Sound Effects

You know in movies when you see some old spectacled man walking shoes across a table on a radio show for sound effects? That's what we do here at Nervous Films! All of our film sound effects (or foley! ooo fancy!) basically come from this box of random stuff and other things I bang on to simulate sounds- today I was banging on a canoe, I'm not even sure what the sound was for? Other noises recorded today were a lot of hinges turned angel wings and some wooden-block-cardboard hammer nailing action!

Ode to Our Friendly Kersosene Heater

The film is filmed in stop motion- the acting, the dialogue, everything! (I'll get into the crazy details of that later...)but the strangest thing that I never payed much attention to was the lighting. Since there's a pause between each frame natural light changes just the tiniest bit between shots so if there's a long scene the light will change drastically. This is why we film a lot in the freezing night with our friendly, extremely dangerous, pre-owned kerosene heater (picture the end of a rocket ship but slightly smaller)...you can sort of see our heater friend in front of the scaffolding in this picture- his wheels make him even more unstable for our safety!

I was always the tallest...

Brent told me he wanted me to make a twelve foot long dress. So I did.



Then he told me he wanted me to stand on twenty-something foot tall "legs" on a tiny platform wearing the dress. So I did that too.


I don't think I will ever forget the disgusting feeling I got when I watched them pull the scaffolding away.

Cold

The set is outdoors...which has upsides and downsides. I think the biggest downside so far has been when we heard this horrible noise last winter and looked out the window to see a sheet of ice the size of our barn roof destroy one of the walls surrounding the set- ice can bend steel & cut 2x4s in half! An upside of the outdoor set is that the cold weather forced me to buy this snazzy hunting onesie at a thrift shop that vaguely smells of deers blood and feels like wearing your favorite quilt! I also love that it's covered in various paint colors from the set so I am camoflauged there also!

"...but Easter's over!"

Brent wanted the eggs to be vividly colored so they'd show up on camera nicely. Dyeing eggs when it's not Easter makes you feel insane. Like carving a pumpkin in July. It shouldn't make me feel crazy given how ridiculous dyeing eggs is no matter what season but it did...

We went to a farm near our house, Al's farm, to get the eggs. We asked for a half dozen and went home with a dozen and a half. He runs his farm in a different era- rabbits running around, buckets of drying scallion bulbs,a small grove of blueberry bushes, beehives, a few goats for milk, all kinds of different chickens in coops- all run by him and his hands. The first time he gave me a zucchini it was so huge I kept insisting it was an unripe eggplant.

The Real Moon is a Lot Bigger

The moon for the film is made out of wood- thin balsa wood and routed down plywood. The real moon may or may not be made out of cheese. I also heard today they found water on the real moon but it was on the internet so it may or may not be true. Brent kept getting excited about the size of his moon and I kept having to remind him that the real moon is much, much bigger...

Mary Wood

The character I play in the movie collects bird eggs to sell at markets. She makes birdhouses with trap doors in them so she can sneak into their homes and take away their unborn babies in their eggs. That makes it sound sinister. I don't think it's sinister. We accidentally left eggs in them when we were shooting so most of the shots in the film with the birdhouses I am curling up my nose, choking down vomit because the smell was so horrible...

Set Yard

Brent made this model of how he wanted the set to look out of balsa wood one day. Then we just started building it. It's in our backyard. This was it a few months ago. We're still building stuff in between filming. I still don't like heights.

Leonard & Mary

The film is called Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then and is a true story about a man named Leonard Wood who lived outside of Louisville Kentucky. He found out his wife Mary was dying and he wanted to save her life. He built a house around her that he thought would heal her. He played music to God hoping for miracles. He even wrote her a letter over a decade after she died begging her to communicate with him somehow.

...we have a box of tapes of his piano hymns that he banged out towards the heavens. I think he might have killed a few angels with them.

Brent

http://nervousfilms.com/multimedia/

Brooklyn, NY to Schuylkill Haven, PA

About two years ago I met a person in New York and he said after awhile"Why don't you move to the woods and help me work on my film?" "As long as it's not a porn, I'm in" I said. I didn't go back to the office the next day. I'm sorry for that boss. It was unprofessional.