48 hour film project

We were going to close the program down if we didn't get any students by May 27th, then we had two students that night, that have not come back since.

Our Silent Warrior Martial Arts program is slated to continue on into September, but it's kind of pointless to do without students. We're waiting on setting up a time for John to do the Tai Chi program, but since he's not sure what his future employment status is, at least for the summer, we can't do that yet.

I'm thinking we give this another month at the schedule we have. I'm going to do a little more to promote the program, and see where that takes us. Kids program still a possibility.


In other news, yesterday I took part in this year's 48 Hour Film project with our team in Berlin. We'd been tossing around ideas we could use based on what genre we pick out of the hat for the 7 minutes of less film. We ended up getting "Comic Book" movie. Our director had his mind set on a "Sin City" type concept with a plot that was more like the "The Crow", where our friend Rina plays an IT specialist that's just randomly killed, brought back from the dead from some entity, and goes on to kill all the thugs.  This led to some frustrating arguments Friday evening while coming up a with a script. First off, this will make the third movie he's made with our friend Rina pretty much just killing everybody. Also, he wanted it to be serious and not "goofy".

I was hoping to have fun with the comic book concept. When some of us protested our director's idea, including Rina, he pouted; then continued to ignore any other ideas thrown at him for another concept/script to the "comic book" genre we had to do. What pissed me off the most was that this wannabe "Crow" film was never brought up before in all the conversations we'd had over the past year, and this was also the first I've heard not wanting to do anything funny.

The next day we filmed, me as one of the big bad guys. I made up the choreography for the short fight scenes. To Rina's credit, she took direction on this stuff well for someone not trained in martial arts beyond some kickboxing classes. Also, she's a tiny 4'9 athletic blond, and compared to my stocky 5'10,  260 lbs frame, we had to try and make it look vaguely realistic for her to defend herself against me.
We were supposed to have a big fight at the end, and Rina and I came up with a pretty cool brawling fight scene. Unfortunately, due to time and our director's stubbornness, we had to cut our fight scene short and with a pretty pathetic ending to it.

So I got to look all big and bad in a short film, while claiming credit as Fight Coordinator. This wasn't nearly as much fun as last year though, which is a shame. While I'm a big fan of the "The Crow", I really think we made a lackluster and unoriginal movie. Unless the special effects they add in look really really good, I think we'll end up just being seen as another unoriginal movie in the competition.

Worst part is, I'm really not sure if I want to be involved in any of my friends film projects again. This was supposed to be a collaborative effort, not something to placate his ego.

Don't mind me folks, just a little frustrated at the moment. To not leave this blog on a sour note: I'm still thoroughly happy right now training again with John, work is going well and I've got a super awesome woman in my life.