Not Much Happening
December 1995
A New Camera - For Christmas, mom agreed to get me another camera. For what it would have cost to repair the VHS-C camera I figured I could get another one that was regular sized VHS. I had become to grow weary of VHS-C back in '94. A VHS-C tape cost about two dollars more than a VHS tape and not only that but you could only get 30 minutes at the most on standard play while on VHS you could get two hours. It was just more cost effective. Plus the VHS-C casing wasn't all that protective of it's magnetic contents. The tape getting scrunched seemed to be a common problem.
I spent a good portion of the month going to the pawn shops around town, looking for a full sized Panasonic camcorder(that way I could be sure that it's synchro edit jack would be compatible with the one on my VCR). About a couple days before Christmas I found one at a Cash America Pawn Shop in Azle. It was only $300, so I took it. I should have looked harder. The synchro edit jack didn't work and the battery didn't work either. The pawn shop also didn't give the money back. They would let you exchange it for another item within 30 days. By the time that 30 days was up they never managed to get in another full size Panasonic.
Winter 1996
Film Styles Class - I had finally gotten into the film styles class that I had waited about a year and a half to get into because the space was so limited. They just so happened to have Panasonic S-VHS camcorders for us to use, so I found out that the synchro editing problem was in fact with my camera and not the VCR as it could have possibly been. I also discovered that the battery that had come with my camera was bad and not that the camera didn't seem to want to use it. So to that end I went ahead and bought a replacement battery. I had held off because I wanted to be sure that it wasn't a problem with the camera itself.
While in that class I did a total of three projects all of them with Chris. The first was a meeting and a chase story done without sound. I had to team up with a classmate, Tyler Walker to do that one. The objective of the assignment was to get one partner to shoot the meeting and the other one shoot the chase. I opted for the meeting because the Sniffles chase scene had given me all I could stand of people running after each other.
I decided to try to be fairly serious in my approach. It's about a guy who is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend who is getting along with her life with a new boyfriend and so he goes to kill her. When I screened it in class it managed to get big laughs especially at the part where you can plainly read Chris' lips yelling, "stupid fucking bitch!" I got a 94 on that one. I could barely read my teacher's handwriting on his critiques, so although he thought I had a good variety of shots, he thought there was a shot of a door that I didn't hold onto long enough. I didn't know what he meant and when I asked him, he couldn't seem to remember what he was talking about either, but he "must not have counted off too much for it."
The second project was supposed to be a silent documentary. I decided to do mine about Chris while he's working at Pizza Hut, making pizza, making deliveries, and cleaning up the store for the closing. At the screening the teacher seemed to be impressed by how the editing gave it a surrealistic feel. My classmates seemed to be impressed as well. I got a 98 on it. There were comments like, "excellent pacing" and "good following of the action". However he would have liked me to have done more with the actual delivery of the pizzas to people's doorsteps.
These two projects may or may not ever make it to Sniffles. They just don't seem to fit in with the mood of the show. It all just depends on how hard up we are that will be the deciding factor on whether they make it or not. Or maybe if there's a public outcrying for it(yeah right).
Finishing an Old Project/Making a New Enemy - When I had first gotten into the film styles class, the instructor encouraged us to get some practice with all of the equipment that we would be using so that by the time we had to do the projects, we wouldn't have to worry too much about technical concerns. To me that meant that I could use the editing equipment to finish working on an old friend, Summer Project '95. So at the beginning of the semester, for about a week I would spend about three hours a night in the editing room trying to finish the abandoned project.
There was this guy, Habib, who was responsible for the equipment checkout and the editing rooms. We had recognized each other from the school tv station meetings and I can remember him from previous semesters being fairly cordial with me. But this semester he decided that he was going to be a complete dick to me. He was busting my balls since the very first exercise in the class where we had to get in a group of three and shoot a series of meaningless shots for the purpose of exploring the different camera techniques.
Well anyway for the entire week the guy hadn't said anything to me when I was up in the editing room. Finally on the last hour of the last day that I had planned to be there for that week, he decided to come in to check up on me. He asked, "what are you doing?" It wasn't a "oh I'm curious about what my fellow students are making" kind of question, but more like a "what the hell are you doing here?" I said, "I'm...uh...just getting practice with the equipment." "These are for class assignments only!" he replied
He left and came back with this piece of paper. "I don't know if your teacher passed these out to you, but I'm going to give one to you now." It was an explanation of the abuse of equipment policy and the penalties for each infraction. Three penalties meant that you couldn't use the stuff for the whole semester. So if you've got a class where you need to use it and you can't, then apparently you're screwed. I didn't get an infraction thankfully
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. That particular class has a fairly high course fee because of the fact that you are using all of this expensive equipment. So why can't I use the stuff that I've paid to use. And here's where I will go into a little bit about the overall uselessness of film schools. If you want to learn how to make movies you're going to have to do it out of class time with your own equipment if you can get a hold of it. Because if Habib's assertion that the equipment is only to be used for assignments is true everywhere, then you will never learn anything. I know several fellow classmates who had never made anything before and haven't done anything since that class. So what good has film school done for them?
