Welcome to Day 12 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Zilpha Marsh performed by Brittany Ann Whalen!
Welcome to Day 11 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Margaret Fuller Slack performed by Jen Weber!
Welcome to Day 10 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Nancy Knapp performed by Morgan Thomas!
Welcome to Day 9 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Wendell P. Bloyd performed by Drew Thomas!
Welcome to Day 8 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Elizabeth Childers performed by Syndi Eller!
Welcome to Day 7 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is George Gray performed by Eric R. Patrick!
Welcome to Day 6 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Julia Miller performed by Christi Gerrish!
Welcome to Day 5 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Aner Clute performed by Annamarie MacLeod!
Welcome to Day 4 of the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
Today is Lucius Atherton performed by Mark MacLeod!
Welcome to the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.
For Day 3 we have Hannah Armstrong performed by Michelle MacLeod!
Welcome to the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. We just so happened to have filmed 13 poems so it's perfect for the 13 Days of Halloween! Also I need a deadline or I will never get these edited.
For Day 2 we have Barney Hainsfeather performed by Dan Zangerl!
After you've watched the video you can enjoy this alternate version which began as a blooper and became a whole scene.
Welcome to the 13 Days of Halloween for 2021!
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Sine Fine Films this year I will be posting a new poem each day from the 20th Anniversary SFF production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. We just so happened to have filmed 13 poems so it's perfect for the 13 Days of Halloween! Also I need a deadline or I will never get these edited.
Here is Edith Conant performed by the amazing Annamarie MacLeod!
You might also notice the focus is a little off. Fun fact - this is when I discovered I really need glasses!
After you've watched the video you can enjoy this alternate version of the scene where the Annamarie makes fun of a puppet (featuring Dan Zangerl).
For the second day of SFF Halloween we'll get to see one of the 12 shorts from Quatrain! Written by Diana Neatrour and starring Annamarie and Jacob MacLeod it's Scene 3D!
(I think we might need to name the films something because scene # and director letter)
After you've watched the video you can enjoy this alternate version of the scene where the actors goof off, have fun, AND get all the lines right!
Let's kick off the 13 Days of SFF Halloween with a brand new movie filmed this year! Yes, it was filmed AND edited in the same year! How the hell did that happen?!?
Snack Shorts is a trilogy of delicious short films about salvation, revenge, and cheese crackers.
This video introduces five new members to the SFF company: Grace, Henry, and Clark Graaf and Asher and Elizabeth Johnston. I know all five of these talented kids will be making more appearances in future productions!
UPDATE: My computer crashed on Day 3 and so there were no more 13 Day posts for 2020!
Andrew Thomas as Ryan Aurelius, the Count of Monte Carlo, a suave
sociopath who has a royal and rich background. Although he has an obscene
amount of wealth, he is morally bankrupt and honestly believes there is nothing
money can’t buy.
Brittany Ann Whalen as Regina Vasska, the Divil. She the world’s biggest Diva and is the
Queen Bitch…I mean Bee. The Queen
Bee of Bitches (there we go, that works). She gets whatever she wants, whenever
she wants it or there will be hell to pay.
We did the best we could with the time we had (I was three freaking
hours late to the set) and had a good time making villainous t-shirts, pitching
tents, and roasting whores…smores. I mean smores! SMORES, damn it! 
Despite the last minute planning, the ridiculously late start, the lack
of proper costumes for a few of them, and the incredibly cold night, I think we
all still had a great shoot and lots of fun. I know I did. 
We also got to hang out with some old friends (and new ones) who came by
to help out as crew – Bryan Kieft, Billy H., Jen Weber, and Ben Thomson. Although we did not actually finish filming the movie, we will be
reuniting at the end of June to finish it up.
Also, a MUCHO BIG THANKS to Brittany Ann Whalen, who not only brought
along a bunch of food, but also an entire studio’s worth of equipment to the
set. That allowed us to do a studio set up for shooting the ad-libbed scenes
(which was all of them).
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| Picture from here |
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| Picture from here |
It’s a very sweet story and has all the elements of most
Christmas tales – sharing the little you have with those around you and giving
gifts from the heart. It appealed
to me because I’ve always loved the mythic archetype of the Kindness of
Strangers (such as Baucis and Philemon from Greek Mythology). I twisted it by making a modern tale of
a farmer and his adult daughter (instead of a woodcutter and two children), and
making the stranger be Mary instead of Jesus as a child (mostly because of who
I had available to cast). I’m
normally not fond of having a heavy religious message in my productions, but
this is a more serene and sweet tale that, as the word archetype suggests, can
have pretty much any divine being swapped out for the Christian figures of Mary
or Jesus. 
We filmed on December 27, 2010 and since the script was
short (5 ½ pages) and all located in the same place (the MacLeod Farm) we were
able to shoot it all in one day (in one afternoon really). Unfortunately I had been sick for
several days before the shoot and had lost my voice to laryngitis so I needed
Jen, my assistant director for the day, to be my ”voice” on the set and repeat
my directions to the actors if they were farther away then a few feet. Annamarie was also sick with a bad cold
and, if I recall correctly, almost thought about begging out of filming after
we were done with the pick up shots from Hulde, but after hearing my raspy
voice and coughing she realized there would be little sympathy from me on it
(in other words, if I could do it, so could she).
Willow, Lucy, and Bone (the MacLeod
dogs) are all sweet and wonderful, and are pretty well behaved and well trained
(and so CUTE!). However, they were
excited to be let out and have all these people around them, so getting them to
do exactly what we wanted wasn’t easy - as you can see in this little featurette
from the DVD:
In that scene, Sarah is making soup and Mary helps her set
the table, then they all sit down to eat.
