Bloopers 101 - Add Ons, Part 2

December is a month in which people celebrate various holidays all over the world.  Here at SFF, the actors often gift the cast and crew on set with additional and funny lines that were not in the script.

Add Ons - the gift that keeps on giving!

Bloopers are from:

Pandora's Box
The Gift Bearer: Time After Time
Twisted Tales: Charming
Mind Games
The Gift Bearer
Goddess Anonymous
Twisted Tales: Charming
Eidolon

Bloopers 101 - Technical Difficulties: Food

Props aren't always easy to work with, but working with food on set can be especially troublesome or simply awkward.  From cupcakes and muffins to cereal and hotdogs, eating on screen can lead to some memorable moments.

Bloopers are from:

Fortunate Ones: Only You
Goddess Anonymous
The Gift Bearer
Pandora's Box
Twisted Tales: Charming
The Curse

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from Sine Fine Films!

Best Costume Designs for an SFF Production - CAST YOUR VOTE!

Halloween isn't just about candy and pumpkins.
It's also about COSTUMES!!!

Just for fun, here is a poll about which
SFF Production you think had the
Best Costume Design. 

Before you vote, take a look at pics 
from the nominated productions:

Which of the following SFF Productions has the best Costume Design?

Destiny II

The King of Elflin's Daughter

Pandora's Box

The Gift Bearer

The Cursed Destiny of Pandora's Gift Box

The Medea School of Melodrama

Twisted Tales: Charming

Other

Please Specify:

Poll Maker

Bloopers 101 - Lines That Take Forever

October is a month for scary movies, ghost stories, and haunted houses.  Nothing is more terrifying - and frustrating - for an actor than having a line or scene that they just can't get right.  Scenes that take forever can be an actors worst nightmare!

Bloopers are from:

The Gift Bearer
Dream Chasers
Pandora's Box

Mind Games
Destiny III
The King of Elflin's Daughter
The Vigil
Eidolon
Destiny

Bloopers 101 - Crack Ups

Every production has times where the actors just crack up, and once the giggling starts it's hard to stop.  Here's a selection of some of the best.

Bloopers are from:

Mind Games
Quatrain
Dream Chasers
Eidolon
The Perfect Combination
Pandora's Box
Destiny III
Goddess Anonymous
The Gift Bearer

Bloopers 101 - Flubs

Lines aren't always easy to say (especially the ones I write), so actors often stumble over the words or just give up halfway through.  Here are some of the best flubs over the years.

Bloopers are from:

Pandora's Box
Destiny
The Gift Bearer

Mind Games
Twisted Tales: Magic, Inc.
Quatrain
The Cursed Destiny of Pandora's Gift Box
The Perfect Combination
Eidolon
The Curse

Bloopers 101 - Actors Taking Over

Actors enjoy talking to the camera when I'm not around, and sometimes even when I am.  Whether I accidentally leave it recording or they turn it on for themselves, these are bloopers where the actors took over the camera.

Bloopers are from:

The Gift Bearer

Destiny

Destiny III

Mind Games

Dream Chasers

Pandora's Box

The Dragon & The Unicorn

Destiny: The Mini-Series

Destiny on DVD!

The movie that started it all is now available on DVD!  Um...for SFF people I guess. Not sure about rights to ship it to others. I need to look into that. 


Anyway, the DVD contains the newly edited version of Destiny and special features such as bloopers, alternate scenes, a featurette, and even some easter eggs!  


 I also made a new poster (for the cover art) since the last poster I made for Destiny was about 12 years ago and I've gotten a lot better at both photoshop and creative design since then:

And just for fun, here's the box cover, although it will be better to wait for the whole trilogy to be edited if you want a boxed edition (I just made this for fun...cause I obviously have no life).

Bloopers 101 - Names

Sometimes I come up with bizarre names that are hard to pronounce, sometimes people just forget another characters name - or their own.  

Bloopers are from:

The Gift Bearer
Pandora's Box
Destiny III
Eidolon
The Cursed Destiny of Pandora's Gift Box
Goddess Anonymous

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).

