One Last Sniff, Then On to the Pistachios: 48-Hour Film part 5 - David Loftus

Sabra finished shooting her Chinese girl scenes about 1:00 p.m. Sunday, and then drove me back to the city from the Valerios’ farm. When I got home, I took off all my dirt-covered clothing and had a shower. My wife Carole said, “You look like you could use a beer.” She was right.

So we went to our local pub and I was halfway through a salad and my second pint -- maybe about 4:30? -- when my cell phone rang. Brian McKee, the cameraman, wanted to know if I could do one last shot for the film. I had to go home, put back on the dirty clothes I’d worn all weekend, and rejoin Brian.

The script had called for a brief shot of my character sniffing the urine sample on his clothing while riding the bus home from work. Dan had planned to do a “guerilla” take on board a city bus, but that seemed too dicey, particularly given that we were only a couple hours from the deadline to turn in the film.

So we shot the scene at a Portland Streetcar station just outside Powell’s Books instead. Brian lurked at the far side of 10th Avenue while I planted myself at the stop. The other “passenger,” the girl, and the traffic were all fortuitous elements. You’ll see this sequence early in the film between 0:42 and 0:50.

Dan’s script for “A Hole Story” won Best Writing for the 2009 Portland 48-Hour Film Project.

Which brings us up to this year. At 7:00 p.m. on Friday, August 6, we received our assignment: character would be Pete (or Pam) Peterson, artist; prop was pistachio nuts; and line of dialogue would be “I have a surprise for you.” Our particular team was assigned the genre of Mockumentary.

We had a lively brainstorming session from 7:30 to 10:30. Several separate ideas that surfaced during that time would come together in the finished film. Dan was interested in the self-referential, post-modern idea of inserting videos within a video. Someone called pistachio nuts “addictive,” which raised the notion of bringing the prop into the story as an actual addiction. Dan’s team had worked on other stories in which a guru figure teaches a novice how to do something, and it was suggested our artist could be a video filmmaker who knew how to make viral YouTube videos.

It was only in Dan’s script that the character became a filmmaker who expressly could not make such a video, though he was trying desperately to do so. That would allow Dan to parody some of the most famous viral videos on YouTube, such as “the Numa Numa Dance” (Gary Brolsma lip-synching to a Moldovan pop song in front of his computer Webcam), guys getting injured doing stupid things, and cute animals.

When I was describing my thoughts, I conscientiously referred to the as-yet hypothetical protagonist as “Pete or Pam Peterson” -- but speaking quickly, I ran them together. The person next to me, Alex Huebsch, heard them as one word and suggested the character’s first name should be “Peteorpam.” This not only made for a great inside joke for the other Portland filmmakers who would recognize a slurring of what we’d all been assigned, but would sound like “Peter Pan” to a wider audience. Best of all, it set up a “who’s on first”-style comic dialogue with a package delivery person played by Dylan Hillerman.

I didn’t get the script in my email box until something like 9 a.m. Saturday, and arrived at Dan’s house well after 10. We shot some of the script in around his house: a sequence involving a TV repairman that Peteorpam arranges to have pushed off the roof (which did not make the contest-entry version), and the deliveryman sequence (which did). Then we headed out to the Valerios’ farm, site of last year’s imaginative film about digging a hole to China.

Part six:  Critters in the House






Read part one: Overview of The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: Daniel Elkayam and the Overcast Productions strategy


Read part three: Digging a hole to China


Read part four: In the dirt and through the earth

Son of a Ditch Goes Up the Creek; 48-Hour Film part 4 - David Loftus

[Here again is a link to "A Hole Story," the short film I'm describing in this account:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4 ]

The mound of dirt you see at 1:52 was heaped up in the Valerios' “front yard” (actually, a plot of ground between a barn and their driveway which is closer to the passing road than their home) by Jim and his backhoe. We hollowed out a “hole” in the middle of it to shoot into and out of as the mouth of the hero’s hole to China. The girls look down into it a little later, and both I and the Chinese girl shout and drop things into it -- supposedly at opposite ends of the earth -- near the end of the story.

The naturally-lit scene of the mound of dirt at 1:52 was probably shot on Sunday morning, as was the next scene at 1:57 -- where I’m in a fairly dark area supposedly down the hole. But that was shot in a creek bed below a road and culvert several miles away from the mound of dirt and deep in the woods. (You can see the bottom edge of the culvert near the upper left corner of the screen when I’m talking to the girls at 2:07-2:25.)

Each side of the conversation with the girls was shot out of sequence: me at the creek earlier in the morning Sunday, them at the dirt mound much later that morning. Similarly, the little girls weren’t anywhere near the culvert to drop the bucket on the rope to me at 2:45; someone else did that.

