A Monumental Filming Weekend Was Had

Well it was also exhausting as hell but well worth it as my bro, Jermaine, and I filmed footage for two teasers we are working on.

The first was Crapshoot.

On set at the Hickory Street Lounge for Crapshoot.

It’s the story of a woman who gets her hands on a strange device that revives her when she dies, each time with a random superhuman ability. She struggles for answers and normalcy while dodging crazed scientists, religious zealots and mercenaries bent on recovering the device from her.

Crapshoot is one of a handful of projects we will be submitting to script contests, for grants and every other thing under the sun that could possibly be a source of funding for us to make it happen.

As I have mentioned before, Jermaine and I have been friends since we were kids and we spent many days of our youth planning stories, creating characters for comics, movies and TV.

We go back like 8track and Crackerjacks

The web really wasn’t a thing back then, but if it was we would have been thinking of that too. Jermaine has helped me from afar with feedback and advice filming my web series like Party Girl under my Taurian Films banner. But he and I had yet to work on something HANDS ON together under the Jigsaw Entertainment banner.

Crapshoot was the first one. It was cool. While casting gave us some hiccups in the week leading up to filming, things got worked out eventually. We filmed a few scenes at the Hickory Street Lounge. Ken is a kick ass owner and we owe him a ton for letting us in the place for as long as we were there. From there we moved to Fort Worth to the home of Stan Baker, who plays Big Bear in Crapshoot. Stan’s an amazing guy and an asset to any shoot both in front of and behind the camera.

Jermaine, working and planning shots.

I have tried to work with others on shoots before in the capacity that Jermaine and I were for these shoots and it has had…mixed results I will admit. But not so with my brother and I, perhaps because we were more in line with each other as far as the vision of the project or perhaps I simply trusted him more than others with what I wrote. He was primary on the camera and I stepped in on the shoots when I needed to as did he. Often we dovetailed what the other was saying or going to say, so it was cool to see we were in such lock step with each other. Made for a smooth shoot and we needed that seeing how we went from early Saturday morning into the Sunday morning hours. We called in Tony Dotson, Cloyse Caruthers, Brandon Henry, Derrick Andrews and Kerry McCormick for on camera rolls in the teaser as well as Nathan Hartley to help us behind the scenes getting still photos, something we never do enough of on shoots.

At least I don’t.

Long hours, but a lot accomplished. Did we get everything, no. I have some small pick ups to obtain in the next week or so. But I will get those in and all will be good.

Filming a take from the HTB teaser.

Sunday brought us Annie Cruz and filming HTB (Hard Target B*tch). This was monumental as well. We were finally filming the project we have been talking about the longest. Annie was in town attending Exxxotica with her fiancé promoting their new business venture and while she was tied up Friday and Saturday, we marked off Sunday to make the shoot happen. I whipped up a small, short teaser to film with her. We had our first planned lead have a schedule conflict, so again I called on Derrick Andrews, who was available and great to work with.

Wrapped after a long but fun HTB teaser shoot.

We filmed in Recycled Books on the Denton Square. That store has an amazing look and feel to it. We filmed video for our next stab at fundraising for the HTB graphic novel. Possibly the film too, but we will see where things go, but the first priority is the graphic novel and the money it will take to make that happen.

Making Derrick a little messy for the next take.

After that we filmed the teaser footage. We got a lot in, and we have some small B-roll pickups to knock out in the next couple weeks. We were filming as the Sun dipped so time was short to get what we needed in the light we needed to have for it.

Jermaine and Annie talking through the next take.

Again, it was a good shoot to work on together and be in sync regarding what we set out of to accomplish. I think it was good for Annie too, as much as we have talked about it to finally be here in the moment, in the character…that will go a long way towards feeding that fire to get out in front of the people and show them that this is a great project to get behind. We tried and failed before as far as fundraising for the book, but having this experience and having her be the character, it will just make us all work that much hard when we launch that campaign again (because we will and soon) and try to get the project going.

