The magnificent Dave Broadbent (a.k.a. “Elfie”) held another white elephant gift party at the venerable Ohio House (where he no longer even lives, but I gather it was the only venue available) this past Thursday. Not wanting the festivities to go undocumented, I brought my camera. You may peruse the results below.

12th Annual White Elephant Gift Exchange

Dani, The Madam of Mayhem’s Birthday Bash

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.

How an Epic Movie is Made

Created and performed by

Julie Hinton and Rob Moffat

Orchestrated by

Stephen Anderson

Recorded by

KC Blake

Edited by

Jeff Dickson

Filmed by

Parker Mann

Makeup by

Charity Rawlings and Melissa Parker

Costumes by

Stefani Batson and Melissa Parker

Lights by

Matthew Stumphy

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

My best friend Max has a big, incredible family. They throw amazing events for major holidays, and happily for me, my infrequent visits home to Utah coincide with these events. Max’s older sister Maryann and her husband Paul have an annual 4th of July barbecue, after which they attempt to melt the asphalt of their street with glorious patriotic incendiaries. Max’s older brother Matthew and little sister Amanda, not content with igniting only inanimate objects seem possessed with a desire to take fire themselves. I happened to have my camera along, and did my best to record the show. Enjoy.

July 4th, 2011 – The Sidewalk of Fire

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.

I thought that when the show ended, I would be quite beside myself. I knew that once it was over, I wasn’t really going to have much opportunity to interact socially with all these wonderful people anymore. I’m not all that fun to be around, I think, so generally no one seeks me out just to have me around. In any case, I think it was a good thing that the night we did our final performance, we immediately adjourned to someone’s apartment for a little party. If I had been forced to go home immediately, the rather abrupt end would have probably induced me to cry myself to sleep. We were in rehearsal from the beginning of February through mid-April (or at least I was…I apparently joined the cast a bit later than everyone else), and by the end, it was taking up nearly every moment of my free time. So it was a good thing to have an immediate cast party to start the closure. We had another party a little later, smoothing over our break-up with the play a little more. Perhaps the others were simply relieved it was all over. I wish it was going still.

Christmas Morning with the Fitts

The pictures were all shot with a Canon 7D, mostly using the 18-135mm kit lens. Shutter speed was locked at 1/200 to avoid motion blur. I usually left it at the maximum aperture (somewhere between 3.5 and 5.6, depending on how zoomed I was). I set the ISO to automatic and let it adjust for the various levels of light. Thanks for the comments.

Christmas Morning with the Stumphys

Christmas Eve with the Fitts