Also, the sequence between 3:13 and 3:20, when I first hear and discover the buried miner, was shot Sunday morning at 8 or 9, many hours after we did the miner’s end of the conversation, which was done between 10 p.m. and midnight the night before. That had been in the ditch that Clay had cleared out, somewhere in the woods between the culvert/creek and the Valerio homestead with the dirt mound “at the surface” of the hole. (The distance from culvert site to the mound was, I would estimate, something like two miles.)

Tony Green, the actor who plays the miner, lay on his back in the bed of the ditch, and we buried him in dirt all around and over him from his waist to the crown of his head while keeping only his face uncovered. The camera was hung directly above him, “upside-down” from his perspective, and I crawled into the shot from the other direction for a few scenes where the back of my hatted head appears with Tony.

The interspersed scenes when I’m facing the camera right-side up were shot the next morning, in the culvert creek, with no Tony around and someone else reading his lines for me to respond to. (I notice the background in those shots starts pretty dark and gets lighter as the scene plays out, because the morning sun was coming up and increasingly piercing through the tree cover.) Obviously, at least two different half-eaten apples were used, too.

One of the challenges of doing the scenes with the miner was getting enough lighting out there in the deep woods in the middle of the night. We had a few artificial standing lights, but we also pointed the headlights from two different cars, I believe, down on the scene from the road above. It was a cold night in the ditch, and the dirt was cold too, so Tony asked for blankets on his legs, and by the time we finished and he could go home, shower, and get to bed, he was shivering. When he wrapped, we all applauded his brave work.

(That's Tony emerging from the dirt at the completion of his scene. In the background you'll note a silver "bounce" disk to reflect some of the artificial lighting, probably from the car lights, down onto him when he was lying on the floor of the ditch and covered in dirt.

I continued shooting in the ditch for another hour, to get the scenes of “Brian” deep in the earth and getting closer to China: first lying on my side and pretending to dig downward, toward my feet while the camera shot me mostly from above; next, a side shot of me digging the pick into a wall of the ditch; and finally, another shot of me on my side in the ditch, appearing to pick at the wall above me while the camera moves in and gets a shot of me pulling out the all-important prop of the picture frame for continued inspiration. I remember Dan asked me to wipe my brow in almost every one of these shots, but I thought that was a little too repetitive, so I pretended to be out of breath from the labor and trying to catch my breath.

At 7:03 the film moves to a dramatic new location, both within the story and during the shoot. Obviously, the camera shoots the field in “China” upside down as a piece of visual wit. This field was a different location from everything else: the dirt mound next to the driveway was a little west of the Valerios’ home; the forest, ditch, culvert (even the hill and pond where Juno is seen dumping the dirt) were all pretty much north and east, I think; while this pasture land was several hundred yards down a hill to the south.

We moved back to the original dirt mound for the shot of the shovel and me “breaking through” (which I think you can tell from the treeline in the background), and to get that, I had to scrunch myself down into the hole in the mound, let myself be covered with dirt and grass -- partly held in place by cardboard flaps -- and deal with spiders and potato bugs that dropped out of that mess on me while the camera was being set up for the shot.

Then we hustled back down to the alternate pasture for the rest of those scenes (including Maggie the Horse and Juno at the very end), for which Jim Valerio had dumped another, smaller mound of dirt with his backhoe. As the Chinese girl, Sabra Choi also clambered out of the original dirt mound, shot from a different angle. That mound is also the mouth down which both of us yell, supposedly at opposite ends of the earth.

I’m proud of my leap into the earth-long hole from the China end, which was really just a jump behind a small mound of dirt in the “Chinese” field. I had to crouch down instantly behind it to make it look like I was plummeting all the way to the other end of the planet, and I think it works.

I believe I had finished shooting all my scenes by the time Sabra arrived to shoot hers close to noon on Sunday. Dan wasn’t sure Sabra was going to make it; all through the weekend, he was hunting for alternative girls, possibly making them Australian (which might have made more sense, geographically; through the center of the earth, and all), but a Chinese girl made more emotional sense, so Dan was pleased that Sabra could make the shoot.

Part five: Trying to Go Viral

[It was announced last night by the Portland chapter for the 48-Hour Film Project that our entry for this year, “Hit Count,” had made the finals and will screen with the other best films of the 2010 Portland competition on Thursday -- hardly a surprise, since our film won the audience favorite award in its group in the first round of screenings two weeks ago. There are one or two more things to relate about “A Hole Story” and then I’ll move on to my account of this year’s shoot.]


Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: Daniel Elkayam and Overcast Productions' approach


Read part three: Digging a hole to China

Digging a Hole to China part 3 - David Loftus

Dan had concocted a sweet tale about a lab researcher who has a rotten day at work and decides to live out his boyhood fantasy of digging a hole to China. The big question was: How to depict the physical act of shoveling down through the Earth on screen?

