Day 3 of Dave Bullis' GAME OVER

Lots of films have bad days. Some of them are just slightly annoying, while others end up being a full-fledged clusterfuck. You can't get rid of them entirely, you just have to hope it isn't too bad and doesn't have a domino effect on the whole project, as one really terrible day can kill a film.

Assuming you survive, one of the big tests is how the production responds. Does it rally, making up the difference and then some? Or does it kind of sputter along, not making things worse, but not really fixing anything either?

You may recall that Day 2 on GAME OVER was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Very little went well and, honestly, I thought we were minutes away from a meltdown at a couple of different points. So how did the production respond? Let's take a look.

The Night Before

As soon as filming wrapped for the night, there was an impromptu meeting far from earshot between several production heads. I don't imagine it was a pleasant conversation.

Which is how myself, director Dave Bullis, 1st AD Zach Zimmerman, 2nd AD Michael O'Donnell, and the only PA worth a damn (Eric Torbio) ended up in Dave's living room, trying to sort thing out over cheesesteaks.

My theory: the production lacks a motor to keep all the different departments moving forward. A number of times in Day 2, things got bogged down (or stopped completely) for no reason whatsoever. That's not good.

I offer to be more assertive on-set when things start to slow down.



Day 3

One thing discussed at the meeting the night before was the utter worthlessness of several of the film's PA's (other than Eric). Apparently, they were recruited from a local high school and essentially spent the entire day leaning up against a wall, doing whatever it is kids do these days. This isn't entirely their fault, as I'm pretty sure no one was really in charge of them. That's part of it, but I know for a fact they were given things to do and just didn't feel like it.

So, since they weren't doing anything, every time I walked by a PA leaning up against a wall, I gave them something to do. Some of it was important. Some of it wasn't. I had one PA tape a trail from the set to the Green Room, since people were constantly getting lost. They spent a lot of time running messages back to the Green Room for us, stuff like how long until we'd need an actor. They were mostly ok with it, except for this exchange:

Me: "You a PA?"
PA: "Yeah"
Me: "I need you to get [coffee order] for the DP and AC."
He started to chuckle.
Me: "It's not fucking funny. Go. Now."

He got the message (but screwed up the coffee order). More importantly, it scared him into be slightly helpful, instead of just one more mouth to feed. And when I told Dave that I had started yelling at his PAs, he smiled.

"Awesome."

Sometimes you've just got to have a bad guy, and who better than the person who's leaving town as soon as the production is over?

Motivation is high, as everyone knows that the production is under the gun, time-wise. Things move at a decent clip, not frenetic, not slow. New on set for day 3 is photographer and cinematographer Marvin Burwell, who loans me a wide-angle lens to play with.



And so, not really knowing how to shoot effectively with a wide-angle lens (this is why I get a cinematographer), I wander around until actress Tammy Jean (who's playing the DJ in the party for the new video game system) gives me a few pointers. Then, Marvin checks in to give me a few more.

I don't think a whole lot of it until a couple of days later when I do my standard basic research of everyone I might potentially write about (I find some interesting tidbits that way), and discover that Tammy was (is?) a Playboy model, something no one bothered to tell me. I'll let you do the NSFW Googling at your discretion.



The day moves along. The time for lunch comes and goes. We keep filming. Finally, we break for lunch. Only, there is no lunch. The crew wanders around the holding area, snacking on carrots and whatnot. 15 minutes. Still no lunch. The producers don't know where it is. Neither does the director. No one does. I lay down on a wrestling mat they were using for some stunt practice. 30 minutes passes. It's 40 minutes before the decision is made to start setting up for the first post-lunch shot. 5 minutes later the food shows up. All that momentum gained during the day is lost. A ravenous crew eats and rushes back to work. By this point, the day is almost over. We won't get our pages. Obviously, another day of filming is going to be needed, but when?



Actor Kenneth McGregor has to leave in 20 minutes, but his big stunt move is still left. He starts taking over, making sure they get it before he has to leave, directing the other actors. Clearly he's done this before. We get the stunt. Kenneth runs to the car. We shoot a few more setups and then we have to be out. In no way are they done.

Will it cut together? Honestly, I don't know. They'll need at least another day of filming, maybe more. As for me, I've got to be on the road. So while that's not a wrap for GAME OVER, it is for me.




Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 2 of Dave Bullis' GAME OVER

Day 2 of GAME OVER starts with the word that we have extras--lots of little kid extras. And that in the scene we're filming, they'll be chasing a guy dressed up like a gerbil. Does this invoke the old rule of never working with children or animals? Does it count as an animal if it's just an animal costume? I'm not sure. On the one hand, the person inside the animal costume can certainly take direction. But…that costume is a hassle. There's a lot of moving parts and some of them are held together by safety pins and gaffer tape.

The brave soul inside this costume is Vikram Joshi. He's got some experience doing stuff like this, but never before as a gerbil. I wonder how much that translates from costume to costume.





Then there's the kids. No one's entirely sure just how many of them will descend upon us (in my mind, they show up like locusts in the Bible). And I know that I said I'd do whatever is needed, but I'm really hoping that I'm not on little kid duty. I can handle one little kid, if they're related to me. But ten? Twenty? Not so much.



The scene that involves the kids exists outside of our contained set. The plan is to do a company move over to a local Blockbuster that's now shuttered, where we'll film a sizable chunk of today's footage. But like most plans, that changed on set. Moving that many people that far just didn't make a ton of sense when we were in an area that could maybe work as a faked exterior. Eventually, the production settles on a seemingly closed office complex across the street. It makes sense. Vikram's gerbil costume isn't exactly easy to get in a car, so he can walk. Plus, we're closer to our base, which is always helpful.

Of course, we have no permits (and didn't for the original location either) but, hey, that's indie film for you.



The scene is such: Jerry the Gerbil rounds a corner, running pretty much in slow motion (not from a tech standpoint, but a "this costume makes it impossible to run" standpoint). He's followed by a hoard of screaming children who seem hell-bent on destroying him. They gain quickly and at the last minute, Jerry throws a bunch of tokens on the ground, thus distracting the little monsters so he can make a getaway. We've got 2 cameras running. Easy enough, right? Except, on the first take Vikram trips over his massive feet. He goes tumbling. The rubber tread of the foot rips off. Thankfully, he's ok. The rest of it is pretty uneventful. We wrap the children, and we trek back across the street.



And then, we come back to film a couple more scenes. It's around this time that the production more or less grinds to a halt. Between takes, an actor takes a break in a car and someone (name withheld) drives the car back over to the green room without anyone releasing the actor. That halts things for a good half hour.

On almost every production, there's a day when people start to mentally check out for the day. You see this a lot on construction sites when something prevents people from working. Once the work stops, the crew is mentally gone. Sure, you can get them back, but it takes some doing. Today was a day where they didn't come back, and I'm not sure a whole lot of effort was put into attempting to rectify that.



It was, to put it bluntly, a bad day. Tempers flared. Communication broke down. Almost nothing went according to plan.

Having finally finished the outside scenes, we went back to the set, only to discover that props hadn't been greeked and the banner announcing the launch party of the "M2" game system was actually for the "M3". Apparently no one had bothered to check. Things had spiraled. One problem was that the layout of the location, with a green room far enough away from the set to provide a nice sound buffer, had also served to completely disconnect the two halves. The left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing. So something as simple as telling makeup that an actor was needed in 10 minutes resulted in that actor showing up in 20-25 minutes. Such things add up. Meanwhile, we have PAs standing against a wall, texting their friends.

And, honestly, I'm not sure what my role is at this point. How much of this do I film? How much of it can I even capture effectively. It's not like there's a Christian Bale moment. It's more of a death by a thousand razors. These things happen to the best of us. There's no use pretending they don't. Near the end of the day, I was walking down the hallway with one of the crew members and we were talking about how badly the day was going. I somewhat innocently said "The problem is we don't have an AD on this set". To which he replied, "I'm the AD". I looked over at him. "Then you need to start fucking yelling at people."

This is where it would have been really helpful to have a camera crew following me.


Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 1 of Dave Bullis' GAME OVER

There aren't a whole lot of moving part to GAME OVER. Much like CLERKS, it exists almost entirely in a small store, the story revolving around the lives of the people who exist in the world of this store and the immediate surroundings. Being a TV show, this makes sense. It makes everything more or less self-contained.

Well, I'm guessing that's the case. I haven't read the script.



