Hello dear friends,

See below the rough cut (also with­out sound mix) of the scene from The Ultimate Challenge in which Marshall Walters (Tom Danford) dis­cov­ers that he has been kid­napped and forcibly entered as a con­tes­tant in a Martian game show hosted by The Englishman (Al Fiene). Announcer voice pro­vided by the Immesurable V. Gagnepain, who appears to have for­saken the inter­net (don’t tell any­body, but I mailed him a sus­pi­cious pack­age as a form of sur­re­al­ist revenge).

Your com­ments and crit­i­cisms are appreciated:

The Ultimate Challenge: game show rough cut from Andrew Gingerich on Vimeo.

Number 2 is a trick ques­tion, by the way. See, if you’re dig­ging for water on the sur­face of Mars, you first dig shal­low and if you don’t find any water, then you dig deep. No need to keep dig­ging if you dig shal­low and find water.

As always in faith­ful service,

Andrew Gingerich

Saturday evening marked the first shoot­ing day for The Ultimate Challenge.

Our first shoot of the evening took us out to Cottage Grove, where one of our actors (Matthew Feeney, who is play­ing the detec­tive Howard) gra­ciously offered up his home as a prin­ci­pal loca­tion. I don’t have any pho­tos of this because we were in such a hurry to shoot the scene before the sun set that we just didn’t have time to get any stills. The upside to this is that the sun looks the pret­ti­est right before it van­ishes, and since we were push­ing our sched­ule so far, we got some dis­gust­ingly gor­geous light for our close-ups.

Our sec­ond loca­tion brought us all the way back down­town to Pepito’s Mexican restau­rant, whose owner (also the owner of the Parkway Theater next door) gra­ciously allowed us in to shoot a quick dia­logue scene. You know what this means, guys! Eat at Pepito’s! Go see movies at the Parkway! Tell them… well… tell them what­ever you want, they prob­a­bly won’t remem­ber us. But it’s a really cool place, and it made for a per­fect location.

I’m already hav­ing a lot of fun with this pro­duc­tion. I get to have an idea and rather than sit­ting for hours, mulling over the dra­matic and nar­ra­tive ram­i­fi­ca­tions of my urge, I can just shoot it and then play with it on the com­puter. For instance, when we started shoot­ing, Matthew was just moments out of a stage pro­duc­tion in which he took a prat­fall and banged up his knee. He was icing it between takes at the restau­rant, and I decided to put it in the movie as a scene tran­si­tion. How awe­some is that!

The whole thing went way smoother than it had any right to. I’d like to thank our cast and crew, as well as Marlene (she did pro­duc­tion design for Tracy McKnightly last sum­mer), who, due to my own geo­graphic ambi­gu­ity*, acci­den­tally offered to drive all the way from Colorado to Minnesota in order to crew for me Sunday night. This geo­graphic con­fu­sion, com­pounded by my poor tele­phone skills and bad cell recep­tion, led to a fun lit­tle mis­un­der­stand­ing that resulted in sev­eral befud­dled con­ver­sa­tions with other crew mem­bers and con­cluded with a sec­ond, clar­i­fy­ing phone call, a moment of epiphany, and my excla­ma­tion, “No won­der she sounded con­fused when I asked her if she had a car!”

To con­clude this post, since I’m shoot­ing dig­i­tal instead of film this time around, I can show you things like this rough cut of the scenes we shot on Sunday:

Rough Cut: The Ultimate Challenge (day 1) from Andrew Gingerich on Vimeo.

The rea­son that restau­rant scene sounds so gravy (groovy, but also as smooth and rich as Grandma’s home-made gravy) even though it isn’t at all mixed yet is because we were wor­ried about loca­tion noise, and so we wired our actors up with con­cealed lava­lier micro­phones taped inside their shirts. It also means that actors can talk over each other and since they’re miked sep­a­rately, they can be mixed on sep­a­rate tracks in post. This is how Robert Altman did his magic Altman thing, start­ing in 1970 with M*A*S*H. It’s my new favorite method of field sound record­ing, and I fore­see doing a lot more of it for this movie.

Next shoot­ing day is this Saturday, then another one on Sunday, then Monday night, and that’s (the­o­ret­i­cally) the end of prin­ci­pal photography!

* Much like Winston Niles Rumfoord, I exist as a wave for­ma­tion that oscil­lates at ran­dom inter­vals between Fort Collins and Minneapolis, hin­dered only by the price of air­fare and the occa­sional sunspot.