How to Make a Movie in 15 Years

This is an account of a film project that took David Eblen and Steve Herring 15 years to make. It can be taken as a warning or as inspiration to future filmmakers. Why did it take 15 years?

Count the number of people on the end credit roll after any Hollywood film. Unfortunately David and Steve couldn’t afford to employ any crew, so tackled the work themselves. Though they lacked money, they did have a lot of……time. 

David chronicled their journey presented here.  Enjoy.

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1995 – The New Jesus

I was 27 years old and single. It had been two years since graduation day at the University of Oregon and I had already become disillusioned with what I was doing in the prime of my life. I was working in a cubicle office wearing ties and dress socks, speaking words like policy, issuance, remuneration, and audit without cracking a smile. My soul was dying as I was kept busy 40 hours a week, 2000 hours a year, with meaningless tasks for a job and a company I didn’t like. For me it was absurd. So absurd that one day I decided to channel my inert creative energy in an equally absurd, yet more exciting direction. I would make a freakin’ movie!

What qualifications/certification did I have to make a film? Did I have at least 3 years of film school? Did I know the right people? No, no and NO! Just who did I think I was? If there was a gatekeeper, surely I would be denied. Fortunately the only gatekeeper was myself. And this gatekeeper was feeling very generous.

What kind of ground breaking movie would I put to screen? Something between Pulp Fiction and Blair Witch, but 100 times better than both, that’s what! The images I would create would tear up the masses in dumbfounded awe. It was a religious moment and this Jesus wasn’t going to let the moment slip away.

I didn’t have a ready script. What I had was a short story I wrote in college about an evil chess set. I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, so this story naturally fit my leanings. Script writing was new to me so I searched out for how-to books. I had decided it would be multi-genre:  one story would be about two thieves contracted to steal a strange chess set, the other about a young woman discovering she’s gay and having to find a way to tell her boyfriend. I was searching for a story I hadn’t seen or heard before. What is the point of recreating something that has already been done? As far as I knew there had yet to be a Pulp Fiction-esque/Scary Chess game/Lesbian type story.

I was a wanna-be star filmmaker, bridled by ignorance and naivety which protected me from the awesome forces that stood my way. Even if I was aware of the work ahead, I would have proceeded anyway. This new adventure was bringing my fading soul to life. So as I pretended to listen to customers on the phone, hit computer keys, and moved papers from one pile to another, I contemplated my real destiny.

I sat in cafes carefully studying script writing books and trying to string disparate words together in a meaningful and cool way. The title would be: Eden’s Crossing. I even had the poster thought out: a shot of the main character, Eden, with a bridge carefully placed behind her. The symbolism! The double meanings! Is the story about her crossing the bridge? No! Well… maybe yes. That’s ART man! You’d have to see the movie to find out!

Rolling up my sleeves and rubbing my hands together, here’s what I had: A roughly sketched script, myself, a car, and a few hundred dollars. My local cable access center offered cheap camera courses and made their equipment available for free. Their Super VHS cameras were somehow better than normal VHS cameras and weighed 20+ pounds. That baby sat on your shoulders like a rocket launcher and I decided gave me a splendid professional look.The project would have to be shot piecemeal, weekend by weekend.  The cable access center had a landmine of crappy equipment which helped reinforce cable access mediocrity. But what do you expect for free? The bored heavy set guy in the equipment room sighed at every complaint and always assured me that yes indeed the equipment did suck. I was attempting to build a masterpiece using Legos.

It was at cable access where I found Steve. He was a nineteen year-old crazy techno wizard who made a pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics conference in Las Vegas every year. Laughter was the glue that bound our friendship. Restaurants serving chicken strips with honey mustard sauce were our meeting spots, where we planned shoots and which movie to see that night. 

I placed ads in the newspaper for actors. Over the following weeks, I received calls from 60+ actors eagerly inquiring about auditions. This wasn’t theater it was a MOVIE for god sakes and every actor had the sad clichéd Hollywood dream. My dream was a means to their dream. I rented a small theater to hold auditions which helped add to the illusion that we knew what we were doing.

About a week later, I agreed to meet a 30 something woman who couldn’t make the auditions. It was early evening when I drove out to her house and in her dining room she performed the scripted lines, while her husband loitered nearby. I made the mistake by telling her she was the last to read for that particular role. After her very bad audition, she asked me point blank if she had the role. I hesitated and told her I had to think about it.

“Oh, come on. You can tell me now. You should know if I’m at least in the running.”

I hesitated some more, looking longingly at the front door at the far end of the room. Her husband hovered in that direction, looking innocent but an obstacle all the same.

To my right was a sliding glass door, but I heard big dogs barking out that way.

“I don’t think you are in the running”, I gulped.

“Why not?! This always happens and I want to know why! I never get called back. What exactly is it that I’m doing wrong?” Her voice was rising and I had a quick vision of a younger version of this feral woman as school yard bully.

I don’t remember how I got out of that house, but I do remember the very bad feeling and the personal promise never to do that again.

