Here’s a mini-doc Micah made for his class. It’s Tyler, not Trevor, and Erin is a Producer, not a PA, and I’m not nearly as goofy in real life, all that was actually staged, but otherwise it’s great…
Latest
Friends of the Buskers!
Here’s a shout out to the local companies that helped us out during production. There’s more to come, I just have lots of footage to dig through still!
About Face Magazine, Upshur Ave:
Backspace Cafe, 5th St.:
The Canvas Art Bar & Bistro, Upshur Ave:
The Cup & Saucer, Mississippi Ave:
Green Bean Coffee, Mississippi Ave:
Lodekka Vintage Clothes, Williams St/Freemont Ave:
Muddy’s Coffee, Mississippi Ave:
Tiny’s Coffee, Hawthorne Ave:
Behind the scenes, Day 9: Scene #47
Buskers + Lou: The Musical.
Important Update: Fundraising Almost Done!
Hello Everyone!
So we’re in the last week of our fundraising drive with Kickstarter. We’re 80% to our goal but we still need a bit of help to push the fundraiser over the edge — Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing site, so we need your help to get that last 20% in place. We have incentives from $5 and up if you can chip in, and if you can’t but you still want to help out, please repost the kickstarter this link in your social media outlets:
We have until May 8th at 6 PM Pacific. Thanks for your help!
Also, you can follow along with the process of the movie though Twitter, or you can join our Facebook page here.
Thanks, and thanks for supporting our movie.
Lights, cameras…
Our equipment is rented, our locations are mostly set, our cast and crew have received their first call sheet, and our fingers crossed for some decent (ie: not too sunny, not too rainy) weather tomorrow. Keep an eye out, because we should have the rough cut of the opening title sequence uploaded here in a couple days, and then we’re taking a break while our Kickstarter and other fundraising efforts wrap up and we develop characters and plot points with our actors.
If you’re in the mood to pitch in a little cash to help our little do-it-ourselves indie flick, click on the link above. $5 or $5,000 — any amount helps and there are incentives for any price range. Also, we’re constantly on the look out for musicians, locations, interesting eccentrics, and local businesses. The script is designed to allow us a lot of flexibility, so if you’re interested in getting a little bit of inexpensive exposure for yourself or your business, shoot us an email at thebuskersandloumovie@gmail.com.
On that note, my alarm is set for 6 AM and I’m going to close my eyes for a bit and try hard to not to think about scheduling, budgeting, props, set dressing, locations, wardrobe, makeup, cameras, lights, audio gear, actors, transportation, permits, or craft services for a couple of hours…
CASTING NOTICE: Bucket Drummer needed this weekend
We are looking for a bucket drummer for a quick and easy scene in the movie. It’ll be about an hour’s worth of work in downtown Portland this weekend. Our schedule is flexible. Please email us at thebuskersandloumovie@gmail.com with videos or links to your work. We are offering $50 cash for the hour, plus $50 deferred and a copy of the movie on DVD. Also potential for future soundtrack work as well.
Thanks.
Behind the Scenes: Casting
I’ll be honest with you, even in the most comforting circumstances casting is always my least-favorite part of the moviemaking process. Add in the fact that I was in a new city — somewhere that you couldn’t just walk into a coffee shop and wave a script and have actors flock to you — I was more than a bit nervous to start this stage of the process. However, “The Buskers & Lou” being a movie, we are definitely going to need actors at some point and that point is now, so we loaded up on caffeine…
…and we filled our bellies with a quick Thai food dinner from the closest food cart…
…and we got our work space organized…
…and our camera ready…
…and we were off and running.
Day 1 started out on the opposite side of awesome when, right as our first actor arrived, I received a text — followed by an email, and finally a phone call — from another actor who just couldn’t wait to tell me that he’d read the sides I’d sent him and decided he wasn’t interested in the project. So that was exciting. But after that, things started looking up. Our first actor was solid and he didn’t seem to mind that the director was unprofessional enough to not silence his cell phone, and over the course of a few hours we saw a few dozen actors that ran the gamut from totally professional and amazing to interestingly weird and distinctly Portlandish. And when it was all over, I’ll admit, I was blown away by the level of talent that showed up — I figured we’d get one or two people who really stood out, a handful of people who would work out just fine, and a few people who we could use in a pinch, but then we’d have to deal with scheduling issues and conflicts, and questions about the content of the movie and so on. But we walked away the first day with the Definitely Maybe stack completely dominating the Definitely Not stack.
Day 2: The Round-table Callback Experiment: After dividing our Maybes into groups and splitting them up based on speculation and projection, we brought in one of each of our primary characters to see how they might work off each other. And, it surprised me a bit but the experiment turned out well and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun.
But now comes the hard part — the movie could very easily go in a number of different directions, but we’re in the fortunate position to have a lot of talent to choose from. It’s been a long week, so next step: knock back a celebratory glass of whiskey, finish this blog post, and hit the hay. We have to make some final big decisions tomorrow but I’m looking forward to having our cast in place.
With that step behind us, our next immediate goals to tackle are to find a web developer and designer to work on promotional material and building our web presence while we push forth with trying to get the opening credit sequence knocked out next week. Production is definitely underway, there’s no looking back now, so check back here soon to see how things are coming along.
–Alex
