Bev (her name in the film and in real life) came down from Minneapolis for the scene. Her granddaughter (middle) and daughter (right) joined her as extras. A three generation adventure!
I wanted to share a couple of short, sort of recent film related adventures.
The Sedona Festival director called to invite us to their festival (yep-an old fashioned phone call) while we were in the car driving from Vermont to Minnesota in a blizzard to shoot another scene. (who does that?) Even though our film was complete (pretty much…) we wanted a stronger ending so we pulled everything together one more time.
Six of our actors and our ‘regular’ sound person came down from Minneapolis. We found and rented an Alexa camera and Optica Elite S35 lenses (Zero Dark Thirty, Robin Hood) from an interesting guy with a magic company in Sioux Falls who uses the equipment to shoot magic videos. Also from Sioux Falls, we were lucky enough to find a wonderful hair and makeup person. Rob our DP flew in from New York.
40 extras. We needed farmers. I figured recruiting farmer extras in the winter would be easy since they would all be at home doing nothing, but no…turns out, we were competing with the local lumberyard who was having their annual FREE customer appreciation beef commercial dinner (in Minnesota the noon meal is dinner) followed by ‘must be present to win’ door prizes.
The gangs all here.
Food. I was freaking out about meals until I remembered I could do the cooking. (dah) My cousin Susi came up from Iowa to help. A few people asked where the meat was but that was the closest thing we got to a complaint. It was actually really good food if I do say so myself 🙂
We shot at one of the Lutheran churches in town. We borrowed plates and silverware from one of the other Lutheran churches in town. We got a 30 cup coffee pot and mismatched coffee mugs (that we labeled with masking tape and people’s names for the day) from Carol, the once Tyler High School home ec teacher that married the once Tyler High School math teacher. We composted (or would have if there had been scraps to compost). Good green indie film making at is finest as usual.
Mind you, this is all for a 46 second spot in the film. Satisfying with a bit of a twist. Was it worth it? YES! YES! YES! And you’ll have to see the movie to see why!
