutes. So instead of a time-consuming neck appliance build-up, I literally taped two tubes to her neck with surgical tape, dappled some makeup on it, and slattered the whole thing with gelatin blood. We messed up her hair to hide the tubes that were snaked down her back, and then Gwen and I hid behind the counter and operated the syringes while Scoots gagged for the camera.

The Julian Monster was my other rush-job and he ended up looking like the Toxic Avenger’s retarded brother. Because I didn’t have the time to actually cast the actor’s face and sculpt out an appliance beforehand, I made a bunch of generic bumps and moles out of latex to stick on him while on set as well as a headpiece and some rubber arm sleeves that could be attached to his costume. I got the distinct feeling that the actor himself wasn’t keen to the idea of being in full monster makeup so I had to make the process as quick and simple as possible.

-Shiva

Scene any good movies lately?

2010-08-04T02:17:00.000-07:00

(Originally written February 2009)

A few years ago Duckie wrote this cute little parody on the movie “Saw”, which he videotaped a storyboard using stuffed animals and then set on a shelf to collect dust. Eventually Garith stumbled across the footage and thought it would make a fine project for us to begin our quest to become film-makers. It was short, sweet, and only involved three actors who were firmly stuck to their marks for most of the time. There was only one problem?

“We can’t get a bathroom.”

The project sat on hold for a while until my demented muse bopped me over the head one morning and reminded me that we had access to a perfectly good storage barn that with a little creativity and a lot of elbow grease could be magically transformed into a set. I looked around my workshop to see what I had lying around that could be used to accomplish the thing, and then I announced to the guys that they would have their bathroom after all.

Did I mention that I had about sixty dollars to work with?

The first thing I did was cover the walls with some heavy canvas fabric that I had laying around my shop. I painted it with a thin layer of plaster, and then I hurled gobs of plaster randomly at the walls to make them look old and crumbly. The beauty of this is that the more it splattered on the floor, the better things looked.

I coated the whole thing with a layer of eggshell latex paint and then splashed the walls with buckets of extremely watered-down acrylic paint in greens, yellows, and browns to give the walls the creepy moldy appearance. Once the walls were dry, it was time to build the components to make the room look like it once served a purpose.

I did mention that I only had about sixty dollars to work with, right?

The first thing I had to consider was that two of the characters had to be chained to something. Although the original script called for a bathtub, my searches through online auctions and garage sales turned up nothing that the budget would allow for. So I decided to go with a decrepit shower fixture instead, with plenty of pipes to secure the actor to.

I cut a stencil out of cardboard for the shower wall tiles and sprayed those in place first. Then I found some old PVC pipes and thick wooden dowel rods lying around, so I sprayed them metallic silver and then aged them out with a black acrylic was and textured paint before attaching them to the walls. Using some spare fragments of plywood as a base, I cobbled together some handles and a shower head using styrofoam, plastic cups, clay, and duct tape. These were also mounted to the wall and painted to match the set.

To chain down the other character, I found an old mixing container for clay used in ceramics, which I painted up to look like a water heater and stuck in the corner. After remembering the bane of any elementary school janitor when it comes to bathrooms, I soaked some bathroom tissue in green-tinted water and then slapped them over the container to hide any parts that didn’t look like they belonged.

The light switch was nothing more than a small box fitted with an electrical switch and painted to match the set. I glued a piece of wire to it and then nailed the whole thing to the wall.

To finish the bottom edges of the set, I painted up some cardboard panels to look like larger tiles and glued them to the walls as a border. To cover the top edge of the set I taped a bunch of boxes together to look like air conditioning ducts and covered the whole thing with yards of aluminum foil.

This is the point where I ran out of money.

Fortunately, Duckie was able to secure a toilet for me at a reasonable price so I was able to finish dressing the set. The toilet was hands-down the most disgusting prop I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Originally I was going to smear it down with chocolate pudding, but then the firm voice of logic reminded me that we live in Florida and have more bugs per capita than the average state. So I had to figure out a way to make the toilet look as juicy as possible without making it appetizing for the local wildlife.

I started with a piece of cardboard cut to fit the inside bowl of the toilet and painted it with crap brown paint. I glued wads of paper towels soaked in paint to the cardboard paste, and then gave it a heavy coat of gloss to give it a fresh, wet look. The result was a bit too realistic for some stomachs.

Once the set was built I had to turn my attention to dressing the characters themselves. I bought the costumes on the same shopping trip as for “Coffee” and there was very little to worry about by way of props or special effects for the film. However, I was given a lot of creative freedom when it came to the one special makeup need for the “Game Master” character. In the original “Saw” film the character has a very nasty bullet wound in his head. The only instruction I got for this parody was to “make it funny.”

So I sculpted out a sort of exaggerated pimple and gave it a big smiley face, which I then cast in latex to make an appliance to glue to the actor. Once it was firmly stuck to Phinesse, I painted it to match his skin tone and then dressed it with a bit of gelatin blood to make it look like a happy little bullet hole.

-Shiva

A Bitter Coffee Indeed

2010-08-04T02:14:00.000-07:00

(Originally written February 2009)

This was the second shoot we did after ‘Scene’. The experience can be easily paraphrased ‘have you ever run backwards through a cornfield naked?’.

We had just shot ‘Scene’ and were really pleased. It went so much faster then any of the books said it might so we underscheduled for ‘Coffee’. Really underscheduled. One unfortunate thing was that we hadn’t learned the importance of immediately checking the dailies either. Joy…

Now, ‘Coffee’ was meant to be simple. It would be a minor gore-fest with a bit of ultra-violence thrown in. We had done it all before in our stage plays and our performance art, so how hard could this be? The script was the bare minimum you could possibly describe as story, but that was okay. After all, this was just for the benefit of getting experience.

