Sine Fine Films: October 2013

Once a month I’m going to talk about a specific production, what it was like to film it, and what was involved in making it happen. This month I’m going to talk about Mind Games

Mind Games was a very important production for a number of reasons. It was the first SFF movie to be publicly premiered, the first entered in a film festival, and the first film not directed entirely by me. It was also the production where I learned the most about directing, shooting, and visual artistry by watching the main director – Edward Stasheff – as he worked on the project.

PRE-PRODUCTION

The idea began from a radio theater script Edward had written as a teenager for a group of friends’ radio show. I’m not sure when, but at some point he decided that it would make a good movie with some rewriting. He approached me about the idea in the spring of 1998 and I thought it would be a great idea. We had a couple of meetings to go over the script, cast the parts, and work out costume designs and locations.

Finding the cast was easy. We discussed some options, but in the end we decided on Rachel Anderson to play the lead part of Tilia and Chris Lamb to play the main antagonist, Talin. I seem to remember that both characters kept having their last names changed up until the point where I commissioned name tags for the costumes, then the names were set in stone…or plastic, I guess.

I really wanted Rachel to play the lead because the only parts she had played up to this point (and for a while afterwards) were silly, goofy, crazy characters that were pretty much comic relief parts. I wanted to give her a chance to play a real character and challenge Rachel with a part where she could really act. Ed wasn’t too sure at first, but once he saw her act on the first day he was happy with the choice. She did a great job!

Talin was a little harder to cast because we wanted someone different to play the role then the usual lead actors in the company at the time. Edward liked the idea of Chris Lamb playing Talin, as I remember, knowing he had a good look for the role and wanting to see him play more than an extra. I agreed. The other two roles were easy to cast. Having Annamarie MacLeod play the stern and commanding Captain Vesper was a no-brainer, and we both were curious to see Chris Hutchens play the rugged and slightly psychopathic ship’s gunner, Chevron.

COSTUME TANGET** Edward wanted to make sure that I used military uniforms and carefully oversaw the wardrobe choices because he didn’t want my usual flair that often resulted in vests and sequins…and sometimes sequined vests. I decided to do different colored uniforms for the different ranks to make each character visually stand out. Having Captain Vesper in red and black made sense, although there were a lot of jokes about her hat that had something to do with color, shape, and size being compared to Steamboat Mickey on more than one occasion. Having the lifetime military man, Chevron, in the typical olive-green jacket and beret worked well. For Talin, who is a member of the Psi-Squad, we wanted a black uniform because he ends up thinking he’s Death so black clothes made sense.

The only outfit color that didn’t make sense was Tilia’s. She was the ships engineer and wore white – which no engineer would ever ware on the job! However, I wanted the contrast between Talin and Tilia of black vs. white for the visual impact and that was nice. I had to fight hard to convince Ed to let me do the slow and subtle change of Tilia’s clothing from flirty to serious. She starts out in floaty white shirt and short skirt over a silver tank and white pants, but as bad things start happening she loses the skirt, then the shirt, and eventually adds her military uniform jacket once she accepts the seriousness of the situation.

And she has kick ass boots, which I made myself - although I was accused of having shots that lingered on or highlighted the boots a few too many times because I loved them so. The boots looked cool, but they were not very practical considering how much Rachel had to run in them. She had to run a lot, like “practicing to be a Doctor Who companion” a lot. “(I had a) fear of face-planting every time I had to run down another hallway in my slippery boots,” Rachel recalled, “although I don't think I ever actually fell down...” **END COSTUME TANGENT.

Edward created most of the props. However, lighting was a big issue. I didn’t (and still don’t) own a proper light kit. Mostly of the time I just use natural light or whatever kind of light is in the room – which has led to some very dark scenes, obviously. However, I knew going into the production that the majority of Mind Games would be taking place in dark rooms where additional light would be needed. All I had were some flashlights and desk lamps, but I used them as best I could and I think the result was not too bad. Because we had no real extra crew I used whatever I could to hold the lighting equipment in place – stacks of chairs, books, etc.

