Bottle Rocket: Martin Shooting

Friday, the 2nd of October, and once again the five of us (well, four of us, given that Steph lives there) trundled on over to her Carlton North house to film our ‘Instrumentals’ segment.

The first interesting reflection I had to make on Friday was meeting Harry, the actor playing Martin (the busker that both Matt and I had a hand in creating). Harry was already dressed and ready to play the part, having been briefed by Steph, and he was nothing like I had expected. Matt and I had similar visions for the character: a surly, brooding, tortured artist. Dark clothes, dark sunnies, a wannabe Pete Docherty or Johnny Depp. Harry, however, was wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt, round wire-frame glasses, some lurid baggy pants and a green cap … with the logo of Alaska emblazoned upon it.

While I loved the ensemble, and Harry’s bizarre take on the character, it caused me to reflect on the clarity of my writing – something I’ve had cause to reflect on twice already in this course. Apparently, people reading a script I write can’t actually read my mind, and so they make their own assumptions based on the dialogue. While I thought that it was obvious the look I was going for, Steph took it a completely different way, which in the end, was actually a lot funnier than anything I had thought up. Bit of a blow to the ego, but good for the project. Harry was excellent as Martin – he had clearly thought about the character, and had his own observations, but was also completely open to direction and new ideas, which made filming with him a lot of fun. It’s funny, while I had also envisioned Martin to be likeable, I’d actually questioned how we were going to do that, given the fact that he’s such a tool. Harry’s performance was the solution to that – he played Martin has arrogant, self-centered and vain, but also friendly and charming, with a distinct lack of pretense (and knowledge) about anything he said. It was a great experience watching him perform. While Alexandra’s take on the character was very close to what I’d imagined, Harry’s took it to new, exciting levels, and as the character’s co-creator, that was really fun to watch.

The versatility of Steph’s house was probably the star of the show on Friday. While we had used the facade, hallway and kitchen on Thursday, the Instrumental shoot utilized her backyard area and lounge, which worked really well for our purposes. Martin’s confessional area was a little microcosm of his persona – a busted up stereo and a sewing machine sitting in the background. Why a sewing machine? That’s just the sort of eccentric personality he possesses, I guess. It was another example of a spur-of-the-moment idea that we thought would lift the scene. A different outdoor area, with overgrown grass and a crumbling brick wall, served as our busking area. The idea was that the shabbiness of the space would reflect their ineptitude as a performing unit, but I actually think that this didn’t work that well. It’s the one location I’m not very happy with – it’s just a bit nothing. We originally intended to shoot this scenes on a street, but our restrictive permits, coupled with the availability of Martin’s busker friends, meant that we had to shoot somewhere close by, thus the choice of the brick wall backing. While the scenes themselves are funny, I just watch it thinking, where are they?. It’s a little disconcerting, and an element that I’m just not that happy with.

However, something I was really happy with on this shoot was our embrace of improvisation. Harry was happy to just throw ideas at us and see what stuck, and we were happy to let him, so we shot multiple scenes where we just told him the broad outline of what we wanted, and let his imagination run wild. These were typically very funny, and we ended up loving them. The idea is to intercut them with longer explanations from Martin about himself and the band, so that we don’t have to just watch him sit there and talk. Summer Heights High does a similar thing – while Mr. G will talk about his dog, for instance, we’ll get little shots of him walking her and kissing her, etc. They just flesh out the character a little, while giving the audience something mildly amusing to keep their attention occupied.

I was also happy with how we learnt from Thursday’s lessons. For one thing, Matt had prepared, and we didn’t have any issues with our battery length, which made us rush through the last section of our filming the previous day. We were also much more organised, with every knowing their production role, and were able to move from location to location without much fuss. There was a lot less sitting around, and a lot more filming, which I think made everyone feel like we were improving as a group, and getting a lot of shots that were very proud of.