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Indiewood
A Podcast for Indie Filmmakers
In the world of social media, and fast-paced journalism, knowledge is abound. But with all the noise, finding the right information is near impossible. Especially if you’re a creative working in independent film.
Produced by Cinematography For Actors, the Indiewood podcast aims to fix that. This is a podcast about indie filmmakers and the many hats we wear in order to solve problems before, during, and after production.
Every month, award-winning Writer/Director Yaroslav Altunin is joined by a different guest co-host to swap hats, learn about the different aspects of the film industry, and how to implement all you learn into your work.
"We learn from indie filmmakers so we can become better filmmakers. Because we all want to be Hollywood, but first we have to be Indiewood."
Indiewood
Innovative Indie Filmmaking Techniques with Jamie Parslow & The Story Behind “Black Hole”
Can you imagine creating an award-winning short film during a period of unemployment? Jamie Parslow, a true multi-hyphenate in the indie filmmaking world, shares shares how he brought his short film “Black Hole” to life in a single weekend. Learn how a serendipitous meeting at Dances with Films led to a spontaneous and transformative writing session that turned struggle into an artistic triumph! Jamie also recounts the resourceful journey of his earlier short film, “Patch,” uniquely funded by Bitcoin, showcasing the ingenious and creative approaches essential in today’s indie filmmaking landscape.
Jamie discusses the crucial role of collaboration, particularly with actors and VFX supervisors, to enrich character dynamics and production design. By diving deep into the creative process, Jamie and his team unearthed new character layers and unexpected audience reactions at film festivals. Finally, Jamie shares the profound impact of embracing sadness to craft hopeful scripts. Don’t miss “Black Hole” - watch here
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A Podcast for Indie Filmmakers
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IG: @indiewoodpod
YT: Cinematography for Actors
In the world of social media, and fast-paced journalism, knowledge is abound. But with all the noise, finding the right information is near impossible. Especially if you’re a creative working in independent film.
Produced by Cinematography For Actors, the Indiewood podcast aims to fix that. This is a podcast about indie filmmakers and the many hats we wear in order to solve problems before, during, and after production.
Every month, award-winning Writer/Director Yaroslav Altunin is joined by a different guest co-host to swap hats, learn about the different aspects of the film industry, and how to implement all you learn into your work.
"We learn from indie filmmakers so we can become better filmmakers. Because we all want to be Hollywood, but first we have to be Indiewood."
Hello and welcome back to the IndieWood podcast, a podcast about indie filmmaking and the many hats filmmakers have to wear in order to make those films. My name is Jaroslav Altunin. I'm a writer, director, editor, cinematographer. I've done a lot of things under the sun, and this podcast is about sharing stories and techniques and tips and ideas and experiences with listeners and with each other, with me and my guest, so that we can become better filmmakers. And we are starting a new series with a new guest, and with me I have the incredibly talented, uh, jamie parslow. Hi, jamie. Yeah, of course. Yeah, jamie is a writer, a director, cinematographer and producer, and I don't use those titles lightly because I think you truly are a multi-hyphenate. I think you've done everything under the sun, and quite extensively, might I add. So welcome to the.
Speaker 3:EWU podcast. Oh, thank you, that's me. You know, I just met Jim Cummings. If you know who Jim Cummings is, that's a true multi-hyphenate. That man is just on another level. He does distribution and self-distribution and stuff like that. So I'm always impressed by multi-hyphenates.
Speaker 2:I feel like we have to be more multi-hyphenate nowadays. I feel like in the past you were like oh, you're an indie filmmaker, you have to be multi-hyphenate, but you get in the studio system you could just do one thing. But now, even in the studio system, you're like no, no, let's have you write and direct and produce and whatnot, and I think it's getting out of hand.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I feel like, well, I feel like that's kind of one of those things where, um, nowadays even you get these. Uh, you know, I'm of the philosophy that you have a hard time breaking into the film industry as a director without also being a writer, which you can't do either without also somehow producing at this point in time, and then you absolutely have to know how to edit, you know, and that's. That's kind of just what it is nowadays.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it's becoming like it's not a multi hyphen anymore, it's just the the filmmaker.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's literally just filmmaker.