What an experience.

It all started out with the casting. We were shooting with a bunch of actors, all with very different amounts of talent and experience, who were entirely unfamiliar with any of us. I was especially spoiled when I had directed other things because I had people crawling all over one another to be in our other productions. Well, perhaps not crawling as such, but we had enough of a following and very loyal actors who were eminently familiar with what we did. A huge problem with directing is getting your actors to trust you. For every slapstick comedy, for every heart wrenching drama, a great performance depends upon an actor really believing that their director will not make them look like a complete twit. My actors were all found on craigslist, and they all had quite a bit of travel just to be involved in this. Couple that with the ridiculous gas prices, and we never really had the chance to get to know one another that well. I got the opportunity to see some very talented performances, but I could not use them very effectively.

The schedule we made was too short to begin with, but it was further compounded by all the little emergencies. Two great big holdups were a great big punch in the teeth, but every last little detail we had to attend to simply ate away at our projected time.

Speaking of projected time, how about scheduling all this in downtown Daytona when all the bikers are arriving?

Shiva gamely pushed on with the effects. This should have been a simple procedure…

Well, as if timing were not bad enough, I later discovered that a camera’s greatest advantage is equally our greatest enemy. Though it may be nice being able to focus the viewer’s attention where you want it, you must also remember that you are in fact, focusing the viewer’s attention. Ultimately it becomes a balancing act of unexpected proportions.

Finally, I mustn’t forget the on-board microphone. It is modeled after canine ears and will pick up sounds far too faint for the unaided human ear. Also like a dog’s ear, it can often ignore any dialogue directed at it. I thank Garith not only for his persistence in cleaning up the audio, but for his foresight to buy a unidirectional microphone for later shoots. I don’t have any raw footage to put up that demonstrates the original audio, but you can simulate it by watching the finished footage with bags of Doritos shoved painfully into your ears and banging your head with a cast iron skillet.

Now, Shiva reminds me not to be too hard upon myself regarding ‘Coffee’. Well, I’m not really. I did get to work with some really talented people, and most importantly, I learned. Any fault you may find in this short, I take responsibility for, and I accept that responsibility gladly. It is a mistake I will remember always, and be less likely to make in the future. I produced a musical in the early ’90’s that will never be mentioned again, but ‘Coffee’ I will remember always, and fondly… if painfully.

-Duckie

See Saw Scene

2010-08-04T02:12:00.000-07:00

(Originally written in February 2009)

Our very first video!

This was a parody I wrote that could have easily been a stageplay, except for the fact that we had moved to another town and no longer had the easy resources we once had.

This is also the first script I felt could be used in a video, so I sat down with a video camera and a bunch of stuffed animals and shot my absolutely first video. You might call that gay, but I prefer the term ‘art-fag’ thank you. The acting was pretty weak, but I did get my first bit of practice plotting out camera angles.

A year later we decided to commit to making videos. Shiva came up with a gorefest that would be fun to make and Garith pulled out my script… Scene. Perfect!

We put up an ad on craigslist and got some great auditions. We built a set and shot it and edited it and all was wonderful!

Oh, wait. No it wasn’t.

The auditions were supposed to happen at a friends coffee shop. Unfortunately, he was up too late the night before, so we were sitting in downtown Daytona trying to come up with a solution. Shiva came up with the idea to get a hotel conference room, but I didn’t like that. “Audition to be in videos! Just step into this hotel (heh heh)”. As people began to show I realized we didn’t have much choice. So, Shiva and I started walking.

Out of the blue, some crazy guy starts yelling at me. Now, I am an intimidating 6′5″ and 240 lbs. Not a lot of people run up to me yelling so I was a little bit stunned, and a little bit wondering if I could kill him quickly before he pulls a gun on me. Imagine my surprise when I realize that this is an old friend of mine from Orlando. Steve the Bald Guy. Of course, he isn’t bald at the time so I guess I can be forgiven.

Well, Steve is a really good actor and I thought I hit the jackpot. It did, just not the way I expected. He wasn’t there to audition, he was there to open up the restaurant / night club he managed, and he offered us a great space to hold our auditions.

So, auditions work out pretty darned well and we’re reeady to go. I schedule two days to shoot twelve pages and everything works brilliantly. Er, no.

On the good side, we got two extra cameras and shot three angles simultaneously. The characters were pretty much chained to their spots, the actors did well and we finished in less than one day.

On the bad side, this trashed my understanding of “one hour per page”. The performers did the best they could with the material, but occasionally it was difficult to get what I was looking for because they just didn’t know me well enough to trust my direction. I was too used to working with people who had known me for years. I still saw some incredible performances and really want to work with these guys, I’m just going to have to work at it.

So, we finished up and all was great.

One of the tapes went missing. We lost one whole camera angle! The guy editing was brilliant, but too busy to work on editing.

The best part though was that we got a perfect performance from each of the actors, even with their unfamiliarity of me and my methods.

Do I even need to lead you on? We recognized the best performances from each actor because we live a few miles from a tiny little airport. Tiny little airplanes flying overhead that you can barely hear. Unless you are a videocamera. Yeah, each time we got a perfect take, we ran with it and we found out later that every perfect take had the drone of an airplane playing over it.

Yup. Every aspect of this short was brilliant in some way, unfortunately, lack of experience meant we couldn’t actually put all those brilliant moments together.

Well, this is a parody of a film that has had 4 sequels so far. I think I can make a brilliant sequel!

-Duckie