Post-Halloween Post: Catching Up

Peter here: sorry kids, no shorts this Halloween. Oh we tried and tried, but our creative juices have all but dried from the well-springs of our minds.

In it's place is an actor reel. Yes, these actors are new to L.A., flavored by European accents; but they ain't bad. From an outline provided by our actress, I wrote the script in three pages; about one page too many. The shorter the reel, the more likely casting directors will bother. I managed to pare down the cut to a swift two minutes. To some agents this is still one minute too many.

The location is a private bar in L.A. We had to wrap in three hours, minus the combined hour it took to set-up and then clean-up. Outside, it was a Sunday night in full swing; if Sean and I had social lives we might have envied the twenty-to-thirtysomethings downstairs in the public bar, busting seams of laughter, flirting and spilling drinks as baseball looped on the screens. We might've, but we didn't. Maybe in another lifetime, when my fixation isn't in the telling of a barfly pimped out by her lowlife boyfriend.

One main criticism I have of the reel is that the exposure is uneven. There's a story to that: as we were hauling the equipment out of the Scion, a block away from the bar, Sean lifted out the pre-assembled softbox and out tumbled the lighting head. It had come loose from the fixture. I heard a sound like crunched glass. Sean muttered "Oh no!" The lighting head had tumbled onto the asphalt and landed on it's fifty-dollar bulb. A minute prior, I was telling Sean how the three-point lighting should be arranged. "Guess we'll have to make due with two," he added, not without a hint of irony.

Thankfully, the reel helped our two actors land an agency.

That's the kind of news you hope for. But enough about boring old actor reels. Bet you're all wondering about Take Zer0. While I'm not typing this from a homeless shelter (yet), we've all run afoul of hard times. (I'm at a coffeeshop typing this on my iPhone, sipping coffee paid with quarters and dimes I scavenged around the house) The autonomy Sean and I shared in earlier times---like a full tank of gas to drive where we pleased---is a liberty we're very, very nostalgic for. Thus we have decided that when we do make videos it will be for professional reasons. Believe us when we say that when we've made a few bucks to get ahead, we'll be sure to cook up a few new videos for you all.

But creativity is king. As Joke and Biagio allude to in their blog, creation is the key to success. Those of you who remember Jaemin Yi will be happy to know that he intends to write and direct a feature film. At least that's what Sean tells me. And Drew (remember Drew?) has finally posted a video after a long hiatus. As for Sean and I, well, the truth is that we did try to shoot a short for Halloween. I wrote it quickly, and regrettably I think it needed at least one revision. And then we didn't have time to finish the shoot. It's a ghost story, of sorts. Here's a screen cap of Anna (that's Sean in the foreground checking his watch, which figures into the story).

Well, I guess this phrase was going to be inevitable: Hope you all had a safe and happy Halloween! What did you all do? I sat around and revisted They Live (what I consider an influential low-budget genre film) and Freaks. And so, until next time...