The hardest part of pre-production, though, was finding the locations. We didn’t have the budget to build a space ship set, and there aren’t a lot of space ships located in Central Illinois. We found a few good places, starting with the enclosed back porch of our house at night, which we redecorated to be the captain’s office. It wasn’t great but it worked. Edward secured the basement in the dorm building he was living in at the time, Watterson Hall, for the climatic showdown between Talin and Captain Vesper. We were able to find several hallways in various buildings such as the Sunshine Dinner Playhouse that worked well but ended it up giving the ship the feel of being a very big ship with a skeleton crew of four people. I think that actually added to the eerie feeling of it, although it was clearly just a mishmash of whatever locations we could find.

Some sets had to be built, like Talon’s room and the medical bay (that was pretty badly done by me) both built in Rachel Anderson’s basement (which I left there for a year – sorry about that Rachel, my bad), and occupied the same room. We built Talon’s room first, then dismantled it and turned it into the medical bay. There was also the Cryogenic Freezer room built by my brother (you can tell cause it looks amazing) constructed in a basement room in the Homestead.

The best set Edward made – simply because it was funny – was the Kiddie Car of Death. It was created to be the gunner’s cockpit, so we only needed to see the inside. The outside looked hilarious. At a costume sale the previous fall I had purchased a few things that I thought could work – one of which was a giant kiddie car on wheels (I have no idea what show it was for), that I thought could be made into the gunner’s cockpit. Edward was doubtful, but he managed to transform it nicely. It looked great from the front in a limited shot, but zoom out and it was pretty funny.

The biggest problem lay in finding the space ship’s main control center. There was no way we could build one that looked even halfway convincing on our meager budget, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t green light the project until we found a place we could use. In 1998 I took an astronomy class at Parkland College and they just so happen to have a Planetarium there. It looked perfect for the bridge of a space ship. I asked David Leake, the director of the planetarium, if we could film there and he agreed (yay!). Once we had the main locations set, it was time to start filming!

PRODUCTION

The first shoot was on a hot July night in the summer of 1998, filming the scene in Captain Vesper’s office. Because it was the summer and the scene had to take place at night for location purposes, the shoot didn’t start until around 9pm and, since it was a long scene, we didn’t finish until after midnight. There was a lot of fun silliness on set involving shadow puppets, valley-girl accents, and colored pencils, but there was also some torture involved – mainly in the form of the actors having to drink a combination of cold coffee and cola for the dual purpose of props and keeping them awake.

“(I remember) filming on your parent's back porch with Annamarie very early on in the shoot,” Rachel recalled, “Lots of silliness!”

Annamarie also remembers that, “(It was great) really getting to work with Rachel for the first time - maximum hilarity.”

In August of 1998 we had a big awards ceremony where I declared that I wouldn’t film any more movies (feel free to die laughing now). But, since we had already started filming Mind Games, I made an exception and said that once I was done filming that I would film no more (if you’re still alive, please continue laughing). So we started filming again.

The next shoot was at the end of August (or beginning of September) and was the big, intense, and very long scene were Talin tricks Vesper, Vesper fights back, and Talin drives her insane. We traveled to Bloomington to film in the basement of Watterson Hall. Luckily, since it was in a basement, we didn’t have to wait for it to get dark before starting the shoot. However, we didn’t really get going until around 4pm and the shoot lasted until about 2 or 3 in the morning. We didn’t finish, we just called it a night because it was so late and everyone was exhausted. I have a distinct memory of being completely worn out and frustrated because Rachel and I got lost in Bloomington, the land of one-way street traps, and we didn’t get home until around 4am.

It turned out to be a memorable shoot for everyone. “A fight scene with my girlfriend!?,” Chris Lamb recalls. He was dating Annamarie at the time (they’re married now). “(Also the) headband not quite the same shape as my head. It was liable to go flying off if I was not careful with my head movements.”

The headband was a very cool design, but the red lights on the side were battery operated and while filming a long scene, Chris had to keep turning them off when he wasn’t filming to save the battery. Several months into filming, Edward finally found a way to hook up a larger battery and made the design better to make the red lights look brighter.

It was the first time Edward was directing action. The previous scene he directed was set in a small office and mostly involved people talking. This scene was at least twice as long and involved a number of fight sequences and tricky filming. I was the videographer, but I was used to be a director and kept getting annoyed at how long Ed was taking. Little did realize that he was directing how you should direct, not how I direct which is the “just get it done” style. Ed was playing with angles and focused on the artistry and intensity of the scene. Which made it take longer, but resulted in it looking better.