Speaker 2:Speaking of filmmakers, me and you met at a filmmaking event uh uh, a film festival. We met at dances with films, where I had a project and you had a project.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that project, because I think it's some of the coolest filmmaking I've ever seen. Because you, on a budget, you and a buddy of yours shot a film about a black hole appearing in someone's living room, yeah, and then it went from this like funny, slapstick kind of thing, to this. I don't want to say esoteric, it wasn't esoteric, it was like eclectic I've used esoteric before. Okay, yeah, yeah it became this this like experiential thing about existentialism, so I want to hear more about how that came together.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Because you and your friend put it together. You shot it in a couple weekends, right? One weekend. There you go, one weekend, and then it ended up in a film festival and a bunch of others won a bunch of awards.
Speaker 1:So congratulations on that, thank you.
Speaker 2:And it had a lot of VFX, but anyways. Anyways, before we get into the vfx, let's start with how it kind of came to be yeah, I uh really interesting.
Speaker 3:Um, it came from a sad place, obviously. I think that as all films.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it has to um, I had a job for a little bit where I was the head of production, uh, and I had I had, actually I'd seen the writing on the wall and knew that the company was sort of not sticking around for a little bit, so I had had asked to be let go, and they did that, which was kind of them. But my journey as I think a lot of us feel, especially nowadays, trying to look for another job was near impossible, and so I found it was a weekend alone and I just had the bug and I sat down and I just started writing whatever came to mind. This is something this like black hole in someone's kitchen was like a dream I kept having, or whatever it was, and I was like what is that?
Speaker 3:So I just sat down and wrote whatever I was feeling, I guess, at the time, and I just did it in a night and I let it sit and I was like, well, I'm not gonna be able to make that for a minute, um. And then I did eventually get a job, uh, and in that job, you know, afforded me the stability and the ability to, to you know, sort of live my life. And I was like, well, you know what? I had a short film right before that, called patch, that was making its rounds in the festival circuit at that time and that was really really not really really expensive, but pretty expensive for a short film.
Speaker 2:You put a budget behind it yeah. So, if you don't mind me asking, how much was it for Patch?
Speaker 3:Patch was $55,000,.
Speaker 2:I believe yeah.
Speaker 3:It was a short film that we did. I think we were the first fully funded by Bitcoin short film.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 3:Uh, I think it was a feature film that was fully funded by Bitcoin at one point, uh, right around the same time, but we were the, as far as I know, we were completely, uh, funded by Bitcoin and was the first one that that did that. Not my money, somebody else's, but um, uh, I couldn't understand bitcoin for the life of me if I tried, or any of the crypto world.
Speaker 3:I couldn't figure that out, but that one was making its rounds. It was cool, sci-fi, but it was big. It was, you know, multiple locations. We built a robot. There was all kinds of stuff that was going on in there.
Speaker 2:Um, so I wanted to really really bring this thing down, bring it down to earth, so to speak so um, which is really funny when you watch the the short and you go wait what? Yeah, it feels like you. You're talking about being a small film, but when you watch it and people can watch it on your website, uh, jimmy parslowcom, or you can go to dust it's also in dust, it's on dust, yeah, which is which is awesome too yeah uh, so congrats for that.
Speaker 2:But you watch it you're like, oh, this isn't a small film, like there's a black hole effect, like someone falls into a black hole. And if you've seen interstellar it's like very similar, you know yeah there's a bit of like um a similarity in how you guys bring that, bring that black hole to life.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah it was one of those things that we once again. It was just a vision I had in my head for a long time that I couldn't get out, and so, like there are folks that you know they're the sci-fi folks, the hard sci-fi folks, that are like that's not what, what you know, yes, it's not what it would look like. The event horizon wouldn't, wouldn't be that it would just be like a uh, sort of a nebulous, like sort of sucking, in effect, if you will uh, it would.
