Dancing!

This is worthy of a major announcement -- Tex, the one who denies dancing and refuses to particpate in the act, based his fantasy movie on, yes, dancing!
It was not I nor Andrea who had the idea of making a boogie fantasy movie; it was Tex himself who suggested it. Of course, we all thought it brilliant and terribly amusing.

Tex and Barry entered an (inter) National Film Challenge and recruited their friends to help out with the location, the sound, the acting, and all other parts of making a movie that needs to be done. This film challenge is unique in the way that you must write, create, edit, and complete a four to eight minute movie in 48 hours. Now, four minutes sounds like an awfully short amount of time, but believe you me, four minutes can take weeks to perfect, and we only had a few hours.

On Saturday, our friends and colleagues were invited over to partake in the filming of the movie. We had spent Friday night writing our script as it was only at 7 pm that we received our genre, line, character, and prop. Sunday was to be left free for editing and sound.

Our genre: Fantasy
Prop: Oil
Character: Bobbie Soxer
Line: "If it doesn't work, give it a shake."

Now, just by looking at this, it is beyond simple to deduce how we came up with the dancing theme. I mean, we already squashed the idea of the oil being shook; that was incredibly obvious. Oh no, we were to create a magical world in which everyone had to dance to do things. Simple things like opening a carton of juice needed a special dance for it. If you wanted to cook a meal, you had to dance, and there you have it, you'd be eating like a king no time. These magical dancing people don't even dream of using their hands. I mean, why would there when their shakin' it method works so well?

As soon as I heard the name Bobbie Soxer, a slightly disturbing yet exciting image came to mind: a dirty, chain-smoking, deep-voiced lesbian. With a name like Bobbie Soxer, what other kind of character could it possibly be? So, it was at the very early stages of the movie-making that I dubbed Andrea Bobbie Soxer. She won't outwardly admit it, but she loved her character (let's just say I had a tough time getting her out of her frayed, biker's shirt).

Making the movie was fun, tedious, hilarious, and long. It was really neat having your family and friends collaborate on making a movie. We took all day Saturday to film, and then collapsed from exhaustion that evening after replenishing ourselves with a Mamerz home cooked meal. After being on your feet all day long, repeating scenes over and over again, tweaking with the sound, changing angles, trying it different ways, and putting up and down the filming equipment, relaxing over sausages and Archie comics felt like magic (without the dancing).

Now that I have wetted your appetites, I am sure you are all dying to watch our five minutes of fame. You can watch All the Wrong Moves here.

N.B. If you wish to read another approach of the movie-making weekend (at least, I think that is what he's rambling on about), this will re-direct you to Tex's entry.