48 hours of madness.

Swithun signs his legal name for the official documents, Steve feels
"I don't even know who you are anymore..."

This past weekend the Village Idiots participated in Buffalo's 48 hour film project.
It all started with a group trip to our neighboring city where, on Friday evening, we were briefed on the necessary contents of our movie.

Here's what we got:

• Genre: Film Noir
• Character: "Arnold Peters" or "Amanda Peters" (Visitor)
• Line: "You don't have a clue, do you?"
• Prop: A deck of cards

With this, we were now equipped to start our creative journey of awesome.

Most of Friday night was spent scheming and writing the overall arc of the film. 

Some of our discarded ideas included...

• A detective who, although extremely serious and convinced of his keen eye, is always making the absolute wrong deductions.
• A physics professor who receives a mysterious note that solves Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle and he is thus enlightened to solve every mystery presented to him through the power of science. It is later revealed that the note was, in fact, a prank pulled by one of his graduate students.
• A very distraught stay-at-home mom who keeps misplacing objects around the house and keeps blaming it on a bigger conspiracy. She also happens to get heavily distracted by the seductive pool boy working on her premises.
• A (crazy) homeless man that takes conspiracies very seriously and also happens to be the inventor of pizza.

As you can tell, our creative bug was fading into an altered state of consciousness by the early hours of Saturday, so we picked our storyline - THERAPY - and got as much sleep as possible to prepare for the full day of filming that was ahead of us.

--- Filming ---

 The movie was loaded with emotional moments, love stories, mental turmoil, mischief, violence, murder, double-crossings, and even guns. Well, let me specify...

LOTS of guns. →

And what about the amah-zing special effects make-up? We've got to thank Molly Hill for her first dabbling in the craft - it was a thing of beauty to see her batter the three young men below.

 David, Matt, and Brandan sure look like they need some explaining to do to their mothers... The Village Idiots have turned them into hoodlums and thugs!


The action-packed film required lots of work - from the small details in dress and facial expressions, to having to wait for the right amount of sunlight or waiting out the noise of passers-by as they came and left from Carifest.

Our filming didn't stop until the night crept on us, which ended up being a nice touch throughout the time progression of the film. Some shots took a bit more work than others, for instance this car scene was a bit of a challenge to illuminate just right - like any good Film Noir would take into consideration.

Really, we could go over all the specifics and dissect the movie for you, but we much rather share a whole bunch of pictures with you and let you see for yourself.
The movie will be made public after 8/15/2014 given the competition's guidelines. For all the content and extra pics, make sure to visit our Facebook Page!

                                                                               

   Aaaand... let's give a round of applause to our camera-men: Steve Spindler and Shawn Gray! These guys are not only talented, but super-professional at what they do. This race of a project didn't feel half as chaotic as we were expecting and it was in great measure thanks to the way they handled the shots and organized the team in the most optimal ways. We wish them great adventures in their filming careers and hope to collaborate on more movie shenanigans in the future~
                                                                                                                     

Matthew Vimislik. detective.

Speaking of wonderful things... The Village Idiots have found a super-talented artist by the name of Matt Vimislik. Seriously, this man can act! He's a natural, for he claims he hasn't dabbled in any sort of drama-related field before stumbling across our silly, little group and taking his first level 1 class a few weeks before. Matt does not only act like a fish in water when on stage, he is also an absolute sweetheart and made it a pleasure to spend a day working with him when we threw the lead role onto him after people in our troupe couldn't make it. --- Thank you for all your help, Matt!

From left to right:
Joanne Brokaw, Tammy Colvin, David Scherer, Brandan Sankar, Matthew Ross.

This movie wouldn't have been at all possible without the help of our lovely Level 1 Students!
We would like to thank them all for bringing their talented selves to the stage. It was really fun and exciting for us - maybe they don't hate us for stressing them out in this nervewracking project? Oh, and we hope to see them again soon. Play well, children ♥

Photo credits to the wonderful Joanne Brokaw and Molly Hill. These ladies are, simply put, "FANTASTIC."