It’s been a few months since our last post. We’ve been distracted by other things (including Chicago’s beautiful summer!), but now we’re back at it!

We’ve revised the website, updating its look and particularly that of the blog, as well as adding some new features – the new trailer is up, as are some Thorne family photos.

If you want to start your Christmas shopping early, producer Jay Delaney’s documentary, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, is being released on DVD this Tuesday, September 29th! You should buy a copy for everyone you know! It’s also available on Amazon and Netflix. To buy directly from the distributor (the best option for the filmmakers!), click here. We’re very proud!

Well, it has been a crazy, busy few weeks.

The big news is Jay and I moved to Chicago! He was offered a position as Executive Director of a Chamber of Commerce and Chicago had been high on our list of possible cities to live, so we decided to come up. We’ve been here about 2 1/2 weeks now and are loving it! It’s a terrific city with tons of culture and arts. We’re really excited about what’s to come.

We’ve begun submitting Hope for a Thorn to film festivals, but it’ll be a while until we hear anything. Also still trying to come up with the perfect title. I’ve been hoping that it’ll just hit me while walking down the street one day, but no luck yet.

In short film news, my film Life To Go has been selected to play Girl Fest Hawaii next month. Check out their website for more information. I’d love to go, but unfortunately can’t really afford a trip to Hawaii right now. I also recently learned that my short The Girl Who Couldn’t Dream is a finalist (one of 12) in the Lifetime Movie Network’s Every Woman’s Film Competition! I’m thrilled about it! Even if I don’t get any further than that, it’s really an honor to be a finalist. Last year’s judges included Angela Bassett, Jennifer Lopez, and Mimi Leder, so it’s exciting to know that high calibre women will be viewing my film. Among the prizes is the opportunity to be played on Lifetime, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

There’s some really exciting news for Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, Jay’s fantastic documentary, too. Keep an eye on his site for some announcements.

Well it has been a busy few weeks. Hopefully things will start to calm down a little, now that summer is here.

Jay and I have been doing a little a little of the festival thing lately. We were at the Sarasota Film Festival in April for the World Premiere of my short film Life To Go, as well as the Southeast Premiere of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. We had a great time, but wish we could’ve been around for the whole festival. The most fun thing about the festival circuit is running into the same filmmakers. Several of the filmmakers we met at SXSW also played Sarasota and the Maryland Film Festival, which we went up for a few weekends ago.

We had a quick trip to Baltimore, which is a great city and a great festival. Hopefully we can make it there again.

In Thorn news, we’re still editing and getting it out to people. We held a test screening last weekend. While it’s never painless to put a film out there for the sole purpose of having strangers tell you what’s wrong with it, I’m really glad we did it. We had about 17 people watch the film and then answer a questionnaire and participate in a discussion about what can be improved on the film. It was very informative for us and helped shape our editing plan for the next several weeks.

Marco and I spent Monday and Tuesday back in Deland where our exterior locations are, shooting a few additional shots, for transitions and establishing shots. It was kind of surreal being back there. I also had a meeting with our sound designer last week. We watched the film together and talked through some ideas. I’m really excited to see how some of our ideas play out.

In other news, I am now finished with teaching and with school (save the 1 hour of thesis I am enrolled in over the summer) and have relocated to St. Pete. Hoping to get a little bit of fun summer time in, amidst finishing the film and working on my festival strategy, developing a few other projects, and finding some way to pay the bills…

Below are a few pictures from the festivals:

We are thrilled to announce that Hope For A Thorn has received a grant from Women In Film – Florida! We are proud to have the support of this wonderful organization.

Jay and I will be leaving for SXSW on Friday! His film’s premiering Saturday night and we’ll be able to catch two screenings before we return to Florida on Wednesday.

While we are in Austin, my advisor Ula and friend Alix will be presenting a workshop at the Women as Global Leaders Conference in Dubai which I helped author. The workshop is called Leading Through Creative Voice: Women In Film and analyzes the current state of women in the industry as well as the portrayal of women in popular films. Because of the conference coinciding with SXSW, I am sadly unable to attend this year, but they will do a tremendous job presenting (and promise to bring me back a new shawl!)

In honor of the conference, I am including one of my favorite pictures I took on my 2006 trip to Dubai:

So we have finally gotten around to updating our site! Hopeforathorn.com actually exists now! The following posts contain the posts originally from our production company’s site, Lassothemoonproductions.com, as well as some new posts. Enjoy!

Thursday afternoon my rough cut is due. I find I work much better with deadlines, so it’s been good having that looming over me for the last couple weeks.

