i remember in university, a girl i went to school with had a schtick, you know, how we all have our bits that we do, but hers was this hapless superhero called "MASTER OF THE OBVIOUS!!!" mostly he'd just kind of stride purposely into a room and state something... well... obvious.
the reason this comes to mind is that i was involved in making a short (read: 1 minute long) film this morning, which will theoretically be on Zed TV on CBC, for any Canadian viewers. and the director said something about people being able to view it on their cell phones/pda's. very hi-tech, very hip and happening with the youth culture, our CBC.
in any case, apart from lending my apartment for the interior locations (note: if anyone asks you to lend them your apartment for a film shoot, never do it. they will rearrange your furniture, traumatize your cat, and discover all sorts of embarrassing things like your boyfriend's multitude of candy wrappers, old christmas paper and the like when they move the couch.), i played the role of an innocent bystander who is inadvertently killed by a crumpled-up piece of paper thrown off a highrise balcony by a frustrated scriptwriter. this neccessarily involved numerous takes of me getting beaned with a paper ball, and hurling myself, unconscious, to the concrete.
for anyone unfamiliar with northern alberta, particularly this week's weather in northern alberta, today's temperatures reached a balmy high of -28C without the windchill. and so there we were, camera, boom, reflective silver disc-thingy, standing in the snow out front of my building, taking turns knocking me down with wadded up paper.
buses were slowing down. traffic was honking. oh, yeah. check out the big movie stars-- maybe they're filming a BRICK COMMERCIAL! there was a guy in yellow who would NOT GO AWAY. he kept asking questions. i think he even asked if we were making a porn. yeah, a really AWESOME FREAKING PORN MOVIE. it's called Polar Necrophiliacs 3:Flesh for Fantasy-- the action's just starting when i hit the ground!
so for one particular shot, the other actor had to run past my motionless body. this meant that i had to lie down on the (cold cold) sidewalk. no problem. it was actually fun. but we had to keep waiting while the general public walked by. so there i am, lying there, eyes closed, and this woman walks by. i just see her fur-covered boots, i have no idea what she looks like. but she says in this CLASSIC falsetto voice "must be cold!".
Must be cold.
cold?
MASTER OF THE OBVIOUS!!!
u/v
2 comments:
you know...in nyc they force production assistants (who linger lower on the production ladder than, say, extras and the craft service people) to hold the teeming general public back on the sidewalks. they yell things out like, "cross to the other side of the street. the other side of the street! thank you, people. the other side of the street! you can't get through here!" while they hold their arms out and sashay back and forth in an often vain attempt to prevent people from slipping through.
glad to hear that, for this shoot at least, the director decided to use your poor, quickly freezing body on the sidewalk for the same purpose. oh...people of prairieland...do you really think if you honk or wave or look at the camera like you're really wanting to buy that sofa you'll make it into the film? hasn't anyone heard of editing?
on the Master of the Obvious side of things...in high school i volunteered to be a part of the halloween activities at a outdoor park/living museum in which i was required to lie in a shallow hole in the ground (kinda like a shallow grave), covered with a tarp with a slit running lengthwise which was then covered with leaves with only a hole for one eye to see the action (and my cue) so i could pop out of the ground to scare visitors taking the guided "tour" of the haunted town. we were on a hill and the visitors were supposed to stay on the path. it was dark and freezing and we had a few flood lights to give the right amount of glow. now there were guides who were responsible for keeping the visitors in line but they didn't always do their job. during one performance i remember hearing a dad say to his son, "hey, let's walk over here. we'll see better" and i heard footsteps approaching me. before i know it, the dad is literally stepping on me and since our schtick for this thing is that we're all silent ghosts, no one is telling this guy to get off me. but he doesn't stop when he steps on me, oh no...he keeps stepping up and down, up and down and right before i pop out of the ground and kick his foot off me i hear him say, "oh, the ground is kind of soft here." like duh! that's because it's my body you nimwit!
Speaking of one's house as a movie set: one term when I lived in Toronto, I was sharing space with a film student at Humber (Scott, in fact). He was working on his final project, which was a short film exploring addiction and society through yoghurt.
So I come home from work one evening to find all kinds of lights set up outside the house, shining into the living room. I enter the house, look, and find a turtle-style wading pool, filled with yoghurt, and some guy in boxers soaking in it.
I decided that this would be a good time to head down the street to the laundromat.
(One good thing came out of the movie shoot: Scott & his crew painted the walls a really nice blue, since apparently the white was bad from a filming point of view.)
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