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 20th
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).