Liars and Lunatics :: Film Blog

When you work in theatre or film, you become expert in the art of cleaning up. And if you’re really good, you become expert in the art of cleaning up quickly and efficiently.

Especially if you don’t have a whole lot of money to waste.

One day, during pre-production of our film Liars and Lunatics, we were doing some tests at one of our locations. Testing for sound and lights. We were in the church building where we were to shoot the courtroom scenes. Well, quite frankly, we had made a mess. There were tools and equipment everywhere. Blankets were hanging up on the walls. 

It looked like a mini hurricane had hit New York City.

And then who should walk in… but one of the church people! He was there to open the door for the organ-tuner. Needless to say, we were a bit embarrassed at the state of our mess in his church. So we decided it was time we were finished with our tests for the day. We’d better clean everything up…

And fast!

Well, fortunately for us, we’ve had good practice striking sets from our work in theatre. So, in less than a half-hour, the church sanctuary was neat as a pin. In fact, we probably could have taken those before-and-after photos!

We never did find out what that member of the church felt when he came back later in the day to lock up after the organ-tuner left. In any case, the whole clean-up drill certainly was good practice since we would have to dismantle “our set” at that location several times during the course of shooting the movie. Especially for Sunday morning church service…

{{ photo :: The blankets act as a sound buffer in filming. }}

Well, it’s a new year, folks. Time to get back to work…

Which brings us to all the problem solving techniques required to bring a film to life.

Which then brings us to remember the blankets. 

Those blankets gave us some great sound for our film, Liars and Lunatics. But before that could happen, we had to sit down to figure out how to make these blankets work.

We decided to use grommets—you know, those little metal eyelets. We scoured every shop we could think of. But apparently, grommets must have been going out of style that summer (either that or they were very popular). 

We had someone go down to the fashion district in NYC, but unfortunately those grommets were too small our use.

Fortunately for us, we did find enough grommets. And actually cleared off some store shelves in the process.

But then came the labor-intensive work of attaching those grommets to the blankets. Mary, one of our production assistants, proved herself time and again to be the Amazing Grommet Girl. (Perhaps, one of these days she’ll have her own comic strip to follow the adventures of this superhero.)

Well, we were able to string the blankets together (using the new grommets, of course) and hang them as sound dampers on ceilings, on walls, wherever they’d be out of sight of the camera’s eye. Up and down, those blankets came.

And they sure worked. We have the sound to prove it!

{{ Photo :: The film crew attaches our “sound blankets” to the ceiling. }}

Problem solving. That was one of the things necessary when working on a film. We’re still in the editing room fixing “problems”.

Problems are inherent throughout the filmmaking process. Thinking back to when we were preparing for principal photography of Liars and Lunatics in the summer of 2006, we were always testing out ideas on how to make things work.

One of the biggest challenges was filming in a church. With the high ceilings, we needed to minimize the echoes and such for all the dialogue scenes. Our solution: blankets.

Yep! We put a “casting call” out for blankets. Anyone getting rid of a blanket? Give it to us! By far, the best blanket donation was from a hotel in New York City. They were getting rid of about six big blankets. They were relatively light in weight. They had that pink floral pattern that many hotel blankets began using in the 1980s and 90s. Not really quite in the style of the Moon Brothers…

But we snatched them up. Hey! They were free. How could we turn them down?

It was like getting a Christmas gift (in July)!

And with that… May we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas… from the Moon Brothers… 

{{ photo :: One of our grips, Nathan, takes a break during the film shoot. You can see the blankets hanging behind him in the background. }}

New York City seems to be revising their plans a bit regarding the whole film permits thing. After all, they are trying to bring people to the City to film, right? Isn’t that what their ”Made in NY” incentives are all about?

…Yep! To try to keep filmmakers here in New York, and away from the West Coast or the Frozen North!

When we lived in Toronto (we were doing theatre back then), there always seemed to be movies in production…just in our neighborhood alone! You could always tell when they tried to make the setting look like New York City. They’d put up a blue mailbox (in Canada, mailboxes are… red) and add graffiti all over the place. This was supposed to make you think the setting was New York. (But sometimes, if you look closely at these films, you might catch a glimpse of the CN Tower in the background!) 

