That's a wrap!, Shooting for BCP finished!!! Options

[Bargod]

Well, we finished our shooting of Bubba's Chili Parlor last night. With all the rain Texas has been getting all summer, we were very lucky and didn't get any delays... until yesterday. What should have been a very short and quick series of shots yesterday afternoon turned into a grueling ordeal. About 10 minutes before we started shooting the thunder and lightning started, quickly followed by massive amounts of rain. We ended up shooting when the downpour, or "gully warsher" as they say in East Texas, turned into a drizzle. Those periods didn't last long and what should have taken an hour at most turned into 5 hours.

We did get to witness something pretty cool, though. After the initial downpour, as we looked out from under the pavillion we took shelter in, the ground seemed to be moving. Upon closer inspetion we saw countless thousands of baby toads appearing from nowhere (or from the sky...) and hopping towards high ground. This was pretty damn cool. It also made me think. In the past few months Dallas has undergone torrential rains and flooding, a tornado, a huge amount of crickets, and now toads appearing out of nowhere, or perhaps falling from the sky (as in the biblical stories, and yes, I know they were actually in the ground) and I wondered how many more plagues Dallas would have to undergo. It makes what seems to be an unbelievable Old Testament story seem much more understandable.

Anyway, we finished shooting last night at my house and held a small wrap party afterwards (shhh, don't wake the kids). I was kinda worried about this last shot because it involved somebody running naked down my back alley. No, not like a city alley. My neighborhood is identical to the neighborhood on King of the Hill, which is not a cartoon, but is actually a documentary, lol. The homes around here have driveways in the back and they are accessed by a back alley and all the back yards are fenced in. My neighbors and I often meet and drink beer and discuss things, just like on King of the Hill.

Although shooting is complete we still have a lot of work to do. Editing will probably take as long as shooting since rendering from DV tape to the PC takes a long time. We also need to finish the sound and soundtrack. I'm eager to get into the foley fx. I've always thought that part of movie making was pretty cool. We're trying to get some more money so that we can finish the sound in a studio, but if we can't we can just do it ourselves. The studio would of course be preferable.

The footage I've seen so far looks great. Oh, sure, the acting could be better, and continuity is surely going to be an issue, but it LOOKS good. We used a fairly high-end camera and nearly half our budget went into renting Zeiss prime lenses and a 35mm adapter that makes the 30 fps DV camera shoot at 24 fps which is what film cameras shoot at. This really makes a difference as our movie looks less like video and more like film.

I'll keep you all updated on the progress, and hopefully you'll be seeing me in the servers more now that I can start to relax a little more, lol.