TRL: Pursuance of Justice: Just Desserts.

30 Sep TRL: Pursuance of Justice: Just Desserts.

greetings fellow riders of the great intertubez!

happy Friday! it’s been a good week here in Los Angeles. Shriekfest has started! I’m excited to see some horror & sci-fi films and meet a bunch of other genre filmmakers. CERTIFIED screens Sunday at 2pm. details here.

a year or so ago the trailer of THE REAL LUKE: PURSUANCE OF JUSTICE had just been released. I had a very special guest blog written by the one and only The Real Luke. he details the Hollywood Adventure that led him to California to make his first epic, feature length motion picture. here is the trailer to refresh your memory:

when we were on set, we ended up shooting a LOT of extra material. specifically in the desert scene. I had the project pretty well story boarded and knew what shots were needed to make the trailer. but we were running ahead of schedule and our Director of Photography, John Matysiak had some ideas for additional shots… so we shot a bunch of material that didn’t make it into the cut.

while editing I realized that there was enough footage to make an entire OTHER project. but there were a few slight issues. we were missing a number of “connecting” shots. after all, we weren’t trying to make a cohesive scene – we were trying to make a trailer. we had a bunch of cool action, but the moments weren’t really tied together.

in order to show a story that made sense, we’d need to film these “connecting” shots. having reshoots wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, since I was the actor, owned all the props, and the locations were “free”…but there was a BIG problem.

I had shaved my beard.

so… how would we do it?

did I need to spend a few months regrowing my beard?
should we only shoot me from the back?
what were the simplest possible shots w/o showing my face that we could use?

together w/ my intern Kevin Allen-Bicknell we laid out the shots we had in the best possible order. then discussed what was missing story wise and how we could tell that story with INSERT shots.

we went outside the yetiesque offices and shot those inserts on my Canon Powershot. then cut them into the sequence with the HD material. it wasn’t pretty, but it did let us see if the story made sense. and it did. next we needed to film those insert in HD. so on one of the scouting days for CERTIFIED I brought my Mackinaw, camo, and hatchet to set. John and I walked down the road a bit and quickly filmed the few shots.

they cut in perfectly. our plan had worked!

I wanted to set up the project as a “sneak peak” into the post production of the film, so I added the timecode window burns that normally are found on footage during the editing process. there aren’t filters for these, so they we all made by hand. yes, that means EVERY frame is a different title. (I can talk about what all the numbers mean if anyone is interested…let me know)

here’s the finished project, THE REAL LUKE: PURSUANCE OF JUSTICE: JUST DESSERT.

-Luke