The Trilogy (Part 2)

Creating the story was the hardest part of this whole thing, I had to think of 3 intertwining stories that were all simple to shoot and didn’t require major acting skills. One night I met up with Geoff, Marky, Mike, and we cranked out the story idea. Here’s how it broke down.

Story A: 2 Russian Gangsters (Marky and I) were on a stake out in front a drug dealers house waiting for a buyer to show up for an unknown object. Geoff directed this.

Story B: 2 Mercenaries (David and Geoff) were on route to the drug dealers house to buy the unknown object and deliver it to the Russians. However, the Mercs were going to double cross the Russians and resell the object to the highest bidder. I directed this one.

Story C: A drug dealer and his hooker girlfriend (Colin and Kristyn) were
waiting for the Mercs to show up and buy the goods. When the Mercs show up, everything goes to shit and Russians burst in and start shooting. Everyone dies in the end because of a grenade blast. The other Ryan was the director.

I was never able to come up with a title for the project, so it was aptly named “The Trilogy”, a name that it still holds today. I was able to make these scripts 7 pages or less, and keep things simple. I had the benefit of working with inexperienced college students who didn’t care what kind of story we told, just as long as it got them a good grade. Although, they were glade we went my script instead of Colin’s. That script was comprised of the same jokes about going to White Castle, and the unknown object was really the Spear of Destiny (while I liked that idea, I wasn’t too keen on the part in the script where the drug dealers scrape off Jesus’s blood, melt it down, and shoot it like heroin. All so they could say “We’re getting high on Christ!” (there are some things that even I find offensive). While I give Colin credit for writing these scripts in one night, I think he did a line of coke to help him focus.

For the most part everything in the pre-production phase went smoothly, it was the filming that had its own set of problems. I got called away on a business trip right around the start of filming (ok, I won tickets to go to the Xbox 360 official launch party in the Mojave Desert – Marky and Noah went too), so I couldn’t be on set for the first day of shooting, which happened to be the traveling scene in the Mercenaries short. I was ok with this because we had to reshoot it when I got back anyway, so I didn’t really miss out on anything…. That’s not entirely true, the next morning after we got back from the launch party, Marky and I were supposed to film our scene in the car. I know I won’t ever live this one down, but because of tiredness from the trip, we were 2 hours late to the shoot

Once we got the ball rolling, the rest of it went off without a hitch. We hammered out the Merc’s opening scene in the garage (complete with the blow up doll I put in the scene – this was to piss off our professor, who was a devout Mormon), and everyone else was able to get their scenes pulled off.

In the finale of Story C, I wrote that squibs would be needed during the gun fight. This was all fine and dandy, but I had to build the kit, and test it before the last day of filming. Using a blueprint I snagged off the internet, my other friend Marc and I went out and built this air powered squib kit (a 30 pound insecticide sprayer with a plugged up garden hose on the end…pretty easy to make). But then we had to test it.

Because it was my script, and my wanting to shed blood, I volunteered myself to be the test dummy for the kit. So, on one very late November night, I duct taped an almost frozen garden hose to my chest and we tested out the range of the spray. We were able to get the thing figured out after only 5 takes. I was definitely hurting the next day after that, not so much from being frozen stuff, but being covered in kool aid, and having to repeatedly rip duct tape from my bare chest. Yes, it hurts.

With the kit ready to roll, we set up for our final day of shooting. We were fortunate to have access to Dayna’s apartment as the location for the last scene. We all arrived on set at around 12:30 p.m. and started setting everything up. Because we were all new at this game, we had a lot to figure out, and the sheer amount of people on set became increasingly difficult to shoot around. So we had to start sending people outside, or home, because we had nowhere else to put them.

The final scene broke down like this: The drug dealers meet up with the Mercs and that shit goes down. Then the Russians run in and the gun fire begins. Pretty simple right? It took us till 4 a.m. the next morning to finish everything up. We had complications with the squib kit and the fake blood, and when we finally got to that scene, we only had one take because we didn’t have a wardrobe budget. To prepare Dayna’s apartment for the bloodshed, we lined the immediate area with drop cloths so we wouldn’t ruin her almost white apartment. Yeah….that didn’t work out too well. When my squib went off, it sprayed, and I mean everywhere. We had pumped it more than we should have, and it covered everywhere except where the drop cloth was! Within a matter of seconds we gave her apartment walls and carpet a nice splatter look. I have to give props to Dayna, she didn’t freak out or kill me for that one.

With the final shot in the bag, we wrapped production, had a congratulatory smoke, and went home for the night. Now it was in the hands of the editors to make our masterpiece come to life. Well…that didn’t happen. Danielle was editing Story A, and she only used the 2 master shots we had filmed, she didn’t use any of the inserts. Dayna edited Story C, and on the day that it was due, some of the clips went missing, and she couldn’t find them, so no completed piece there. Ryan edited Story B, and my only complaint with that one was that he (and none of the other editors) shared the gunshot sounds, so it sounded different in each short. Although, I can’t really complain about that, it gave each piece a distinctive feeling that really worked for the different aspects.

I should point out that this whole time we kept this a secret from the Professor of the class, he had no idea what was going on, and when he saw the final projects he was surprised that we all worked together as a team and created something – while not great – that had never been done before in the history of that school.

The repercussions of our actions were both good and bad, several classes had their curriculum changed in order to help students utilize the large group mentality, and in other classes it was forbidden that we form large groups in favor of smaller ones.

You win some, and you lose some…

Here it is, almost 3 years later, and I have since left the school and teamed up with a great group of guys (most of whom I went to school with). I will always look back fondly on that experience, as it not only proved that film students can work together without it being a requirement, that we can change the system from the inside. And if we can do that, just think of what we can do in Hollywood?

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