I’m not dead yet. Just a bit out of touch lately.
Fist Full Of Staples wrapped shooting this weekend. It’s directed by Nick Falls. It’s an office western. It’s somewhere in between “The Office” and “The Good The Bad And The Ugly.” I played Sam, and it was shot on 16mm film. This was my first 16mm production (as well as the director’s), so I am pleased to say that for the most part everything seemed to go quite smoothly. Except for when they set off the fire alarm and the fire department showed up in a big fire truck looking to put a fire out.
Which leads to the absolute sum total of my ultimate wisdom with regard to film making: No children, animals, old people, or fog/smoke machines. To this day, I have never actually seen a smoke machine work right on set. So, for anybody who might run across this bit of wisdom, and really wants to use a smoke machine despite it being a stupid idea:
-Do it outside. Outside is easier to vent than inside.
-If you must be inside, make sure you can easily vent the space. Really easily. Seriously, be on top of this. Smoke machines will not only set off the fire alarm, but also make it impossible to shoot the next take until you vent.
-Have fans. Fucking enormous giant fans. Many of them. Even if you are outside.
-Have a cold box setup. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you aren’t supposed to be using a smoke machine yet! Generally, people want a smoker for cool “ground hugging” fog effects. To accomplish this, you need to run the smoke through a cold box so that it stays near the ground.
Indymogul did a good cold box tutorial. Check them out at indymogul.com.
It’ll be a while before the film is developed and telecined (Put onto a video tape), so we won’t know for sure that nothing bad happened to the footage until then. But, I think it probably turned out quite well, and I’m looking forward to it.
Also, my main phone number is working again. If you tried calling me in the past week or so, you may have gotten a cryptic error message. It’s a SkypeIn VOIP line through Skype, which I paid for the next three months on. But, they dragged their feet on actually recieving my money (which showed up as having been taken from my bank account very quickly) for several days. So, the number expired for a while until I complained. Once I complained, they were able to realise that they did in fact have the money within a day. So, when Skype says “Pay Pal usually clears within an hour, and always within a day” they actually apparently mean “like a week, depending on how lazy we feel.” I dunno, maybe it was some issue between skype and paypal and actually wasn’t Skype’s fault. Still annoyed the crap out of me. The key point I’m trying to make is that my phone finally works again.