Pictures from LA

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So, I believe I owe you some pictures. I'll keep this pretty simple.

Here's our fearless sound re-recording engineer, Kieth Waggoner, sitting in his red studio in front of  his sweet sound set-up. This was after we watched the movie with the pretty new dialogue that he had cleaned up. It sounded better than we hoped.

We were also able to just brainstorm together and do some good ol' fashioned artistic collaborating about getting or improving some of our original sound effects and about how he would eventually mix the dialogue, sound effects and music together. It was pretty nice, I tell ya. Well, until we got into a huge fight and were threatening to kill each other.

We also got to hang out in LA and be awesome.

Stay tuned. I'll have some more pics of our score recording in the studio adventures soon.

Some Pics From Our Final Shoot

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Me and Barnaby's cat on set

So, Science, Sex and the Ladies is, well, like 95% done. It's all edited; the insane amount of compositing is finished; sound effects and credits are all done, and the score is written. We will be recording the score in February and getting a final sound sweetening, but other than that the movie is done. Well, that was until we looked at it again a couple weeks ago, and just could no longer abide by a small part in the early movie. It always bothered us, but suddenly, it just seemed like it dragged the movie down in an unacceptable way. So, we did the only thing we could; we threw together a bad-ass re-shoot in about 10 days. It was merely a 3 minute scene, but it pulled the first part of the movie together better than we even hoped for. The even better part was that we shot this in a real set (created in Barnaby's living room), so didn't have any green screen post work to do.

The scene took place at slumber party in the late 80's, with mom and dad having a frank discussion with the girls about the physiology of a female orgasm. Alicia Walker, Elle Beals, and Emma Weber all played our slumber partiers. I got to be the mom, and Barnaby got to be the Dad. Sarah Murrell was our spectacular (and I really truly mean that) make-up artist. Mr. Jake Fritz boomed for us, and our nephew Drake joined us as much needed additional crew.

This was a fun shoot, not just because of the sweet 80's stylings, but because the people were great. Thanks to all our cast and crew. This is the actual, truly true, final shoot for SSL, and you all made it a great one! Enjoy the pics.

Alicia enjoying a brew and some sweet keyboarding on set (she was allowed to drink because she didn't have a line, was over 21, and is super cool)

Barnaby, looking like the sensitive and knowledgeable father he is. His profession is probably in psychology.

Elle rockin' a rad 'do

The whole cast

Emma, with stale popcorn and awesome crimped hair

Jake Fritz, our boom operator, eating gross prop popcorn and looking good

Charlie and Drake working hard

Borowicz's looking suave

Movie-Making Learnings Plus A Thought On Sexuality

Hey all! This is Charles filling in for Trisha. She's been a little busy at the day job, so I thought I would write a little something today. OK, this movie has taken way longer than we ever anticipated, but it's almost done, and we're proud of it. We're excited to move into this new phase of "getting this thing out there," and while I'm sure there will be an interesting learning curve there - no matter how prepared we think we are - we're ready. Its been an interesting process so far, so I'm gonna go over a few things this movie has taught or reinforced in me as filmmaker. I think they apply to pretty much any independent creative endeavor though - especially one executed by a group.

1. There are things that cost time, and there are things that cost money, but a lot of things can cost either if one is creative enough. 
2. Everything will break, inexplicably and usually not permanently, but enough to slow one down or ruin one's day/week. This applies to machines one uses, software one runs, and people one depends on. Be prepared for this. Have backup methods, and understand what is essential and what is not. This is not a matter of if but when. 
3. There is a way to crew/produce an independent movie that is very different than the way one reads about in books by Hollywood people. There are essential on-set roles like boom and camera, but the management, wrangling, and  even the directing need to be much more fluid, and there is even less room for any ego on set.
4. Digital asset management is the most critical thing. How you handle this will dictate how fast every other process can happen.

