Film Stuff
My first experiences in filmmaking were with a sketch comedy show, The Steven Amos Show, named for (obviously) my brother. The show got its start my senior year of high school as a possible weekly live show hosted by Steve, with a couple recorded sketches, like most late night talk shows. Our local public access had a show or two that were this style, without the sketches, so it was definitely possible; in the end, though, we decided to stick with solely recorded material. We ended up doing three episodes over the course of about a year and a half. With each show, the quality jumped - the first episode featured things like shaky handheld cameras, single-shot sketches that lasted way too long, and not a lot of funny. The second episode was an improvement - we decided to tripod everything - and was completed right around when I left for my freshman year of college.Episode three was different for a handful of reasons. Firstly, I took over directing and editing duties, because Nick, our good friend and the other core member of the SAS cast and crew, moved to Michigan. Secondly, the show was a mix of sketch comedy, and a 15 or 20 minute short film, entitled "The Job", about a guy who starts a lemonade stand. Finally, it was longer than episodes one and two combined, at around 40 minutes - we spent a summer working on it. The episode had its moments, but for me, today, all of the Steven Amos Shows rank somewhere between well-meaning misfires and unwatchable embarassments.
The summer before my junior year was split in half - I spent the first six weeks in Boston, taking a summer semester of Chinese at Tufts and writing a feature-length movie, and the second six weeks filming it. That movie was Prom. The movie was 65 minutes long, broken into six interconnected short stories, and featured 11 main cast members. For those six weeks, the movie was about all I did - two of those weeks were editing, with loose-end filming done all the way up until the day before the premiere. The movie was far better than anything we had done with the Show. We used two cameras for many scenes; all audio was done with a boom mic that ended up delivering better-than-expected sound (and allowed us to do shots we couldn't have before). However, it also had a lot of weak points, mostly because of me. The bulk of the script was written in three weeks, and the first draft I wrote ended up being the shooting script. There was very little character development and we relied very heavily on Family Guy-style cutaway scenes for laughs. For the most part, the directing involved us bringing a camera to the scene, pointing it at the action, and hitting record. Even though it was the best the Steven Amos Show crew had done, there was a lot of room for improvement.
This past year, film stuff exploded. First off, I started writing our next movie, for the summer before my senior year. At some point in March, I suggested to Steve that we start a film festival, and within a week we had booked a space and were taking entries. We're the Door County Student Film Festival, and by now have expanded into some exciting stuff and are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit - check out the website for more info. At the first festival, we debuted the movie which I had been writing, called The Moviemakers. It was our attempt to make a real, dramatic movie; in the end, it may have leaned more towards a comedy, but it definitely focused more on the storytelling and characters than the jokes. We spent the entire summer filming, but kept the cast small - the "main cast" was made up of just six of us, and there are only a couple scenes with more than one extra at a time, which made things simpler. We bought a much nicer camera (Panasonic DVX100), so it looked great, and had the boom mic, so it sounded pretty good, too. The movie's runtime is 98 minutes, which is much longer than we had expected. But, over a month out of the premiere (as of this writing), I'm still proud of it, unlike just about anything we've ever done.
Unfortunately, with the film festival doing a touring show this summer, we're probably not going to do a summer movie (ever again)? We've got a Laff Attack-style comedy short in the works for winter break, though.
A couple clips from Prom:
Clip 1 (5 MB) - this might be my favorite scene in the movie. Seth stole the show with Prom. The idea for next summer's movie basically was formed around letting Seth go crazy with a character, and working from there. This also displays the sort of cutaway style we were using throughout the movie (and the terrible lighting).
Clip 2 (5 MB) - This one was one of the few scenes that were kind of funny standing alone. It's not very representative of the movie, since we stayed away from the gross-out humor for the most part.
Another project:
Laff Attack with Brian and Steve (4 MB) - Steve and I did a little 5 minute short this winter break for kicks. After Prom and working on the script for next summer, it was fun to be weird and spontaneous.