This is the power I had: the ability to crush peoples’ dreams. I was a lesser deity fashioning my own world, picking the people to populate it and choosing how they would behave, what they would wear, what words would come out of their mouths.

It was June and my traveling circus was finally gathered, ready to strike out. My initiative and momentum was incredible. Everyone wanted to be aboard: can I shoot in your store? Yes. Can I shoot in your café? Yes. Can I shoot in your house? Yes. Can I shoot in your parking garage, hair salon, office, bathroom? Yes, yes, yes, YES!

The universe was on my side and I was unstoppable. We’d finish easily in time to storm into Sundance with my Super VHS movie and change cinema as we know it!

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1996 – Reality Bites

There was no Sundance. No cheering crowds yelling “Encore! Encore!” No meteoric rise of status.

The movie wasn’t finished. What we ended up with was about a half of a movie, scenes that were poorly lit, dialogue that was meandering and meaningless, acting that was stilted or over-dramatic, and a confusing storyline of lesbians and chess pieces that was less genius and more WTF!

How was I going to be the next Christopher Nolan if all I could do was make this crap? I couldn’t believe the wonderful script I wrote could turn out to be so bad on screen. I mean, I read every page of “How to write a movie in 16 days.” EVERY page.

I shaved my goatee and gave my beret to goodwill and returned to the cafes to rewrite. I was going to rewrite the hell out of it. The lesbian story still appealed to me mainly because I hadn’t before seen such a story enmeshed in a horror film. I still aimed to experiment with the story despite the horrible failure thus far.

It was February and the dangerously rising Willamette River threatened to overtake the sandbagged Portland waterfront and flood the parking garage where we were shooting all weekend. It was the worst flooding Portland had experienced in 30 years. The ominous biblical scene was perfect backdrop imagery to our drama and a manifestation of the many evil forces of anti-movie making determined to sabotage our every effort. I tried to keep the film’s slow progress and the encroaching river from my mind and enjoy the shooting of scene 24: Lesbians Kissing in Parking Garage.

We were nearing our year and a half mark of shooting and I could tell the lesbians’ resolve was beginning to wane and they wouldn’t be kissing each other indefinitely. Oh but how the camera did like that image! Or was that just me? The actors who played the lesbians moved from a phone call away to three or four calls away. Morale dipped lower as the months slipped by.

Yolanda (Eden #1) didn’t want to drive the security car at high speed without her prescription glasses (her character didn’t wear glasses). I tried to reason with her. I asked her if she could come up with a cooler way to attack the creature than hitting it with a car at high speed. Her glare I took as a “no”.

All she had to do was drive in a straight line, really fast, and then slam on the breaks. It was mostly safe. The mall parking lot had plenty of wide open space between the concrete light poles. Finally we got her to do it. We only got 3 takes.

The start of the 4^th take had her squealing out of there in her own car at high speed in a way that was better than any of the filmed takes.

If only Yolanda and the other actors understood the importance of this project. They saw it as just another non-paying no-budget video project being made by some beginning filmmakers who had no real filmmaking background. How can you make art surrounded by such negative energy?

I pondered this tragedy as I threw the Subaru into third gear, chasing my brother Jeff who was sprinting along the Hawthorne bridge. The December night was heavily chilled, Jeff’s locomotion breath visible. He was running as fast as his legs could carry, with the Subaru closing in on him fast, approaching 30 mph. Steve was above me with the camera (It was the POV of our invisible chess creature), in a sandbag bunker we built on the car roof, yelling at him, “Go! Go! Go!” Jeff’s fear was palpable, very real, even from behind.

Jeff’s patience was great and as years went by, incredible. Each night we shot, it would entail at least 30 minutes of applying creature slash marks on his face. Our first attempts looked like strips of strawberry jelly, but over time he began to look like the victim I wanted him to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1997 – New Beginning

My parents were on a short vacation, so we had only two nights to get everything shot at their house. It was about 3:00am on the first night and Yolanda was to cautiously open the bedroom door and walk toward camera, gun in hand (The creature could be anywhere!). Her yawning was incessant, making her look more bored than scared.

“Action!”

The door creaked open, but no one came through. “I can’t keep my eyes open,” She groaned.

“Cut! Please try harder!” I shot back.

The Lesbian story was finally wrapped in January. I knew the girls were elated. I had been their Hollywood pied piper who’d led them into a back alley of no budget movie making and bludgeoned them with false hopes. And now they were finally free.

Steve bought a new Sony VX1000 digital camera and we quickly learned the wonderful advantage of digitizing footage directly into the computer. Steve eventually acquired the steady-cam junior and video goggles making us itchy for a chase scene.

Even reflecting back a year from this point, we had to laugh at our modus operandi. For our dolly shots, I would push Steve in a wheel chair with our rocket launcher loaded on his shoulder. Once, after shooting at my mom’s boss’s house, he commented to her how nice of me it was to bring on a handicapped kid to help with the project.

With our new and improved camera, other elements of our production also needed upgrading. Thus began my journey down the slippery slope of forking money out to

rent good equipment such as lights and sound gear.

