The Soup Party (Short, 2004)
The Soup Party was my first endeavor into filmmaking.
The story goes like this: I was in my freshman year of college and was taking my first video course, TV/Video production. After probably 5 years of off-and-on film projects that never got off the ground, all of these cameras and techniques were driving me insane! It was too much, I had to make a movie.
At the same time, on our campus bulletin boards there’s a poster that is pinned up: “Student film festival, enter now!” The deadline was a couple of weeks away.
I teamed up with another forward-thinker in the group, Gloria McClintock and we set out to make a movie… but one problem, no script! Well, another was we had no actors. And still another was we really didn’t have a camera. Or sound equipment.
So I snapped into action and converted an idea I had been working on, an idea for a bunch of strange people who get together for a party where they taste soups and take themselves entirely too seriously, into a screenplay. I learned screenplay format in a couple of days, and hammered out the script. It turned out to be much more comedy than sub-textual awkwardness. I’ve since noticed its very difficult to not write comedy into a situation that begs for it if you have a sense of humor.
Gloria and I met on several occasions to prep the film. I remembered that I had an old mini-dv camera (so old that it didn’t even have a firewire port). It worked, and that’s all that we needed. I broke down the script into a cast. It was assumed that the crew would be myself as director, my father Fred as cinematographer and Gloria as everything else including Production Manger. I also made a shot list… and to this day I think it was the most efficient shot list I have done. But still, no actors, and no time to go and audition (not to mention I had no idea how to hold an audition).
By this point you’re probably getting the picture, we were rushing into this thing full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. It was all very exciting.
Janis (Christa Mathis) and Adrian (Mark O. Bedard Jr.) embrace.
Then came my idea: Go to the theater! The theater program at our school was a good sized one, so I talked with the director on the phone, and he offered to allow me to announce my film’s roles I needed to fill at the next theatrical audition, but he highly recommended the starring couple of the school’s program, Mark O. Bedard Jr. and Christa Mathis, to play the leads in my film, Adrien and Janis. What a great idea – a pre-packaged couple that’s used to acting together!
I met all of those at the audition in the lobby of the theater and, consequently, they all ended up filling the roles in the film PERFECTLY. We had a read through. But we still needed a location, fortunately Fernando Alcantara, who was to play Joey, Adrien and Janis’ college friend, offered up his apartment in Los Alamitos. We were set! Now… to make the movie.
We planned our camera setups at the apartment, adjusted the shot list, and were ready to go. We shot on a Saturday sometime in spring of ‘04. There was no lighting, except for one practical lamp, practical kitchen flos, and we just blacked a couple of windows. The audio was in-camera. There was no coverage, it was all masters.
One of the great things that happened as a result of the shoot was Fred had created a device, a no-budget steadicam, that we used. We still use it today.
A couple of other notes from the shoot: The theatrical background of these actors meant they were 100% prepared. I love it. They gave me what I wanted and when I had to direct their action a little, they were right on. In fact I had a tiny role to play in the movie and was probably the only one who flubbed a line in the whole thing.
We had a great time, it was a terrific experience. Consequently, we shot everything we needed to, on-time and under-budget, and the picture was in the can. I edited the movie over two days in Sony Vegas, with a soundtrack I scrounged up off the internet for free (Ehma), after I the producer of the “royalty-free” music I was looking at wanted to charge me hundreds for usage. Elated, I called the cast and crew and let them know we were going to make the film festival entry deadline. I hand delivered the film on VHS, and entry form. We had a cast and crew screening. Everyone enjoyed the 10-minute film, enough that they wanted to watch it again — always a good sign.
Soon after, my worst fear hit: the student council in charge of running the film festival was going to cancel the festival. I won’t go into details, but after some discussion, they decided to hold it anyway, where our film was given the prize for Best Comedy. It was an honor. The whole team was proud.
My TV/Video production class viewed the film, the first totally public screening besides the festival. They were mortified at the end of film. Which, not to spoil the ending of the film, but I considered it a grand success.
My feelings on the film are, obviously mixed. I’ve read that even Spielberg sweats it when others watch the movie, and that the only thing that any director sees in a movie is its flaws. And I believe I fall in line with both of those. This, being my earliest work, has lacking visual and audio quality, and as a director obviously only master shots is one way to go, but some coverage would have been nice. But the story telling is good, and the acting is very good. I’m thrilled to death with the way it came out on those fronts, and honestly I think my editing pulled it all together as nice as possible. I’m proud of it as my first effort, but it is exactly that, my first.
Soon after that, I decided to move to North Idaho to work on a restoration project, and lost contact with many involved in The Soup Party. But the great thing is, the movie lives on forever, so do the actors, and so does the memory of this filming adventure.