I’ve been working pretty hard, spending many hours hunched over a computer (and I’ve got the back pain to prove it!). My strategy has been to attack the film in segments – I’ll take 5 – 10 scenes, depending on length, and cut them together and then move on to another segment. I only have a few scenes left – 5 or 6. They are the ones I’ve been putting off because they scare me the most. They are all really important scenes and also have the most footage so they’re rather daunting.

I have yet to put all those pieces together though. That’ll be the real test. Individually, I’ve been pleased with the sequences overall. A couple scenes have proved problematic but for the most part, they’re working out well. This weekend I will string everything together and then I’ll be able to see how the film flows and where the problems are. That’ll be a scary day!

Hopefully I won’t find that we need to reshoot anything, as that’s pretty much an impossibility. Our primary location has been transformed back to a normal home, but we could do some exteriors if we needed to. I’ve got my fingers crossed that that won’t happen though. We do, however, have to reshoot some stills we staged for the poster and publicity images. We snapped a few rolls of really great stuff inside the house (the only stills of the parlor, a crucial location), but the lab botched them. So next month I will be taking Sarah and Pat out to DeLand to shoot the image for the poster.

We’ve been wrapped for over a month now. In some ways, it feels like an eternity ago. In others, it feels like yesterday. It’s very strange trying to get back to normal life. Because it’s not just the three and a half weeks we were in production. It was months and months of having a ridiculously full schedule. I always had an impossibly long To Do list and scads of meetings.

I’m still busy. Full time grad school, teaching a class, helping in another class, working, editing, packing my house… Yet I feel like I have so much time on my hands. It’s hard to get motivated. I need an AD telling me where I need to be when! I want a call sheet each day, outlining my day’s schedule for me!

I’ve started editing and I really wish I could just be swallowed up by it. It’s hard to juggle everything though. It’s coming along really well. Editing a feature is a very daunting task. I haven’t quite figured out the best system for it yet. I’ve decided to just start at the beginning and cut in order.

So it’s all done. That realization still hasn’t quite sunk it.

We wrapped last Wednesday, August 8th. I am still astounded at the fact that we only had to add a half a day and that was due to a severe thunderstorm. We managed to stay completely on schedule the entire time, an impressive feat considering our low budget and strict schedule.

It’s quite surreal that it’s over. It’s strange how you get so used to seeing people all day every day for week after week and then, all of a sudden, you just don’t see them anymore.

The rest of the shoot went really smoothly. The house stuff went really well. We had some issues in getting all of the locations dressed in time, but in the end it all worked out. Everything looks beautiful on camera and that’s ultimately what matters. We were able to be really resourceful and recycle a lot of things too (including locations – we used one bedroom for 3 different rooms!).

Things get more challenging the smaller the space gets. There were some rough times – the closet set was tiny, the bathroom, and even the bedrooms got difficult. Some of the handheld stuff we did required the room to be nearly empty and even when we had a static camera, it was difficult for more than the essential people to be present. I always hate that, because I feel it’s bad for morale when half the crew has to be downstairs while the rest of us are up shooting. It really made me want to shoot everything from now on in a studio, where I can have complete control over light, temperature, and sound, plus there’s enough space to move around. But then, I guess you lose out on everything that makes independent film so wonderful.

I strongly believe that creativity comes from limitations and indie film is certainly rife with limitations! It’s sort of a love-hate thing. The qualities of indie film that are so great and that really push you as a filmmaker and end up being so fulfilling are also the ones that make you wish you had a desk job. But in the end, it’s worth it.

Pat’s last day was Saturday, which was quite sad. I hated to not end with Pat and Sarah. Sarah wrapped on Tuesday and Wednesday we drove up to Mt Dora to pick up the day we missed. I had been concerned about that day since before the shoot started – it was period (1940s) and we didn’t have a makeup artist, our location was sketchy and full of bugs, spiders (big ones!), and alligators, we didn’t have working bathrooms on location, I wasn’t sure if we had power… But the day went off without a hitch. Almost had a setback when the contractor working on the house showed up to put in screens on the porch, but we sent him off to lunch and by the time he got back, we were wrapped. We shot some beautiful stuff, some in slow motion, which is always fun, and it was quite a nice way to end the shoot.

Until we were leaving and James, our boom operator, rear ended Matthew, our 2nd AC. This brings the car incident total to 5. This list includes our location manager’s flat tire during our technical scout (halfway to Mt Dora), a PA driving our key PA’s car several blocks with the emergency break still on, our propmaster and his fiancee getting in an accident, and Andrew, our line producer, having to drive to Punta Gorda or something to buy a new car in the middle of production.