What Do You Want to Do Now?( Revisited) - On the very same night that I had shot the documentary with Chris, we decided to get a hold of Modester to reshoot the sketch we had tried to start almost two years before. It was literally because of the documentary that I had bought the new battery for the camera so now we weren't confined to wherever there was an electrical outlet.
We went to Kim's apartment and we didn't get there until almost 3 or 4 in the morning. I know it was only an hour or two before sunrise. We would not make the same mistake as we had before. We would shoot everything all in one day. This meant shooting the nighttime stuff in the pre-dawn hours and the morning and evening stuff when the sun finally came up. We did it out on this small playground in the courtyard of Kim's apartment complex. By the time the morning had come we were all so very tired. Kim was leaving early in the morning so we all crashed over there for a few hours until it was close to noon.
By noon we had only had a couple of hours of sleep. I was dead tired, but at least I would be able to go back to bed once they had left. Poor Chris and Modester had to be to work. We couldn't get the same kind of coverage on the noontime stuff as we could on the other stuff because by that time the kiddies were out in full force. With all their yelling and screaming and running around there would have been no way we could have gotten everything to match in the editing. Not only that, but in the finished product you can see how the kids are all very aware of the presence of the camera and how they are all playing up to it.
Teddy - This was something that we did off the top of our heads or more like Brian's head. With the new battery we had the means to shoot wherever we wanted to and Chris and decided to take advantage of it one Saturday afternoon. We went over to Brian's apartment. I can't remember why specifically if it was for that reason or not. Joe was over there as well, so I think on a whim we decided, "Hey, let's do something." So we went outside where Brian had been living at the time, near the Kimball Art Museum.
Brian just started doing a character. He had this teddy bear with him and he started talking to it. Out of that Chris came up with some situations to put Brian's character in. Chris decided that it would be interesting to throw in him and Joe fighting around Brian. He wanted to try to do all the segments in single takes because Chris' goal is to set things up like that even when it would be more sound pacewise to cut. For better or worse I managed to get some cuts in here and there. After we shot a scene to our satisfaction we would literally ask ourselves, "so what could we do now with the character?" And so we'd walk around until we figured something out based on what we could find in the area.
The last and in my opinion funniest part came completely by accident. Brian decided to just sit down and talk to the bear. Hopefully something funny would come out of the improv. I was taping some of it when all the sudden Joe stepped in front of Brian with a mouth full of water that he dribbled onto the bear as if it were a urine stream. Since none of us were expecting it, the take was altogether unusable, but we redid it and on the first take everyone bust out laughing at the end.
April 1996
A Night in the Dorm Pre-Production - On the final project for class, Un Nuit(episode 4), I decided to go all out. Since I would never have to be on camera that would free me up as to the kinds of things I could do as far as movement and that sort of thing. I had been planning this out since the previous semester. The basis of it where Chris goes to the bathroom and pisses on himself is based in reality.
My dorm had community baths as you can tell from the piece. Well at the time I was having a serious problem with the sprinkles where if I wasn't too careful my urine stream would come back toward me and hit my pants. I would have to hurry down the hall in the hopes that nobody saw me before I got there to change my pants. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but why not? I'll go ahead and be perfectly honest with you. Besides I haven't had the problem for a while now.
There was also a problem as far as roommates were concerned. Often people would leave their keys in the room when they went to the shower and when they got back to the room they would find themselves locked out because their roommate had left. It's happened to me and I've done it to some of my roommates too. Seeing someone have to go up to the front desk in their bathrobe or with a towel around their waist asking for a spare key was not an uncommon occurrence. So I decided to make that a part of the story as well.
We had to submit proposals of what we wanted to do to our teacher and whether we got to do it or not was based on whether he approved it or not. I had to rewrite and resubmit it. He didn't have a problem with the subject matter. He just didn't feel that there was enough going on. I needed to add another incident and so I racked my brain trying to come up with something because as I had it, it ends with him getting a spare key. End of story.
I had been reading a book on the making of Psycho and so I thought it might be a cool idea and have him go take a shower at the end of the fiasco and then I would duplicate shot for shot Chris getting murdered like in Psycho. I wanted to have him killed. That I knew, but I decided not to do it as a parody of another film. Eventually I realized that it would be best to have his death interrelated with the rest of the story and that's how I came up with him being executed for having been late with the key.
