Three Movies in Three Weeks: Mr. September

In which I have a brilliant time and generally make a fool of myself.

While I was in the midst of shooting "Sins" and doing pre-pro for "Mary," I had a three-day commitment to my good friend Nadine to do her film, "Mr. September." September was about a guy who loses his job and starts working out to try to keep his girlfriend.

I was grip and electric on this film, a job I've been getting more and more comfortable with, especially on smaller shoots. If production is becoming my self-educated film school major, grip + electric is becoming my minor (with directing, I am hoping for extra credit).

So I was comfortable, I was on my own turf, but, best of all, I wasn't responsible for anything. After the frenzy of "Mary" and "Sins," this was just about the most liberating thing that could've happened to me. I had a great time just going around, doing my stuff and not being responsible for anything.

Some of the fun stuff I got away with:

Room Tone Dance
For editing purposes, the sound department has to record about 30 seconds of silence ("room tone") in every location of the film. Ideally, you'd want everyone to be in the exact positions they were in when you were shooting the scene, because everything from which lights are on to where the bodies are in the scene affects the nature of the silence you record.

However, room tone is often overlooked until just after everything else is shot, and actors run away to deal with important business and whatever.

So, we were about to record room tone and I volunteered to sit in the actor's seat. Now, 30 seconds is a long time. I quickly realized that the camera was focused on me, and then I realized that no one would be allowed to stop me from doing whatever I wanted (or make any noise at all, for that matter.)

It was then that I invented room tone dance.

Room tone dance is a unique and highly modern dance designed to get the crew of the movie to laugh and ruin the take. I'd show you, but that video would cross the globe like a bullet that killed an Archduke. Maybe some day I won't care - I did post the link to that Milkshake movie, after all.

I managed maybe two or three really good goes at a room tone dance. Each and every one was well worth the three days of unpaid labor I needed to do to get them.

Similairly...

I Convince an Extra I'm Crazy
We had just lit a scene where the two main characters talk after an exercise class, and Nadine had a bunch of extras standing around with their bags pretending to talk.

I say pretending to talk, because, on a film set, everyone must remain absolutely silent except for the main characters in the scene. Their dialogue has to be recorded as cleanly as possible, and then whatever crowd noises or what have you are added during the editing process. Whenever you see, say, a bunch of people talking in a restaurant in the background of a scene, they're faking it.

Okay, so all the extras were placed in the scene, but one girl didn't have anyone to pretend to talk to. Nadine asked me to stand just outside of frame to pretend to talk to her.

So I could be seen by only the crew and this one girl, I was just out of frame so I wasn't being picked up by the camera and no one was allowed to talk. I decided this would be a good time to teach my captive extra how to bake a cake.

We did two long takes. During that time, and using only my natural enthusiasm and the medium of mime, I showed my extra how to shop for ingredients, how to mix them, how to spice and pour the mixture, how to place the cake in the pre-heated oven, about how long to leave the cake and, once the cake was done, how to throw it in to the air and shoot it with a shotgun.

I am not sure how much of my recipe got across.