Melissa Parker found herself in a bit of a pickle. The Los Angeles LDS Singles Film Festival (that we do every year) was upon us, her movies were shot, but she didn’t have anyone to edit them. When she asked me to help, she seemed to think I was doing her a favor. It was such a delight to work on, though, with Corbin Frost, the director, sitting behind me tweaking my cut, that I think she had it absolutely backwards. What a delightful project. Here are the two movies we churned out:
We had extra fun applying aging effects to the footage of several of the shots (the baby doing pull-ups and the explorer/archaeologist are the obvious ones. We did a little bit of discoloration and scratches/grit on the baptism and praying over the car as well). Gotta love After Effects and all the tutorials you can find to do stuff with it online (I used this).
Director
Corbin Frost
Writers
Melissa Adrina Parker & Corbin Frost
Producer
Melissa Adrina Parker
Cinematographer
Duncan Rawlings
Editor
Matthew Stumphy
Production Designer
Kenny McNett
Composer
Laurel Bogner Plewe
Cast (in order of appearance)
Most Interesting Mormon
Adam Johnson
Narrator
Keith Paugh
Eavesdropper
Victor Vaile
Investigator
Martha Howe
Missionary Companion
Brandon Stanford
Toddler
Justin Plewe
Wife
Trina Talbot
Monk
Amery Ken Thao
Pretty Girl
Stefani Batson
3 Nephites
Curtis Bridenstine, Eric Newnam, and Eric Gerace
St. John
Agostino Marfello
Stroller Kids
Grace and Audrey Erekson, Brody Orton and Milton Bird
Archeological Tourist
Victoria Von Roth
Crew
Co-Producer
Orchid Cameron
Costumers
Stefani Batson, Martha Howe, and Julie Hinton
Sound Recorder
Meghan Stettler
Grip and Electric
Curtis Bridenstine and Mike Hammari
Production Assistant
Kelly Flanagan
Special Thanks
Lon-e and Krista Parker, Kristen Johnson, Joyce Norton, Alex and Sarah Lowe, Dave Broadbent, and Mike Mahoney
This was the opening video played at this year’s Los Angeles LDS Singles Film Festival on August 13th at the Santa Monica Stake Center. The shoot was on the evening of August 8th (and carried over into Aug 9th). I was the gaffer, which means I was responsible for the lighting. Enjoy the video below, as well as some production stills I snapped.
Every year the Mormon singles of the Los Angeles area get together and have a film festival. The movies are usually very short (the rules of the festival for the last several years have limited them to 4 minutes) and pretty silly. Most people just try to throw together a couple of gags and call it even.
This time around, however, an innovative young man called Kenny McNett decided to break new ground and make a serious movie. He tapped me to be the DP, and we spent a Saturday (or at least a good 16 hours of it) shooting his film. To fit it into the four-minute limit, it was written as two movies, the first with something of a cliffhanger ending that is meant to be continued. Here they are for your viewing pleasure:
Directed by
Kenny McNett
Written by
Samuel Douglas Miller
Story by
Kenny McNett & Samuel Douglas Miller
Produced by
Kenny McNett & Samuel Douglas Miller
Cast
Samuel Douglas Miller
Verona Masongsong
Kenny McNett
Meghan Stettler
Sean Summers
Casey McDonald
Corbin Frost
Director of Photography
Matthew Stumphy
Editor
David Broadbent
Art Direction & Production Design
Kenny McNett
Asst. Production Design
Mike Hamill
Sound and Grip
Mike Hamill
Music
Stephen J. Anderson
Re-Recording Mixer
Justin Wikke
Makeup, Hair, & Special Makeup FX
Melissa Parker
Smoke Effects
Jeff Dickson
Stunt Choreography
Verona Masongsong
Script Supervisor
Melissa Parker
Craft Services
Kelly Flanagan
Stung Driver
Jihan Zencirli
Special Thanks
Los Angeles 1st Ward YSA, Santa Monica 3rd Ward YSA, Lisa Bigelow, Tim and Stephen, Hailey and Rob
I managed to get myself involved in a play this Spring. I had notions of trying to direct a play myself (Shakespeare’s Twelth Night was the leading contender), only to discover that someone else was ramping up to do this one, and would probably be pulling from the same pool of actors that I would have tried to cast. So I tossed my idea out and threw in with them.
I suppose you could say the whole endeavor went relatively well. I was cast in a minor role as one of the villain’s henchmen, which required me to do just a little singing in choruses and to pronounce my two or three lines of dialogue with a French accent. I think I got to speak the best verbal gag in the show (for those of you who know it, it was “Well…it spoke Latin”). For me it was generally fun, but not too taxing or overwhelming.
I actually wanted to be more involved than just that, so I volunteered to act as assistant to the director. I find that my efforts there weren’t really of all that much use. I tried to take copious notes of all the stage directions that she invented as she invented them. I say I tried because sometimes I was busy writing down the stage directions for my own character, or worse yet, I was busy actually trying to execute my stage directions, so I seemed to miss a lot. The few times someone actually asked me what my notes were, they tended either to be missing, or to contradict whatever the actor remembered such that I was summarily overruled. Despite the notes never getting much use, I found I got a bit misty the day I was asked to erase them all out of my folio. It must have taken me a full hour to get through it all, as I had very generously decorated every page of the thing.
A slightly more useful (albeit not much more) task I took on was the building of a website to promote the show. You can find it at magnificentproductions.net.
The site was fun to do because I got to play with some design techniques I hadn’t tried before…like having a multi-layered background (gradient over a tiled image, with one of the images placed right on the element). I also got to build a new interface for looking at photo galleries that involves a lot of auto-scrolling (in other words, you hover your mouse over the thumbnails in the gallery, and the thumbnails scroll up and down depending on whether you move the mouse up and down, without you having to click on a scroll bar or anything—too bad it doesn’t work on touch screens ). You can see examples of this in the cast and crew gallery and in the performance and costumes gallery. I imagine about 12 people ever visited this website, but at least I can use it as a showoff piece for web development jobs.
The thing I did for the show that really was useful was craft services. I brought snacks to every rehearsal. I don’t suppose they were the greatest snacks of all time…I would usually just raid a Ralph’s before each of our big Saturday rehearsals, with a trip or two to Smart and Final to buy bulk items that would keep longer. You get a really good sense of what people want to eat vs. what they say they want to eat. Everyone always asks for healthy stuff: fruit, vegetables, bagels. But the donuts will always get devoured before the carrot sticks. I suppose then, that while I may have contributed a great deal to the ability of our cast to continue to function throughout some of our longer rehearsals, I may have also contributed to their girth. Sorry kids. Read more...
Continue reading the full text of The Scarlet Pimpernel. (843 words, 2 images, estimated 3:22 mins reading time)
Another outing with the mighty 7D. A friend asked me to shoot a video for her to send as an application piece for a job working in marketing for Virgin Airlines.
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). You can see examples of this in the 
