Having Fun When You Shoot!!!

Long-time friend and Director Matt Green called me up and asked if I wanted to go on a road trip to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. "Where's that?" I replied.

As it turned out Johnstown is this old mining town east of Pittsburgh and I might say a very scenic and secluded town!

Matt had a client who wanted to create a "Juice Trailer" to see if he could garner some interest from investors to fund a sequel to his Brainiac movie that was released in 2004.

Roadtrip, making a trailer... sure, let's go, when? Matt said, next weekend! "Ahh, no problem!"

We drove the nine hours from Atlanta since I had a good bit of equipment to haul and once we got to Johnstown we started filming. The first night of filming was relaxed and didn't require very much crew or actors. It was a basement scene and we knocked it out pretty fast.

On Saturday we got rolling with several locations and rolled through the shot list. For the most part, I knew what we were shooting and how it would work in the final edit. But every now and then I would have my doubts. But Matt has this talent to do something on a small budget that you would think is just crazy and couldn't possibly work.

For instance, when Brainiac is chasing his victim we were in this basement and it required a prosthetic tongue with teeth to come crashing through a wall. I read the script and shot list and said "How in the hell is this going to happen."

Matt brought in a clean section of sheet rock and said "Ok, let's setup here and have someone hold the sheet-rock and I'll score the back of the sheet-rock and then well put this goop on the tongue and crash it through the sheet-rock and oh, by the way, we only have two takes to get this right." If I didn't just tell you how we pulled that shot off, you wouldn't have ever noticed it.

We shot in slow motion and had to use the second shot, but it worked! Around :38 of the trailer.

A lot of people think shooting a movie, a music video, a commercial is fun.... For me it is very stressful as I'm always working to get the best shot I can with sound and good lighting. And on top of that, we are usually shooting a lot of material with a tight deadline.

Matt often says "Relax, enjoy the process, have fun when you shoot!" Well, for me the fun of shooting is getting a great product at the end of the process. There's no better feeling than seeing your work on the big screen and seeing/hearing people's reactions.

 One of the most fun aspects of this shoot was the final location where we had the town's S.W.A.T team for a shoot-out scene. The weather sucked. It was cold and had started raining. We had three cameras setup and I was worried about water-logged equipment. We got setup and ran through the shoot-out scene several times. The best part was one take where I setup the main camera about four feet from the gun barrels of three S.W.A.T. guys. When Matt yelled "action" these three guys unloaded their prop guns, fifteen rounds each. As they unloaded their blank loads I could feel each compression from the muzzel. Even though they are blank "movie" loads, the gun still sends an incredible flash and banging sound out the barrel of the gun.

When Matt yelled cut he came over to me and said "Was that fun?" to which I said "best shot ever!"