So now that the adrenaline that has been keeping me alive for weeks is gone, I’m wholly exhausted. Every bone and muscle in my body is sore, tired, and achy. I want to sleep for days, but I haven’t really gotten a chance to rest yet.

I’ll start editing in the next few days. I wanted to take a little bit of time away from it, because I’ve been living with it (and eating, sleeping, and breathing it lately) for so long. Sometimes you just need a little break. I’m really excited to go through all the footage. It’s going to be such a beast to edit, but I can’t wait. Now is kind of the nice time though – before I get into it and realize what doesn’t cut and what shot I should have used, etc etc. Now I can be blissfully ignorant of all the wrong choices and just be satisfied that we pulled it off.

It’s interesting to me how there are two very distinct battles in indie filmmaking; the first is the obvious one – trying to make a good film. But the second was one I had previously underestimated – actually getting a film made. It will never cease to amaze me that films actually get made. I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum one Saturday night during production and was just blown away. All of the difficulties we had on our film… I simply can’t imagine trying to accomplish something of that magnitude. Maybe one day I’ll feel otherwise, thought I’m not quite sure that I want to.

The fact that we had a successful shoot is such an accomplishment that I haven’t really had much time to think about whether or not it’s a good film. It almost seems beside the point sometimes. Production just becomes such a battle – getting through the day. I don’t mean to downplay it – of course it was something I thought about frequently and tried my best to make sure everything was as good and true to the story/characters as it could be. It’s just that I don’t feel people give enough credit to the fact that films actually get made. We should look at films and say, okay well it’s terrible, the dialogue is horrendous, the actors have no chemistry, the story is lame, but wow! They made a movie!

Alright so maybe not. But it’s not an easy thing. And we were lucky. It could have been much worse, if we’d been less prepared and had less smart, talented people.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Thanks for reading.

–erin

Wouldn’t it have been great if I could have updated this after every day of production? Unfortunately, I am usually way too exhausted by the time I get home and I have to review scenes and shot lists for the following day.

So, regarding this past week… One of the most fun (and sometimes frustrating) aspects of filmmaking for me is the little challenges that come up through the day. Take yesterday for example. We were shooting a scene in which Victoria tries to go on a date and completely falls apart while getting ready. Sophie comes in to comfort her. We shot the first take and it was really good – Pat (our wonderful actress playing Victoria) gave a great performance, but she was so into it that she landed with her back to the camera. Naturally, I wanted to see her face, so we tried it again. The blocking still wasn’t quite right and the performance wasn’t as good. We rethought the blocking and realized that we needed to push a dresser further down the wall to give Pat enough space to fall and still allow Sarah (Sophie) to make it through the door. However, once we pushed the dresser down, we found that the wall behind it wasn’t wallpapered (our art department is very economical). So we took ten minutes or so adding the wallpaper (thankfully we had enough extra to work with). So we tried it again. The performance still wasn’t there. So Pat requested that we give her a few minutes to go off alone and let her get in the proper state of mind. We decided we could shoot it as a pick up and only do the second half (the most emotional part) of the scene.

So we sat in the very hot bedroom for about ten minutes, waiting for her to come back. We wanted to be able to start rolling as soon as she walked in the door. When she came back in, however, she started apologizing to me. She said she needed me to yell at her, to tell her how she’d disappointed me, because she just couldn’t get there emotionally. While saying this, she started getting really upset and choked up, so we rolled and she just went right into the performance. It was completely amazing – the best performance I’ve seen her give (and that’s really saying something). However, our process had been that when I was ready for Sarah to come into the room, I would signal Mike, our first AD, and he would whisper into his walkie talkie to someone that was waiting out in the hallway, who would then signal Sarah. Worked like a charm the first three takes.

But on this particular take, Pat had gotten into the performance and had pushed Mike out into the hallway. So when it reached the point where Sarah was supposed to enter, I realized that we had no way to signal for her. So the performance went on and on (and Pat was still completely blowing us away) and the entire crew was waving their arms, hoping Sarah would see through the slightly cracked door. She finally did (after probably 2 minutes or so) and they finished the scene. I was nearly in tears afterwards, because I thought we couldn’t use the performance because it took so long and I didn’t want coverage – I couldn’t make Pat go through that again. So quickly Jay, Marco (our DP), and I put our heads together to figure out what we could use as a cutaway – something we could shoot to cut to and then come back at a later point in the scene, thereby cutting down the duration. So we shot two options – Sophie’s entrance from a different angle and a really cool reflection in Victoria’s mirror. So it was a terrific way to end the day and I couldn’t be more pleased.