Yeah, those are movie things, and I know the readership for this blog is (hopefully) less full of filmmakers than persons interested in female sexuality and how we can be making it better. So, on that note, there is one thing that has continually been in my mind as we made this movie. Its not gonna shatter your brain, but it is food for thought.  Every generation has to learn sex all over again. Sex is not something you generally sit down with your parents or grandparents and discuss at length. Details, mistakes, funny stories, and tips about sex are not shared this way as they are with so many other things. They are much more likely to be shared between friends of the same generation as they figure it out with each other. Sexual discussion is very largely intra generational rather then inter. I feel like there are a lot of implications because of that, and I could go on for a bit but I think it will be more fun if I let you think them up.

  -charles

Our Actual Final Shoots for Science, Sex and the Ladies

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Me resting on the green screen in between screwing up my lines

Thank you to the friends and family that came out to shoot re-do scenes this Sunday and Monday. Love to ya'll!!!! We are so close to finishing this thing. We've received the funding for the sound finishing and music recording (thanks you, thank you again to our Kickstarter Campaign supporters). Also, a few months ago, Charlie, Barnaby, and I went through the whole movie scene by scene and picked it apart. So, we've been working through corrections, changes, and re-dos for the movie since then. When we are finished - we're talking beginning of May here. We will send it off to our composer, who will start working in more detail on the compositions. Anyway, part of the changes included re-shooting 2 scenes. The final scene of the movie was just a big monologue before. It was kinda boring and somber, so we cut a little out, spread the lines around, and tried to create the feeling that it was the people behind the movie talking to the audience as opposed to actors saying lines to the audience. The scene is filled with the real people who actually do support the aim of the movie, and it's kinda personal with family and friends in there. We shot this at our our Anderson, IN set-up. Thanks Central Cabinet for the space!

The scene we re-did on Monday was just bad before (which is why we decided to re do it), but this time we cut stuff out and turned the voice over into an on-screen narrator. This scene opens and closes the section of the movie about porn. The onscreen narrator is a porn star who talks to us from her porn set just before she begins the porn shoot, and then also talks to us while relaxing after. Ervin Gainer was our male porn star, and made for a beautiful addition to the set. We actually did shoot this in a hotel.

From left to right: Amber Helms, Natalie Ingle, Stephanie Fritz, Lindsay Leonard, etc, etc, chillin' on set

Nick Marson and Amber Helms doing the things we were telling them to do while rehearsing their lines - like holding hands and looking into each others eyes

Kelly Cantrell sporting a recently acquired Rugby shiner. She intended to be in this scene...and that's good enough for me!

Nick Marson acting like crew instead of an actor

Me with my awesome parents, Pat and Bill, before we shoot a little scene together. I mean come on, not everybody has parents supportive enough to be in their crazy indie female sexuality doc. I have no idea what we're talking about, but I think it's intense.

From left to right: Abby Henkle, Kristen Marley, Sarah Perfetti, David Charles, Sachie Marubayasi, Danny DeSloover. I call these people the pose masters - particularly Sachie.

We got our sisters (the ones with kids) together! From left to right: The Bickel Family (my sis), The Nadler family (Barnaby's sis), and the De La Cerda Family (Charlie's sis).

Way back during our first shoots, Emma Weber played a little girl from the 50's who morphs into a 60's college gal. She came back all grown up to say a line about adolescents in the final scene.

Christa Grimmer gets dust wiped off her shoes before stepping onto the green paper. Check Barnaby in the background doin' some tapin'!

Jeremy and Christa were in SSL during our first shoots. They were engaged during that time and since have gotten married and had baby Jericho. They came back to say a line about parents in our final scene, and Jericho was awesome!

Me and Charlie between my takes. My feet hurt like a bitch.

Ervin Gainer, Abigail Wright, and Charlie getting ready to shoot the part of this scene that has our on-screen narrator playing a porn actress talking to us before getting to work.

Our fabulous actors after finishing the last scene in which our on-screen narrator talks to the audience while acting as if she has just finished up on a porn set.

Final Shoot Before We Begin Submitting to Festivals!

