1. Two day shoot a tight schedule.

2. "Quick pass the blood!".

3. Inspiration.

4. Is that black bin bags on the window?

5. The art of sheep blowing.

6. Nancy Sinatra, Wong Kar-Wai, we love you!

7. Slight editing problems.
 
 
 
 

1. Two day shoot a tight schedule.

Ok! Why the hell do we decide to stress ourselves out and try to shoot the whole short in two days? Well mainly because our previous film "Mouthwash" took a lot longer to come together than expected. Mouthwash took us about seven weeks from the start of filming to the end of filming. This is of course still only working out to 4 or 5 days of shooting. But the gaps between shoots being the problem.

So well we came up with the idea of trying to shoot 2 or 3 short films in two days, so that by the time December came around we would have five or six films in the bag.

One problem this time was the hire of a hall for two hours, to shoot our main acting scene. Now due to a few minor technical errors (one of our main stars not turning up) and what not we are running too long into our two-hour hall limit time, and still with the big acting scene to come the director is working hard on a family of ulcers.

Now I know our actress, brilliant as she is, is not going to get the shot in the first couple of takes. This is not really a problem as I explained in the "Mouthwash" director's notes. But we do only have an hour left by the time our main character turns up and we start shooting, and we are running out of time quicker than someone with a free bus pass skiing down the Alps.

Part of the fault for this laying with the director for picking such a funny song to be played over the scene. Which makes our Shiona giggle and forget her lines. But does the girl get the lines. Of course he does she is a brilliant actress after all. It just takes her a little time to feel through her scenes and get her lines right in her head. And BAM!!! She hits you with a brilliant performance, when she finally gets it,

So with only a few minutes to go in our hire of the hall, and our actress with her difficult scene in the bag, all it takes is for us to get our special effects shot and a reverse shot for the final scene of the movie.

So we call over our special effects man Martainn of MonkeySpankFX to give us our early AM mixed up blood, and Monica screams "I'm ready for my close up Mr. De Mille!" So we rush through the very technical process of pouring tomato sauce, water and food colouring mixture onto our devastated cadaver, and rolling camera is in there and two seconds later, and cut.

"Clean it up quickly!" screams Pistachio and cue our actress, a quick read of lines and on set. Two takes later and god the girl has got it again. The perfect ending for our film.

Now just where the hell do you come up with your ideas Pistachio huh? Are we bloody weird or what? Well yes we are weird, but not that weird!

The idea for the film came from someone who wrote a letter to one of our great literary (not!) Scottish newspapers which shall remain nameless.

Basically some dude was on a night out with his mates, and his girlfriend on a night out with hers. He got home first and as his mates had bought him an inflatable sheep (not as wonderful as our Monica you must understand, Monica is special!) he decided he was gonna make love. So his woman comes in and catches him inflagranti delicto with this sheep! And the poor lad is writing letters to a newspaper worried that his relationship is in trouble! Read original letter here!

And well the rest of it after that I just sort of made up, the hostage scene was nice little idea. Of course totally giving me the chance to poke fun at a certain director's films, whom of course shall remain nameless, but not chinless! But easily recognisable for those who read the screenplay or saw the film.

Well of course it is! Ok so we can see black bags on the windows during he hostage scene. Ok now let me see! Well I suppose if our kidnapper were taking her hostage to a room that had windows she would cover them up with black bags right? Right! Of course she would, well that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Of course we put them up so we didn't scare anyone with them seeing us in there with a gun and the corpse of a sheep. And so we don't have to do endless re-shoots because of people's curious faces peering through the glass, especially when were on a tight enuff schedule as it is.

Now this is a tricky one. You know you cannot just employ anyone to turn up on set to blow up your inflatable sheep for you.  We hired specialist well-trained professionals to do this job for us. The art of sheep blowing goes back decades and the industry has many well-trained, seasoned and new professionals in this art.

With thousands of employees, the industry has it's own union "B.L.O.W.", Brotherly Lovers Of Wool. To which all members pay a yearly fee, and who hold an annual gathering in the countryside each year, when the country is overrun with inflatable sheep and their respected, professional owners and blowers. So next time you decide to put and inflatable sheep in your movie STOP! And make sure you look out for a local sheep-blowers convention, and consult their experts on casting their leading sheep, they will make sure you get the best actor/actress for the job.

So why are we, well that is me, trying to copy a scene from Wong Kar-Wai's "Fallen Angels"? Well yes we are trying to copy it. It's just an experiment really. The scene looks brilliant in Fallen Angels and in no way were we even thinking our scene would look anywhere near as good as that. But we were still going to experiment with it, and give it a try!

So on the day of shooting I'm directing this stairway ascent and my crew has absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I explained a little but I guess without seeing "Fallen Angels" it does not really come across. But we go ahead and film it anyway. And well when it's edited and my massive crew of three sees the film, the scene looks great and they enjoy the film immensely. Which is why we made it in the first place, making people laugh and giving us a little time to experiment along the way.

Ok so I wrote the script and I knew straight away that I was stealing scenes and styles from other directors or films. This was 100% intentional. I knew when I started I wanted to a pay little homage to one director, and poke a little fun at another. The obvious homage above was to Wong Kar-Wai and all his films not just Fallen Angels.

And so whom are we poking fun at? Well as our hostage scene will show you it's Mr. Tarantino. I wanted to make the film funny and perverting a scene from one of the most well known films and of one of the most overrated directors of our time seemed a good way to do it.

We needed to have something to happen to our hostage after its indiscretion at the start of the film. So this hostage scene is what I came up with.

So we start with the usual (as in every Tarantino script) trunk scene, so the poking starts right there, and with our hostage scene the dialogue I have for my actress and the background music we chose we hope it turns out quite funny. Well it does so we were all quite pleased with ourselves. And hey at least we did not steal the whole story from another movie like someone I could mention!

Ohh as well as a nice wee experiment for us the film is not meant to be serious and hopefully will be funny from beginning to end.

We had a very wavy picture during our first finished movie, "Second Time Around" that was very noticeable in the panning shots. What was this and how did we fix it?

What caused this was the fact that they key frame rate, at which the video is output, was set at key frame every 7 frames, which means it is taking reference from 7 frames ago, and if you are panning the shot this makes the edges of the frame look very wavy. It' looks ok when the camera or the characters aint moving much, but hey what use is that? Anyway it is easily fixed; you just change the key frame rate to 1, making every single frame the key frame. I'm not sure if this increases the size of your file once it is output, but it may, but for the price, of a non-wavy picture, well it's worth it.

They key frame rate is found when you are producing your file. Once you click produce, and you select the file that you will use as your template, you press edit and this is where you look at or change all the settings for that file before you produce your file. Now obviously we are still using MGI Videowave, but I'm sure other programs will probably have something similar to this on their output procedure.

See you next time,
Giovanni Pistachio

© Owned By Giovanni Pistachio 06/03/02 18:33:26
Giovanni can be contacted at:- giovannip@pistachio-films.com

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