about as quickly as it came, the weekend is now winding down to a close. a productive weekend, and packed with good stuff. akira movie night on friday was a success, and renewed my love for a movie that i haven’t seen in years. i also really enjoyed the bar we went to beforehand, which needs to be revisited. the burger i got featured sloppy joe “slime”, a fried egg, and jalapeños – a combination fit for a king. it was quite good, but were it to feature extra slime and be paired with tiny corn dog nuggies, and followed up by one of those intriguing tang-infused margaritas, it would probably be a much more satisfying experience.
saturday was spent enjoying myself on such pleasures as sleeping in until ten (a rarity these days) and becoming the spider man through the magic of virtual reality. it was a good try at a half-hearted attempt at a video game-type experience… meaning it was basically an advertisement for a movie. but i’ll take it. if they put effort into an actual game of this style, i think they could make something really fun.
a good amount of time was once again spent digging into my old work. i found a few bits of inspiration, one or two concepts that may be worth salvaging, and then a ton of stuff that was delightful to go over but is better off living on “in perfection” through my imagination.
i spent a long time reading through my ill-fated feature length film about a crazy kid and his talking formaldehyde cat. there was some cringe in there that read like an angry teen lashing out against religious institutions he didn’t understand (i was not a teen at the time of writing, and i still don’t understand the religious institutions), but there were also some very good little bits. kids conducting a note-passing discussion on what to do about the murders they discovered; christmas kisses under the mistletoe with a corpse; a soccer game climax written with zero understanding about how soccer works… some real solid stuff in there. but the fact that a second draft wasn’t even attempted is not surprising, and was probably the right choice. at least it provided me with entertainment and warm memories for an evening.
one great re-discovery was the short film “half and half”, written and filmed in a single rushed night after one of our regular visits to denny’s. it’s not a smart film, but it still works for me after all this time. and the editing is relatively tight, which had been a problem that plagued our early films. it seems to be a mile-marker indicating the slow improvements we were making to our work.
inspired by half and half, and following my desires as mentioned in the last post, i took today to start building out the foundation for a short film that can be 1.) easily filmed 2.) with two people, 3.) in an outdoor setting. i came up with a concept early this morning, and am now sitting with a full outline and a bit of additional world building. it just needs some polish and then the actual writing and dialogue, but it’s a decent idea and it should be a simple shoot. this would make a good bang-for-your-buck project to start things back up with, and it’s got me feeling confident.
Half and Half has definitely aged pretty well. The editing was definitely much improved. However, we still had a long way to go with other production values. That being said, for a concept that was dreamed up and then filmed in a couple of hours on no budget, it’s pretty fucking good. HALF UND HALF
I think my favorite part is that it’s just… light. It’s not about a “punchline” (I mean it has an anticlimax which was just our standard climax) but instead, it’s just kind of… a little vignette. Instead of just shitting on the audience for the sake of “subverting expectations”, it instead has this message that is kind of hopeful and uplifting. Basically, terrible things will happen in life but a good attitude and good friends will make it bearable.
On a scale of -10 to 10, 0 being ‘mediocre’, I give it a 3.1.
that’s far too generous for such a pile of shit.
seriously though, i think the cutting is top notch. also the acting timing. your “uhh…” & shrug was perfection. and the music was also kind of a revelation. beyond being a song that just humorously had the same title as the creamer, it set a solid mood for the short, the opening is delightful because of it, we “played it off” as being natural audio, the “stinger” with it blaring and patrick laughing madly, and then the final note played as the ending bow… audio brilliance. it is probably the most thoughtful and well done use of music we’ve pulled off in a film.