Bill & Maggie UPDATE: Production Has Wrapped!

WE DID IT!

I am so relieved, thankful, and blessed to be finished with Production on Bill & Maggie, because everything went right. And anything that went wrong was fixed very quickly.

We managed to shoot our entire film in only three days total, which is insane. Our first actual day of shooting was Feb 22nd, where we shot 25 shots total. Then we had Feb. 27th, where we shot 28 shots in total. And finally we had Feb. 28th, just this past Saturday, where we managed to shoot a total of 56 shots, including some of our biggest and longest Master shots. This is actually unprecedented for me. It’s a whole new record. Not like I try to make it a record: I’d like to give every shot of my films their due diligence and time. But due to our massive time crunch based upon the schedule of our female actors, we had to get things accomplished as swiftly as possible. Resulting in a shooting day that captured 56 shots. My previous record had only been 38 shots in one day, and that was on a much smaller production with far more dialogue to memorize and recite.

Any way, many of our shots are quite spectacular and fun. Lots of potential for when we composite them with other elements during post production. We shot tons of behind the scenes photos and even held a promotional photo shoot with each of our actors in order to have advertisement material and images to use for inspiration on our official poster.

Sadly, our Kickstarter is practically unresponsive, so I won’t be holding out much hope for it. But none-the-less our plans for Bill & Maggie will not be hindered, and we will be commencing with Post-production as soon as everyone returns from Spring Break here at SCAD.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1096791254/bill-and-maggies-intergalactic-taxi-service

Our post-production process, if you have not been privy to it before, will consist mainly of in-camera photography: including miniatures, optical effects, cloud tanks, prisms and laser beams, fog-machines, liquids and milk on glass, stop-motion photography, and many other traditional visual effects techniques that were perfected by people like Douglas Trumbull, Richard Edlund, and John Dykstra. I’ll be conducting extensive research into all of the most tried and true approaches to outer-space visuals and beginning our visual effects process from that basis; expanding and experimenting from there. There’s so much possibility with what we can do with live, in-camera visuals that it’s literally like a toy room, where you get to play around with stuff and make things happen on screen. You get to play with toys, paint, light, and plenty of other materials, and you bring the imagination to life. That’s actually why I became a filmmaker. I was always fascinated by how Dykstra and Edlund had created the space ships in Star Wars and Empire and Jedi, that I actually recreated half of Empire when I was only 7 years old. I used paper to make the space-ships, green straws to make the laser bolts coming from the destroyers, my Mom’s old action figures for some of the characters, and tons of random Legos to make still other space craft and miniature objects. My execution of many of my shots weren’t very effective, but the passion, the determination, and the imagination was all there. And so now this is my chance to live the dream I’ve always wanted to, because now I get to create the visuals I had always wanted to recreate all those years ago, but never had the understanding or the technical expertise to do, despite clearly having the patience for it.

For those of you who have been checking out the progress of my short film “Bill & Maggie’s Intergalactic Taxi Service,” I hope these most recent production photos will further garner your interest in the project, and you’ll continue to stick with us as we move towards completing this film. So much more to do and so little time to do it. Our initial deadline for an early final cut is the tail end of May of this year, for the sake of our SCAD class requirements. But still more changes and updates may be made during the months of June and July, depending on how unfinished certain elements may be. Because we intend to begin sending this film off to festivals this summer, and over the next two years.

I hope you all enjoy the photos and production stills. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I will see you all again very soon with another Cinema Warehouse review.

Comments

comments