Living on the cheap |11:42 PM|
I spent a little over $5 today and still had a great time. I ate, I partied, I ate some more, went to a play, and got breakfast.
First, I got a call from Christina needing a ride to the party last night:
Even though I was about 1/10th of a mile from the party at that point, I still agreed to come pick her up, as long as she covered the gas (otherwise we were going to be limited to places that were downhill). Along with the couple of bucks from Christina (not enough for a full gallon of gas)I spent an additional $2 in quarters to keep fumes in the car. I managed to drive her home, and still limp back home. I really should have taken the everclear from the fountain at that party and used it to fuel my car, as I certainly wasn't going to drink my share.
From there I went to help Josh and Katie move: Note: Neither of the people in this picture are Josh and or Katie. They paid me in Pizza.
The first set of pizzas was ordered from Mangia's, and we only ordered three. The connection was bad, so when he said the total it was a bit garbled.
Me: "Man for a second there it sounded like he said the total was $70. He obviously said $17. Hmmm wait a sec. I'll call him back." Pizza dude: "Yeah that total was 73.60" Me: "SEVENTY DOLLARS"
Josh, Eric and I at same time, in perfect harmony: WHOOOOOOA
Thanks to our Church Choir-esque harmonizing, the dude was already cancelling by the time I started asking for the death of that pizza order.
The papa john pizza Josh ended up getting kept me fed for a bit.
I drove over to Sheel and Mike's place without the A/C on, and I helped them move as well.
Sheel examines Christina's tiny cat toy thing while I'm trying to eat.
After that I hit a free showing of The Intergalactic Nemesis featuring/starring an old friend of mine Lee Eddy.
As I parked I promptly fucked up my car when a tuft of dirt was revealed to be a concrete pillar.
Luckily I was able to quickly enlist a couple guys to help me push my car. I did want to ask Lee after the show to help, if only to say "Hey Lee! It's great to see you after so long, want to help unfuck my car?"
After that, I scraped together another couple of quarters for gas, and hit Tetco. I then remembered that it had been a long time since I used any of the reward points I'd been acquiring, and from that I was able to purchase "Breakfast" Fritos and cheap milk! Awesome!
All in all, a productive and entertaining Saturday for less than the cost of 2 gallons of gas.
This is another fine production you've gotten me into |10:50 PM|
It wouldn't be a Gravity Well/DamienMalice/LucidVision production without someone we were forced to trust bailing RIGHT before a criticaal deadline, along with catastrophic hardware failure.
Earlier this evening I had been called by Captain Fantastic to help with some technical issues with video capture. I thought to myself "Alright, so it should take about half an hour. So it's going to take 3 hours." As it turns out, I should have sextupled the 3 hour estimate.
Sextupled, is that even a goddamn word? We're currently at the G.Well/DM/LV/DnIC HQ, No Mor studios. Of course, No Mor is a small former bedroom in a residential area, but it is dedicated. So that makes us cooler than 90% of the beret wearing, coffee drinking film goofs in this town that never make it out of pre-production. Because, if I may toot our collective horns, we may go through re-fucking-diculous problems and operate on a budget where the shoestring is stolen, but we always finish the movie.
Hell, we're finishing "Chicken Ass". I have much greater confidence in Chicken Ass after some comments PortalStar made upon seeing the chicken prop. Specifically: "Cecil! What is this?" then "This thing, this chicken thing on the coffee table" followed by "It's horrid. Do you have a cover for it or something? It's hard to look at"
Terrible Ideas, evolution of a solution. |12:22 AM|
Proper Growing Conditions:
It was getting very late at our foley booth, which conisited of a bath tub I'd lined with blankets. I was trying to make convincing moans and groans for a person who had just been very badly burnt. Unfortunately, for every proper sound noise I managed to weeze out, I also made noises like an obscene phone call.
I debated with my crew about trying to think of the worst "hit" I'd taken, or something along those lines.
Genesis of the bad idea: "Hmmm... I need to somehow make the same breathless weezes I only make when I'm in pain, but I can't use memories to do it. If only I could some how simulate intense pain. I suppose I could somehow hurt myself, in a minor way...nah that'd be dumb. "
The bad idea evolved a bit, and as I became more tired, impulse control started to fade. That's about when I punched the tile wall with a bit of force.
FUCK.
After the intial burst of curse words, I was able to produce pain noises that the director called "Well, chilling."
So though I spent most of the rest of the night with an ice pack on my fist, it worked. And it was a nearly free solution.
As an update, due to damage to the tape containing these sounds, I had to get back into that tub, and do it again. Instead of punching the wall, though, I requested matches. Over the headphones, Captain Fantastic could hear the woosh of a match, the hiss as I put it out in my hand, the gasp, and the pain noises we needed.
Him: "Are you doing what I think you're doing?" Me: "Shut up and tape this shit!"
Also, when trying to record the sound of a whoosh of a pack of matches being lit, Captain Fantastic managed to set the microphone on fire. Good work.