Even after experiencing the failures of the original thieves’ tale, it was difficult to gauge success of my new efforts. It seemed logical to write a detective story. There were murders taking place after all. And since the crimes were paranormal in nature, I wanted to ground the detective in reality as much as Eden’s story. I felt that would better sell the fantastical parts of the film. The creative process proved to be easier for me, weaving in this new story in and around the already completed lesbian story.

Armed with a sharper eye for talent I began a more discriminate search for actors to populate this new story line. It proved to be difficult because most of the available actors in town were fresh out of college. They had flexible schedules and were able and willing to do the time on their first movie project. Nothing screamed low budget more than when your entire cast is made up college age kids. Older actors are harder to find. After a couple months search, I was only able to find one. And even his audition left me unsure.

He lasted about four scenes, about a month of wasted shooting, before an attic door slammed onto his forehead, creating an enormous bruise – a deal breaker. I felt fortunate, because his acting just wasn’t translating well through the camera.

Unable to afford the $25 theater rental fee, I held the next round of auditions in Steve’s parent’s front yard. I waited on the steps of the small porch, feeling pathetic.   The first potential was a pretty boy actor who had a stage name of Dakota who was supposedly a favorite of a few local acting coaches. He pulled up in a convertible and wore cowboy boots and spoke with a slight lisp. I had him read a few of the scenes I had prepared. Each scene required different emotional content. He did pretty good, however, each of his performances carried the taint of disappointment for my venue and my script which was still rough. By the third read, I could tell Dakota had had enough. I sat back down on the porch and watched as he trotted his fine cowboy boots up to his nice red convertible and drive away. I felt like a small character in the western that shouts at the hero as he rides his horse out of town to battle the bad guys. I felt like yelling, “You can do it!”

The next candidate was a no-nonsense type of guy, a forty year old who took care of himself physically. We’ll call him Hernando. He didn’t seem to care about my front yard venue and was enthusiastic about the scenes. We collaborated a little on each scene about how to make it better. I wanted to work with this guy. His voice had a nice resonance to it and his acting excellent. I called him a few days later and he was hesitant to accept my offer of a role with no pay.

I drove out to talk to him personally. He asked who else I was considering for the role. He was the only one I was considering for the role, but I lied and rattled off a few of the others that auditioned. Fortunately he knew of Mr. Dakota. I told him I was considering Mr. Dakota, but I would give him the role first if he wanted it. After a few days of thought, Hernando was on board.

Our summer turned out to be very productive. We shot several wonderful detective story scenes, weekend after weekend: rooftop gunfights, dirt field murder sites, dingy apartment investigations, forest streams, city sidewalks, meetings under bridges, etc. Despite scraping by with just Steve, me and an occasional volunteer, we managed okay. The footage was markedly better shot than our previous stuff. Hernando was a high caliber actor who was very believable as our detective. As we moved through that summer weekend by weekend, I began to feel much better about the final product.

In September I was fired from my job. Money flow stopped. Filmmaking stopped. The company where I worked was bought out by a large insurance corporation. We were moved to their location in a very ugly business park. Their employees were lifers past middle age who hobbled by us in the halls, zombie-like, shuffling their claim forms. The nurses who came to administer the annual blood drive would joke about the difficulty in finding blood in their pale white arms. My work was less than stellar and my new boss didn’t seem to think I took the office seriously enough.

So in mechanized, non-human fashion, procedures and policies were applied to efficiently and effectively remove me from the premises.

The rest of the year I wallowed, feeling useless and being unproductive as I meandered through an underworld of low paying temp jobs. Out of desperation, some weekend nights we went out with the camera and chased my brother some more through the eastside warehouse district. His character running from some invisible creature that had yet to materialize on screen and me chasing shot after shot like an addict pursuing their next high.

1998 – Going Solo

My cell phone rang, the minutes nearly drained. It was Hernando.

“Hey Hernando, what’s up?”

“Hey Dave, how’s it going?”

“Good,” we had 8 scenes in the bag with him and I was bracing for the worst.

“Yeah. Say I just wanted to let you know I’m selling my car.”

Pause. Okay, not the worst, but almost.

“But we have some more scenes left to shoot with it.”

“Sorry Dave, but the thing is on its last legs and I need the cash.”

We already shot 3 scenes with that car and I had at least that many more planned.

“How much are you selling it for?”

“Three Hundred Dollars.”

Pause.

“Dave, you there?”

“Do you need all that up front?”

Steve lost his job at a post-production facility (NW Video Works) after it went belly up. A few months later he was offered an editing job at CNN, in Atlanta. Unemployed and without Steve, I felt very alone and hopeless. I began thinking about giving up on the whole business. There was still a lot more scenes to shoot and even though I had Steve’s camera with me, I had no money to rent equipment.