Speaker 3:The lensing effect. There's a major lensing effect with no light around, uh, the corona, um, which is fine. It's not really the point of what it is that we were doing, um, but it was just something I had in my head and then we actually wanted to shoot it, uh, physically properly, like on set, like practically. So we actually, before we, we got that the visual effect that you eventually saw there. Um, we had actually gone and searched for some Vantablack. Of course, vantablack is there's a copyright on it or something that the guy wouldn't let anyone use it.
Speaker 2:And you're talking about the paint that's so black that, like light, can escape Correct, yeah, so we went with what was called Black 3.0, which was, and so we took a-. Is that the open source version of it? Yeah, okay, what was called?
Speaker 3:black uh 3.0, which was, and so we took a that, the open source version of it, yeah, okay, yeah. So we we spray painted that and it was like a styrofoam ball that we did, and we we warped two see-through records um to to make the corona, and we glued them together and stuck it on the on the black hole itself and then we took uh, you'll never see it, but we took a Leeko and we just like shot a light from behind and hitting the black hole in the thing, and so eventually, that's what we were planning to work with, and the VFX actually was donated by my friend, roger Nall, who's worked on like Starship Troopers and a bunch of other movies from the 90s and 2000s.
Speaker 3:And he's still working to this day and he was just like.
Speaker 2:I just did this for you and I was like oh, okay, let me just did it can I just use that please?
Speaker 3:so that was um.
Speaker 2:That's where that came from so he built the acid for it and did he do the compositing for it too, or you do that yourself uh, a little bit.
Speaker 3:It's sort of like a mix between the the actually three of us it was, it was myself, it was roger who helped me with a lot of, with a lot of. He basically was like here's one shot and here's how I did it.
Speaker 3:Go do it yourself, kind of a thing that's cool, yeah, so that was a cool way to do that, uh. And then aaron moorhead, who's in the movie, uh, and he's also like a vfx pro. He came in and he cleaned up some of that as well. So we sort of tag teamed it a little bit.
Speaker 2:So the team was you, Aaron, who was the actor in it, but also VFX.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Guru. I would yeah by a mile, and you said uh, Roger helped you with some of the assets, and then who else was on the team?
Speaker 3:Uh, Evan Sistemopoulos was the cinematographer, no-transcript, and so we just kind of all sort of moseyed on out here eventually and Aaron's obviously taken off and done some big stuff and we're just making our own stuff as we move along.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I think that's the best way to make movies nowadays If you want to add in some like production value. You get all your buddies together and you kind of build that community and you help each other out you know, and then from that came Black Hole.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's kind of a thing that we do all the time, which I mean much less so now than we used to. But you know, you go out and you're with your friends and you want to make a thing, so you say, hey, friends, let's get together. It was a nice way to like corral everyone one last time. So the budget on that was far, far, far, far, far smaller. It was like thirty five hundred dollars, I think, at the end of it, and that's, I think, a little bit, including, um, some festival fees and and things, things like that.
Speaker 3:Uh, evan, evan wanted to redo the house that he was living in, which is where we shot.
Speaker 1:So he was.
Speaker 3:So he was just like ah, throw in money just to like paint the house and like yeah, so that's kind of what he did and then our and then so we had read nice wonder as well, who's our producer on there? Um, he sort of helped us with a lot of the logistics and getting it across the finish line, that kind of a thing. So Reed's a talented filmmaker in and of himself as well.
Speaker 2:He's just very quiet. I remember when we talked about the film initially and you were talking about doing the black hole because you wanted to like print it on a paper, almost.
Speaker 3:Or you wanted to print the actual background of the kitchen and kind of burst through it a little bit. So one of the ideas that I was trying to do and I really pursued this and it just didn't. I didn't want to use green screen. I think one of the big things that was I just truly didn't want to use green screen. I wanted to make things as practical as humanly possible. So I went after this. It ended up. The cost was a little too high. I probably would have justified it at some point in time, but the idea was that we wanted to print a sort of um spongy background we had actually like shot the 8k like background with the light and everything in there to print up on this thing.
