The Actors Playground and Blue J Productions presents

Mr. Graves

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THE SHOOT:
How did the film shoot go?

SCOTT L: I had a great time playing the two stage part of my character. As this was our first film together as a group it was exciting and very educational. The house we shot in was a great location, but boy let me tell you, did it ever get hot in there. Especially when Andrew, Juan and I were all dressed up in our mobster get ups. It was great fun, and we are all looking forward to seeing it in its completed state. Also I hope that all of you reading this will be able to enjoy our work as well.

SCOTT V: Three Sundays down in El Cajon, in a house that was currenly unoccupied. I had fun finding a carload of props with a conspiracy theme, and setting up the room to look like Jim the Psycho really lived there. The tricky part was, believe it or not, this was filmed mostly in the daytime. Scott L and I had to nail layers of blankets over the windows (he stood on the narrow termite-eaten ledge and knocked juniper crap in my eyes) to give the thing the dark mood we needed. Jorge brought in a team of guys, and got the job done. So I'd have to say the shoot went smoothly.

DEBBIE L: I was really nervous shooting Mr. Graves, as this was my very first film. I don't think I was very happy with my performance, but there is always room for improvement, and it was a great learning experience. It was fun being a part of the project and watching it all come together.
 
SCOTT V: We all liked you! You gave the stressed housewife, annoyed sister impression I was looking for. Even if you did yell at us every take. ;-)

SCOTT V (Feb 2004): POST-production has been difficult. Jorge did a rough cut, then we bounced around a bit and it took a few months to get together and look at it again. Then we saw his cut, made some suggestions, found a way to skip around the few missing lines, and Jorge delivered his final edit. Trouble is, the color balance was never done, so I had to pull it all apart again, fix that, and trim another 30 seconds to keep to our target length of 10 minutes. Then I extracted the audio and spent at least 6 hours cleaning that up -- only a few lines were beyond repair, and we'll be re-recording those soon. Finally, I had a clean edit where it was obvious that we have to record several minutes of fictitious news broadcasts to replace the CNN footage ... when I was done I had 5 pages of new audio scripts for the background, which we'll be recording tomorrow (2/8/04). A lot of work is going into this one. So far the whole group seems to like it.

SCOTT V (June 2004): The audio recording session was a blast. I've finished my final cut, but Jorge doesn't like it. He says it needs music, which is silly, since the soundtrack to Mr. Graves' life IS the news and radio noise. The barrage of news adds a creepy element to the whole production. So, it's done as far as we're concerned.

SCOTT V (Oct 2004): I finished the DVD authoring and sent out discs to the cast & crew. We can't sell them or do anything else with them until the director (co-producer) gives the okay to release it. But heck, it's all ready to go!