It was a long brutal weekend yes, but very well worth it.

Don’t forget to check the Taurian Films productions…

Party Girl: The Series Season 2

Suicide Squad: A Typical Tuesday Fanfilm

Putting in that work on HTB and Party Girl

Monday marked a great occasion as we took another step toward bringing HTB to life.

Bj, Jermaine and Annie meeting summer 2012 in LA to talk all things HTB.

HTB is a screenplay written by me (Bj Lewis) a few years ago as part of the April Script Frenzy event. I had the character around for longer than that, and had started planning some aspects of it, but it was really Script Frenzy that gave me the kick in the pants to bang out a draft of the script.

Annie Cruz prepping for the kickstarter campaign video.

Over the years, I got my brother from another mother, Jermaine Spencer involved in it, fulfilling dreams and aspirations the two of us have had our entire lives. And then the heavens opened and we got Annie Cruz involved in the project and things could really roll.

Last year, as mentioned on this blog before, while on a trip to California for Power Morphicon, Steph, Jermaine and myself met up with Annie and outlined the project and our intentions and got her fully on board.

We nailed down a potential budget and decided to go the crowdfunding route to bring the character to life. As part of that endeavor we have been planning the campaign, the videos, the perks all that fun stuff.

Monday, Jermaine got Annie in front of the camera to record her portion of the pitch video as well as recording content for some other videos we will post as the campaign goes on.

I plan on a longer blog on this and detailing the creative history between Jermaine and myself, but I just wanted to mark this step in the process.

It’s exciting and continues to motivate us.

Find more information at http://facebook.com/HTBMovie

And of course even with the movement on HTB, my primary focus on my end of the world in Texas is Party Girl and continuing to do what I need to do to bring it to life. Footage and project files are in the hands of Jason Terry who will do the FX, so ideally that goes smoothly. We will be working closer together in future episodes to make sure what we shoot makes it nice and easy for him to do his FX work.

A still from episode 1.7 “For My Sister” featuring Party Girl’s battle with Delilah, a thief from Angel City.

The search for music continues and the search for a grasp of when to use music and when not to continues. I realize larger projects have people specifically to handle the musical end of things, but this is one of a million other things I am handling myself for this project. But when in doubt, do it yourself right?

Soon, very soon, it will be released and years of hardwork can be seen by the public.

Geeked.

And of course more can be seen at…

http://facebook.com/PartyGirlWebSeries

A fruitful trip to Cali…Morphicon and Annie Cruz

Tired doesn’t begin to describe how I am feeling right now. But it was a weekend that was a year in the making and worth it on so many levels.

Steph and I traveled to Pasadena, CA for Power Morphicon 3, a Power Rangers convention and to finally have a sit down meeting with Annie Cruz, Jermaine Spencer, Steph and myself to discuss the graphic novel and feature adaption of that graphic novel.

The project, “HTB” has been in the works for a few years now. The name came from something I started brainstorming about in 7th grade, which continued to a character I made for the City of Heroes MMO PC game. I penned the first script for it a few years ago for a Script Frenzy event. (RIP Script Frenzy)

A partnership with another writer on a comic book he was producing that was using a the name and likeness of a reality star got me into the idea of partnering with someone on HTB to help push the book. Steph suggested Annie, who is a huge gamer and comic book fan. I said no at first, but Steph, rightly so, said the worst Annie could say was “no.”

Which she didn’t.

Annie was a go for the project and since then I had an artist, Joshua Chinksy, pen a kick ass sketch of her in the title role and I had sent the script for her to read. It was important for a couple reasons for her to see the story and make sure she was down for it, and to show how serious we were.

And again, the meeting we had out there was more effort to show that we are indeed very serious about the project and moving forward with it. Annie had a great reaction to the script and the story and characters and the other business-y sort of questions we had to work out were answered and worked out and we are all set to move forward.

This project will be done under the banner of Jigsaw Entertainment, which Jermaine and I started years back and anything we work on together goes under that umbrella.

Can’t wait.