Speaker 3:You know, make some stand ins and then just sort of comp out wherever the, wherever the, the pipe edge might have been and we would have taken, like the back, like a hook or something on the back of that, like that stretchy material, and just warped it physically back behind us and that was kind of in unison with the physical prop of the black hole that you had.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So we, we were hoping to go that route. It didn't. You know, obviously it didn't go that, that, that way. So we decided, okay, well, let's just do the green screen, we'll do the plate comp and then we'll just work it from there. It's sort of the sacrifices you have to make on those types of projects, but it would have been really cool to have actually done a physical, practical version of that to really warp people's minds about. Well, how did you do that?
Speaker 2:Speaking of practicality, there's a moment in the end of the film where the main character goes into the black hole and there's this moment where they're floating in blackness and just empty emptiness or in a space where no light exists. And I thought that was a really cool scene because it felt like you're in a big studio, you know you kind of how did. How did how'd you do that?
Speaker 3:uh, really, um, kind of what you see is what you got. The big, big vastness is you know, that's obviously like we just shrunk him down. That blackness is just blackness. We had a I think it was a china ball above him which gave that sort of top down-y look to the whole thing, and then we sort of you know we, we skirted all the way around the china ball and then we just let everything fall off so that fall off is truly the black that's behind him.
Speaker 3:And then we just took that same sort of black and you, just you, just sort of um clone it yeah expand it outside. Yeah, exactly the image, yeah, so there's no green screen, there's no nothing there. Um, you've got a little bit of the, the sort of partickling that happens in front of it, that's just. You know that.
Speaker 2:You add that in post, kind of a thing but I like that because it's it's a simple what two, three layers tops, you have your, your, your live action layer, which is just a character silhouetted with a light in a dark space, and then you have, like, your particle effects, which you could find you know wherever for a couple bucks and then everything beyond that is, you know you, you just basically bucket, drop a black right, yeah, that kind of so yeah, with a little gradient, so there's a little bit of uh, feathering and whatnot.
Speaker 2:I'm using photoshop terms, but they they cross post to Da Vinci, resolve, and you have yourself a really cool image that like kind of reminds me of what was that film with under the skin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so she like lures men into this alien craft that's in like a pub or something I don't know In England, and then they it's like a black space and there's like a black floor that they kind of fall into. Yeah, you know which feels it's like a set? You know, yeah, and yours looks very similar, because there's a moment where the main character is also like kind of floating yeah and it feels like they're underwater. Yeah, was that just slow-mo, or did you actually go underwater?
Speaker 3:it's slow-mo with no no no water. It's Aaron, literally just floating his arms out. He looks so funny doing it like in real life.
Speaker 3:He's floating his arms out, he's got tears in his eyes and he's just sort of standing on one foot, sort of like floating his other foot out, and we just sort of, you know, you rotate it and you move it in post and then, yeah, a little bit of it was. You know, you get a little bit of inspiration, probably from get out if I had to guess or even stranger things, when they have that little bit, and uh, and then he lands, he lands on the black, whatever that is, and that's just like black Mylar.
Speaker 3:I think on a on a dance floor or something like that, and then yeah that's kind of where that that's really it. It's a very simple and very easily. As a matter of fact, it was in a um, it wasn't even a set, it was, I think, a storage unit that we did that in.
Speaker 2:So we? Was it like one of yours or did you rent one of Evans?
Speaker 3:Evan has a friend who had a little storage unit and he was just like, can I just like shoot there for a day and he's like hanging out in the in like the little bathroom, so they don't, so you don't scare the cat a little bit. And it's very, um, very sweet. Uh, fred was the name of the cat and um she.
Speaker 2:she was very cute and very lovely, but but not loving, not being you know, know, so yeah, it was just a friend's cat that uh volunteered it and was like, okay, yeah, sure, I like talking about filmmakers that have been doing kind of these or trying to attempt these vfx or even special effects for a long time, because there's a refinement and it feels like something that you can watch.
