Cross-Country Part 4

And at long last here is the fourth and final section of Cross-Country. The "Totally not Ashland Street" graphic is a dig at the fact that we obviously never went outside the bounds of Muncie, Indiana to film any of this. Instead of trying to fake it or make something that laughably doesn't have a single establishing shot of Nebraska, Charlotte, or anything in between, we decided to just acknowledge it in a joke and move on.

My fight with the hat is my personal favorite editing job that I've ever done. In filming all I wrote in the script was "Murph fights the hat, gets into the car, and runs it over." All of the shots were essentially improvised in a span of about 15 minutes. The sound effects are all really awesome. My only beef is that I wanted to set the fight to Ace of Spades, but I looked through my audio library and found that I actually had a crappy live version instead of the actual studio version, so I had to settle for Blur.

I could bitch about the overall quality of the acting in the scene between Mark and his ex-girlfriend, but I really didn't do them any favors with the quality of my writing. It was really just horribly apparent that semi-serious exchanges between two people in love probably isn't what I'm cut out to do. The role of the girlfriend was actually supposed to be played by a former winner of the Miss Ball State pageant, but she stood me up for meetings twice, and she stopped responding to e-mails. I was excited because she was beautiful and an acting major, but I really have better things to do than get ignored and jerked around. Actually, there was supposed to be a casting director as well. A member of the theater department volunteered to work as my casting director and claimed she was going to organize auditions and discuss the casting of all of the roles with me. I was overjoyed that maybe I would film something and not have to goddamn act in it, but lo and behold she broke off all contact with me too. I was on a strict deadline because I was turning this in as a final project for a video production class, so I had no choice but to forge ahead the way I've always worked. Quite frankly I'm lucky the film even got done since I delayed filming a full two weeks waiting for them to come through. The unprofessional treatment has pretty much turned me off to working with anyone from the theater department, and that's the reason why they received special no thanks in the credits.

Overall I like how this turned out. There are clear issues with certain continuity errors, certain lines weren't acted as well as they could have been, and the sound is severely fucked up in certain scenes, but I still think it turned out very well. The response from those who have seen it has been overwhelmingly positive. I'm actually in the process of adapting this decidedly PG-13 script into a longer R-rated feature film script. Let's hope it turns out well.