The Valerio family had volunteered the use of their farm for any location work it might come in handy for, and it turned out that there was a culvert and stream in the wooded portion, as well as a fairly long, dry creek bed filled with dead branches and leaves nearby. While we shot the early indoor sequences, Clay Reiling spent much of Saturday morning in the woods, clearing out the creek bed, and Jim Valerio used his backhoe to heap up a pile of dirt that would appear in the movie as the mouth to our hero’s epic dig.

We were able to shoot “A Hole Story” in mostly sequential order. The opening sequence in which Kenneth Campbell provides a urine sample was shot Saturday morning in a men’s room at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

“Brian” spilling the sample on himself; at his desk, looking at the map of China and the pictures of a pagoda, the Great Wall, and a dragon; and packing a lunchbox and picking up the shovel, pick, and lamp . . . were all shot Saturday morning and early afternoon in a loft space above West 14th and Burnside, just across the street from the Crystal Ballroom (for you McMenamins brewery and concert fans), where producer and assistant film editor Luke Norby had his workspace.

The only scene in the first 1:18 that was not shot on Saturday was the bus stop (actually, a Portland Streetcar station next to Powell’s Books), which I’ll explain later.

We got to the Valerios’ farm in the late afternoon. I seem to recall futzing around, looking at locations and carrying equipment down a long dirt road into the woods to get to the small field where the next shots take place. The sequence from 1:19 to 1:29 is one continuous shot in which I walk six steps, set down the lunchbox and pick, take three more steps, and take a moment to survey the area. The camera moves with me for the first half, then does an almost full 360-degree circle around me in the sunshine.

The sun was setting, and though Dan probably knew he could shoot many of the “underground” scenes at night, I suspect we were still running a bit behind on the shooting schedule at this point. Since I know we shot it at sunset, it’s impossible for me to see the scene as taking place at sunrise, but I hope the innocent viewer takes it that way.

That near-360 sequence was the work of Dan’s cameraman (aka DP – director of photography), Brian McKee, wearing a Steadicam rig. Brian’s the other primary center of the creative team on this project. Fun-loving yet businesslike, mostly taking Dan’s orders yet sometimes making suggestions with regard to camera work and even what the actors might try doing, Brian is just as responsible for how these films look as Dan is.

After a short break for the title, “A Hole Story” returns to a second Steadicam sequence by Brian, which parallels the two Valerio girls as they run through a field (toward the place where the camera circled me and I started digging, but not to the hole you will see me inside of shortly). At the end of that, at 1:52, the film starts to break up in terms of the order in which things were filmed over the 48-hour weekend shoot, versus their sequence within the story.

Part four: Down in the Dirt

*  *   *   *

Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: how Daniel Elkayam's Overcast Productions team tackles the 48-Hour Film Project

*  *   *   *

There are two places on the Web to see the 11-minute director’s cut of "A Hole Story." The best version is on Daniel Elkayam's Web site:

http://www.danielkayam.com/

Click on “Short Films” and you’ll see “A Hole Story” on the right. If your computer doesn’t handle streaming video very well (this version gets hung up and jerky on my laptop with wireless Internet access), a second option is the simpler digital copy on YouTube, which should play more smoothly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4

Digging A Hole to China, the 48-Hour Film pt. 2 - David Loftus

A 48-Hour Film Project team can be as small as one person who sets up a camera, then goes around front to act for it. The theoretical upper limit is unlimited. According to the 48HFP Web site, the largest team ever put together was in Albuquerque: 116 people and a team of horses.

The two Daniel Elkayam/Overcast Productions teams I’ve been a part of are probably fairly average: about 12-15 people working in front of and behind the camera (moving equipment, handling sound, scouting and preparing locations, fetching food, etc.), and another half dozen toiling elsewhere on the music and keeping in cell-phone touch with Dan as the story and film evolve.

Another invaluable resource for Dan’s team the past two years has been Jim and Mary Valerio, who put their farm to the west of Portland at our disposal, with a wide array of terrains (everything from pastureland to deep forest, pond and creek to carpeted home), and two little girls – Mary Ann and Juno – as featured supporting actresses.

On Friday night, many of us gather at Dan’s house for the brainstorming, which takes place from 7:30 to 10:30 or 11. The process goes like this: each person in the room gets a tablet and pen or pencil, and spends 15-20 minutes free associating ideas about potential plot situations and arcs, the character, the prop, and potential uses for the line of dialogue. Then each person shares his or her ideas with the rest of the room, which sparks further ideas from the others. Dan writes down the most interesting and appealing ideas as we talk. Then he reads them back to us, indicating which three to five appeal to him the most as we hash them around some more.