Last summer, we shot our feature film Liars and Lunatics in New York City. Queens, actually. Interestingly enough, there seem to be very few films shot in Queens. Did an internet search and here’s the list of movies…

Coming to America (1988), starring Eddie Murphy and Arscenio Hall (Hey, “Queens” is part of the whole premise. They better have shot some footage in Queens).

Spider-Man (2002) & Spider-Man 2 (2004), starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst (They shot some footage in Forest Hills)

Raising Helen (2004), starring Kate Hudson (Shot in Forest Hills, Woodside, and Sunnyside)

And that’s it… The results of our search on the subject.

Hey… so why don’t more movies shoot in Queens? Well, our biggest problem with shooting Liars and Lunatics in Queens came from a place called LaGuardia Airport. The faint drone of the aircrafts coming in for a landing, or taking off, became a familiar sound on our set. We’d have to pause more than a dozen times an hour for sound purposes alone.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question above. Queens just has too many airports–LaGuardia at the north end and JFK at the south end. But Queens is a big borough. Forest Hills seems to be kind of popular. Maybe they have less air disturbance in Forest Hills…

Or, maybe if we all went back to the silent movie era, we’d all be fine!

Indie Filmmakers are all up in arms over this. Apparently the City of New York is trying to require any group with a camera (i.e. more than two people) to have to get a permit and million-dollar liability for filming anywhere in New York City.

Hmmm… Have any of those guys who are for this regulation ever tried to get a filming permit in New York? Sure, the permits are free (that’s nice). But the million dollar liability. Now that’s gonna cost some money. 

And… If you’ve been down there at the film office in Manhattan (and we were there about this time last year), you’ll find a lot of people sitting around, waiting. And then you find out that you have to go back the next day and… guess what? That’s right. Wait some more.

When we were there last year, we were on time for a scheduled meeting regarding our film Liars and Lunatics. But we had to wait at least a half-hour because the guy who was supposed to talk to us was busy with someone else.

When he finally made it into the room, the thing that he told us at is that they were really only concerned with our shooting locations conflicting with the locations of Law and Order. As long as we didn’t want to film at the same time and place as Law and Order, we had no problem.

Soooo… We had to wait all that time to find that out?

“Time is money, especially when you are talking to a lawyer or buying a commercial.” — Frank Dane

Or at least when your waiting to get your filming permits in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film and Television.

Not to say it isn’t helpful to have permits. It saved us on one occasion. But that’s another story…

{{ photo :: Filming a scene from Liars and Lunatics in Queens… Notice the “I Love NY” shirt? Maybe they should start making “I Love Waiting in NY” t-shirts! }} 

Benjamin Franklin once said:

“Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.” 

This could easily be one of our mottos. We are very careful with how we spend our money… which seems kinda counter-intuitive considering that we’re in showbiz (which is synonymous with the spending-money-like-water mentality).

Actually, we’re usually over-careful with how we spend our money. But we also wanted our film Liars and Lunatics to look like it cost a million bucks. So in order to keep costs down, we scrounged around for costumes and props, frequenting thrift shops, tag sales, our own homes, etc. For example: the brown curtains in Frolick’s office came from the home of our production designer.  

And all those candles? We originally found them lying in a drawer in the church where we were filming. They were already half-used, so we asked if we could use them, promising to buy the church some new ones. Well, we burned those candles down on the very first day of shooting.

We had the church secretary order some new candles; a box for the church and a box for us (as we thought we might  need to do some more shots with the candles… which we did). Well, when we got the bill, it was a little higher than we expected. (How much could candles cost?!)

Well, apparently these candles were of the top-notch variety! With a top-notch price tag… In fact, it turned out that of all the props we purchased, those candles were the most expensive prop we used.

We’re glad to say that they actually made it into the movie…

As opposed to the cutting-room floor!

Good ole Ben was right: little expenses do begin to pile up. Especially, on things that you never really intended to buy in the first place.

{{ photo :: The ballerina surrounded by those expensive candles. }}

Have you ever watched a movie and wondered how long it took to get the scene right?

The big Hollywood films seem to have all the time and money in the world (compared to us lowly independent filmmakers). Which means, they can spend a whole day on one short scene…

Here are some examples of Hollywood flicks and some of their excessive use of takes:

• In the movie Jezebel (1938, starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda) there is a scene early on when southern belle Julie (Davis) uses her riding crop to hitch up her skirt. The footage that was used came finally on the 45th take!
• Apparently the production manager of The Parallax View (1974, starring Warren Beatty) kept the slate used in the film for display in his office; it was marked “Take 98 – Warren stirs soup.”

Wow! How come we never had the luxury for doing 98 takes of someone stirring his soup?! Oh, yeah. We had only 12 days to shoot principal photography!

As we recall, on our film shoot for Liars and Lunatics, we managed an average of two to four takes. Sometimes less, sometimes a few more. Looking back at our continuity reports, it seems that we never went over nine takes for a single camera angle. (Turns out that the nine takes was for a two-shot of James and Paige in the empty courtroom in Scene 97… See above photo).

{{ photo :: Scene 96. James and Paige (Joseph Halsey and Maya Serhan) talk in the empty courtroom. }}

There’s an important lesson here. By nature, we’re actually very careful with being economical and saving everything. We don’t like to spend money unless we have to.

Last summer, when we were filming Liars and Lunatics, we had to do a scene where Dr. Donovin (played by Carson Grant) has to spill his coffee. (See photo…)

Well, our “props department” got ahold of these blue paper coffee cups with a Grecian motif on them.

The trouble came after we began the editing process. We realized that you couldn’t really tell that the coffee had spilled. So we decided a close-up was in order. Another problem. We didn’t have the Grecian paper cup anymore!

We went back to the coffee shop where we got it in the first place, but they were using different cups now. Well, we had to do the insert of the close-up using a different cup.

Most people probably won’t even notice it, though. (Unless those film extremists who watch the movie 100 times and start looking for all our continuity errors!)

Lesson learned: Never throw away your paper coffee cups!

{{ photo :: Dr. Donovin (Carson Grant) and Dr. Frolick (Allison Lane) talk in the hallway of the mental asylum. If you look carefully, you’ll notice the coffee cup in Donovin’s hand. }}

We got up at about 5:00 am this morning… and made our way to Brooklyn in one of our lunar mobiles. Our goal was to capture some shots near the Brooklyn Bridge for our film Liars and Lunatics.

The roads were pretty quiet, considering normal New York City traffic. Definitely not deserted, but certainly not as many vehicles on the road. But hey, it was Memorial Day.

We’re not all that familiar with Brooklyn, so we bounced around on the cobblestone streets patched up with asphalt. We went down at least one one-way street… the wrong way…

We got the footage we needed in a park between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Saw a few early-morning risers walking their dogs or going for a stroll with a cup of coffee. Periodically we waited until a boat was going past on the river so we could get it in the shot.

Then we climbed back into the lunar mobile and headed north to Roosevelt Island. Got some more footage. Of the Chrysler Building. Of the United Nations Building. Of some more boats passing by on the water.

We’re tired. We’re ready to go to sleep. After all, we’ve been up since 5:00 am…

(May 31. Meant to put this photo in sooner….)

{{ photo :: Shooting early in the morning at the Manhattan Bridge… }}

Most blogs post daily. So, then, why don’t we?

Well, folks—in case you haven’t figured out the purpose of this blog—we’re actually in the middle of making a movie. Yes, we’re doing all the post-production editing… We’re doing our own publicity… our own research on film festivals… Oh, and we’ve also started a few other film projects on top of Liars and Lunatics!

We kinda subscribe to the Filmmaking School of Do-It-Yourself.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re writers. We write, we edit, we rewrite. Then we write some more. Then, finally, we post.

Sometimes we write a few days in advance and then post when we feel the entry is ready. Oh, there are days when we get inspired by something and manage to blog about it that same day.

Is there something you’d like us to blog about? Let us know.

{{ photo :: Everyone in the asylum wants to know what’s in the letter Mother Parrot (played Heidi Azaro) found. Is it new instructions from the Moon Brothers? }}