Finally in June, I found an analyst job for a tech firm. It contained the same temporary dull grey walls from my last job. Only these were slightly taller, providing each cube a closed off/disconnected feel. The work was dry and uninspiring much like my old insurance job. This company focused on the logistics of how to best deliver mail from X to Y on the East Coast. What caught my interest, however, was the old warehouse turned parking garage next door. That would be a cool shooting location.

During the summer I was able to muster just enough cash to rent equipment for a weekend here and there. The snail pace stressed me a lot. Who knew how long I would be able to afford this project. Remembering my lesbian actresses, who knew how long I would be able to keep this new set of actors before they stopped answering my calls. So I marched forward, eager to mark more scenes off my list. I could have saved my money and perhaps waited for more consecutive shooting days and more help.  But my new job didn’t give me than many days off this first year and help..

On a no-budget movie it is easy to find actors, but crew is always hard because it’s real work, and the initial excitement of work on a movie quickly fades, especially when you can’t afford to pay them a token amount. Some days found me as the only crew, operating a camera with a C-Stand holding a microphone near the actors. Sometimes the help proved otherwise.

Steve returned to Portland in September for a job with an internet start-up, a social site involving pigs (before the internet bubble burst, people were trying everything). I could tell he wasn’t excited about returning to my project, but I didn’t care. I gladly handed over the camera.

It was a Saturday morning in December and we were about to lay siege to old town Gresham. It was Scene 42: The Grand Chase Scene: we had Hernando running and shooting his .45 at three bad guys through streets of Hawthorne, NW 21^st, a roof in Goose Hollow, and now more streets in Gresham. I didn’t know exactly how cold it was, but I could see Hernando’s breathe as he complained bitterly about the light shirt he had to wear. It seemed a good wardrobe choice when we began shooting this scene in August of the previous year.

On this particular day we applied blood to both sides of Hernando’s left shoulder. He hated the blood and we had to literally chase him around the parking lot to put it on. His character had been shot early in the scene and fortunately, the cold weather gave his normal expression a slight pained look which helped sell his fake injury. Today he was to run from street to building to street dodging fire and returning fire.

We had real guns loaded with blanks. I notified the local police of our activity in advance, but they didn’t seem to take too much interest. Our small crew of two and two actors would guarantee some interesting reactions from people but for some reason I didn’t anticipate some to react so severely. After all, the presence of our camera would surely explain everything that was going on.

I guess it was because we were across the street from a small local bank, which helped make the bloodied up Hernando look more than conspicuous. And on top of that, he was running wielding a .45, shooting it somewhere behind him willy-nilly. This is what the woman saw just before she dived in front of her two young daughters. Many say they would gladly die for their loved ones, but when the moment comes, how many reinforce that sentiment with action? She ought to be proud of that moment.

We managed to soothe over that misunderstanding, however, we soon heard approaching sirens.  I called it a wrap and we quickly dispersed to our respective cars. We didn’t want any trouble, because we had to return at some point to shoot the part involving Hernando being chased down by a SUV.

Later, in a warm café, Hernando admonished, “Come on Dave. We’ve shot a lot of *uckin’ stuff; we should have a movie by now.”

I nodded, “Almost there, almost there.” I pulled out my master scene list and stared at it. Scenes or parts of scenes were being marked off, but lack of money and peoples schedules made the going incredibly slow.

1999 – Pick Ups

“Don’t ever, Ever, EVER, EVER pour from my tap!! HOW DID YOU THINK THAT WAS OKAY!? What would you do if I took one of your film rolls? Would that be OKAY?!” Jimmy was a bar owner downtown and had been nice enough to let me shoot a scene in his downstairs bar, but no one warned me of his volatile nature. I had apparently broken one of his three commandments. An employee of his confided in me later: You don’t ever mess with his Woman, Money, or his Bar.

The man seemed possessed by a devil. His face was red, Grecian eyes darkened even more, veins bulged from his forehead. I could tell he wanted to hit me. Everyone in the bar was staring. He slapped his hand on the bar, hard, “Give me $20!”

“What?”

“Give me $20 NOW!”

The scene was so macabre, so surreal. I was powerless as I watched myself dig into my wallet and meekly hand over the bill. It kinda seemed like he wanted payment for me getting him so angry. But I think it was for the suspected free for all we had with his beer tap. In reality, my actor had only poured two pints for the scene we were shooting. Jimmy wouldn’t have even known about it if I hadn’t offered to pay him for the two drinks.

I would have run out of there, if not for one thing.

“We need to return to finish shooting the scene,” I managed.

He pocketed the $20 and looked at me incredulously. Then he seethed, “It will cost you.”

Of course it will.

I needed a break. The energy needed to muster the troops and go out into the world to do battle against angry actors and raging proprietors was waning inside me. It didn’t help that despite the movie being about 90% shot it still needed a considerable amount of audio work. Due to budget constraints and poor choices, most of the scenes had really noisy backgrounds. This meant we would need to get most of the actors back to re-record their lines in a quiet environment. One of the few things that motivated me was that we were nearly finished with Hernando. He had stayed with the project for 2 years and I needed to get him done.

