5 Things I’ve learned never to do again while filming “Fan Film”
1 – I’ll never film in PA during Locust mating season, or whatever season that was that made them make so much damn noise.
2- When the script says “2 AM”, I will not shoot until the sun is down. As much as I can do with After Effects, I can’t make a 6:00 PM sun shining through a window look like a 2 AM moon.
3 – I will never NOT look at the view screen at least 3 times before saying “action”, making sure that I’m actually recording this time.
4 – I will not write the line “I have hit every obstacle you can imagine in FL” in script again, because that seems to have some sort of magical power that ends up making that line true. For the 90% of footage in Fan Film that is in the project, nearly all of it was shot in 48hours. The last 10% that takes place in Florida took 5 months to get done.
5 – I will never cut my hair before a shoot again. I had to have 2 more last minute hair cuts with screen caps in hand for re-shoots. I should have just kept it long. Although, being the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life, and having a goatee, the pony tail would have made me 1 blue shirt away from looking like the “Comic Book Guy” in The Simpsons.
Well, here’s the start of the series of post I mentioned last week regarding my take on Fan Films, and maybe some explanation of led me to write “Fan Film The Series” in the first place.
Let’s start with the one that started this whole mess. The mess meaning the ever growing monster called “fan films”.
Regardless of popular opinion, I don’t consider “Troops” to be that “one.” Don’t get me wrong – Troops is incredible, and probably single handedly ignited the explosion of fan films that exist today. But before Troops, there was another.
I present for your consideration as “the one that started it all”:
Hardware Wars
Where are currently in the 30th Anniversary of the release of Star Wars and fan films are still just beginning on paper, “Hardware Wars” was released 7 months after Star Wars!
It was written and directed by Ernie Fosselius, and produced by Ernie Fosselius and Michael Wiese.
The parody character names include:
Chewchilla the Wookie Monster
Ham Salad
Darph Nader
Fluke Starbucker
Augie Ben Doggie
Princess Anne-Droid
4Q2
Arty Deco
George Lucas has been quoted as saying “Hardware Wars is my favorite Star Wars parody.”
Which pretty much explains what’s happened to Star Wars since 1999.
I don’t know what else to say about this one. Other than – it’s the first.
So instead of trying to explain it, let’s just take a look:
For those that aren’t a regular reader of the NeoZAZ blog, you may have missed an article about my hard drive crashing.
Long story short, my hard drive crashed. Luckily, I had a spare and a back of the drive and was up and functional fairly quickly.
My first order of business was to get back to work on a client’s project, then check the state of affairs on everything else later.
Well, that time came this evening and I was in for an initial shock. When I opened the Fan Film project files, Premiere couldn’t find any of the footage!
I didn’t panic because I have the footage on an external drive, the raw footage backed up, and the original tapes. But still, not finding the footage was pretty stressful since there are about 30 to 50 files per project I’d have to track down and re-direct per project.
Well, I got about 5 files redirected when I noticed a pattern. All the files what were “missing” were supposed to be on the “H” drive.
Hmmm (no “H” pun intended). Maybe there’s something to this.
Low and behold, when I hooked up the damaged drive to try to retrieve some of the data, it through a half of my disc letter out of whack. So into the Disk Manager – reassign drive letters to the appropriate drives, and bam – everything’s back to normal.
So, that was a pretty boring post, I know. Truth is I put it here as a reminder to myself and something I can reference again in the future when this inevitably happens again. And it will happen again because 1 – I have the kind of luck and 2 – I use windoze.
As we wait for the final filming in Orlando, the final editing of the PA footage, and the final rendering of the post production effects, I was planning to take this time to start a short series of posts regarding Fan Films in general since those are what pretty much inspired me to create this series in the first place.
So, not that the preface is set up, let me change gears and tell a whole other story, though related, that leads to this post.
I was searching youtube.com looking for footage of the fan films I was planning to write about. While watching the trailer for what I consider to be my personal favorite fan film (to be revealed in a post later) the youtube “related videos” column listed something interesting.
“Boba Fett Vs. Predator”.
Okay, I could hear the collective “guish” of everyone rolling their eyes, but hear me out.
The Boba Fett costume looks great, the Predator – well, not so much. But it’s a difficult costume, and considering the typical fan film budget, it’s pretty damn impressive.
However, that’s not what intrigued me about this idea. More, it was the feasibility of the story it’s self.
Consider this – there’s never been, at least to my knowledge, a pin-point location named for the Predator’s home world. In fact, I theorized the Predators were most likely nomads until that steaming pile of celluloid “AVP-R” came out and it gave us a glimpse of the Predator home world. Regardless, the location of said planet was not disclosed. So it could easily be in our galaxy, or in a galaxy far, far away. Even more likely, somewhere in between.
Okay, so the question of location is out of the way. “But what about ‘A long time ago’” you may ask.
Ah, let me give you my take on that. We’ll just throw out the idea that the events of Star Wars happen really, really, long ago. Like, millions of years ago. So long that we couldn’t possibly benchmark those events with anything in the regards to the history of the earth that we know about.
So, Predator history. First, in AVP (the first, less steaming one) the premise of the whole film starts with the discovery of a Mayan / Incan / Aztec hybrid temple that was constructed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years ago. As we learn, this temple is a hunting/training ground for Predators. Good start. So, that doesn’t make up for the each few million years yet. Ah, but one thing to help support that idea is the shoulder canons. The shoulder cans are stored in the temple. They may have been sitting there for thousands of years, yet they are pretty dang technologically advanced which demonstrates a very, very long time of technological evolution.
Now, the further point could be made that “Hey, for all we know, some Predator lackey put those canons in the temple the day before the hunt.”
My response is, though less compelling, “No one knows how old the Predators are so it’s entirely possibly they existed a long time ago, so nah!”.
At this point of the post, I realize my original intention was to just embed this youtube video and say, “Hey ya’ll check this out”. So, here it is:
As a follow up to me previous post (for anyone actually reading this). I got a boot on my ankle after visiting the Orthopedic center today. It’s huge. Here’s the pic:
So just to drive the point home – any filming I was hoping to get done while I’m visiting in PA this weekend will deffinately not have me in the scene unless it calls for me to stand completely still of sit down the whole time.
Funny little side note to this project: A friend of my wife and I is also currently working on a Star Wars Fan Film. Michael Mergenthaler is playing Darth Garin in “Star Wars: The Forgotten”. Check out their site here.
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