weekend eleven: picking up the pieces

We continue to carve a little further into the stone as the weekends pass us by, turning faded greens to vibrant yellows, reds, and blushed orange. Our "rock," as it were, has yielded an impressive amount of talent, laughter, camaraderie, and (at times)even genius. --Or in "plain English," we've had another successful weekend of filming on Divine Manipulation of the Threads.
The series of shoots that took place Saturday, marked another set of hurdles to overcome through brainstorming creative measure. I would like to think that instead of merely jumping or running around these migrane-inducing obstacles, that we could blow those motherfunkers to pieces or set them on fire and ram through them with a motorcycle. However, I think that we managed quite well dealing with the warehouse location no longer having a power source, the wind picking up to the force of hurricane gales, and an "extra" that showed up forty-five minutes late and instead of waiting for his moment to shine in the film, decided to leave five-minutes later... never calling or showing up for the later shoot (I've gone over what I think of this particular kind of behavior, so I'll spare all of you the diatribe for now). The night shoot at the warehouse will be even more of an adventure I'm sure...
As I had mentioned, the wind outside was a little bit heavy. Had my hand not been on the camera, the wind would have tossed it crashing to the ground... and I'm sure that Anthony would have killed me without even questioning the rationale. Thankfully we weren't going to use too much of the audio from the shoot because... well, it's kind of ruined. We'll probably cover it all up with music when we edit the scene together. Forrest was quite brave to walk around the warehouse sans shoes. His feet were covered in a dusty mixture of dirt, dust, dead mice, dead pigeon, feces, homeless people, and frenchfries. Some of us managed to inhale so much of the dusty crap into our collective sinuses that I really thought that I was going to come down with some long forgotten version of the avian flu. When that stuff gets whipped around into gusts of wind, then blows into your nose and eyes... you just know that something bad is going to happen. If I come down with cancer or some undetermined virus or disease... I'll know why. I went through the day forgetting that I had a goatee precisely carved across my face... that looked really stupid (in my humble opinion-- even though it did make me look like a movie villain). I was happy to shave it off. I'm not a mustache kind of guy.
Sunday we managed to knock out some "pick up shots" that involved a voice over montage. I also shot a scene with my brother Bo, taking on his role of "Mac the Crackhead" once again. Later in the day I polished off another rough cut scene that had all of us rolling on the floor with laughter. I don't know if anyone will catch any of the dialogue on this film. The laughter is more than contagious...
Christine has the rest of the weekend shoots scheduled out (with all hopes that we'll make the days and everyone will be able to keep the schedule) so that we WILL be finished by the end of the year (or early January... we've got a few things to tweak in post that I know will take a fair amount of time). So, we'll keep working on it and hope to get it out for the viewing public as soon as we feel that it's ready. Peace and chicken grease.

HERE ARE YOUR THREADS FOR THE WEEKEND:

NICK: Can you believe that he has a shirt to match the bucket of chicken?
(you'll have to see it to believe it-- purple and green psychedelic chicken)

TRAVIS: I cannot believe you wasted all of that chicken.
(referring to perfectly good chicken being thrown on the ground)

FORREST: What's my motivation for the chicken? I have chicken in my mouth and I'm talking on the phone?
(making sense now?)

ANTHONY: His feet look like Fred Flintstone's.
(referring to Forrest's feet in the nasty ass warehouse)

BEVAN: This place is so old it could be Brontosaurus shit.
(referring to the nasty ass warehouse)

BO: I got chicklets, mayne.
(gun runners love chewing gum)

-B