SFF's 18th Anniversary

This year Sine Fine Films celebrates 18 years of filming fun!  To celebrate here are 18 random facts in random order about SFF.

1.  In the past 18 years more than 185 people have participated in SFF Productions. 

2.  There are more than 20 people who are still consider themselves active members and have worked on at least one production in the last three years and plan/hope/would-like-to-if-schedules-and-location-permit work on one in the next year or two.

3.  No one has participated (as either actor or crew) in more than half of SFF’s 44 productions, and only two have been in more than 20.  Jen Weber has been in 22 productions – 11 movies, 4 TV shows, and 7 short films.   Annamarie MacLeod has been in 21 productions – 11 movies, 4 TV shows, and 6 short films.

4.  Annamarie has played 31 different characters (including all the extras), more than any other actor in the company.  Jen Weber is, of course, runner up in that category, having played 29 characters.  Rachel Anderson has played 26, Brittany Ann Whalen has played 21, and Kate Weber rounds out the top five with 19 characters.

5.  Brittany Ann Whalen has been in 15 productions (3 movies, 4 TV shows, and 8 short films), but her achievements behind the camera are just as impressive. She is the only other person besides me to be an Executive Producer (Eidolon) and an Editor (Eidolon, Quatrain), as well as being the lead director on multiple short films, the second unit director on two TV shows, an assistant director, producer, camera operator, sound assistant, costume provider, location scout, transportation coordinator, and she even wrote a couple of scenes for Eidolon.  I think she’s pretty much done all the various technical positions I have!    (I shall call her…mini-me.)

6.  Eight other people have been writers on SFF productions over the years. Joel Pierson wrote The Vigil, Edward Stasheff wrote Mind Games and was Writer 4 for Quatrain.  Diana co-wrote 3 episodes of Pandora’s Box, was Writer 3 for Quatrain, and wrote Hulde for Twisted Tales.  Kate Weber was Writer 2 for Quatrain, and wrote two short film scripts – Mary Contrary, and Cinderella for Twisted Tales. Jacob MacLeod was Writer 1 for Quatrain, and James McKinley, Morgan Thomas, and Brittany Ann Whalen all wrote or co-wrote scenes for various episodes of Eidolon.

7.  Both The Vigil and Mind Games were written and recorded as radio plays before they were made into movies.  Mind Games was originally written as an episode for a serialized space-opera radio show.

8.  Both The Curse and The Gift Bearer were supposed to have more episodes.  The Curse was envisioned as having three “seasons” of 10 episodes each for a total of 30.  And the second season of The Gift Bearer was written as 7 hour long episodes or 14 half hour eps, but given the length of many of the scripts the show would have been close to 34 episodes if all of the original episodes had been filmed.  Neither show were able to be fully realized as I envisioned them do to technical difficulties (i.e. I went crazy)

9.  Destiny III has the dubious distinction of having the most equipment sacrificed to a single production.  During the filming it “wounded” two video cameras, and “killed” 5 VCRs during the editing process, one of which was the duo-deck VCR with a special editing feature and even after it was repaired it never worked right again  (sorry about that mom and dad). Later, while re-editing the Destiny Trilogy into the mini-series the intense editing broke at least three (and possibly four) 3/4 inch editors and required five different edit “bays” before it was completed.

10.  Most shooting days are long, but there have been a few short ones. The shortest day of filming ever was during Pandora’s Box.  It was for one scene in Episode 11 with Turlo and the only reason we shot that one scene on that one day is because I forgot to tell Jacob that the film shoot had been canceled so we filmed what we could with only him.  Which was one scene. I think it took a half an hour – and that includes the time it took to change into the costume.

11.  A lot of film shoots are long – but the longest filming day was during the September shoot in Eidolon.  It was 18 hours long. 18 hours of pretty much straight filming. On that same day we also set a record for the most number of scenes filmed in a single day – 31.  Dude, that’s a lot of filming.  We actually had two different units filming at the same time for several hours that day, so we were able to maximize our time, since the actors could only get together once a month and we had a LOT of scenes to shoot. 

12.  Eidolon is the biggest production to date, taking almost three years to complete from pre-production thru post.  It’s also the most expensive production ever filmed.  Since it was filmed all over the state of Illinois, there were a lot of expenses such as gas, food, and hotels.  The total cost was over $6000 (thank god Brittany shared the expenses)

13.  The project that has taken the longest to complete is Quatrain.  Pre-production began in 2007 and it was filmed in the summer of 2008.  However, it is currently stuck in post-production hell.  That’s right, folks, we started the production in 2007 and now – seven years later – it’s STILL not finished!  It will be officially completed a week from never (actually I hope to have it done before the 20^th Anniversary in 2016).

14.  Over all there have been 5 movies, 4 TV shows, and 12 short films that were in various stages of pre-production.  Some were planned, scripted, even cast and scheduled but were never produced.  If all 4 TV Show had been filmed there would have been 44 more episodes.  If all of the productions had been filmed there would have been 21 more productions and almost 30 more hours of edited footage.

15.  Of the productions that have been produced and completed, there are sometimes several scenes or whole episodes that were never filmed for one reason or another. Pretty much every movie has at least one “missing” scene.  However, some have a lot missing.  Destiny III is missing at least 15 scenes that were in the script – including a large chunk of 10 scenes that are fairly important but required a field trip to a beach that we were never able to do.  We were able to shoot a few of the missing scenes from Destiny II and III a few years later when I turned the trilogy into a TV Show.

Pandora’s Box was the show that would not stop (even long after most of the actors wanted it to), so it’s no surprise that there are some “lost” episodes.  I kept writing stories and scripts and - although most of them were never really meant to be produced - at least 5 were meant to be filmed but never were.  I actually referred to some of the characters in these missing episodes during a scene in Episode 21, just in case we were able to eventually film them.

And of course The Curse and The Gift Bearer had many episodes that were never filmed, and at least 3 episodes from each show had a scene or two (or ten) missing.  If you combined all of the episodes that were planned or scripted but never filmed from every TV show you would end up with about 48 more episodes and 24 more hours of edited footage.

16. The most used location is the MacLeod Farm, which has been used in at least 16 different productions. 

17.  The single most used prop is the black gun that Vesper used in Mind Games (the first production it was used in).  It has subsequently appeared in 10 more productions and will undoubtedly be used in more.

18.  If you sat down and watched all of SFF’s 44 productions without taking any breaks, you would be sitting down in front of your TV for about 360 hrs, or 15 days (that’s if I did my math correctly, which I probably didn’t cause that seems like a lot of hours).  You would probably go insane (and with no breaks you would pee really badly).