What Made you Smile/What Ticked you off Today?

[Ziggy]

I think you must have missed the part where we were talking about our PROFESSIONAL JOBS using various kinds of tape. I never went through a phase such as the one you described.

[REPO Man]

My current jobs don't call for tape, so I mostly approach it solely from a casual user's perspective.

[Ack]

Speaking of which, today we used tape on set to reinforce a basketball hoop rigged to a c-stand, so Camera and Grip departments could goof off while waiting for Set Dec to get their work done. Finally convinced the Producer to come over and do a dunk too. It was a good day on set.

[marurun]

Y’know, Ack, you’d think the fellow who wants to go to NYC to work in a creative industry would pay more attention to your life-in-the-trenches tales.

[REPO Man]

Will any of this advice help with writing the script, securing funding, renting equipment, hiring a crew to operate the equipment, auditioning actors, figuring out how to make certain practical effects (like for a slasher film), convincing a studio to distribute it as a wide theatrical release and figuring out what percentage of my profits to forfeit for 100% of the merchandising rights?

I'll be damned if my slasher cinematic universe gets carved up into standalone releases while the characters get pimped out as Dead by Daylight DLC. I love DBD but I've got bigger plans for The Woodsman, The Plague Doctor, The Patchwork Woman and the supermarket slasher whose name is TBD.

[PretentiousHipster]

Honestly, if you're gonna make a slasher you have a much larger success of filming it now in what you might call bumfuck nowhere rather than NYC.

[Ziggy]

Remake Jason Takes Manhattan, and actually film it in the titular city this time.

[REPO Man]

Actually one of the films is set in NYC, but in lieu of drawing from 80s slasher that one draws more from Italian giallo films.

[Ack]

Actually, yeah. I'm a working comedian, a published author, and a member of a Motion Picture Studio Mechanics Local. Having written screenplays and scripts for film and stage, seen my work performed, acted in it, stage managed it, crewed film, tv, commercial, and short productions in positions ranging from Assistant Director to Production Coordinator to Locations to Grip to Production Assistant, rented and loaded gear from rental houses, wrapped gear back to rental houses, worked in and with unions to hire crew and get hired myself, worked with special effects crews as well as operated effects gear ranging from blood pumps to lifts to fog machines to constructing tents for doing day-for-night, trained in operating various lifts used in the film industry, reviewed audition tapes, worked film festivals, worked directly with producers on both photography and filming projects, and gone through the festival circuit, yeah, I know that stuff.

[REPO Man]

Any books you'd recommend? I'm surprised I haven't bought Lloyd Kaufman's "Make Your Own Damn Movie" and his followups. Also I think Robert Rodriguez wrote a book about filmmaking.

My plan was to cut my teeth making short films and music videos for unsigned bands I'd no doubt meet in NYC. I imagine an overabundance of actors in NYC would make casting pretty easy.

One idea for a film I had is about a 30something living with his boyfriend and their college-aged roommate only to end up with custody of his 17- and 15-year-old half-brothers.