The X Files lessons and More Inspiration

06/17/08

More inspiration from friends. Met with my producer friend, Sharon Hewitt today. It was a great evening. She is a creative thinker.  We have parallel projects. Meaning we are both working on projects and we seem to have some of the same challenges. We brainstormed some ideas of how to approach marketing the projects once they’re done. One of the biggest things as an independent producer is figuring out how to get your project out into the world. The projects take so much of your time. As in years of your life.

That is one of the things I think most people don’t realize when you talk to them about shooting a project. Everything takes foreeeeeever. First of all, once the actual shooting takes place, there is the lighting which takes a while. Then there are the props and the camera rehearsal. Then when you shoot and go back and do another take of the same scene, you’ve got to reset the scene back to the beginning. And that’s just from one angle. Usually you get the Close ups, the long shots, the reversals, etc.  Here’s an example. I was on and episode of the X-files tv show. I played a rattlesnake worshiper. The scene was a woman giving birth to snakes with her cult sisters surrounding her. The scene included a special effect that was a moving prosthetic the actress giving birth had to wear. It was a fake stomach that moved as if baby snakes were moving inside her stomach. Here is how it worked. Two SFX guys off camera had a remote control device attached to the stomach that made the “baby snakes” move. The camera man used a hand held camera, panned it in front of the cult sisters then panned down to the woman’s stomach where the baby snakes were moving. Then the camera panned over to where we see the woman give birth to the snakes. (Another guy off camera pours water with baby snakes in it on the woman to simulate her giving birth.) All in one take. So the crew had to move the cameras, start the SFX snakes, pour the water on the woman and at the same time the actress had to do her thing and act like she was giving birth to the snakes. This scene had to be rehearsed several times to get the timing right for the cameras and the actors. Then when the cameras rolled, each take took about 8 minutes to shoot and then another 10 minutes to clean up the water, dry everything off and have the actress change into fresh, dry clothes before cameras could roll again to do another take. (Because the production was about to go into golden time, I ended up not being in that scene. They didn’t want to take the time to have the stand-ins and actors change places so the stand-in ended up on camera.) So you see, everything takes a long time.

Getting back to my friend, Sharon Hewitt. We are both trying to figure out what and where our market will be after the films are shot. And we both got so excited about the possibilities the internet brings up. So we are figuring out a model to use for both of our projects. We are open for ideas, too.