Speaker 2:you know a movie from the 80s and you can see the same kind of technique where there's like oh, we got a, you know a ball of styrofoam, we painted it black and we shot it in slow motion and it's a, it's whatever, and and in this day and age, when we look at films that require kind of an effect be it special or vfx, yeah, something practical or something digital uh, we tend to over complicate it yeah but there is a simple way to shoot it and as you are kind of exploring and discovering these new opportunities for very simple effects that look really good like look beyond their, their, their, their value, like monetarily, monetary value.
Speaker 2:Um, what's kind of your advice for folks trying to attempt the same thing? How did you get to that point? Was it just trial and error? Or are you like looking at older films, like how do they do it?
Speaker 3:Or is it just no, I think it is. I mean first and foremost, I mean growing up in the YouTube generation kind of forces you to to hit those. I was lucky enough, like I said, I was lucky enough to work with my friends from a very, very young age, you know, and and working on our not very, very, you know, not like beyond 18 or 17, really.
Speaker 3:We all met when we were 16 at a film festival. We all liked each other's work, um, I think even back then I was doing stop motion stuff, uh, and that kind, and so, you know, we were lucky enough to be making our little movies from there, learning little techniques and trial and error. Like I said, I worked at that company. The company was called Loot Crate and we would make these monthly short films that would come out and like and we would do these things. It was really cool, um, where we would do a new genre every month, so we would do sci-fi stuff or we would do, um, we, you know, we would do, uh, fantasy stuff or we would do whatever it was. Um, sometimes we'd do just straight comedy, but they almost all had special effects that we had to learn through the process, um, and so you go through that process and then my advice really is you know, think about your vision, about what I hate using that word vision, but think about, like, what it is you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 3:And then I would almost always argue try not to rely on the VFX side of it. There's something really, really fun and interesting, and you get everyone else excited when you say I'm going to do something practical. Patch was exactly that. Patch was this thing. I was going to build a robot and we went around and we were like how are we going to do this? Like we have no idea what we're going to do. And so I talked to a couple of my friends who had connections at like pixar and some other you know vfx places, and they were like this is going to cost you minimum two hundred thousand dollars to do.
Speaker 1:We can't, we can't do that, we're not.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's not happening um, I forced, I forced it through. We, you know you, when you, when you have to tell a story, you have to do it and it will happen. So through that I got connected with my friend, uh, at this place called state-of-the-art effects or or sofa effects is what they're called uh roy nairam, uh runs it. Um, but anyway, I I sent them the script. I said this is what I'm trying to do.
Speaker 2:I had some artwork that was made I had paid somebody to do some artwork and then they looked at and they were like that is so cool, we have to do that they're the guys that made the original um alpha 5 from from power rangers uh oh yeah, like the like little trash, that guy, little uh, ufo saucer head, yeah, yeah so they're the folks who made that okay, um, and they were so jazzed about it.
Speaker 3:They're like normally this would cost us x amount of dollars, but we want to do this. We like the story. We're going to do that for a reduced price, whatever that was.
Speaker 2:Like wholesale almost.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so what they did is they. I was like this is a character, this is a robot who is part robot and part car parts, because they, you know, over time they would have had to have been sort of rebuilt over time.
Speaker 3:So they built the top half of that. So we just sort of shot the. That's interesting and anytime we went wide, our actor, who was also the voice actor, his name, his name is um adam zastrow. Um, you've seen him in a bunch of stuff. He's in um, uh, what's that? Uh, what's that? David fincher tv show the mind hunter he's in a bunch of stuff like that he's very thin, very you know very gone.