The scene ends there and starts up after dinner was over, so it only
made sense to stop shooting and have lunch at that point. Virginia had added some seasoning to the can of condensed
tomato soup I had brought for the set and the cast and crew chowed down on and chatted while we all took a break. 
The final shot of the day was Mary walking away and
disappearing. She starts off
walking in her snow outfit, but turns back and looks at Sarah when she
calls. Then a light shines
around her and she is suddenly clothed like Mary the mother of Jesus. I didn’t have a lot of time to get
ready for the shoot and I couldn’t find the outfit I wanted to use – a long
white sequined and beaded gown with long beaded lace sleeves and a blue chiffon
veil – and had to settle for what I could find – a white tunic-y thing and a
sheer-ish white veil that looked more like cheesecloth then chiffon but it
worked out okay since I knew I would add some glow to it in
post-production.
However, getting
her from the house to the spot where we were filming without turning her into a
popsicle was a bit of an issue.
Luckily Mark had a down coat that we were able to just drape on her and
quickly take off as soon as we were ready to shoot. As soon as she was done, she ran back into the sanctuary of
the down coat and we all returned to the house to thaw out and wrap things up.
Fortunate
Ones is a series of short films with one common theme – the main characters
wishes for or wants something, then suddenly they get it and realize it’s not
what they really wanted after all, which usually results in a dramatic twist in
their life. Only You differs
from this theme slightly because the two main characters don’t get what they
want, they get exactly what they don’t want – each other.
About three days before
we were scheduled to shoot I only had two actors I was certain would available
to shoot on Saturday, November 17 and no script. So I took a look at what I had available, and wrote the script
to work with that. What I had was one guy, one girl, and a tipi. Yup. I made a movie out of that. 
Since the script was relatively short for a Yibble production – only 8
pages, and most of them a sit down conversation – I knew I could film it in day
and not need to rush things too much.
That meant the shoot didn’t have to start at 8am, which was nice. We arranged to meet at the MacLeod Farm
at 10am and start shooting by 11.
Since Brittany and Syndi were staying with me that weekend it meant all
of us could car pool together.
Which was a good thing because we had push the shoot back to 11am as we
dragged out sorry asses out of bed, still groggy from the previous night’s late
filming, hilarity, and general fun.
A call to Bryan made it clear he didn’t mind the extra hour to get ready
for filming. 
About 11:30 we finally arrived at the farm and were filming by
noon. Syndi or Bryan, I can’t
remember who, started the fire that Mark MacLeod had already set up for us
(Thanks Mark!) while Brittany and I headed out to the road to film the
“forlorn” sequence, ie Scene 2.
After some shaky camera work and many mishaps involving me not be able
to shoot a close up of a cigarette (don’t ask) we finally converged in the tipi
and start shooting the big scene, ie Scene 3 - the multi-page heart of the
script.
We began with a full read through – which the actors did using their Smartphones. That was a bit weird for me. I’m sitting there with a paper script
and two extra copies and they’re reading from a screen. I’m totally a murderer. I killed trees for scripts. I committed arborcide. Which strangely sounds like a holiday drink,
or a garden store…
Now the script is rather raunchy, so everyone’s minds were in the
gutter pretty much from the start, which gave the shoot it’s own brand of
hilarity. We were also cooking
hotdogs and yes, there are wiener jokes in the script, and so there were twice
as many in real life. There were
many escapes with burning wieners, falling wieners, wieners that didn’t
cooperate, and wieners that seemed to be attracted to a certain part of
Brittany during one difficult-to-shoot comedic bit. 
However, the most memorable part of filming that scene was when we got
smoked out of the tipi. At
one point I added a log to the fire that we figured out later was a little
damp, and slowly the tipi started filling up with smoke. We opened the door to try to air it
out, but the direction of the wind just blew everything into the actors’
faces. They were starting to cough
and getting a little hoarse and the camera was having focus problems, so we
stopped filming and went outside for a break. 
It wasn’t until we were sitting in the screened-in porch-area that we
realized just how toasty the tipi had gotten. The actors huddled in their coats and read over the rest of
the scene.
We finished filming the
scene pretty quickly, then hung out for a while roasting hotdogs and making
s’mores, since only the actors had gotten to eat lunch. When everyone was ready to go, we
packed up, doused the fire and made sure it was out, then headed in to town to
Bryan’s house to film the opening scene.
After the actors changed clothes and went over the scenes a few more
times, then we went outside to film.
Because the scene is a little more than a page and they had it
completely memorized, the filming when surprisingly quickly – even with
multiple takes from multiple angles. We were also rushing the sunset, so it helped that it went so
fast.
The final scene to be filmed
was the last one. In the script it
ends with Jack and Bethany going Go Kart racing, but there wasn’t one in the
area so everyone brainstormed a new place to end it, and considering the script
and our gutter-trapped minds that afternoon we came up with the perfect
one. I think it was Brittany who
first suggested it, but everyone readily agreed it would be perfect, all things
considered. 
After that we ended the day with dinner at El Toro, where everyone got
to warm up (I remember Syndi was especially cold), kick back and relax. We parted ways with Bryan after dinner,
then Brittany, Syndi, and I headed back to base camp (ie my parents place) to
watch footage and crash for the night.
Both Syndi and Brittany ended up feeling somewhat ill – probably from
too much smoke, too little sleep, and a diet largely consisting of marshmallows
that day. They both went to bed
early, which was just as well since I had yet to write the script we were
filming the next day. 
