Code of Honor: Day 2

We just had our second actual day of filming, and oh man, did all of our work pay off. We've spent a week straight toiling away at building the set and I'm fairly sure that we all have Stucko permanently affixed to our fingertips, but it looks fantastic. I didn't notice that we had driven ourselves to a strange place until we were sitting in the set in 95 degree weather and none of us were the least bit bothered by the temperature (thank you, Sam Leibowitz, for making me realize we're crazy).

The walls were lined with newly assembled IKEA furniture, featuring our favorite old stuff from home, like torn up books, chipped bowls, and my badass sake keg from a thrift store in New York. Ali painted the symbol of the Monk's order on a strip of fabric and we hung that behind a shrine to the Living Stone. The amount of detail that we put into the set was impressive even to me, and I was there the whole time we were building it. We even covered the windows in plastic sheeting that we spraypainted blue, so the lights shining through the window made it look like night. One snag, however, was the strange shape these papers (pictured right) took once we glued them to the wall.

It didn't take very long for Jim and Shawn to get into character when they were sitting in this prettydamngood looking set wearing their prettydamngood looking costumes with a prettyfuckinggreat looking fire sword. The first test of the Knight's sword went fantastically. Okay, well, the sword actually broke and fell in two while we were filming because the fire somehow broke the magnets holding it together, but, until that happened, it looked fantastic. Don't believe me? Check out the picture and eat your words, heretic.

I'll be coming out with a making of video soon to fully detail how we made the Monk's hut/school, so I'm sorry if this was a bit lacking, but me explaining about how we smeared the the fake plaster is probably way less interesting than flamingfuckingswords.

By the Code,
dk

Code of Honor has Wood

The construction of sets is something pretty new to us. I did a lot of set dressing on Splinterwood, and Mike had school plays, but I don't think either of us has done anything as ambitious as build sets from scratch. We went to Home Depot and bought a hilarious amount of wood to build the interior of the Monk's hut. The plywood is going up inside of Jake's gazebo, after which it will be covered in plaster. The slathered plaster will give a medieval feel to the walls of the hut, with any luck, and will then be used as building walls in the town.

Getting the wood from Home Depot to Jake's house was a bit of an ordeal. We had to put the plywood on top of Mike's Rav-4 (which has those obnoxious bars on top of it that people use to move bikes or something, I don't know) and fasten it down with bungee chords attached to the hand holds. Then, we had to slide the wooden beams through Mike's trunk and out the passenger side window (a similar technique was used to transfer the dolly track during The Rough Cut). This process caused the Rav-4 to have a makeshift lance for car jousting (or something) that would either decapitate me or crush me to death if we hit something (with the bungee chords going through the window and onto the hand holds, it would be impossible for me to open the door).

Luckily, no one died. Jake and I wrapped various clothing items around our hands and held the wood down on the roof for the entire ride home, which was no small workout, lemme tell ya. The wood only threatened to fall forward once, but it was enough to make us paranoid and Mike's driving speed 30 mph for the rest of the trip. We did make it succesfully, however, and we're beginning construction of the hut today. Expect accompanying production blog.

By the Code,
dk

Code of Honor: Day 1

I've come to realize that every great film project has a terrible first day. This is a test, set forth by the ancient Aztec cinema gods to eliminate all those unworthy of recording time. If you can't get past the first day, you can't get past filming a movie, because, inevitably, it's going to get much worse. Art comes from pain, and your film is going to artistically stab you. I don't care what movie you're making, it's going to stab you. Accept this, and we can proceed.

For example, take the first day of our maiden voyage, The Rough Cut. The camera wasn't charged, there was a severe lack of working tapes, leather bound fight scenes ended in near heatstroke, and, worst of all, my hair looked terrible. On the first day of pre-production for Splinterwood, when we all gathered around and shook hands for the first time, it was over the lifeless body of a baby kitten, who's adorability was nothing short of LOL cat. It was dropped (unwanted) from a moving car, after which is seized to death. And, on the first day of Code of Honor, we had trials and tribulations that will go undiscussed until our tell-all autobiographies, but car accidents and epically unsuccessful guerilla filmmaking were among our tests on that day.

Now, on a more positive note, everything looks great. We got Shawn into the Autumn Seed, a spaceship we built inside of Jim Allen's van. Steel bars from Home Depot created the framework for the ship, with computer monitors and HDTV playing the computer displays Mike made in after effects (very similar to what he did for the Voodoo Ninja's introduction in The Rough Cut). We got to test out the 750 watt lights that we bought from Home Depot, which you may know from the screenshots as the sun. And, as we started building the ship last week, Mike had been driving around with it in his car for days. Luckily, it's been disassembled, and will shortly be reassembled as the smuggler ship.

