Hey have you seen Marian? I mean Trisha?
No budget for retakes I guess?
For the first decade or so of making movies, I didn't have any means of editing them. So I had to "edit" them in the camcorder as we filmed. Meaning, we had to be acting the second the record button was pushed, (because we had no way to edit out the "pre-action" footage) and we likewise had to press the button to stop recording as soon as it was a good time to stop the scene. This also meant that we had to film every movie in the linear chronological order. If we had a bad scene, our only option was to simply rewind the tape, try to pause it just as the previous scene ended, and then record the scene again. Since that was a pain in the ass to time right, we almost never did more than a single take.
That limitation is one of the reasons I never wrote scripts for my old movies. Since my friends and I weren't the best actors, we'd probably fuck up a bunch if we attempted to recite a script from memory, so instead we'd come up with a basic idea of what would happen during the scene, and then simply improvise it once the camcorder was rolling.
I know
Mega City Dragons is charming in how shitty it is and how we're a bunch of kids acting like we're in
Double Dragon or something, but by the time we got in our late teens I think we actually started making some camcorder shorts that were genuinely good, like
Count Orlox Gets Head and
Creepy House Party 2. We definitely got a lot better at improv, at least.
Didn't anyone ever get out of their car to stop you guys from beating each other up and filming it? I can't imaging kids doing this sort of thing on the street today..
Heheh. My mom was the one recording it, so perhaps the people diving by just assumed she was making children's battle videos.