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The weekend shoot went better than we could have imagined. I mean there were issues we had to deal with - a ground loop coming through the boom, a point at the end of the day where Charlie suddenly thought we had lost all the sound recording (we didn't, but even the thought was pretty traumatizing)...and there was the fact that the actors had to see me and Barnaby in skin-tight morph suits. Honestly, other than that, everything got done as it was supposed to. We worked the hell out of our hair and make-up ladies (Lauren Bertelson and Rosalind Ferris), but as you can see from the pics below, they did a fantastic job, and the movie would not be the same without them. The actors were great too, nailin' lines right and left and rockin' the non-verbal acting. Even our good buddy Jake Fritz was helping crew the first part of the day. Thanks to all of you!
 

Ellie Church and Carlton Mohn on a canoe date!

Sarah Hoback, Bryan Patrick, and Ellie Church helping us discuss Sexy vs. Sexual

We spent all Saturday before hauling everything up there, hanging the green and the white screen, organizing the lighting - plus we shot a scene (using our Doc Johnson props) that day too. So, we spent all day Saturday and Sunday in production mode (which was actually kind of fun after being in post-production mode for so long), and got a total of 4 scenes completely shot. Two of these scenes - the ones we needed our new family of actors to be in - had been a nagging burden for a long time. We had these worked out visually before the first round of shooting in 2009, but they didn't involve actors. Then our ideas got less and less interesting to us and the work involved seem ridiculous. Then all the sudden festival submission time was approaching, so we had to decide on a approach quick-style, and honestly it was better than anything we had come up with before...and after watching the actors during shooting, we were all even more excited about how these scenes were turning out than we thought we'd be. I love it.  I'll leave you with some pics from the weekend. Enjoy!

Alfonso Gomez and Amber Helms (a fellow Mt. Vernon Alum) on a date with...well you'll just have to see the movie to learn why I'm tied up in an orange Morph Suit.

Elle Beals being coy

Costuming "Science Sex and the Ladies": hoarding, intentions, constraints, and sizing super powers

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I've been staring at vintage (and/or crappy old)clothes on hangers laying in large stacks on my garage floor. They are also in the office closet, in the "gray room" with all our equipment and until recently in the back of our van. They've been laying in stacks in various places since we finished shooting in August 2009. I am notoriously a person that does not keep things. I appreciate a card, but I generally read it and then throw it directly away. If I find something in the closet and I haven't used it in a year, it's gone. I can't seem to get rid of these clothes though.

It's not sentimental. I think what it is is that I was scarred slightly by the process of costuming that movie. I spent so much time (and a fair amount of money) on costuming. I was constantly either researching (albeit - thin web researching) period fashion, making Excel sheets of costume needs, searching stores - particularly thrift stores, organizing and tagging costume combos, lugging stacks of them around, making fits, and all the damn ironing and steaming - oh the ironing and steaming. And, it's not like I wasn't already in scheduling, prop, and shoot day hell. I guess my problem is that I am, for the first time, saying to myself something that goes through other people's heads all the time, "but I might need these some day." I won't. I know that, but I keep thinking maybe we'll use them in another movie, or maybe we'll have some sort of promotional event where the actors are in their costumes from this movie. Don't worry, I will eventually throw them out. The truth is if we make another movie the costumes I have will certainly not only be wrong, but not fit any of the actors we have, and let's get real - even when the actors were in them during the shoots, they usually only fit due to safety pins.

I think I also have a sense of pride about these costumes. I went into this thinking

Thanksgiving - A little late

We're a little late on this since the appropriate holiday for this has already passed, but I thought I'd write about a couple things AnC is thankful for - well thankful for in relation to this movie at least.


1. Cast and Crew

We recently sent out questionnaires to all the cast and crew so we could get some info about them for their pages on the Science Sex and the Ladies website. Barnaby is putting together the bios, and after he read the first few he mentioned that he missed everyone, and we all reminisced about those crazy people that for some reason decided to work with us.
The truth is we had very little money, no fame, we were shooting all the way up in creepy warehouse in Anderson, and frankly - it wouldn't have been crazy to think we were tricking them into shooting a nasty, low budget porno - but they showed up anyway.


