As part of the 25 Days of Sine Fine Films extravaganza leading up the 25th Anniversary I have decided to write a series of posts celebrating the 25 actors who have been the most dedicated by participating in the most productions.
Actor of the Day: Jill Hutchison
Jill was a part of the company right from the beginning when we filmed Destiny in the summer of 1996. She has participated in 9 productions as cast and/or crew.
I met Jill when I started the Gypsy Wanderers Dancing Troupe and was looking for people to join it. Jill was Annamarie MacLeod's best friend and liked to dance so Annamarie brought her into the group. Jill was a great dancer and, having been a cheerleader, could do some cool tricks so that was great. We all had a lot of fun hanging out while dancing and also hanging out just for fun. Although she wasn't a part of the Adventure in a Cornfield that ultimately lead to Destiny, she was happy to cast as Princess Elaina and participated in SFF's first production.
Playing a princess is a movie what a lot of girls dream about, or certainly don't mind doing, but Elaina was not your typical fairytale princess. She was sassy and spunky, had no interest in marrying the hero and was incredibly angry when her mother, the Queen, kicked her best friends out the kingdom for daring to flirt with the prince Elaina didn't want to marry anyway.
She gets shipped off to Traldon to marry King Gergio but he's dead and her new fiancee Balthazar doesn't last much longer. In the end, rather then returning to be the Princess of Liliya Elaina decides to join the pathetic bandit group known as the O.O.P.S - The Organization of Out-of-work Prostitutes and Singers. Although neither a prostitute or singer, out of work or otherwise, she is chosen to lead the hapless group and eventually they become her bodyguards when she returns to Liliya.
Jill did a great job playing the princess with just the right amount of care and compassion to balance out the brattiness. I also really liked her costumes, although her wedding dress and hair were kind of limpy in the terrible heat of Wesley's Great Hall. Although Jill wasn't in Destiny II, since it was a prequel and Elaina wasn't in it, she did return to play Elaina in Destiny III in the summer of 1997. More hot days and long film shoots were balanced out by lovely costumes and lots of laughter. Elaina's character had grown from a sassy princess into a mature regent looking for love and ends up falling in love with the villainous Balthazar in disguise. She did a great job with the love scenes as well as the later fight scenes and hopefully had a lot of fun.
In the late Spring of 1997, before we filmed Destiny III, I shot a murder mystery style movie (calling it my graduation party) which was an absolute disaster. Since there was no script and everyone had to ad lib people often talked over each other and it was really hard to understand what people were saying. Jill played the saucy "French" maid named Fifi LaMiche, and spent most of the movie trying to find Frumpy's will that left everything to her and either blackmailing or conspiring with other people to get what she wanted.
Like I said, everyone was talking over each other and it was hard to understand what anyone as saying but Jill found a brilliant way around this. She would take another character aside for a secret meeting and I would film just the two of them talking for a few minutes. The only parts of the dialogue you can really understand are these secret conversations because Jill was a genius and found a way for herself to be heard. Although Frumpy Gets It was technically filmed before Destiny III I still count it as coming after that because I didn't edit it together until long after I finished up filming and editing Destiny III.
The next movie I did was The Dragon & The Unicorn filmed in the fall of 1997 thru the early spring of 1998. Jill agreed to play one of the villain Asarai's two minions which I named Eek & Squeak. Jill has a higher pitched voice in general and when she cracks up she tends to squeak (it's adorable), so I obviously cast her as Squeak. Eek & Squeak are typical minions are basically vampires so they dressed in gothic style (despite the fact their scene took places in Ancient Roman times - wtf Yibble!). Although she was supposed to be at the big party at the end of the movie with all of Asarai's other minions, Jill couldn't make it to that shoot. It wasn't really a big deal. In the end she really only had to film for a few hours on one day.
As I was finishing up filming for The Dragon & The Unicorn in the spring of 1998, I began to film two other productions as well - The King of Elflin's Daughter and The Perfect Combination. She was only in one scene in The King of Eflin's Daughter which was filmed in the summer of 1998. I needed extras to play fairies in the Fairy Dance scene and luckily Jill was available, did I mention she's a great dancer? She is, she's also lovely, lively, and always smiling - or maybe cracking up I mean we laugh a lot on the set. We began filming in the late afternoon and since I taught the choreography on location we didn't stop filming until late at night.