I turned in the rewrite and this time it got approved. On it he commmented, "Ok. Based on the quality of your work thus far." I felt good that he had complemented me, but it seemed as if he wasn't too sure of my material. He was just going to go ahead and let me do it anyway.
A Night in the Dorm Production - So with all of that set, I got Chris to come up to the dorm. Actually I had to go pick him up in Fort Worth because his car was broken down. We spent one whole night shooting the thing. All told it took about eight hours. I remember the night fairly well because it was the same night that my dorm had its big end-of-the-semester music show, the Bruce Jam. The Bruce Jam was something that Chris had been wanting to get up to see for a couple of years and now finally that he had the chance, I made him work on my project instead. I also took a couple extra days shooting things like the credits and that was about it.
Response to A Night in the Dorm - When it was all edited together the initial response seemed favorable. Chris Switzer had complimented me on my visual sense and this other guy Joel who was also in a different film styles class seemed pretty impressed. The showing of it in class was fairly disappointing however. All of the things that I had hoped would get big laughs was met with dead silence. The only thing that did get laughs was the part where I shoot him in the head(the executioner is me by the way). The part where I rack focused to the Dr. Pepper can seemed to impress a couple people around me although it's just a stupid rack focus.
The teacher didn't give our tapes or grades back until the final exam. I was expecting to get a decent grade on it. I mean I had gotten A's on everything else. What I had wasn't a cinematic masterwork but it did have some thought and work put into it. So maybe I would at least get a low A if nothing else. I got a high B instead. An 88 to be exact.
He commented that my editing was choppy in places, that the pacing slows down too much in the middle and that he felt that there should have been another incident although my thing after the credits seemed to work. SO WHY DID HE MENTION IT THEN? On the favorable side he said the music was good and that the use of locations was good. I know every time I watch a movie I'm sitting there thinking, "Wow! They really put those locations to good use." What kind of a compliment was that?
Needless to say I fell into a deep depression which I will site as yet another journey into Artistic Hell. The usual doubts about my abilities and future as an artist came about. My only consolation was that Chris Switzer seemed shocked that I had recieved such a drubbing. It was hard to tell what the deal was. Was my project just that bad? Or was it that because I had shown some ability with the previous projects that he was going to apply a different set of standards to my work.
To add insult to injury, there was this other guy who had spent almost no time working on his project. He spent about 4 hours on it and it looks like he didn't have anything planned out when he shot it. It just didn't flow together very well. On the day I was moving out of the dorm for the summer I happened to see him and I asked him what grade he had gotten. He had gotten an 89.
June 1996
Death Takes a Train Ride Day 1 - Before school had gotten out Chris had given me a script that he had written for me to storyboard. The script as far as I know didn't have any basis in a specific incident. It was just something he had come up with based on his love for Dr.Pepper.
This was still back in the day when I tried to incorporate some complex moving shots into my visual schemes so we got Modester one afternoon. Of course as always Modester had to drag along one of his girlfriends for the trip. This is how it usually happens. "Hey Modester we need you for a skit." Modester: "Okay, but first take me over to so-and- so's house 'cause I want to get my nut off." So we ended up bringing this other girl for the shoot.
The shoot only lasted about an hour because Chris had to be to work by a certain time and we had gotten started so late. We went out to a park out near Benbrook where there was a railroad track running through it. Modester's girlfriend played out on the swings because she didn't want to walk through the tall grass to get to the track. It didn't matter because all we need was Modester anyway. We only had time to do all of the shots that required Modester as a camera operator(which amounted to about 4)before we had to pack it in.
Death Takes a Train Ride Day 2/Baseball Burp/Barely Manenough - Chris was determined not to let this script go unfinished so about a week later we got together earlier and went out to the same train track to finish up. Before we had completely finished a train started coming. It was moving slowly enough so we gathered our stuff and went to the baseball field by the tracks.
The train came to a stop near where we had been and the driver called out to us. We couldn't hear what he was saying over the noise of his engines, but we pretty much ignored him. He probably just wanted to get on our case about being on the tracks and if that's what it was about then we got the point without his having to say anything to us. Of course we would have ignored that point anyway. That's the only thing I can think of it being because what the hell else would some guy driving a train want from somebody he's passing by.
So while we were waiting for the train to leave, we shot this other thing that Chris had been talking about, but we had never gotten around to doing. It was a little exchange where "burp" is used as a word that is supposed to mean something. Chris set it up like he was somebody who was sliding into first base and I'm tagging him with a Dr.Pepper can. He didn't tell me what the sketch we were shooting was about until the part where we actually had to do some dialogue. To tell you the truth I might have forgotten that we had even shot that had it not been for me trying to recollect what happened on those days.
