Last weekend I finally got to get behind the camera again. The shooting was for Craig Stagg’s upcoming new short “Fuck This Fucking Town” (which from this point forward will be abbreviated as FTF’NT). The movie is a romantic comedy about dating and relationships in Austin, TX.
We had 2 and a half days to shoot over 20 pages of script. I normally subscribe to the rule that 5 pages a day is a good number to shoot for, so this shoot required working fast and smart. The thing that allowed us to move faster than normal is that the final film will be completely animated via rotoscoping. This means that all the video footage will be drawn frame-by-frame by Craig and a team of animators. Craig was one of the animators who worked on Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, so he knows a little bit about what he’s doing in this area.
The location for the first day of shooting was Rock Island in the middle of Zilker Park. If you’ve ever been to the Austin City Limits Festival, you’ll have an idea of where we were. Pictured above are the two leads Briana McKeague and Jason Andres. Craig is in the background looking nervous and Justin Sherburn is tweaking the wireless mic receivers.
Even though the movie will be animated, we wanted to use as many real locations as possible to make the performances and the final illustrated image more interesting. The nice thing about shooting for animation is that you don’t have to worry as much about hiding light stands and other filmmaking debris because it’s easier for the artist to just leave them out when they are drawing the background images. This allowed us to save a lot of time because we could get it lit exactly how we wanted it and shoot – even if a C-stand was in the frame.
We shot all afternoon at Rock Island before packing up and heading to Green Mesquite for beer and BBQ. It was Repeal Day so we considered it our civic duty as hard-drinking Americans to knock back a few Lone Stars.
Day 2 was mostly interiors that were shot in the main studio at Sexy Picnic. One of the recurring elements of the script is a drinking game that is played by a group of friends. Getting 6 people into the same frame is not one of my favorite things to do, but we were able to make it work by forcing the perspective by cheating people’s chairs with apple boxes. I lost count of how many set-ups we did for this sequence, but there were a lot of them.
Around dusk we sent the main cast home and did a new setup for a dating sequence shot from the P.O.V. of the main character. We had seven different girls come in and just made minor tweaks to the lighting for each of them. Each actress delivered their lines directly to the camera and was done in about 10 minutes. We wrapped, lit a fire in the fire pit and drank a few more beers. After that it was off to The Good Knight for the best meatloaf in Austin.
We were fortunate to secure the Longbranch Inn as a location on Sunday morning. This is for a downbeat scene where the lead has moved to a new city and is drinking alone in the bar. He has a conversation with a creepy homeless man played to perfection by Bill Wise.
Jason studies the script while Eric Gerzymisch tweaks lights in the background and Jessica wonders how she got roped into making this movie. You can see some of the lights in the background. The lights themselves are outside the frame, but the stands are visible and will be left out of the animated image.
After the Longbranch, we headed back to Sexy Picnic for some scenes with Stacy and Jason on the scooter followed by a LOT of scenes on the front porch. Jason Newman and Kelli Bland (above) were hilarious as the married couple that provides a home away from home for the rest of the misfits.
We shot on the front porch until it was totally dark and then relit for a scene involving two cars and a confrontation between the three characters you see above. By this scene, we were really firing on all cylinders and the footage looks so good, I almost with the animators weren’t going to draw their funny lines on top of it.
The final scene takes place next to a swimming pool. We didn’t have access to one so Chase built this reflecting pool in the backyard. It’s a piece of plastic sheeting, some wooden beams and some tinfoil. We shot a 2K at the tinfoil and Chase agitated the water with a soccer ball. The result was a nice rippling water effect on the two lead characters. The ripples will be filtered, turned to greyscale and then layered under the line drawings of the characters. If it sounds crazy, it kind of is, but it’s going to look fantastic.
So that’s a wrap as far as live action goes on FTFT. Now the hard work begins – the animation. I will be posting updates as the animation progresses to give you a look at how the project progresses from live action to animation.
Too see more production photos, check out my Flickr page.
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I can’t WAIT to see this movie. Not only is it cleverly shot, but it sounds spot on to life in Austin and the matters of a Texan heart. I was born and raised there and only recently escaped to Vermont for a permanent relocation. But Austin will always be my blood – and I’ll anxiously await the release of this film. Good on you!