This week we have been on a 7:30 – 7 or so schedule. I’m not really a morning person, so it’s been kind of a rough schedule, but it is really nice to have evenings off. We shot the entire downstairs this week, so next week we just have the upstairs. The rooms looks absolutely gorgeous on camera. Christine, our production designer, and her team did a great job.

This week was really pretty smooth for the most part. A few minor setbacks (such as yesterday, we lost half an hour trying to find stuffing for a dinner scene) but nothing too terrible. It gets pretty questionable sometimes as to whether or not we’re going to make our day, but so far, so good! Let’s hope this coming week is as good.

Ah, Sunday. Quickly becoming my favorite day of the week. Today is greatly needed, for everyone I think. It has been a really amazing and exhausting couple of weeks.

Overall, everything is going amazingly well. Our cast is phenomenal and our crew is fantastic. It’s really a joy to go to set every day. We have our bumps and our frustrations, but everyone gets along really well and we’re all having a great time. I often have to cut my shot list down considerably for the day, but it’s really coming to life how I pictured it (if not better) and everyone’s doing such a great job.

Our first week was almost all exteriors. If you live in Florida, you might have noticed this has been a particularly rainy summer. The first day, we got really lucky – we shot for 9 1/2 hours or so (short day!) in Deland and it didn’t rain until we wrapped. The second day, it stormed on our way there and then stopped. It drizzled most of the day, but not bad enough for the camera to read it, so that was fine too. Wednesday it stormed. Bad. Thankfully, we were on a porch. So we shut down for 15 minutes or so and then decided to just shoot in the rain. The storm lasted for the duration of one entire scene and then cleared up.

Thursday we were scheduled to start the day at our primary location (interiors) and then move to the cemetery. We had a beautiful morning, but when we arrived at the cemetery, it started storming. So there we were, with a fake headstone that had taken 5 days to finish and that couldn’t get wet, in a severe storm under several dozen massive oak trees. We managed to shoot one scene, but the other one needed a beautiful sky and the rain had cost us too much time. We had an actor that day that we only had access to for a few days because he was also working on another feature. We were able to quickly shuffle things around and go back to the house to shoot a few interior scenes with him and save the cemetery for the other day we had scheduled with him. It all somehow worked out.

Friday was our toughest day on paper, but it somehow ended up being one of our easier days. Because of child labor laws, we are only able to have our lead actress on set for 10 hours a day. Since she is in almost every scene, this makes scheduling quite difficult and strict. Friday we shot half of the scenes involving our other child actress, so we were able to schedule a 12 hour day. It also involved a 45 minute location change – from Deland to Mt Dora. The day was really tight, but we were miraculously able to get everything we needed and wrap exactly on time. The major problem that day – a next door neighbor and her lawnmower. It frustrates me to no end that people can be so inconsiderate. We politely asked the man mowing the lawn if he would mind waiting for an hour so we could finish shooting (we were outside and shooting a very important scene and the mower was rather loud). He obliged. About 25 minutes later, we heard it start up again. Apparently, his very unpleasant wife had decided that she didn’t want to wait an hour and was bound and determined to finish mowing her lawn right then. So Jay went over to try to explain to her that this was a climactic scene and that I had spent 2 1/2 years working on this film and if she could just give us 30 minutes, we would really appreciate it. She responded that it was her lawn and she could mow it whenever she wanted, or something to that effect. So he stood and waited and she ignored him. Several more people went over and tried to reason with her, but she wouldn’t have it at all. I was really frustrated, because it was a very emotional scene and a resolution for one character and this woman couldn’t stand to be inconvenienced for 30 minutes. What kind of person finds joy in shutting down a student film? Did her crappy lawn really benefit that much for being mowed at that particular instant?

Saturday: We started the day in Mt. Dora. We shot downtown early in the morning to avoid all of the antique hunters. We got some gorgeous footage on the street and then moved inside a boutique. The day was just slow in general and we quickly got behind. We had a car mount that day for some driving scenes and that took quite a while to rig (but was well worth it). We finished up the driving stuff about 2 1/2 hours behind schedule and rushed over to our next location to shoot the opening sequence of the film. That location is a house off a tiny bumpy dirt road way off a main street. We got there and started setting up and then the sky got dark. Really dark. We checked the radar and it was coming our way and wasn’t going to let up anytime soon. Plus, we had shot something the previous day at a different location that would be part of the same scene and the sky didn’t match at all. So the rain started coming down and we decided to shut down. So we are now adding a half a day to the end of our shoot, which I’m not thrilled about, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Okay, time to go work on stuff for the upcoming week (our last full week!), but I’ll try to post later about the second week.