So after we had finally gotten all of that done we went back to Kim's apartment to start shooting another script that Chris had given me to storyboard at the beginning of the summer. It was just a little ditty slamming Barry Manilow. We only managed to finish the scene in the bathroom and bedroom before Chris had to go to work.
We had a hell of a time with the shot where I get up in Chris' face and tell him about how much I appreciate him. He wanted to do it as a Captain Janeway thing because if you notice on Star Trek: Voyager she likes to get right up into people's faces when she's talking to them. It always looks like she's going to kiss them. For us it was weird and awkward and so we spent about 10 takes flubbing our lines because we would break out into laughter before the take was over. It was very difficult to look straight into Chris eyes being so close that you can't even see his mouth and keep a straight face. Nevermind the straight face, in the scene we don't look straight at all.
The Last Shot of Que Clinic - This was just one of those days. We got together to do something, had nothing really to do so we finished up an old project, by getting the shot that Chris had planned to get back in '94 for Que Clinic where his car pulls into the parking lot where Que Clinic presumably is. That was all we got done that day and the last thing we did for the rest of the summer.
October 1996
Love Cubed - The fall semester had come about and I was now in the intermediate film class taught by Fred Watkins who has directed a couple low budget films you can find in some video stores around here in Denton and around the metroplex. The first two are called Brutal Fury and A Matter of Honor although he all but disowns the second movie because of the terrible experience he had working with the producer. His latest movie, which was shot in '95, is just now coming out in some local video stores. It is called Lethal Seduction and it stars former Penthouse Pet, Julie Strain. He is also currently getting ready for a bigger budget action picture that Tom Berenger is probably going to be in.
Anyway in this class we got to shoot on real film, not video like in the beginning class and on Sniffles. The first assignment was to shoot a 3 minute super-8mm film silent and we had to edit in camera. Not being able to edit post-production worried us in the class, like Chris Switzer, but ultimately all it meant was that we would have to be extra careful how we set up shots. And since we only had three minutes and there was no way we could just get another roll if we needed more, we would have to time out all of the shots as we did. This was something I wasn't used to doing, but I learned a lot from it because it taught me about economy, shooting only what you need, and being more aware of how the thing is going to cut together before you even start shooting.
Beyond that the big problem was just a creative one. I had a three minute movie to make, but I didn't know what to do with that time. The inspiration came from some video I shot one night a couple weeks before I shot the project. Chris had come up to Denton with a whole entourage. By that time he had split up with his wife and was living with another girl named Jennifer. Jennifer had this friend Christine who had a boyfriend named, of all names, Chris(we're going to call him Billy because he had shaved his head a few weeks later and he kind of looked like Billy Corgan).
So we walked around Fry Street the big hangout area for my college because we couldn't all hang out in my room since Switzer was going to bed. I also brought the video camera along which was fortunate because I shot some of the best home movie footage of my home movie career that night.
Christine and Jennifer had this bi-sexual streak about them and if you asked they would tongue kiss each other. I got a couple of scenes of them doing that. Christine was also on the rag at the time and I've got footage of Jennifer sticking her hand down Christine's pants and pulling out a bloody finger. Great stuff if you're a perverted whacko like me.
It was from this that I based the story that I planned to shoot: Chris has a girlfriend (wife?), played by Jennifer, and it's a perfect little relationship. She packs his lunch for him as she sees him off to work and they are a happy unit. On this day he comes back home from work to find Jennifer making out with Christine and he runs off in a rage.
In a park he meets a stranger, played here by Switzer who gives him some advice (it can't be heard since the film was shot silent) and Chris realizes that he's been an idiot. So he goes home and gets into a threesome with Jennifer and Christine. I just love happy endings!
All the parties agreed to it and so we went on with it. We ran into a snag getting everybody available all at once and on the day we were originally going to shoot, Christine wasn't available. Chris made the suggestion that maybe we could switch the roles and that it would be Jennifer who caught Chris with Billy. It would have been okay if Chris would have assured me that they would kiss for real, but he wanted to fake it. Not good enough I wanted the real stuff and besides the ending wouldn't have worked since most women aren't like most men in that they want to get with two at the same time.
We were able to get everybody together. I shot the movie and then had to wait a few weeks while the film was shipped off to get developed and then for Fred to watch it and grade it. It was very suspenseful because 1.)I would have no idea if the film turned out before Fred would see it and 2.)what would he think of it? The day finally came and I got a perfect score. Fred mentioned it in class and gave the entire plot summary. On the written comments, he wrote, "Every man's dream." I love Fred.
That was the last thing shot in '96 other than the two 16mm projects I made for Fred's class, but were just plain bad. The first is completely out of focus and the other just plain sucks. Maybe I'll go through the expense of transferring them to video and putting them on the show.