Although was double shooting King of Elflin's Daughter and The Perfect Combination in 1998 I did most of the filming for King of Elflin's Daughter in the middle of summer and shot most of The Perfect Combination in the spring and early summer. I only count The King of Elf as coming first because we began shooting it first and I finished editing it one week before I finished editing Perfect Combination.
The Perfect Combination is finally where Jill got to shine. She had the lead role of Catherine Summers, a talented thief who accidentally gets mixed up with an assassin and become embroiled in a battle for her life and freedom. Catherine in a sly, smart, clever, and cute. I seem to type cast Jill as a lot of sassy, spunky parts, but to fair she does do sass and spunk very well.
As the star of the show (well, the female star, Jacob MacLeod played the male lead) she had to do a LOT more filming then had done since Destiny III. But Jill is a trouper, never complained and always showed up on time ready to film. She did a perfect job as Catherine, exactly as I imagined the character. I could not have been happier with her performance and I was really glad to she got to show off her talent in a lead role and long last.
The last movie I filmed that summer was The Vigil, a melancholic story about a girl who dies suddenly and her ghost is left to watch as her friends mourn her death. The script called for several male characters but I had more female actresses available then male and when I wasn't able to get enough guys I asked some girls to play the parts and cross cast them. Jill played one such role, Clara Atwood, who originally written to be a guy but the dialogue is pretty non-gender specific.
All she had to do was look horrified and run away (in slow motion), then look sad with the rest of Julie's friends, and eventually hold a candle while standing in a circle at the vigil. It wasn't a big challenge, but having to pretend to be sad the whole shoot makes it less fun. Still she did a great job and I was very thankful she could film with us.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to quit my filming addiction after I finished the Vigil, but it didn't work and I filmed another movie in the fall thru spring of 1998-99. This time Edward wrote, and he and I co-directed, the psychological sci-fi horror movie Mind Games. Although Jill wasn't originally cast in any role she ended up becoming a stand in for Annamarie MacLeod. We weren't able to finish shooting the end of a scene when Annamarie was still in town - she moved to New York that to go to college that year so our time to film with her was very limited. We were getting to the point where I really needed to shoot the rest of the scene so I asked Jill if she could help us out. Jill and Annamarie have a similar height and build and with a wig and a wide shot Jill was able to pass for Annamarie's character, Captain Vesper Browning. Since the only part left to film was Vesper covering her face and crawling into a corner to hide after being driven mad it worked out really well to have Jill be the stand in. Thank you so much Jill!
The next project I did was turn the Destiny Trilogy of movies into a TV mini-series that would air on PCE-TV in CU. Although most of the footage was already filmed, I took the chance to shoot or reshoot some scenes that either weren't filmed at all for the movies or were filmed badly. Jill agreed to return and film some missing scenes for Princess Elaina, one of which is where Balthazar proposes to her. It had only been a couple of years since we filmed Destiny III so there wasn't much difference in appearance and Jill played the part like no time had passed. She did a great job and I think there was only one shoot for her in costume, although she also attended the shoot where I recorded voice overs from all the actors.
That was the last time I filmed with Jill. I had hoped to cast her in Pandora's Box but she became busy with life, work, and college. I didn't even see her again until years later in 2012 at one of the MacLeod's semi-annual fall parties where I learned she was going to be a mother very sooner. She had moved away from CU years before and although I'm sure she returns to visit every now and then it never seems to be when I also happen to be in town our paths have not crossed since then.
Jill is a wonderful, smart, talented, friendly woman whose bright smile and optimistic attitude can warm anyone's heart. I do keep in touch with her via Facebook and know that she is leading a very busy life with work and kids so I doubt she will ever be able to film with me again. Maybe sometime I can at least convince her to come to an SFF reunion, it would be nice to see her again.
No comments:
Post a Comment