The problem is the actors were used to my “shoot fast fast fast” style too, where I only do a retake if I absolutely half too (like if someone broke a leg or something). “(I remember) Ed being all professional and wanting multiple takes... and multiple angles!,” Annamarie said. “*sarcasm* I'm sorry, were we not perfect the first time?!”

“Yeah, I learned my lesson about multiple angles/takes that first night, and (mostly) knocked it off after that,” Edward recalls. “There was also me getting kicked off the project and then slowly being allowed back in. I learned how *not* to talk to Elea that night.”

It’s true, I did kick my brother off the project. It took so long to film just one (albeit very big and important) scene that I was worried we wouldn’t have enough time to get everything shot if he kept up that pace. We only had Annamarie through September and very early October - after that she was leaving to go to college in New York City and I wasn’t sure when she’d be back and for how long, or if she’d be able to film again during that time. So we had little over a month to film her scenes and so I kicked Ed off the project, determined to direct it myself so we could get it done on time.

So I went ahead and filmed several scenes on my own. When I watched the rushes later on I realized that my directing just didn’t measure up to Edwards, so I started letting him shoot again. I think he begged me to let him back on the project – after all it was his script – and I agreed if he could film faster. He started using storyboards and making great use of the time, and the space of each location, so that by the time we filmed the scenes at the Planetarium he was back in the director’s chair more or less.

Ah, the Planetarium. Mr. Leake, the manager, was the best! He was so awesome with what he let us get away with. One of Edward’s favorite memories from filming Mind Games is the following conversation:

US: Can we bring coffee into the planetarium?

GUY: Sure.

US: Can we smoke in it?

GUY: I suppose so.

US: Can we set off explosives?

GUY: Umm...

And yes, he let us set off explosives.

“Who just lets kids run around a super expensive planetarium?” Annamarie remembers.

It was awesome. We got to use the fog machines, the effects from the light shows – we even got to film the actors walking on the areas high inside the dome! “(I remember) climbing around the outside of the planetarium dome and getting to push all of the buttons on the console,” Rachel said. “So much fun!”

There were scenes where the actors had to smoke, which resulted in some hilarious bloopers as well as distinct memories. As Annamarie recalls, “(Filming) cemented my belief that cigs are nasty - and raisiny.” Poor Edward probably blew half his budget on cigarettes considering how many packs we went through as the actors abused them – literally, not by smoking them.

Setting off flash paper bombs, fake computer monitors added to the set up, fans blowing and papers flying, even using the central planetarium equipment as the ships computer Astrolabe, were all part of getting to film the majority of scenes in the planetarium.

Most of September was taken up with filming in there, but we also filmed several of the hallways scenes in various places as well as the medic bay scenes with Vesper.

After Annamarie went off to New York, filming began to slow down. We filmed the rest of the hallways scenes and the scenes with Chevron and Talin in the medic bay, as well as the scenes in Talin’s room. We also went back to Watterson Hall to film what was left of the scene we shot there – the “post mad scene” stuff. However, we technically still needed Annamarie for the scene, but since she had no lines we were able to film using a body double, Jill Hutchison. Jill was the right height and build and with a wig was able to pass for Annamarie from a distance. By filming wide shots with her being backed into a white walled corner with a darkish brown carpet, we were able to get the shots we needed in Bloomington. I knew there was a corner of a room in my parents’ attic that could pass for the corner of the other room, so when Annamarie was back for winter break, I filmed the close up shots with her from that scene. Editing it together made it look pretty good, so good in fact that Annamarie remembers, “not recognizing my 'body double' - Jill in a wig - I thought it was me!”

By November we had filmed most of what we had. But there was one thing we didn’t have:

An ending to the script.

The original script written for the radio show was just an episode in a serial adventure. But when Edward revised it as a stand alone movie script, he couldn’t figure out how to end it. For Christmas that year, all I wanted was an ending for the script. I begged him to finish it. It took a long time, and a lot of conversations involving different scenarios, but by February he had finally found the ending. In considering various ideas, the one I lobbied for the hardest was the inclusion of the Psi-Squad at the end. He wasn’t sure at first, thinking it might be strange or seem cliché or something, but eventually he came to like the idea.