Then he sends us home to bed while he hunkers down to write the screenplay, which he does between 11 p.m. Friday night and Saturday morning at 6 or 8 a.m. We gather at 9 or 10, shoot steadily throughout the day until 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., get some sleep, shoot whatever remains to be done on Sunday morning, and Dan edits the film in the afternoon and turns it in to the contest organizers in the evening.

In 2009, our assigned character was Brian (or Breanne) Merryweather, researcher; the prop was a picture frame; and the necessary line of dialogue “For crying out loud.” During the brainstorming session, I suggested the line could be split between two characters, which is what eventually happened: “What did you do that for?” “Crying out loud! It’s good to hear my own voice!”

Our assigned genre was Fantasy. Naturally we started talking about wizards, elves, dragons, aliens, Tolkien parodies, and other things that would have been problematic to put on screen in terms of scenery and costumes. For a while we discussed a “billy goats (or other folks) on a bridge with a troll down below” scenario, because somebody had or could manufacture a troll costume/mask. We also considered a story about a tour getting lost in the woods and having some sort of fantasy encounter/adventure.

In the end, Dan said thought he would write about someone deciding to pursue his childhood daydream of digging a hole to China. I think this was one of Dan’s own ideas from the start, and it puzzled most of the rest of us. We couldn’t picture what to do with that, plot-wise, or how it could be shot.

But Dan pointed at me and said he wanted me to act in it, and we went to bed while he wrote the screenplay. By 8 in the morning, the script was in my e-mail box, and by 10 a.m. Saturday, we had gathered to shoot.

This is probably the time for you to look at what we ended up doing, if you haven’t seen it yet. Although the version submitted to the 48HFP must be 7 minutes or less, there are two places on the Web to see the 11-minute “director’s cut,” which includes nearly all of the original script and which Dan edited later. The best version is on his personal Web site:

http://www.danielkayam.com/

Click on “Short Films” and you’ll see “A Hole Story” on the right. If your computer doesn’t handle streaming video very well (this version gets hung up and jerky on my laptop with wireless Internet access), a second option is the simpler digital copy on YouTube, which should play more smoothly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4

Part three:  The 2009 Shoot

The 48-Hour Film Project, an Actor's Story - David Loftus

Last weekend, August 6-8, I participated as an actor in my second straight 48-Hour Film Project competition. Wednesday night I saw the results on the big screen: thanks to the film crew I rejoined from last year, especially its writer-director Daniel Elkayam, who calls his outfit Overcast Productions, I can say the product was good.

Briefly, a team of filmmakers (writer, director, photographer(s), actors, film editor, and other helpful types) gets 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, score, and turn in a movie of no more than 7 minutes in length.

Here’s how it works. At 7 p.m. on Friday evening, representatives of each film team (there were about 56 in this, Portland’s seventh year of the competition) receive a character’s name and profession, a line of dialogue, and a prop that must all appear in the film. Those items are the same for every team; what varies is the assigned genre, which could be anything from Western to Musical, Horror to Silent, Noir or Fantasy to Mockumentary.

The reps then turn the assignment over to the rest of the team to brainstorm a plot or at least a situation; a script is written; the film is shot – mostly on the Saturday, but often with some final shooting on Sunday morning – and edited; a score added (often something original with the help of musician friends, but sometimes just Creative Commons material from the Web); and the finished product gets turned in to the organizers of the 48HFP on a CD or thumb drive by 7 p.m. Sunday night. (The contest allows a half-hour grace period to 7:30 p.m. before a film is considered late and automatically disqualified, which adds travel time for delivery of the entry and gives the teams a full 48 hours to work on their film, in theory.)

Just three and four days later, all the submissions – including the late entries – are screened for the public (which mostly means, the film crews in the competition and their friends), and a week or two after that, a dozen finalists are screened again before the judges choose the Best Film and honorees in other categories such as Best Writing, Best Directing, Best Acting, Best Use of Genre, Best Effects, and so on.

The concept started in Washington, D.C. in 2001 and in 9 years has spread to more than 50 U.S. cities and more than 35 cities overseas, including Newcastle, Mumbai, Melbourne, and Casablanca.

A year ago, I had just lost my nearly five-year-old day job and was starting a deeper plunge into acting. For nearly the same length of time, I had been doing two to four stage productions a year, dramatic readings, live old-time-radio style performances with other actors and sound effects, and that sort of thing. But in the late summer of 2009 I began to explore film and video work.

I did some pro bono film extra work for Dan’s crew on a coffee company ad they were shooting on spec just two weeks after I lost my job, and two weeks after that, on August 14, 2009, I went to his house for the brainstorming session for the 48-hour film.

Part two: Digging a hole to China