I never had any regrets casting him. His caliber of acting brought so much value to the project; I still feel lucky to have found him…  A scene downtown in an empty parking garage, a scene in front of my cousin’s house, a scene in a café, and we soon had him wrapped. My relief was palpable.

Many of our pick-ups involved another actor I wouldn’t necessarily say was difficult, I think calling her high maintenance would be fair. We’ll call her Ms. Blue Moon. It was difficult to get her to succumb to a few hours to us and our camera. And when we were blessed with that one day, she always had an eye on the clock.

During our shooting I was still trying to figure out what her character was in the story. She was the Mayor’s re-election campaign manager who helps out our detective for a bit and then disappears. I wanted her character more relevant to the plot and was trying out different ideas. I suppose that created some frustration on her part, which she revealed in irritating questions during shooting such as, “Do I have to keep with the script?”

I wanted her character to be duplicitous, perhaps revealing her to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing near the end: someone capable of killing, and is from France. A French assassin! 

We were at the airport. I was apprehensive. My initial call to the airport administrative offices succeeded only in them giving me a list of applications and insurance forms I needed. And I didn’t want to explain that in the scene, the French assassin wouldn’t kill anyone in the airport, it would just be implied by her pulling a syringe from her purse in placing it in her pocket. Bureaucrats tend to not understand artist types and often take things literal. I could imagine them denying my application not liking the idea of an assassin in their midst, French or otherwise. Surely that would be a security breach.

So… what would they do if we just showed up with a small camera with a tripod – local news style? That was one source of my apprehension.

We were bunkered down inside the airport coffee shop, about to step out into the busy main thoroughfare in front of the shops and shoot the brief scene with Ms. Blue Moon. Unfortunately we were late.

After apologizing, I cut to the chase, “Okay, you ready? You got your lines ready?”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. I kept playing phone tag with whats-her-name.”

I hesitated. Whats-her-name was to help with her French dialogue, “So how are you going to say your lines?”

“I’ve been replaying her saying the lines on my mini-recorder. I think we should be okay.”

“I’d feel better if you tried calling her now. She’s the only one who can verify that you’re saying things correctly.”

“Okay, I don’t have any more minutes on my cell.”

“You can use the public phone.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.”

“Do you have change?”

“Here.”

She looks at me, “Are you okay? You look nervous.”

2000 – High Places

“Action!”

For the second time, Shiloh lay back down fully emerged in the ice cold creek, his forehead caked with fake blood. He convulsed a little then went still, while the character Sully splashed up to his side.

“Cut!”

The shot looked okay, but I wanted to do another just in case. However Steve’s concerned look and Shiloh’s cursing helped convince me that we had what we needed. We rushed to him with warm dry towels. A little extra care was in order for this particular actor.

Shiloh was the nearest we had to a celebrity on our project. He had played the boy in “House of Cards” many years previous and his brother was Ryder Strong from “Boy Meets World” fame. I think it was his celebrity status that fueled his argument as to why he had to lay fully immersed in the ice creek rather than a few feet away on dry land. My reason at the time would become invalid later when I deleted certain scenes, but I’m glad I stuck to my guns anyway. Death in a white water creek is certainly more cinematic than death on shore.

The original plan was to have the Sully chase scene end with Sully hanging from a cliff, and the Sri Lankan clutching his foot below him. We even drove down to the Rogue River area for a weekend to scout out possible locations. The best spot turned out to be where Paul Newman and Robert Redford jumped into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Some metal rungs were still embedded in the rock of the outcrop. We spent half a day eating junk food and trying to figure out the logistics of suspending my brother and the other actor safely from the edge of the cliff. Although we could cheat most of it, one shot would be needed that actually showed them hanging from the cliff.

We joked and laughed about the prospect of my brother hanging from the cliff, but standing out near the precipice and looking down at the rocky bank a couple hundred feet below… I began thinking of plan B.

Plan B was a natural preserve corridor in the Gorge. It was an interesting bit of geography, a narrow sandy inlet with eighty feet cliff to either side. We liked the prospect of a gun battle here, almost like one would see in a western. Since we wanted to do it all in one day, a shot list was needed. So a few weeks before our filming date, we made a trip out with a couple of Steve’s friends and had them enact the shoot out while we composed and videoed the shots on the fly. It was a Saturday, so there were plenty of hikers and tourists observing our filming of adults shooting each other with extended index fingers and making the accompanying sound, “Bang! Bang!”

We may have looked ridiculous, but I assured passerby’s, “Yes, that’s right. We’re making a movie.. You’ll see!”

Off camera I would throw a pinch of dirt in the stand in’s face to mimic a ricochet as well as force a reaction from him. In addition his “bang, bang!”s were way off and his shooting finger wasn’t even pointing in the right direction. Working with non-actors can be very frustrating.

The presence of our camera and clap board drew the attention of a forest warden who informed us of the application process we would need to go through to film in that delicate and very protected mini-ecosystem.