Survivors' Club - Sick and Tired

There are a lot of days when we film in bad weather - days so hot your eyeballs feel like they're frying, days so cold your hands might fall off, and rain pouring so hard you could almost drown on set. Each month we'll remember one of those horrible weather days and celebrate the survivors who braved the elements in order to film.  Why would we want to remember those days?  Because going through hell on set has a way of bringing everyone closer together when they can say they survived mother nature AND filming on a Yibble set.

SICK AND TIRED

Filming when you feel like crap

There are a lot of very dedicated actors in the company, and they’re willing to film even when they don’t feel very well.  I’m not talking about how you feel with a hangover or after staying up all night (although many people have filmed in both conditions before).  I’m talking about having more then a sniffle or slight cold – like having the flu, running a fever, or losing your voice.  You may think it’s crazy to run around a planetarium with a hundred degree fever and trying desperately to remember your lines while trying not to faint.  Hm…now that I think about it, it does sound kind of crazy.  But that’s what it takes to be an actor on a Sine Fine set – devotion, determination, a good sense of humor and a whole lot of crazy!

Obviously the people who have been in the most productions are likely to have filmed while being sick at some point.  I know Annamarie MacLeod was feeling really ill – the flu I think – when we were filming the Minstrels music scenes in my basement for The King of Elflin’s Daughter.  I could see her losing focus and having trouble remembering lyrics, but she was a real trooper and kept going. 

She also had a bad cold while filming The Stranger for Twisted Tales, but I had the flu and laryngitis that day so I didn’t have as much sympathy as I should have had.  I’m sure there were other shoots where she wasn’t feeling well, but those are the two I remember most.

“I had the flu and fever when filming my scenes for Dream Chasers,” recalls James McKinley.  “I somehow got through the shooting. But I remember leaving for campus after filming was done and we went to Hardee's.

I think the actor who was the most ill while filming has to be Rachel Anderson.  It was hard to schedule a time when both she and the Planetarium were available to film for Mind Games.  We schedule a big shooting day weeks in advance that was just for her scenes in the second half of the script.  When the shooting day arrived Rachel had the flu and was very obviously very ill.

“I was MISERABLE,” Rachel remembers. “I couldn't remember any of my lines, I was in a fog and all I wanted to do was lay down (it didn't help that we were at the Planetarium and by that time I knew all the buttons to push to create a very comfortable napping environment!). I would happily take freezing cold, pouring rain, crazy hot, mosquito infestation, unrelentingly itchy costumes, or a combination thereof over being that sick.”

Yikes!  I am so sorry, Rachel!  I honestly didn’t realize just how sick she was before we started filming that day or I would have canceled it (but once you’re on set you’re not leaving till it’s over I guess.)

So far we’ve talked about filming while having the flu, but there are other kinds of illness that can strike you on the set – or be forced on you in Brittany Ann Whalen’s case. 

When I was preparing for the restaurant scenes in Episode 3 and 4 of The Gift Bearer, I bought juice to use instead of real alcohol (obviously) and just poured it into an empty wine bottle.  The juice I bought was basically the first thing I saw that was kinda cheap, and I thought the name was cute – Juicy Juice. Yeah…apparently this juice is high in sugar and known to cause some…problems with digestion.  Although, to be fair, anyone who has to drink a whole bottle of sugary juice in 2-3 hours is gonna have stomach problems.  

Unfortunately the Peri-gets-drunk scenes were the first on the schedule for the day and by late afternoon we were filming more scenes in the library.  Poor Brittany had to keep ducking out of the shoot and deal with stomach problems the rest of day.  But she kept filming and did a great job.  If I had realized the consequences of drinking that much juice in so short a time then I would have chosen more wisely.

And speaking of stomach problems, there’s was another actor who had serious problems on the set.  Ryan Davis had been filming scenes from Episode 2 of Eidolon all morning when we took a lunch break.  We drove through a fast food restaurant – can’t remember which one – and everyone got lunch, then we headed to the MacLeod Farm to eat it and prep for the rest of the day’s filming. 

