Scarecrow

Test Shoot and Lyme Disease

2009-09-06T01:08:00.000-07:00

While I originally intended to write these blog entries in a sort of chronological order in which the making of SCARECROW happened, I've decided to throw that idea in the rubbish bin and just write about what I feel like writing about when I feel like writing it. Hopefully, despite the the lack of order, some might still find at least a few of the entries interesting (and I will be more likely to actually continue to add entries on a more regular basis).

Before making SCARECROW I decided to test shoot the opening of an early draft I did for a class at USC called Directing Techniques. The original opening was a night scene in the Confederate camp in which Jack sat with his buddies around a campfire the night before their first ever battle. The 3 boys each deal with their nervousness in different ways (one is very reserved, one is over the top bravado, and the other is obsessed with how terrible it will be). A 4th sits with them, a veteran enlisted man named Harp, and he winds up giving this speech to the boys about war, describing it in hellish terms (and perhaps a bit over the top, though Bob Gilman, who played the role, did a great job with it, and I wish we had been able to keep the scene and Bob's character in the film).

I hurriedly cast the characters and we all drove up to Ventura with nothing but a camera that Canon lent me and some lights, a shot the scene in the woods in 5 hours. It was cold, and the actors all sat around the campfire on the un-prepped ground. Everyone was troopers (including Tess's family who are saints and let us shoot on their property and lent us props). We finished shooting, all went pretty well.

The next day I got a call from Brandon Carroll (who played Jack) telling me he was sick and found a giant tick sucking on his back in the middle of the night. Literally within 24 hours, he had a bulls eye and was sick. He went and got tested and found out he had contracted Lyme Disease from the tick. Now, my sister had Lyme Disease, I know a bunch of people who've had it, but they're all from the Northeast. Lyme Disease is very rare in Southern California.

Brandon got pretty sick, but he's hard core, and still agreed to work with again and be in SCARECROW. In fact, the Lyme Disease accounts a bit for why Brandon looks so authentic in the short (as he reminds me quite often). If you were to meet him today you almost wouldn't recognize him from the movie as in real life he looks very vibrant and healthy (after having thankfully recovered from the various ailments he suffered around the time we shot SCARECROW). Brandon will go through anything in order to practice his craft of acting.

Genesis

2009-06-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

started writing SCARECROW during the Autumn of 2005. Most of my story ideas begin and evolve while either on a hike or a long slow run, and that's how this one started. Believe it or not I was actually running along the edge of South Central Los Angeles not far from my humble single room bachelor's apartment. When I go on long runs my mind tends to dwell in the past.

On this particular run I encountered an extremely pleasing smell of warm spiced apples, which started me imagining running through the apple orchards not far from where I grew up in New Jersey, which then got me thinking about why one would be running through an apple orchard, and then for some unknown reason The Red Badge of Courage popped into my mind and I imagined what it would be like to run away from a battle and find yourself in an apple orchard facing the ramifications of what I had just done. It's at this point in story creation that I usually just begin daydream experiencing the situation as if I'm really there (for those of you who don't run really far distances, it tends to create a state of euphoria where you're kind of high).

So I'm wandering through this apple orchard, a Deserter (a Union Deserter at this point), and I come across a dead soldier propped up in one of the trees with a noose around his neck and a "D" carved into his forehead, and I go through this long back and forth discussion with the body I name Jack. And then I found myself thinking about war today, and what it's like to fight in a battle, and my mind meandered into a million different places. I finished the run, filed the idea away into my memory, and moved on to the next thing. This is how stories for me are born, the idea happens, and then it ferments in my head for a long time until I come back to it.

It wasn't until several months that I returned to the story in a last ditch attempt to submit a short script for USC's 546 class, which I'll discuss next post. It was then that the Underground Railroad would come into play, and the body in the tree would become a scarecrow.

--- Pochuck Valley Apple Orchard, NJ ---

The Beginning of the Blog!

2009-06-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

Starting tomorrow I will begin blogging about my adventures (and my crew's and buddies' adventures too) in thesis short filmmaking. I'm going to be doing this in a somewhat non-traditional way; after all, we already finished the film (that's not to say finished WITH the film, just finished with production and post production). So...a lot of what I write will be from memory, and I'll try to keep the recordings of those memories as honest as possible. Being a storyteller, I'm often drawn to John Ford's credo to "Print the legend," but I'll do my best to print the story behind the legend-making.

Also, this film was kind of a USC film, which is to say most of the crew was from USC, this was my USC Master's Thesis, and USC owns the copyright of the film. There really is no such thing as a quintessential USC Film (or USC Filmmaker) outside of stereotype, but I will probably touch on what I mean by that as this blog continues.

A lot of people have contacted me over the past 6 months who are thinking about attending film school. They want to know what film school is like, is it worth it, what other paths one can take instead, and how to get in. Hopefully this blog will answer some of those questions along the way.