Plan C: Mid August found us miles along a gravel logging road deep in the Columbia Gorge wild reserve. It was a perfect area to dump bodies or to shoot a scene involving a lot of gun fire. No people, no forest wardens. So it was there where Sully and his buddy, Jimmy chased down that damn Sri Lankan.

Back in the summer of ’97 we had our detective on the roof of a building spying on a murder suspect’s house across the street. The scene remained incomplete because I had yet to find the murder suspect’s house. It had to be an interesting looking home, one that we could shoot the exterior, and it had to be across the street from a 4-5 story building which had a roof we could get access to.

Finally, I found a water tower that overlooked an interesting, dilapidated two story home. The tower was surrounded by an eight feet high cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. The metal rung ladder attached to the tower began about 20 feet off the ground. It was only after the home owners across the street gave permission for us to shoot on their premise that I got twitchy, knowing some laws had to be broken.

It was a few hours before dusk when Steve and I nonchalantly moved the two ladders from my dad’s truck to the side alley. A busy street was just a block away just on the other side of the Firehouse Theater. Any passing cop glancing our way would easily spot us. We quickly threw the 25’ ladder over the barbed wire into the precious real estate space underneath the tower. Leaning the other ladder against the fence, on top of the barbed wire, Steve climbed up and leaped over, landing and tumbling with a loud grunt. I winced and wished I didn’t have to follow. But someone had to hold the base of the 25’ foot ladder at the base of the tower, so he could reach the bottom most rung of the tower’s ladder. I gingerly climbed up the rungs and after some hesitation leaped from the top most rung way over the barbed wire, mimicking Steve’s rough landing. To return we would have to climb the cyclone fence and navigate over the barbed wire to the ladder on the other side.

We positioned our second ladder so that it reached the bottom rung of the tower ladder. My worry about police shifted to Steve as he reached the top of our ladder I was securing and grabbed hold of the bottom rung of the tower ladder to begin the 150+ foot journey straight up. If Steve didn’t fall to his death, the footage he would shoot up there would amount to about ten seconds of screen time.

I sometimes think of our premiere, sitting next to someone who glances down at their Iphone whilst the above ten seconds roll by and then… the blood.

2001-2002 – Student of Sound

Picture was finished save for our creature shots. Meanwhile our sound issues were in ugly condition. I would have hired someone to help, but I was still living paycheck to paycheck. Steve became heavily involved with other projects so I spent a lot of time polishing and re-polishing the edit.

Fortunately, I was able to borrow a sizable library of sound effects, and I began applying final sound to all the scenes.  It sounds easy saying it in one short sentence, but the sound was excruciatingly laborious and I was so new to the idea of sound and its place in film, I found myself on a steep learning curve.

I would spend hours watching each scene, applying sound where it was needed. The opening scene had us following Eden’s legs as she navigated downtown at night. I huddled close to the computer monitor, stop the footage and advanced frame by frame until her foot touched the cement, then apply cd6024_43_Steps Female high heels on cement to each step. Layered underneath this would be cd6040_05_City Ambience, light distant traffic. Eventually the sidewalk turned to cobblestone (cd6024_49_Steps Female high heels on cement w/l9oose rock) and she stopped (cd6002_12_Volkswagen Drive-by fast, Exterior). Across some tram tracks, by the Skidmore Fountain (cd6077_23_Fountain, medium) was her Lesbian lover. After a brief hesitation while a tram goes by (cd6011_67_city street car, exterior), she crosses over to her and they enveloped in a deep and passionate kiss (me making out with my arm).

We were able to borrow large slabs of foam from a local audio studio. We made a little fort with them, a primitive sound booth. Over a period of months, we asked the actors to come over and play, and shoved them into our play fort to have them replace their original audio. We would feed them their original line three times through the headphones, and they would attempt to repeat the line at the same pace and inflection into the mic. This allowed us to get nice clean lines for a lot of our exterior scenes whose production sound was polluted with external noises.

Here is part of a scene with original audio:    Eden_Mom_Orig_Audio

Here is the same dialogue re-performed in our phone booth fort:  Eden_Mom_New_Audio

I signed up for a fiction writing class at a community college in September. I tried to write other stories, but my creative energy seemed to either have been drained or stifled by this incomplete project. So I revisited the story of the movie, wrote parts of it out in literary form and read it to my class. Their feedback reinforced some of the better parts of the story and shed light on weak areas that I hadn’t seen before. Its one thing to receive criticism about my written work, but to have it done to my efforts of the previous five years, painstakingly shot to video… it was devastating.

 

But the more I watched the semi-complete movie, the more I agreed with their criticism. I had forced together two unrelated short stories in what I had hoped would be an interesting experiment, and it turned out to be an experiment without the interesting part. Perhaps it would have worked had it not involved two extremely unrelated genres, a detective thriller and a lesbian drama. The story of sad eyed Eden coming out of the closet and faced with breaking up with her unlikable boyfriend didn’t engage very well, especially being weakly linked with a more interesting story about a vicious serial killer. It was like – damn it’s her again, all sad and stuff.

