What about those Little Dudes?
One of the worst moments of my life was when I had to look Little Dude Joseph's dad in the face at the DVD release party and explain to him that his son didn't make the final cut of the movie.
A few people have asked why the Little Dudes aren't in the film, and I now give the same answer I gave to Joseph's father...
There were nine total appearances of the Little Dudes. Seven of them filmed beautifully. Two of them did not. There were various reasons for this, all of them relating to one thing -- not enough prep time to make sure everything looked as good on camera as it did to the live audience. They were but one of many challenges we faced due to this same dilemma (see also "glowing white sugar cube").
Because the Little Dudes served a very important purpose -- giving us the date of the section of the story that followed -- they either all had to work, or none of them would work. There was no way to cut just one Little Dude and keep the others, because the dates were too important. So it was a real all-or-nothing situation.
And try as I might, I just couldn't make those two aberrant shots look good. In fact, they looked distractingly bad. Again, due in no part to the Little Dudes themselves.
So I had to make the extremely unpleasant choice of cutting them altogether.
I did create a montage of the ones that looked good on the Supplemental Disc, and I used a couple of them in the DVD menus. And of course they still received proper credit in the movie itself.
Some things just work better in person, and to the folks who were there that night, the Little Dudes will always be remembered fondly as part of the live experience. But they just didn't all work on camera the way we'd hoped.
7 Comments:
Was it an issue with the light hitting the cards in such a way that the reflection created an aberant bright area that was well above 100ire? Or was is those twobit camera ops that you had. However while perhaps two bit, were made up of a very charismatic and obviously dead sexy bald gentleman in the center of the audience, perhaps on camera #..... two maybe?
No, the cards looked okay. It was just really unfortunate combinations of lighting and costuming... However fabulously captured by the dead sexy and charismatic cameraman in the middle.
Oh, good to know good to know. I mean I just..... you know..... so worry about the..... well you know.. uh... camera issues that pertained to this completely kick ass venture.
(P.S. Joni I played the Doc for some very good friends of mine. They made some fantastic points that I hadn't fully noticed due to my fascination with the work that the above mentioned camera op had done. Anyway the point was that while many many many people think that the nature of filmmaking lies in editing they usually just bugger the fuque out of a peice with their inept skills with software. You however you have used editing to control the pace of the narrative and have even found emotion in a peice that I had not known was in there to begin with. Your editing was done with heart and purpose, two things that most "filmmakers" think they capture with there craptacular hack jobs. This is a point that I am sure everyone that has watched "Dirtbag" could attest to if they knew what they were looking for. The beauty and talent behind your edit is that it ISN'T noticable, it is just felt. Congratulations, I stand amazed.)
I meant their not there..... obviously
Awwwwwww!! Ya big lug! Well, I had awesome footage to work with. And at the risk of turning this into a big mush-fest, your shots of Shout It Out Loud in the basement at Dante's is some of my all time favorite footage of anything ever. That stuff with Eric in the mirror... fantastic!! It actually looks better in the video than it did to my naked eye!
Thanks for the explanation, Joni. It makes perfect sense. And I didn't mean that the extra CD was crap, it's just that we didn't know there was going to be a bonus CD when we pre-ordered, so I'm just pissed that I don't have it...at least I have your autograph...
Well, Ron, you can always buy disc two for the low, low price of $10! (Which my autograph just might be worth in 700 years! So you see, it's win-win!)
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