Alien Vengeance: The Other Me

Again, this is a blog about the movie, but also a place to discuss it, review it and ask me questions.

We had some serious limitations on this movie.  For one thing: Time.

I was shooting while in L.A., working on other things as well and only able to get Michelle Tomlinson, Adam Hebb and Adam Dunnells together for one day.  Thankfully, my make up person and general production assistant on the shoot, Maryanne Schultz, cleared the day and was basically my entire crew.  She did everything I didn't, with the exception of coordinating the location, which brings me to limitation number two.

Our location: The script originally called for an interrogation room.  I had a great design in my head for what I'd build in the garage for about $200 and with some leftover paint and nails.  Since we shot in L.A. and not Apopka, FL, building in my garage was out of the question.  My friends in California don't have three car garages (city dwellers!) so we tried to rent a space.  Our best price was $2500 for the day.  That would have been fine I guess, since we only had the one day.  Trouble was, $2500 was about what I had planned on spending on the whole trip, not this one short film.  So, we shot in an apt provided by Michelle, who also took care of making sure my lights were on set when they needed to be.  Of course, this meant rewriting the script a bit, but I wanted to keep as much as possible the same, so the two way mirror became cameras and the cop and ADA watching her became two agents of Col. Onyx, a key figure in the features who has yet to see her potential.  Overall I wasn't too unhappy with the rewrite and the Adams came through for me.  The played off the "giant bookends" I wanted them to seem like very well.  Two agents with the same training.  One who was clearly more compassionate than the other.

Can you guess what our third limitation was?  Yep.  Budget!  We didn't have one.  The whole movie cost less than that location rental for one day would have been, but that's because it was all up to the actors.  So, I did what I always do.  I found the most talented lead I could and made her run with it.

The locations posed some problems with size and exterior noises that needed to be worked around, but overall I'm very happy with the end result.  Even my stop motion tentacled creation.

Comment below.  Be mostly nice  ;)

If you didn't see the movie already, follow the link to the Free HFP Cinema: http://www.hocfocprod.com/free_cinema