Jared:
Here's my first directing effort while enrolled in SDSU's film program. It's pretty rough. I took some sort of pride in being the only director in the class with the nerve and the stinginess to shoot their Intermediate Film Production final on mini-DV. Sure, everybody else's films had extraneous BS like "production value" and "visual quality," but Market Value's got my good buddy Andy Parish half-naked in my trunk, so who's the real winner, huh? Everybody who gets to see Andy half-naked, that's who.
On that note, this is only the second movie we've shot starring Andy sans-pants. The other one was called "Better Off," and the less said about that, the "better off" we all are. Haaah.
We had a hell of a time wrangling a cast for this movie. In fact, we had a hell of a time wrangling a crew for this movie. While every other crew in the film production class had four or five people, we only had three, including myself. Rachel Book was a co-worker who'd expressed interest in acting so this was her trial by fire. The teacher of this class sure was smitten by her performance, so she gets an A even if we didn't. My dad, Hector Rodriguez, was drafted into this movie when two other hopefuls dropped out, but he didn't turn my teacher on at all, so I guess he just gets a B-. Sorry, dad.
Director of Photography Jason Esse and I crammed into my trunk to shoot this movie. I thought it'd be interesting to run through the main scene of the movie several times with two cameras getting different angles each time (all from the trunk), which I realized afterwards was just kind of wasteful and inefficient even though it wound up saving our asses in the end. Turned out that both cameras we used had some problems. Every single run-through on both cameras had severe video and audio drop-outs, like somebody'd dragged a butcher knife over random minutes of tape. The worst part of making this movie was watching all the best performances dissolve into pixelated carnage.
Best part of making this movie? Driving out as far into nowhere as California's got to shoot Andy wandering half-naked and duct-taped in the desert and having a small-town sheriff with an awe-inspiring handlebar mustache pull up to ask us what the hell could possibly be going on. Best police-interrupting-a-film-shoot-experience we've had yet. Way better than the time we got five cop cars swarming a friend's house as his mom and several German exchange students panicked and an officer criticized all my footage. Way better by a lot.
Quinn:
Don't have too much to say, I had nothing to do with this one, but I like the finished film. Jared's dad is great in this and I think it fits well in the over-all theme of Mongrel Pictures.
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