Shortly after having lunch, Ryan started to feel nauseous.  I’m pretty sure it was food poisoning because I don’t think he felt sick earlier in the day.  I don’t remember him throwing up on the set, but he might have.  Regardless, the poor guy was so sick that there was no way he could film, so we ended up calling it a day early.  We filmed the rest of the scenes three months later, and luckily no one had any problems with food that day.

And then there’s Morgan Thomas, who found out she had a health problem as a result of an injury on set. 

 “Apparently I had a tumor growing that was missed for over 10 years while filming!” Morgan told me.  “And you know how we found it? Because of Eidolon. During the knife fight scene between Ryan Homberg and I, and I hit the doorknob. Well, I was having consistent pain from that. Went to get an x-ray done. Lo' and behold, there the sucker was, bigger than a softball/grapefruit and pushing my insides to the left and putting pressure on my bruised bone from the scene. That's why I was always so sick.”

Poor Morgan has probably been injured more than anyone else while filming, but since War Wounds is another topic entirely, I’ll post about it later.

And then there’s me.  If I’m not willing to cancel a shoot because someone else is sick, then I sure as hell won’t cancel just because I’m not feeling well.  I am perfectly willing to suffer through the same kind of pain I’m forcing my actors to go through, so maybe I’m not just a sadist but a bit of a masochist as well. Mental illness and breakdowns aside, I have bravely filmed with through horrible sunburn, being literally covered in mosquito bites, and with a sprained ankle. I’ve also filmed when I was sick with the flu and had laryngitis – twice.  

The day we filmed The Stranger for Twisted Tales, I was getting over a bad case of the flu and still had laryngitis, which I am apparently prone too. 

 If an actor had laryngitis, then there’s no way he or she could film and I would have to cancel the shoot.  But I’m the director, and although it’s hard to communicate when you can barely speak I found a way to make it work. 

The worst day of shooting for me – on any set – was by far during a shoot for Episodes 15-19 of Pandora’s Box.  It was the first of two really long days of filming scenes at the Virginia Theater right after Christmas. I had come down with the flu a couple of days before filming and it was still going strong.  But scheduling actors and locations during the two weeks of winter break (since most were still in high school at the time) was so complicated that hell would freeze over before I cancelled it for a silly little thing like me being sick. 

I felt like crap - head in a fog, feverish, and of course I had laryngitis so I sounded like Mickey Mouse on drugs.  And one of the actresses – who was in almost every scene – didn’t show up.  Between scenes I was frantically trying to call her to find out where she was, but got no answer (this was before cell phones). It turns out she was traveling that day (literally on an airplane while we were shooting scenes) and I somehow missed the memo (I'm pretty sure she told me and I just forgot). The scenes on the schedule included her in most of them, so we filmed what we could without her. By the early afternoon it was clear that I was a mess – high fever, dizzy, and feeling faint.  So I did the unthinkable and ended the shoot several hours early, figuring that it was better to go home and get some rest then soldier through the rest of the day.  Besides, we were scheduled to film for 8-9 hours the next day. I went home and took my temperature – it was a 102 – then collapsed.

But even when you feel like crap, you can still enjoy being on set.  Like all of the Survivors’ Club experiences, it kind of makes you feel stronger for having lived through it, and even if it was hell at the time it does make for a very memorable day of filming.

“It was fun filming even if I was sick,” added James. “I remember us getting around the fire just to stay warm and all the funny bloopers that got me through it.”

Quite frankly, given the number of times I’ve forced actors to film in bad weather like cold and rain, you’d think more of them would have ended up deathly ill.  Maybe they did, and I just didn’t know about it. 

Did you ever film when you were sick?  Let me know in the comments.

Thank you to all the people who’ve filmed through sickness and health, for richer or poorer, till death do…oh wait. No. No death please. Thankfully, no matter how bad anyone felt, no one ever fainted and we’ve never had to call an ambulance…yet. 

So to those who have suffered with sickness and filmed with fevers, I thank you and salute you.  You are real troopers.