I suffered a brain explosion. How the hell could I even think such thoughts? Seven years ago I was embarking on a single year odyssey along a golden path leading to Sundance! Why, why, why now this?! How come my ideas for story, for scenes, weren’t measuring up?!

It began to dawn on me that the largest of the awesome forces that stood in the way of my successful film was me. Seven years ago, I was like a 19^th century peasant picking up a paint brush and expecting to be the next Picasso. Malcolm Gladwell mentions in “Outliers” that research shows on average, at least 10,000 hours is needed to master a skill or craft. I hadn’t spent that much time filmmaking, but I was getting better at distinguishing bad dialogue from bad acting and the foul smelling combination of both. And the current Eden story was exhibiting all the above.

It also occurred to me that retiring that story would in effect be the last of our original film. The thieves tale and the Eden lesbian story were our training wheels, our laboratory where we experimented and made glorious and horrendous mistakes. So perhaps it made sense to replace both and see how well and far we can ride.

So thinking in this manner, I convinced myself to swallow my pride and trash half of the movie once again. Perhaps I could take advantage of my small step up on the learning curve and fashion a better story, one more complimentary to the detective/serial killer story…

2003 – Eden #2

We had overdone our stay at my old co-worker’s house. Our planned “evening shoot” had run over.  It was past 2:00 am and we were still in her and her husband’s bedroom. The husband was downstairs watching TV, anxiously waiting for us to finish, she was letting off steam in their work-shed. I had overstayed my welcome and we all felt the pressure to get the hell out of there.

Eden and Sara lay in bed. The time pressure was making it hard for me to concentrate. I tossed the sheets about and pulled the top blanket to one side. I had Sara bunch up her pillow and Eden drape her arm across Sara’s midsection. I was trying to visually imply that there had been a lot of bed activity.

I turned to Steve, unsure, “I don’t know. Does it look like they just had sex?”

He was half interested, setting up the camera, sipping soda from a 7-11 cup, “Yup.”

“I don’t know..,” I scratched my head, bunching the sheets some more.

While my co-workers at my IT logistics job were fretting about an imminent layoff, I was hoping it would happen. In fact, I was earnestly making plans for a nine day summer shoot, budgeting money with my hopeful severance package.

It was an overcast day in April when they let loose the dogs through the maze of cubes. They announced a meeting would take place at 1:00pm. I took an extra long lunch to avoid the imminent initial onslaught, so upon my return, I saw only the aftermath. Tears and blood mixed strangely with the normally gray mundane scene as I walked through the carnage. We had been slaughtered like pigs. My boss, who was carrying a bloody axe, saw me and asked that I follow him. I did so with a smile on my face.

Then next morning instead of going to work, I ventured out to my favorite coffee shop with a skip in my step. I was unemployed and feeling on top of the world.

Now I could focus on the real work. How would the new Eden story support/progress the detective/serial killer plot? I wanted her to be a protagonist also, so it made sense that she would be trying to solve the murders as well. Perhaps she had an intuitive ability to uncover the mystery behind the murders. But how and what?

With the detective story cast almost exclusively with men, I liked the idea of casting the new story with all females. This seemed to work with my logic (male) / intuitive (female) spectrum I was creating with both heroes. Luckily, I discovered Louann in my gym circuit class who was a local casting director. Upon reading the rough draft of the script she quickly had some excellent actresses to recommend.

We blocked out nine consecutive days in late July. I had to fork over $3500 to rent all the lights, power generators, cords, sandbags, C-Stands, boom, screens, bounce cards, etc. For those nine 15 hour days, we shot nearly half the movie. Steve and I, along with Michael on sound (we were making sure this time to record GOOD SOUND on site), and a friend’s nephews (age 12 and 14) as helpers, we were a motley crew that was unstoppable.

We fought angry neighbors who complained about our lights, drunken neighbors that made farting noises, my old co-worker who wanted us out of her bedroom, and a party full of Peruvians. When it was late and actors started to nod off, our 12 year old slate boy would slap the slate board extra special.

Our detective story almost had a new location for each scene, which fit the weekend to weekend nature of our shooting schedule. This time, with limited time, I made sure to keep the number of locations to a bare minimum. Having to pick up our large camp of equipment and move would be so time consuming and severely limited how much we could get done in a day.

Most of the nine days found us at a house boat community where my old co-worker, Doug, lived. He was an anti-corporate type like me and had been enduring the cube world 10 years longer than I (he was able to escape a short time later). His generosity knew no bounds. He briefly taught us how to drive his electric motorboat and let us go it without him, “Don’t speed until you’re passed the houses and don’t hit anything.”

A few nights had us working until dawn, which required him and his unprepared Peruvian roommate to sleep out in his boat.

“This is *uckin ridiculous,” he muttered to Doug the first night they spent in the boat.

“This is so awesome!” I excitedly nudged Steve during our fifth 15 hour day. It was 4:30 in the morning and we were driving to Astoria, a coastal town about 1.5 hours west of Portland. A month earlier I had hung around the Astoria port and found a cool guy who would let us film on his boat. We needed to get there early so we would have time to get the boat out of port a mile or so for specific shots just before sunrise.