That's the plan for today: build the smuggler ship. I'll be playing to pilot, Jasco, so be sure to check out my brief cameo when you buy the DVD to support our next ridiculous project.

More updates soon,
dk

Awesome: I Shot That

I just finished editing one of the pivotal scenes in the film and I'm pretty sure it's going on my college demo reel. The scene was shot in my room (which was made even nerdier than it already was) and was directed by me (which ruled). Mike Allen is hilarious and a recent addition of sound effects has somehow made Jon and Morgan seem even more awkward than they already did.

The finished product of the film they're making in the movie is a lot better than I expected (or at least it is at this point). We all went out to finish shooting an earlier scene in the movie and, lucky for us, it starts raining torrentially. We took the opportunity and had Phil and I randomly beat on each other in the rain with very little choreography. It didn't flow together very well, but with the addition of Mike Allen's improv'd coaching from the other side of a computer screen (it makes sense when you watch it) everything just seems to fall into place.

Gonna go rough cut this fother muck,
dk

ps: if you ever get the chance to fight in torrential rain in bad ass costumes while someone films it, DO IT. adrenaline rush ftw.

ps2: a bare-bones version of our website (essentially, the layout) can be viewed by clicking the poster to the right of this blog. it's pretty sweet.

The Roughest Cut: why a 30-minute movies takes forever to edit

I've got a long 10 days ahead of me. Unfortunately, they're not nearly long enough.

A few days ago Mike informed me that he's too bogged down with his current film projects to edit the Rough Cut in time to record everyone's lines over winter break, which would push back completion of the film by several months. Luckily, I've already got rough cuts of several scenes of the film. Unluckily, it's not nearly enough. Why not? Check this out.

Donny's To-Do List

1. Finish school
2. Apply to college
3. Fix shower/get new bed/finish getting Christmas presents before girlfriend arrives
4. Train for 2nd degree black belt testing
5. Edit the Rough Cut

With applying to college and my girlfriend heading down and the holidays coming up, the next few weeks of my life are going to be ridiculously busy without me editing the scenes. I'm happy to do it, I mean, editing is what started me on film making and anything to get the film done faster is fine with me, but I'm worried about editing scenes while my girlfriend is here, because it's insanely boring to watch and I'm already cutting our time together a day short by going to Sundance. Editing while she's here would just be dick.

Hoping someone makes a sweet movie about my stress-induced self decapitation,
dk

Roughcutstudios.com

The website should be live shortly. I just went through all of our production stills to pick out the best ones for the website's gallery, and I narrowed it down to 102. Damn. So I narrowed it down to 67. Which then became 35. Which, hopefully, Mike will turn to 20. I'm thinking we could easily come out with a book of production stills once we do a legit feature. If we did one thing right on this movie, it's definitely that. Epic win on production stills.

Will update when the site is live,

dk

Website, Post-Production, Craig's List?

The Rough Cut is slowly movin' along. Mike's been doing some edits up at school and I've been working on t-shirts and the website layout and all that. It's not going quite as quickly as I'd like, but these things take time, so it's totally understandable. This is the first movie I've made where there are, like, y'know, plots, so I can understand while teen dramedies take more time than people fighting over magic trench coats or adaptations of men in cyborg suits who bob their heads a bunch and love the word 'fuck'.

Also, we might have a new movie to film in December? Aside from finishing the Rough Cut and (hopefully) filming with Josh Gad, our December slate looked pretty bare. There's a zombie project that we've been stirring around the idea pot for a while, but that's a handicam movie, so it wouldn't really use any of these nifty new tricks we learned over Rough Cut, which was my only real problem with it. Luckily, Jon (that Jewish kid on all the Rough Cut posters) can write apparently, and came up with a pretty sweet screenplay about finding what you want to do in life that just happens to have super powers in it. It's not ABOUT super powers, they're just in it. It's a thing. You'll see. Probably.

This might be the first movie that we legitimately 'cast' cast. Mike recently held auditions for his short film that were arranged via Craig's List, which, hilarious though it may sound, proved very effective. There are way too many good actors and not nearly enough parts, and actors will totally do stuff for fun, practice, or just something to put on their reel. Should we have done this for Rough Cut? Maybe. Have we learned our lesson? Hell yes. Working with a lead we don't know personally, using everything we learned over the summer, and having Jon direct will prove to be a very interesting experience.

Will this movie have a legitimate production blog? Mayhap. An extra person who is obligated to help with production should make things considerably easier. My one major regret with the Rough Cut was not loading the prop camera with tape and a battery to make a really kickass production diary. There just wasn't enough time to think about it. I've been considering assigning someone else entirely to do the production diary/making of. That'd take a lot of pressure off me AND get more people involved in the project AND be a sweet compilation book, once we make enough movies. Good idea, me. Good idea.

-dk