With the final ¼ of the script in hand, we were ready to resume filming. In early march we filmed a number of scenes that only needed Rachel. There was one day where we were filming scenes in the Planetarium and she was horribly sick with the flu, I think. She was a little hoarse, but her determined-yet-tired demeanor worked well for Tilia after all that she had been through at that point. I didn’t realize just how sick poor Rachel was until later when she said that she was running a 100 degree fever while filming. Wow. Thanks for being such a trooper Rachel!

Later in march we filmed the medic bay scene where Tilia confronts Talin, shot the cryogenic freezer room stuff, and tackled the huge, final fight on the bridge that involved a machine gun, more flash bombs, fans and flying paper. It required a crew to help with everything, which my father “volunteered” for, and had everyone working to make the psychic battle turn out well. I had no way to include generated special effects at the point so it looked okay, but it wasn’t great. I need to go back and re-edit it now that I have a whole world of digital editing at my fingertips.

The only scenes left by that point were the final two scene sections of Talin waking up to his old self and finding out what he’s done, and Tilia meeting the Psi-squad and them “taking care” of everything. By this point I was already working pre-production for Pandora’s Box, so Ed did most of the filming for the final scenes. I wasn’t actually there for either one, so I can only say what happened on the shoots from watching the footage.

The Psi-Squad stuff was filmed first. Edward was in charge of casting the three parts and wanted people that could look both military and unusual. Basically he wanted a trio that could look very creepy in the right costume and setting. So he cast Jen Weber as the leader, Jacob MacLeod as the medic, and Margaret Olson as engineer. “(I remember) everyone thinking I was really scary. Hilarious and fun!” Margaret recalls.

The scenes were great, with a lot of funny bloopers, and the trio, dressed in the black Psi-Squad uniforms, looked very creepy. Edward also filmed the scene where Talin wakes up at the end, and again I was doing something elsewhere for Pandora’s Box, although I helped with the set up. I think we were doing a read through of the first script of PB because I remember being upstairs with other people and hearing Chris Lamb screaming. Apparently that was went they were taking off the medical tape he was wrapped in (that I may have helped put on, I’m not sure). It was a lot of tape, and hearing Chris’s screams it was not fun to take off.

I will definitely say that you can tell who directed which scenes. It’s painfully obvious. The scenes that I directed are your standard Yibble fair of good, but not great. The scenes Edward directed were creative with the angles, artistic with the look and feel of the setting, always had a great design style, and the actors were so much better. He took the time to get great performances out of all of the actors and it showed. I learned SO MUCH from watching him direct that carried over into my other productions.

I started getting more creative with my angles (a little, not a lot). I learned to take a little more time (not a lot) with my scenes when I could to make them look better. However, the single biggest thing I learned while making Mind Games is that I am a producer, not a director. Edward is a fantastic director, and I’m a great producer and once I realized he was better at it and gave him more control the project looked better. My biggest regret – my only regret – is that I didn’t let him direct all of the scenes because it would have made the movie twice as good as it already is.

He also took the time to build sets and props that actually looked good, not just sort of did the job. His dedication to the production – and the dedication of all the actors – really made a huge difference and made the production a success.

THE PREMIERE

Mind Games premiered to the public – a first for an SFF production (although at that point it was still called Starlight Productions) – at the Staerkel Planetarium. That’s right, we got to screen the movie in the place we filmed so many scenes, and although we couldn’t afford to rent out the place for the premiere, they let us show the movie for free. I will now restate the fact that David Leake is the best! We charged a $2 donation fee at the door with all the proceeds going to the Planetarium to help cover the costs.

Due to an article in the local News Gazette about the premiere, we actually had people there who were complete strangers! It was very exciting. There were about 50 people in the audience, and although most of the people were family and friends, there were at least 15-20 I had never seen before, so that was really cool.

It has now been 14 years since we filmed Mind Games, but it will always be one of the greatest productions I have ever been a part of and to all those who participated I can’t thank you enough!

I will now leave you with this running joke from the Planetarium set about the Captain’s Cool Chair: