@ The Movies

Oh my. I'm so very behind on the news....

Tonight I went to the Graphic Design Meetup Group, for the first time in a long time. They used to have it somewhat nearby and then moved it so far towards downtown that it would be a 70-mile trip for me to make it...alone, at night, in the city. Um...no.

So anyway, they noticed a precipitous drop in attendance, and decided to have two meetings and more or less split the locations, one meeting downtown and the other closer to the 'burbs. So I made up a lasagna and threw it in the fridge for Doug to heat up and I went.

Nothing spectacular happened (though I'm proud to say that I left my business cards at home. Nice. Really a swift move to make when you're at a networking event, don't you think?), though I did have an interesting conversation with someone who took a break from design work to make a movie. It's not a huge budget sort of thing, but it sounded really interesting...I mean, how many people take time off to produce a movie? So what kind of movie? In a nutshell, a woman wakes up in a pit of mud on a construction site, with no idea who she is or what happened to her, although it appears that she's been beaten up and left for dead. She spends most of her time going on a quest to figure out what has happened. There's a male character who appears throughout the movie who's "trying to help her, although, as the audience, you're not sure if he's really helping her or going after her," she says. There are a few paranormal instances thrown in, weird flashbacks which, inexplicably, seem to be set in the 1850s, and you're not sure if your heroine is remembering being a character in a movie, has been reincarnated, has gone completely insane....and there's a twist and a surprise ending, which obviously you're not going to reveal to a complete stranger standing there in Starbucks. Makes total sense to me. 

I asked how she was going to distribute this movie...she says probably via a couple of film festivals and some private screenings and such. I'd have no idea how to go about such a thing. 

She says all of it was shot here in and around St. Louis. The interior church scenes were shot at SLU's St Francis Xavier College Church, which is a positively amazing venue. And so many of the scenes just fell together so nicely, it was eerie. "About a week before shooting, we still didn't have a place to shoot the opening," she says. "We were hoping to find a church that had some construction going on, so we could do the mud pit scene with all the construction stuff there in the shot. All the churches I kept contacting were either uncomfortable with it or couldn't for various reasons. And one day I go driving and a church right next door to me suddenly has scaffolding up, so....it took me four days to get a hold of the right person, but once I did they were like, 'Sure, no problem.' And it was great, the day we were there the real-life construction crews were doing work, so we had our actors in hard hats in the foreground, and in the background we had real construction workers climbing around and all their heavy equipment." I can't imagine what that would have cost if she'd had to hire all the extras, and the set, not to mention the equipment. 

Some of the other scenes were also shot around Old Town St Charles, a place I know and like quite well. They had a lot of people dressed in period clothing to do the scenes, and used a bed and breakfast which was already decorated for the right time period. Everyone was totally cooperative with the whole thing...she says her parents came to visit her for a few weeks and they got to come to the set to watch her work. They were a little worried about the movie (I mean, what, she's filming something in someone's backyard?), but she says that night they'd set up on Main Street on one of the cafe patios, "fogged the whole thing over, and we had like an 80-foot crane with a huge spotlight shining down, like it was moonlight."

"What did your parents think?"

She thought for a moment. "I think they were impressed, you know, it wasn't something like they'd been worried about, and that night we were able to just sort of sit in the corner of the patio and watch all the scenes unfold."

There's a preview of the movie on YouTube. It's called Shadowlands. 

So that was my evening. Before that I had SUCH a good time at home; I scrubbed out the shower, gave the kids a bath, cleaned out the litterboxes to the nth degree, and did five loads of laundry and three loads of dishes. Glad I didn't have any pressing client issues going on!

We went to Eagle Days again, and this time Lauren wanted to come. David likes to go because he actually LIKES eagles. He's kinda got this raptor thing going. Lauren wanted to go simply because David was going. So of course she's freezing to death and whining and complaining and essentially ruining it for everyone else. I REALLY don't think I'm taking her next year. Heck, David might not want to go next year. Who knows? 

At any rate, I DO have more news, but frankly, it's getting late, so I'll catch up a bit more later.