Speaker 3:And so he was able to fit into the suit, and from a distance, he's really good at walking like a robot.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 3:So he did a really good job doing that and his voice, and because he is also the voice actor, we were able to move the character to his voice and move, move. You know him in the thing. Anyway, the idea was I had to tell the story. We knew we couldn't do it that way, so we found a sort of workaround and the thing is, once you get excited about something, which you really get excited about something, you start getting other people excited about it, and then other people like I gotta, I gotta jump on whatever that is, that's gonna happen to happen regardless, and so that begets interest and one thing begets the next. It's kind of how it works. You know, it's not about coming at it from a executional point, it's coming about it from a, from an interest point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, at least in my experience, I think you're, you think you're, you've kind of cracked it. It's. We don't make movies because like, oh, this is going to be like my big ticket, I'm going to get rich, or like you know, I can pay for this or whatnot, or it's going to hit, it's going to be a big thing. Because you get excited about it. Yeah, and you have to, because you stay with a project for so long, you have to be like excited about it.
Speaker 3:You have to be married to it. Exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2:You have to be excited about it enough that when you get beaten down over the course of making it, at the end you're still excited.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really cool. And then for festivals, I think you said something interesting because you were like, oh, let me have some money for festivals. I think that's always important to have in your back pocket, like tagged in your budget, just something. So when you finish, when you finish editing, when you have your final cut like I don't think a lot of filmmakers really focus on that or really even think about that how much they should have for their dcps, which is the digital cinema package.
Speaker 2:Uh, for festivals, festival fees, like that's so important, yeah, because then it's you know you get there and you're like, oh, I need another 500 bucks, I need another thousand dollars. That's coming out of your pocket if you don't really let your market for your no, yeah, I was lucky enough to have To do two things.
Speaker 3:Dcps you brand. Oh, dcps are so annoying because they've locked into this Linux system thing that they know they're getting at. So there are services that will do that for you.
Speaker 3:And I got. I had one service that charged me ten dollars a month for a year and I couldn't get it canceled. And I had no idea what that was all about, cause I had to go through somebody else's. I had to go through a film festivals DCP process. Um, that was with patch, I learned uh, or I made that mistake. But with black hole I was like, no, we're just going to make our own DCP.
Speaker 2:So we did that Because usually people are, they'll gatekeep it a little bit. They'll be like oh, you can do it, there are open sources, open source solutions, but it's difficult and there's going to be mistakes or there's a you know. So they're like just hire somebody to do it. And thankfully for Dances with Films. They connected us with a company that did a good job you know, but for yeah, what did you do for Blackpool? Well, I had two things, I but for yeah, what did you do for Blackpool?
Speaker 3:Well, I had two things. I had a friend who had a Linux computer, so he offered to do that for me and simultaneously I learned how to do it. You can do it through a Mac system. I forget what it is. I think I had to download some sort of software. I'm going to be honest with you, I do not remember it's been so long since I did it but I did do it through the mac system and it worked. How it worked, I don't know but it just magic functioned.
Speaker 3:I was like wait, this is, this is good. Um, so I had two dcps of my movie just in case. Uh, you could, you could figure it out.
Speaker 2:There are ways to do it yeah, I, there's's some small film festivals that I did that were like oh, just burn a QuickTime file on a disc and send it to us.
Speaker 3:I love those film festivals. I love it when they do that.
Speaker 2:But with a DCP, though, I feel like it's. I don't know if it's more legitimate, because it's neither here nor there.
Speaker 3:It retains all the sound information. It retains the quality, it has more depth than a QuickTime file.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a hard drive.
Speaker 3:Exactly, I get it. It's the future we live in the future.
Speaker 2:From Black Hole. What was the one thing you learned? Because I feel, like everything you do, you learn something new. What was the one thing you learned from Black Hole that you bring with you into future projects?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. Uh well, main, main one is um collaborate with your actors.
Speaker 2:Uh, collaborate all the time it's it's easier when your uh actor is also your vfx supervisor. But like so to aaron's credit.
Speaker 3:Um, I mean, you know he's making, you know he's making big stuff for a reason, and he's making and he's making successful small stuff for a reason. And the idea is, the reason being is that, like he, he's in it to win it, he's he's full, he's full tilt in in the thing. Um, and so it was really easy working with him. And you know this goes to actors. It's a sort of like when you get a script, ask the director, ask the writer questions, be like hey, you know this, you know where am I at right now? How am I feeling? Because when you're writing it, when you're directing it, you're not always thinking about those notes, those, those, those processes, sort of like.