It's a small set, but it's on a parcel of land that's pretty well removed from a lot of stuff, which makes it a lot easier to operate. There's a large basketball court where we can keep gear and rooms in the back where the unneeded cast and crew can relax without having to worry about talking too loud and ruining the sound. Pretty much we have the run of the place. It's a big building that doesn't really seem to be doing anything other than this, which is nice.



Call is 7am and we load in, which takes a bit. The crew is about the size you'd expect. We start filming around 11am. The first scene revolves around the store's chief gamer Trey (Robb Stech) berating a kid who's trying to play some video game, and then being too cool to deal with a customer. So, yeah, it's a lot like CLERKS. Robb improvises the scene quite a bit, which is effective, as it adds a freshness to the dialogue. Plus, it tends to get better reactions from the other actors.



I'm not sure why I'm so surprised that CLERKS is a template for something that takes place in a video store. It's a pretty easy series of dots to connect. Maybe I'm just surprised that we're still so thematically beholden to a rather mediocre indie from 15 years ago that wouldn't have a shot in hell at finding an audience if it came out today. It just strikes me as a pretty terrible starting point for your story, especially when you consider that CLERKS itself is sort of based on "The Divine Comedy". Why not go back into the original source and work from there? It's kind of like basing your love story on TROMEO AND JULIET instead of, you know, Shakespeare. I dunno, it seems like you really limit yourself with that approach.

Just a pet peeve of mine.



The real highlight of day 1 is the early stages of Kenneth McGregor's performance as Jim, an older store employee who sort of exists on his own wavelength. Think Kramer, without the caffeine. It's always fascinating to watch an experienced actor work, and this is one in full control. He knows his character and, beyond that, he knows the other characters and works to make the other actors better. It's what you think of when you hear the term "actor's actor". It's a joy to watch him work. And even more importantly, he's damned funny. You probably remember him from X-MEN. He was Magneto's father.

You don't meet a whole lot of actors that make you want to write something for them specifically. He's certainly one of them.



Coming up in Day 2: something called Jerry the Gerbil. And a shitload of little kid extras.


Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Prequel to Dave Bullis' GAME OVER

A traveling tip from me to you: let's say you have to get on a train that leaves at 7:20am and you've been up drinking until 4am. Find some Red Bull and just stay up. I know you think you're very responsible and will surely get up in an hour or so, but you won't. You'll end up waking up at 6:51am and panicking when you realize that you never did get around to packing the night before.

Fun fact: did you know that depending on where you are in Pittsburgh, you can get from a dead sleep in an apartment to your seat on the train in 24 minutes? It's true!

Anyway, the train took me to Philadelphia, where I managed to get in the wrong car before finally being whisked to Aston and Sun Center Studios, the location for Dave Bullis' GAME OVER.



GAME OVER is in name a TV pilot. The plan is to shoot this pilot episode and shop it around to networks and such. That's Plan A in the sense that every indie film you work on would really like to get into Sundance or one of the bigger festivals. Of course, you've got to have a fallback plan in place. Theirs is to turn the show into a web series. A pretty reasonable Plan B, if you ask me.

I don't know a lot about the series going in, other than the fact that it's about "the worst video game store in the world". Off-topic, that's more than I know about video games themselves. (But I will kick your ass on Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo. Don't even try.)

I arrive the day before and they're putting the finishing touches on the set. My first task is to take some magic markers and greek out video game cases in order to hide faces, logos, titles, basically anything that could get the production in legal trouble. There's probably 200 of these that still need to be done, so there's no way I'm going to finish in time. The plan is just to swap the finished ones around as needed.



From there, it's over to Neumann University (never heard of it? Me either) for a production meeting with the world-famous Leah Cevoli. It's around that point that I realize I haven't eaten all day. I've also had very little caffeine and no alcohol. This is Philadelphia. Shouldn't they be handing out cheesesteaks when you get off the train?

I get easily distracted when I'm hungry and tired and holy shit, they have cases of Four Loko here. Must. Resist.

Where was I? Oh right. Tomorrow we start on GAME OVER. Call is 7am. Must sleep. But first, an actual conversation:

Dave Bullis: "Sorry my car's a mess. I've kind of been living out of it lately."
Me: "That must be a hassle."
Dave Bullis: "Yeah" [beat] "Oh," [Laughs] "I completely forgot who I was talking to."



Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Operation

Dammit, he can fix a broken game system. He has the technology.