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
Read more...
Part 1 - New Moon
Matt said:
I believe this is the only song I had any influence over whatsoever. The original title Zaid had given it referenced some sort of music terminology. I liked it but it seemed out of place so I suggested he change it to ‘New Moon’ to bring it in line with the other moon songs. We already had a ‘crescent moon’ and a ‘full moon’ so it seemed only right to have a ‘new moon.’
I didn’t want to have any influence over the music. I wasn’t part of the band, and, although I secretly wanted to be in the band, I thought it would be best if the writer were an outsider. I wanted the music to dictate the action. That’s the way most music videos work. In movies, it’s usually the other way around. The music or score slaves to the image. But, I didn’t want to make a music video. Nobody wanted that. We wanted a movie. It had to tell a story with or without the music. So, it was more like a silent movie based upon the Ozark Cousins album.
The image of a cowboy waking up with a bullet wound was the very first thing Craig, Zaid, and Amelia described when they told me the idea for an album-length movie. The band, Ozark Cousins, sounded sort of countryish with flairs of spaghetti western so a western-style movie seemed a reasonable fit. I left the opening pretty much unchanged. It was my favorite thing about their idea. It was a good image. Something I could cling to while I tried piece together the entire story. At the time, we didn’t really know what it meant. At least I didn’t know how it would fit in with the storyline of two cowboys—one bad, one good—fighting over a woman. Was he dead? Was this the afterlife? Who knows? Who cares? I tried to preserve that ambiguity when I wrote the screenplay.
So, the first image we thought of became the first scene in the movie. I don’t know if that owes more to an uncompromising vision or a persistent stubbornness.
-Matt Weber, director/writer
____________________________________________________
Craig said:
Musically, this is one of two songs I had nothing to do with on the album, the other being track 5, "Isn't it Me." It was, however, the song that inspired me to say to Zaid and Amelia, "We should make this into a movie," thereby eleminating virtually all of my weekends in the first half of 2007 due to filming and editing. Something about the ambient "windy" sounds in this track gave me a picture of a dusty old western town. I could see tumbleweeds.
Anyway, we proceeded to map out a plot for a movie on a piece of cardboard (I still have it) that we thought we might make. I still had many doubts we would actually go through with it at that point. The plot involved a man returning to town and having to win back his girl. But there were many differences in this original plot. Matt's script was better. This opening, though, was something Zaid, Amelia, and I more or less planning from the onset.
As far as shooting, it was actually quite cold that day and this was at the end of a long shoot involving the climax of the film. I mainly just wanted to get the hell outta there. The fake blood was really annoying because it was sticky and I had no idea whether or not the blood was all over the clothes underneath my costume. It wasn't. Compared to the rest of the day's shoot, this was easy. At least I got to lay down.
This was the first song I edited in it's entirety, mainly because it was the first song filmed in it's entirety. We had pieces of many songs, but this one was done right away. I had a hard time filling out the entire track because we didn't shoot much for this scene. You see pretty much every angle we shot for this. But I ended up holding on shots for long periods of time and I think it makes it work better anyway. When I finished I just remember being very excited by how awesome the footage looked and how well the emptiness of the scene (one lonely man on a beach) matched the ominous mood of the music. I couldn't wait to see how it would all turn out. Oh yeah, and the Title font was just put in as a place holder until we came up with something better and more elaborate. I don't even remember if it was me who put it there. May have been Ryan or Matt. We eventually decided it was perfect. Others can debate that if they want.
-Craig Benzine, actor/editor/guitarist
____________________________________________________
Zaid said:
This track started off as some piano thing I was playing around with. I think the working title was "Etude in Cm". Amelia eventually played piano on the recorded version and Matt suggested renaming it "new moon" to go with the other instrumental tracks. On this record most the synth work was done with an old arp odyssey. It really gets put to good use here. The contrast of the heavy bass and those distant howls really create a spacious lonely mood.
Read more...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