By day nine we were mostly wasted away, barely functioning. With a shaky caffeinated hand, I made notes on the scenes we were shooting on our last day. In addition to some day stuff, we would need to fight dawn for our night shots around the villain’s house. This is the house our heroine is drawn to in the middle of the night. It is also the house we shot from the perspective atop the water tower across the street in 2000. Fortunately the same people still lived there and were still willing to let us blast their house with lights and make noise all evening.

Our new Eden would be asleep in her car in between our set ups. When ready, I’d wander over to her car in a daze and lightly rap on her passenger window and she’d fly up wide eyed. Yes, it was the same nightmare.

Kristen, who played our new Eden, was a wonderful actress and carried the role better than I could have imagined. She was a low maintenance person and brought her best with her all nine days. And all those days were dedicated to her character, so if she had proven sub par in anyway or become non-committal… I hate to think about it.

One of the final scenes at the housing boat community involved Eden and her mother (played by Lorraine) running full speed along the dock from our creature. At a crucial moment, mom would be shoved hard (broadside tackle from creature) off the dock and into the cold dark river. Weeks earlier we had Lorraine at my gym running along side the pool, trying to figure out ways to mimic a creature tackle that would send her flying into the water. Splash! Splash! Splash! Nothing really worked until my gym trainer had the good idea of using a large rubber gym ball to shove her into the pool. It looked pretty convincing. We could easily erase the ball in post production.

So on the night of the shoot with $500 lights blasting the marina, we had the two women sprint down the dock toward camera. At a precise moment, my gym trainer would step out with his big ball and shove Lorraine into the dark water with a boyish grin. Our second take was perfect. I am in debt to Lorraine for subjecting herself to our craziness.

I vigorously went about editing the new scenes, sliding them in with the old detective stuff. I pieced it together the best I could and put place markers where our yet to materialize creature was to appear. Then, after paying a desperate last minute $150 same day shipping fee, our VHS tape was off to the magical land of Sundance!

Surely they would see past this rough, shoddy edit and the missing creature parts (I inserted black cards that said, “Creature” where it was supposed to appear). Surely they would see through its imperfections, chip through its rough coal exterior to discover the diamond inside and recognize the movie that would mark the beginning of a new epoch in film!  At last!!

2004 – Wanted: A Creature and a Job

“That’s it man, game over man, game over! What the *uck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?” - Aliens

My movie wasn’t accepted. The Sundance panel had no imagination. Their minds went blank when the black insert flashed “CREATURE!” It’s sad really how our society is geared so much toward visuals… no one seems to like reading anymore.

I had mopped us into a corner with this creature. We had hit a wall that for the moment was impenetrable. As if on cue, Steve’s work went bankrupt and he had to put his house, where we both lived, on the market. We were forced out like vagrants and lugged all our furniture to a small apartment. My unemployment checks stopped appearing in April.

Despite our drowning situation, I still inquired online and through people I knew in town about a CGI artist who would be willing to work on a creature for a low budget movie. No pay, of course, but it would be wonderful for a reel. It was dead end after dead end. The inexperienced artists were too intimidated and the experienced ones just laughed.

I had various artist friends draw up designs for the creature. However none of them felt right. This became more problematic as we would shoot my brother running from this thing. When he looked back at it, would he look up, down, or straight ahead? If it was humanoid, would he recognize it as something alien right away? The decisions we made for my brother’s reactions started to put constraints on how the creature would look and move. And so far none of the designs fit the bill.

Also, this creature was supposed to be Ravana. Shouldn’t there be some Hindu influence in the design? I checked out images in books and the internet. The images tended to be cartoon-like and over exaggerated.

Early in the project we joked about having a guy in a big black chicken suit making chase in front of a green screen with some eerie chirping noise. And at one point, Steve had rendered in a giant Pac-man chasing Sully in a parking garage, but it just wasn’t that scary.

Somehow we managed the resources for one last shoot involving Sully running from our invisible creature in that old parking garage where I used to work. We did well in casting my brother in the role of Sully. I know no one else who would have spent seven years running across bridges, under overpasses, through parking garages in the middle the night with a car close on his heels.

We had him fall down stairwells and even threw 2 X 4’s at him for good measure (An idea related to the creature that was wisely discarded). He was truly a victim, but perhaps not of our imagined creature.

We were fortunate to have his character wear a blue bandana in a way that covered his whole head. As the years went by it did well in covering his ever receding hairline.

It wasn’t too long before we were back living in our respective parents’ homes. Steve stayed alive with odd jobs at a post production facility. I borrowed money from my parents to pay bills, not having any luck finding a job. My financial hole deepened, fueling my stress and depression.

Thus was my condition when, in October, I got a call from my brother who said I could get hired on where he was working. Desperation is a powerful motivator. I found a safe space in a closet at my parents’ house to store the movie hard-drive and 50+ DV footage tapes, packed my suitcase and got on a flight to Vietnam to teach English.