We had our second day of filming today and it went great. The morning started with what I knew would be one of the most difficult scenes to shoot. To complicate things, I was supposed to have 2 “men in black” who were parodying the Agents in The Matrix, and one didn’t show up. I quickly initiated my backup idea of using the one guy in both roles and trying to splice it together later to have him playing against himself. After filming all the complicated scenes to make this work, the second actor called me and had only just seen the email. He rushed down, and we filmed it all again with the both of them to avoid the editing headaches later.
After running a bit late on that shoot, we ran around town during our lunch break, gathering up props and such that we needed, and grabbing a quick drive through lunch. The second two shoots of the day went amazingly well, as I suspected they would. We had a great scene with a long coordinated sequence which we shot in one continuous take. It went great. Giant thanks to Andrew Fraser who came on board as Director of Photography and Camera Operator. We could not do this without him there. Also Big thanks to Dan Eggleston, who not only runs the Yahoo mailing group where I got a lot of my cast and crew. He also came by and played a small role for me, and hung out on the other two shoots of the day taking a buttload of pictures! Very cool! Thanks Dan! He was very covert too. I had no idea that he had taken that many pics throughout the day.
The one big snafu was that at the end of the day we realized that we had forgotten to shoot the last line of the entire film. Doh! We quickly re-thought it and came up with a solution that I think will work excellently.
One more day of shooting either next week, or the week after, and we’re done filming! Then it’s on to editing.

My cousin and I did our first day of filming on Saturday. We decided to start out easy, since we weren’t sure what we were doing, so we set out to film several Austin landmarks for the opening credits. I luckily figured the camera out fairly quickly, and found that all the experience I had picked up from my crew work came in handy. I had picked up many little tidbits about operating Mini-DV cameras, what settings to use, and various other little pointers that had osmosized into my brain. We ended up getting some really great looking shots. I was quite happy.
Then I put out a call for cast and crew on a local E-mail list that is and extremely popular and widespread tool here in Austin. There’s something like 3500 members on it. After being deluged with headshots and resum�s, I started casting. It was weird to be on the other side of that scenario. Normally I’m the one sending in my info and hoping to be called. I also felt a bit bad having to be the bad guy and not being able to use everyone, or deleting someone’s E-mail because they just didn’t have the “look” I was going for in my head. However overall I’m quite enjoying being the captain of the ship and making my very own project as opposed to trying to get onto other people’s projects.
If all goes as planned, we will shoot our first actual scenes this Saturday! This train is a rolling, baby! Let’s just hope I can keep laying the track down in time!

Long time, no update, eh?
So I’m about to embark upon my first film making endeavor. My cousin works for the computer science department of the University of Texas, and his department decided to create the “Kinetoscopic Wonderment Festival”. Anyone can submit a 10 minute or less short film into the festival as long as there is someone affiliated with UT on the team. I whipped up a script based on the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan that’s popular here, and we’re going out to scout some locations and possibly film some opening establishing shots today. The deadline is in March, and we probably will only really be able to film on Saturdays, so we gotta get a move on!
In addition to writing, I’ll also be directing and starring in it. Jess will also be starring in it, as will my cousin, some of my actor friends, and anyone else I cast for the various other roles. I already have various bits of music I had recorded for other purposes that will work great as soundtrack music. I’m excited and nervous as I really have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Well I do, but I don’t. At this point, I’m just hoping we actually get through it and end up with a cool finished film.
My world domination plan continues.

Well not technically. Technically, my big screen debut was in “House of the Generals” which debuted at a theatre in Dallas, and I couldn’t make it. However, my first big screen debut that I’ve seen was tonight a the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Austin. It was the first screening of half of the entries in the 48 hour film contest. As you may have previously read, the way it works is that Friday night at 7:00 all the teams drew a genre, and then had 48 hours to write, film, edit, score, etc. their film. We drew film noir. Every film also had to have the following:
Character: Jordan Moonie, professional skateboarder
Prop: brick
Line: “Excuse me, I think I love you”
In case anyone cares, beware spoilers for our short film “Dead Stock” below.
Friday night, the writers wrote the script. Saturday morning filming began. I wasn’t needed until about noon supposedly. I was later told that they wouldn’t be at the second location until about 2:00. So around 2:00 I went to the location (a dry cleaners) and they started to film scenes there. We got to my scene about midnight, and I wrapped up filming around 2:30 a.m. I played the small, but fun and pivotal role of Drake Manford, uber successful pro skater nearing the end of his career who is fabulously rich and successful, but whose wife convinces my former prot�g�, Jordan Moonie, that I’m the one who attacked him and shattered his knee with a brick, because I was jealous that he started to do better than me. She also convinces him that she’s in love with him, and that I beat her, so he agrees to kill me. In the end she kills me, frames him, and then trips on a brick and falls unconscious on a train track as a train approaches.
The contest itself was also full of drama. At one point the editor called and told us the tape we had run to him was blank. Nothing on it. Turned out we had sent the wrong tape, so whew! Later however the actual tape we finally got him had glitches (it had jammed in the camera) and was unusable. This was about 2:00 a.m. and that meant they would have to re-shoot 2 scenes, one of which included an actor who had long since gone home. They shot everything except for that one scene, hoping to get it first thing Sunday, and wrapped around 5:00 a.m. The next morning, they still hadn’t heard from the actor, so the director stepped into the role, and did great. At some point the editor had told them another tape was totally blank. eventually the problem was figured out, and they got the tape working, and I believe, in fact, also figured out that they could have used the other “bad” tape too, but at this point they had already re-shot. The deadline was 7:30 p.m. at Mother Egan’s Irish Pub, and at 7:20 they were in the car still editing with a lap top while speeding to the finish. We were literally the last film submitted right at the 7:30.
Tonight, we went to watch the showing of the “group A” films which included ours. It was amazing. In everyone’s opinion who I talked to, our film was in a complete other league from the vast majority. Every film played looked very much like an amateur film shot on somebody’s home video camera, and all but the first one were generally bad all around. Acting, writing, etc. When ours came on, it really looked like a real movie. Moody lighting, good acting, nice script, good score, editing, etc. It was just tremendous.
There was only one film after ours. Unfortunately it was the absolute hands down best of them all. It looked, and sounded 100% professional. All the elements were just jaw dropping good quality from the look and sound of it, to all the things I mentioned about our film, and even the credits. There was just no denying the big dog. I have to think the order of the films was no coincidence. Just as seeing our film after all the rest made me smile hugely, seeing the one after ours took some wind out of the sails a bit.
All in all though, I am ecstatic with it. The team was amazing, the writers took a very brave choice of doing a straight dramatic film noir instead of going to more audience friendly comedy route, and we delivered and incredible piece of good looking cinema that was just miles beyond everything except the last film. Hopefully someone will put it online at some point. Now I just hope there wasn’t anything to incredibly good in the “B” group of films which we didn’t stay for since we would have had to buy separate tickets to it. Tomorrow I’ll be talking to some of the guys who stayed for the second group to find out.