January 30, 2008
Part 2 - Basghetti Western
Matt said:
The traveling sequence, the return of The Musician, was one of the first sequences I laid to paper besides the opening scene. I initially wanted the world to be in perpetual twilight, like the city lay near the poles. I had the ridiculous idea we could shoot the entire movie at dawn or dusk. In twenty minute increments. I’m glad we scrapped that idea. Otherwise, we’d still be shooting.
Most of this was shot on the first day of shooting. We filled up two 60 minute tapes—most of which turned out to be unusable because of a dirty lens. The dirty lens wasn’t as big a tragedy as we first thought it was. We had so much footage, we never needed any of it. Why did we shoot two hours of footage for a four minute song? Lack of discipline maybe. It’s always good to get a lot of coverage but I venture to guess that we didn’t use 90% of the footage we shot that day. I think we were excited about the camera. Everything looked so good on it, why not shoot everything? We ended up running out of daylight and we didn’t get everything we needed. Most importantly, the breakdown scene was too dark and we never got the motel scene nor The Musician sleeping in the car. Thank God, we got two hours of Craig driving around the city.
Also: It was pretty cold on the beach so I lent Craig my gloves. He promptly lost them. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Craig.
A lot of people have asked me, “Where’d you get that deer?” Go to Irving Park and Cumberland. You’ll see a big forest preserve. Go inside and you’ll practically trip over a deer. They’re like pigeons. They flock around the park looking for hand-outs. It was a challenge getting them out of the shot. I didn’t want Craig to be feeding a ton of deer because it would look like we were in a petting zoo or a game farm. Those deer were disgusting. Eating out of the trash. Following you like hungry cannibals. They were like a bunch of junkies, addicted to wonder bread and garbage. Easy pickings, though because those deer never learned to fear humans. I’ve got a fridge full of venison if anyone’s interested.
Matt Weber Writer/Director
____________________________________________________
Craig said:
This very linear sequence was pieced together from many different days and locations. After I finished editing it, it took a while for the whole thing to flow in my mind. Watching it now I almost forgot that the shot of me getting out of the car and the shot of me checking under the hood are in completely different places on completely different days. Movie magic!
We actually shot alternate versions of much on this stuff on the first day, but realized it was crap (due to dirt on the lens and bad “artistic” choices). In particular, we scrapped our first attempts at my waking up, the car breakdown scene, and the gas station. We even went back and re-shot some of the interstate driving, and we had A LOT of driving footage. Actually, we re-shot the gas station but while editing I realized the original was better so I used that one.
We all thought the last shot, the very long one of me walking left to right at the beach, was amazing. I was so excited to see it on tape. The lens turned out to be covered in dirt. Luckily, Ryan showed me a little photoshop trick and I cleaned up the shot. Most of the shot is a doctored still image, except for the section I’m walking in. You can tell it looks a little too still if you pay attention. So don’t.
The first day was one of the only days, if not, the only day we took up more than one tape. After looking at it, most of it was unnecessary or unusable. The first day! We had so much ahead of us. I felt quite intimidated and frustrated by the task ahead. Luckily, we got better.
The third or fourth day of shooting was the opening sequence at the forest preserve. My character was supposed to wear that damned blue shirt all the time so I couldn’t use a coat. I had a lot of layers on underneath. This was the first time in my life that I can remember being frightened of a deer. They were everywhere at this preserve so we decided to get some random cut away shots of them. Ryan pointed the camera at one, and on cue it turned and stared. Then it walked closer, and closer, and closer, until Matt told me to take my coat off and walk up to it. So I hesitantly stepped up to it, worried that I was going to get hoofed to death, until it ran away.
After all that work and worry, I think we made a good road video. I would say that of every sequence in the movie, this is the least necessary as far as the plot is concerned. But I think it could stand alone as a music video better than any of the others, because it doesn’t rely on anything that happens before it or after. Maybe that’s why we had such a hard time with this song. It had the least amount of structure leading up to the shoot.
Craig, Actor/Editor/Guitarist
p.s. Matt, I have no memory of losing your gloves.
Zaid said:
This was the first song that we recorded. I was pretty excited to get
working, Craig and I hadn't worked together since making the DPC
album. I remember having a lot of fun messing with the guitar tones,
playing with the space echo, and basically fucking around. This is
where, to me, the time you spend on any one part can take forever but
its okay, It's a great thing. I think steve plays two bass lines,
awesome because he does both parts on an 8 string bass at the same
time. When i think about the song i like the rawness it has in
contrast with new moon. Taking a subtle step between landscapes to
laying it all out. I asked Amelia how she thought of the backing
vocal. apparently it's inspired by tribal Indian wailing.
I think we did the drums for this song first as well, but maybe not.
Todd and i got together for a couple weekends and laid down all the
drums before recording anything else, so things blur a little.
Zaid Maxwell, Vocals/Composer/Actor
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment