Post-Production : Just Finished Shooting My Short Film by Jacob O'Neal

Four days. That's all we had to shoot Lepus. I remarked to my writing partner, Brian Smith, several times during production that we should have done something smaller our first time out. We had five locations, 13 speaking parts and 9 kills in this comedy/horror short. My God, it was rough. Thankfully Stage32 helped me find some great local talent. Day one was designed for me to get my feet wet. Brian had never acted before and I wanted to have time to make him comfortable. He got into it right away.My cousin Tracie was playing his first victim and she was a real trooper. She was running around on uneven ground in a long skirt. She fell for me deliberately about 6 times. After the scene was over she showed me her bloody knees. I almost felt bad. We shot her death scene and then went home for the day. It was a very successful first day of shooting. Day two was much longer. It was Tyler Gallant's first day on set. He got there at noon and shot a scene with my lovely sister, Cherith Pruitt. We did a few set ups and then moved on to working with Rob Edwards at the same location. After that we did the scenes with my niece, Kelsee Benson, and actress Kat Garcia. We got the interior stuff done and tried to take advantage of the magic hour by improvising and not going to our original location. Instead we chose a park right near the house we were shooting in. We got there in time to shoot a quick scene then packed up and went back to the house and finished up in the front yard for another scene with Rob, this time next to Randy Robinson. They worked off each other so well. That was the end of day two. Day three was very light as we didn't think we would have Tyler or Kat. They were both supposed to be out of town due to a callback for a major motion picture. It got cancelled but we didn't have time to schedule more on the day. Instead we recorded our podcast and had Tyler come in as a special guest. You can hear it at http://gorramnerdhour.blogspot.com. After finishing the podcast we went over to do the shots we ran out of time and light for the day before. We had to do a few shots of Kelsee and Brian. We also needed to shoot Sierra Benson's scene. Then we went to Cherith's house to get a quick pick-up shot of her in bed. Then we wrapped for the day. Day four was by far the hardest. Nearly the entire cast was there for the final day of shooting. On top of that we had 5 kills left to do, 20 extras, and several pages of dialogue left. It all went very smooth...surprisingly. We were a little worried about finding a Sexy Nurse. Thanks to our DP/Producer/Camera Operator/Special Effects Guy David Sabal we were able to get Victoria Paege to come in for a few hours and play the part for us. She was awesome. We got her kill done and wrapped her for the night. Then we took care of all the extras so we could get them home to their families. That left 4 more kills and a lot of dialogue. We still have a few pick up shots to do with my sister. I am dreading the pick up shots with Cherith. That kill was the hardest one to do. It's not that I have any qualms about killing my sister on camera. It was the manor in which I had her die. It was very uncomfortable to direct. She has a vibrator get shoved into her mouth and out the back of her head. No matter what I said for direction on set it sounded grossly sexual - "Okay, we're gonna do a few takes so Brian is gonna stick it in and pull it out a few times. Are you good with that? Can you get the vibrator any deeper?" These were things I never thought I would be saying to my sister. All in all I am 90% happy with the footage we got. There were a few things I would have done differently had I had more time. It's a shame we lost most of Wednesday. Oh well. Live and learn. I was not about to recast Tyler or Kat. Hell, I wouldn't have wanted to replace one person in my cast. They were all so amazing. I loved working with them and would do it again in a heartbeat.