My Film Debut!

I have to start bragging on myself, so just indulge me. Last weekend, our team (okay, bunch of goofy friends who like to hang out together) participated in the Alamo Drafthouse’s Bloodshots competition. It’s part of the Fantastic Fest, the annual horror/ sci-fi/ anime film festival that the Drafthouse puts on every year.

Bloodshots is a 48 Hour Filmmaking contest, and the Drafthouse swears that every film will be screened on their screens during Fantastic Fest. Each team is given a horror subgenre (we had “haunted house”), a prop (corn) and a weapon (a Ninja star). Each movie has to be between two and eight minutes. We had from 7pm Friday to 7pm Sunday to write, shoot, edit and deliver the film

We went round and round with our brainstorming session, and finally decided to go with a simple idea- a lonely guy moves into a new house and that’s haunted by the ghost of a former occupant. The former occupant just happens to be a “hot chick.” Our regular female lead had to cancel out on being in the movie, so that left us with two options—our female director, Susie and myself.

Susie’s pretty smart- she managed to finagle out of doing the role, and our producer decided that since I’m currently dating the homeowner/ lead actor/ “best actor,” we wanted to “keep that sense of intimacy” and I’d play the ghost/ hot chick. I’ve got to confess that I REALLY wanted the role but since I have a history of freezing up in front of a camera, I was worried I’d ruin the movie.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry. We used very little dialogue (since as a group we’re notorious for not writing scripts) and basically all I needed to do was look creepy and menacing. The “creepy” part was really hard for me because I don’t know how on earth to be creepy. The advice I got was to be emotionless, which I hoped looked good onscreen. Shawn, the victim, just had to look pathetic, and we did that by having him eat corn out of a can (hey- we got the prop in), drinking by himself, and watching Salma Hayek in a bikini.

My favorite part of the movie is the scene where my character decides she has to kill Shawn because he’s on to her. We did a tribute to a Tarantino movie (according to the guys who set up the props- I’ve only seen one Tarantino movie so I’ll just have to believe them). I had to go across the kitchen and pick up several potential weapons, discard them and finally pick the Ninja star as “the weapon.” I got some wonderful direction on how to do it, and I loved doing something so physical. I also made some bloopers when I kept trying to put the large steak knife back in its place and it kept getting stuck in the holder and slowing me down. Shawn finally told me to just put it down and give up on putting it back in its place.

We shot until about 4pm on Saturday, and then we watched the raw footage. We shot about an hour’s worth of stuff, and they worked on Sunday to edit it in iMovie. Shawn watched it Sunday afternoon and called to say it looked really great. He also told me I “stole the show” and “you played menacing really well.”

I get to see it tonight, since he got the camera man/ assistant editor’s copy. I’m really excited about seeing my film debut, so my fingers are crossed.