“Senator Feelgood, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Touch Your Mother, Which is My Mother Too, Because We’re Brothers, and I Love You, Man.”

This was Mutually Assured Productions’ entry into The Grand Cinema of Tacoma’s 2011 72 Hour Film Challenge. Thursday April 21st at 7 pm, we were given a list of criteria that had to be included in an under 5 minute short film, which would be due on Sunday April 24th by 7pm. We wrote Senator Feelgood Thursday evening, polished the script Friday morning, shot most of it Friday afternoon, and started editing Friday evening. Saturday afternoon we shot the remaining scenes and the editing was finished Sunday afternoon. The film was delivered complete within the 72 hour time frame.

The criteria for the short –
Under 5 minutes
Prop: An egg
Location: A dock or pier
Line: What are you going to do about it?
Condition: Someone must have a super power

Senator Feelgood earned the Honorable Mention, runner up for best film at the 72 Hour Film Challenge.

Senator Feelgood was a blast to shoot. Kyle Scott, Travis Blood and myself, (Ken Carlson) gathered on Thursday evening to write the script. We brainstormed several ideas, but ended up going with this one because it seemed it would work best. We made arrangements to have a friend meet us at another friends sailboat on Friday. We hastily arranged our actors, (one en route from Walla Walla!) and set off to shoot. Erik Cornelius – Senator Sandusky, the actor from Walla Walla ended up stuck in traffic and wasn’t going to make it in time for his intended role, but could make it later. We asked Rob Taylor – Moses Sandusky, if he could fill in. He was happy to, so Erik and Rob switched roles at the last minute, and we’re all quite happy with the way this turned out. At the sailboat, our friend had forgotten the passcode to enter the marina. Crap. Despite having overcome our actor issue, we now had no way into the marina, and we were running late.

Turns out the owner of the boat was at work and couldn’t be reached. After frantically calling around amongst other friends, we were able to get the passcode and get into the marina. We immediately set up to start shooting. Some guy was pressure washing his boat the whole time we were shooting, so all the audio for the scene ended up being dubbed later in the evening. The boat scene is also where I messed up and broke the 180 rule. Life goes on. We wrapped at the marina about 30 minutes behind schedule, not bad in spite of the setbacks. Ember Cossette – Brenda Stottlemeyer, was waiting for us at the Legislative building. We rushed over there to meet her. Erik Cornelius called again and said he didn’t know when he’d be in town because there was an accident on I-5 and he was stuck North of DuPont. Crap. Ember had come out here and gotten all dressed up for nothing? No, we’d get something, so as not to make it a total waste of her time. We had a couple of other shots to get at the Legislative building anyway.

Kyle and Lyquoc went to my place to pick up my dog, The Dude. We shot all of Rob’s stuff and by some grand function, Erik showed up! It was an amazing bit of luck, so we were able to shoot everything we needed at the Legislative building before the sun went down. It was an amazing days work. We headed back to my place to get some food, capture footage, and start editing.

The next day Rob, Erik, Kyle, Travis and I all headed down to Winlock Washington, about 45 minutes South of Olympia. Kyle and Travis say the “world’s largest egg” resides in Winlock. So we’ve decided to shoot our final scene there. The egg was not quite as impressive as I would have thought from the descriptor “world’s largest,” but it was still cool. Even more cool was the giant white building behind the egg with the painted words – “Washington Egg and Poultry Co-Op Association.” This was perfect, since our Senator Sandusky is accused of working for Washington State’s notorious “Egg Lobby.” A few things were interesting about Winlock. The town was very small, population 1235 according to the recent census. We drove through the town a bit before finding the egg, and I counted no less than 10 churches. There were more churches per square mile than any place I’ve ever been. It was a little on the weird side. Another interesting thing I noticed were seeing lots of children, middle school, and high school aged children, and many older adults. I didn’t see a single young adult in their 20′s or early 30′s the whole time we were there. It finally dawned on me, that’s because they all leave when they turn 18. Duh.

We all had a really great time shooting “Senator Feelgood,” and it was a truly fun experience. Hopefully we’ll get some laughs when it debuts at the Rialto Theater in downtown Tacoma on May 6th!