So we had a crew meeting today. Our director and lighting/art direction guys were there, M and S, as was our lead actor! I finally got to meet him, he was a nice enough guy though he seemed rather nervous about the fact that he’s been cast as the LEAD ACTOR. He’s not acted in anything before as a principle, so he’s -rather- nervous. I think we’ve got him an assistant though, a guy I know named D____y is interested in acting, he’s a theatre student here at school and he’s maybe going to be the assistant to ML, our lead actor. He was like, “So what would an assistant do,”
So I explained to him “Oh you know, he’d get you food if you needed it, water, anything you’d need on set, he’d be hooked up to us to know when to get you on set, etc, or like, if you suddenly needed a doctor’s appointment while you’re in the middle of the shoot, he could do it for you.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I’d need that.” He looked mortified at the suggestion of someone making a doctor’s appointment for him. He’d make a terrible diva.
So anyway, Dr. Bob had some of the professional crew guys go around the room and introduce themselves, so everyone got to meet M and S, our official shooting senior crew guys, they’re awesome. They’re fraternal twins who made their own production studio as college students back at this school in early 2000, and have made a successful career with it from that. They do the shooting for Bob on every production that he’s done so far, which is awesome because they A. Know what the heck they’re doing. B. Do -great- work. and C. They connect well with Bob, they get his vision. I’m happy to work with them, honestly. It just ups our production on the scale in terms of value and aesthetics. They’re going to be truly amazing. They’ve done some major production work in the past, like shooting various commercials for different people around town, like some banks and some other places, and they’ve done a couple music videos. And next week they’re screening a premier of the movie they’ve just made. It promises to be great, and I _will_ attend.
We also got to meet AL who’s doing our music. I’ve listened to both the demo tracks he’s done for us (Bob LOVES showing it off *g*) and they are super good, I think with the right mixing, adding some power behind it, changing up a little, it could be some seriously great music. I mean, the Dirge song, which has got an interesting creepy carnival type sound, comes off as something truly Tim Burton-esque (Sorry, I’ve forgotten the other guy you mentioned, Bob/AL/etc!) It’s going to be great, I think.
And then…I think we’ve found our senior sound crew, the two girls who came for that, both grad students, are super excited about sound, they have a lot of experience working with stuff in school and I think that if I talk to Bob, they’re going to probably be our senior sound girls. As a project, they’ve been working on stripping the sound off of one of Bob’s other movies (That one of the girls worked on actually!) and remixing it for a grad project. The movie is called “Wait”, a very powerful short film about a man who has just lost his son, who’s a soldier, to the War. There’s a scene at the end (spoiler alert!) where the father shoots himself in suicide, due to grief. And the good natured girls have had to see this 37 times. They said “By the end, we were trying to decide if it was a comedy or a drama! We kept laughing at the part where he’s crying going ‘This is so wrong! Oh my gosh, he keeps squeaking! No, so wrong! But sooo funny!” They said they hadn’t slept in four days during the sound remix and there was one part where one of the girls added a string orchestra sound, and the other goes “Is he in heaven now? It’s so beautiful!” They’re very dedicated to their jobs. I look forward to working with them.
I’m just excited! We’ve got the bare bones of a true crew now, I’ve got names and email/phone numbers for about 20 people. I’m going to put together a contact email list and then have smaller groups for just sound, just camera work, etc, so that the people in charge can get the names/email of the people they’ll be working with, AND so if Bob wants to communicate something to them, all he has to do is email me, and I’ll email them.
I am super duper excited, as always. More later!