2. Digital
Strange to say now, since everything is digital, but when AnC first started making movies in late high school and early college (gems, these movies were), we were shooting on SuperVHS and editing from VCR to VCR. There were no consumer digital cameras. Let's just say, things shot on VHS look like they are shot on VHS. The only real option to make a quality movie was to use film - which is super crazy expensive. Luckily, during college, movie quality digital cameras started becoming relatively affordable. We hatched a plan to save and buy a Canon XL1. We now have a new baby that shoots in HD, but our first born digital camera will always be close to our hearts. It was sold 2 years ago to a couple shooting wedding videos in Rhode Island.

3. Mild Spring Weather
The first shoot for this movie was fairly cold (especially for Chris West and Brandi Payton who had to sit half naked on a pedestal with a fan blowing directly on them...sorry about that you two). The last couple shoots were pretty hot (especially for the dancers in layered clothing busting a move in 80 some degree weather with lights beating down on them...sorry about that too, but I didn't enjoy it either. I realized later I has a 102 degree fever that day). The days in between were just right though. In the past we have shot in some of the hottest and bitterly cold places I could imagine, Since we were shooting in a non heated or cooled warehouse, we tried to plan this in mild weather. In the long years and months of pre-production we were never sure if we could get to the shooting part at the right time, but somehow the stars aligned, and we got about the best weather period we could hope for.

Scene 39 Rough cut

Here is a screenshot from the newest scene to get a good rough in. The words might change in content and form in the final version. Scene 39 deals with sexual education and the particular points that make it less useful and even useless in some instances for women. The happy couple here is Ben Aaron and Michele Morones. We shot this on our second green screen we built. We had learned a lot from our first one (which worked great) and we were able to make use of the largest room in our shooting space for this long walk (about 145 feet). It turned out really nice.  We hope to have a complete rough cut in the next week or week and half then we can start talking about pickup shots, music, and the future!

Closing in on a shot movie...

first things first. We started shooting without our Brevis this week. We're able get more out of our lights this way. The HVX could be rated at 320 ISO sorta but with the Brevis on its a little more like 120 so we don't have to light the set so much. This really helped in changes and setup. We were ready to shoot almost as soon as we unpacked. Plus it helps us avoid grain and noise all of which our HVX tends towards in the blacks and you can use the lens controls on the camera so its just easier.



h We shot with David Charles and Christa Shoot and they rocked. They're playing a couple from the 50's and having a cookout while discussing frigidity and some other "relations" issues They were joined by Nick Marson and our very own Trisha Borowicz who stepped in at the last minute.








Sarah Aaron, Nick Marson, Trever Brown, Christa Shoot, and Rick Clark portrayed our 40's family. Sarah filled in a spot for us that we really needed. Thanks! She also made the pterodatcyle that we loved!

Here we have Joanna Winston, David Charles, Curtis Cole, and Barnaby Aaron hanging out between takes for our Romance Novel scene.

Abigail Wright, Joanna Winston, Katie Sheets, and Lisa Smith. Its part of dream sequence at a college campus...

Christa Shoot as a 50's wife and then a 40's daughter. That could actually happen.

Sarah Aaron 40's mother.


Trever Brown 40's politician.


Here's Charlie stepping in for the romance novel scene. We had an actor drop out at the last minute and we had costumes rented!


Trisha as Marie Robinson.


Rick Clark 40's Father. He cried some great tears for us!

Curtis Cole...magician? No he's an old antique dealer for out Romance Novel Cover.

Joanna Winston Romance Novel Heroine.




David Charles as a Navy man in the 40's, a Yacht captain, and a 50's Husband


Nick Marson, always a pleasure to work with came in as Paul Popenoe, who he does resemble, and a 40's son.

Katie Sheets college girl 60's

Abigail Wright, college girl 60's

Joanna Winston College Girl 60's
We're getting into the home stretch.