Speaker 3:Why does this character do what they're doing? One of the things that we, one of the things that ended up bleeding into production design, was a conversation I was having with Aaron and we were like what doesn't this character have? And I said, well, I don't think he has control. I don't think he has control over his life. He doesn't really have control over practically anything, which is why he gets so obsessive about this black hole, because it becomes a part of his personality and about this black hole because it becomes a part of his personality and he becomes really possessive over this thing, which is why when his girlfriend starts like throwing chips in there and all that he's like, am I gonna kill you?
Speaker 1:like that little eye, that little eye, flick he does um and what?
Speaker 3:we were just sort of like, okay, what can he control? I was like, well, he can control plants, he can. He can water plants, he can. He can, you know, be a little horticulturist, a culturalist, whatever horticultural culturalist so we were like, okay, great, he's into plants and so that's what we do.
Speaker 3:He, he's, he's out there, sort of um, you know, plowing and and and taking care of his plants and and stabbing the ground when he's angry and and so it's one of those things that comes out when you're having conversations and aaron, at one point in time, was like I feel like I want to. Um, can I cuss on this? Yeah, he's like I kind of want to fuck the black hole and I was like well, that would suck him into the thing. I don't think we can do that. But we were like, but that is cool, like there's something weird and you want to add a weird moment to your movie.
Speaker 3:So my wife and I, you know, uh, we're like, well, it's not gonna like have sex with the black hole, but what can we do to make it, you know, stand out?
Speaker 1:and we're like, oh well, what if he?
Speaker 3:like, throws his his after processes.
Speaker 3:If you will into the, into the black hole, and use it as a trash can and so that's having those conversations really helped flesh out the character, flesh out some of the some of the actions that happened, fleshed out some of the comedy that came through. Um, the script in and of itself was funny, uh, from the get-go to an extent, but it wasn't ha ha funny, it wasn't. You know, we the intent, we myself I wrote it but like the intent wasn't like, oh hey, let's make it, you know gimmicky and and whatever it was it was, let's, you know, make some funny moments in here and see if people pick up on it, kind of a thing.
Speaker 3:So that was an interesting thing. Another really interesting thing, especially going to film festivals and doing it, was you never know who's going to find what funny, and that's awesome.
Speaker 2:That's so cool, yeah you're sitting there and you, you experience your version of the film, and then everybody else around you is experiencing something different yeah and some moments hit, some moments don't know, and uh't, and it's vastly different.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd love to talk more about film festivals, but I think we'll save that for the next episode. Yeah, so for everybody who's listening, go watch Black Hole. It's on Dust on YouTube, yeah, or on Jamie's website, jamieparslowcom. Dot com P-R-S-L-O-W.
Speaker 3:Yeah, jamie, as in J-A-M-I-E, not Jaime. That's where people make the mistake. That's a different. Yeah, that's where people make the mistake, or just Google it Black Hole, Jamie Parslow, and you'll find it.
Speaker 2:It's 2024. It's not like we have to send you a care package with the address. It's a fun one, let me know what you think, talk about it, watch it and then kind of go back and listen to the convo that we had, because I think it'll make sense a lot more. There'll be a different perspective.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, another lesson I learned be sad, just be sad, let yourself be sad.
Speaker 2:One of my best scripts that I've ever written came from a sad place, but it's. There's hope in it.
Speaker 3:That's what I had. I wrote hope in mine. That was part so hopeful, all right.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for coming by. Thank you, Thank you for listening everybody. We'll see you next week. Thank you for joining us at the CFA studio for another series of the Inwood podcast. You can find the podcast wherever you find your podcasts or on YouTube at the Cinematography for Actors YouTube channel. See.
Speaker 1:From the CFA Network. Cinematography for Actors is bridging the gap through education and community building. Find out about us and listen to our other podcast at cinematographyforactorscom. No-transcript.