Evil League of Evil

Bad Horse put out the call: the Evil League of Evil was seeking applicants. A rare opportunity to get on-side with the Thoroughbred of Sin. Many people rose to the challenge. And I helped one of those people. Here’s the app:

Evil League of Evil Application: The Embezzler from Jarratt Gray on Vimeo.
This is all a spin-off from internet musical Dr Horrible, created by Buffy-maestro Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike. When Dr Horrible is released to DVD, ten or so ELE applicants will round out the package. The open call was an invitation to compete for one of those spots.
JB saw his chance and devised a heck of a script around the Embezzler character. He gathered together a crew of amigos and amigas to make it all happen. A lot of effort went into prep, and a lot into editing etc. afterwards, but it still felt like the day of the shoot was when it all happened – always to remember, shooting a film takes a lot of effort. I was recruited to play second-string character Devil’s Advocate, and when we did a script readthrough in the morning I took the opportunity to stick my nose in about how the story resolved. To my delight, the whole crew managed to usefully find a shared creative energy – sometimes too many cooks will spoil the broth, but here it felt like every idea contributed moved us closer to a solid final product. I note that I am co-credited on the script, but to be honest, it’s very close to JB’s original, and most of the changes originated from other people – my main contribution was finding a good structure for a three-minute bit, and even then I had lots of help.
It was cool to have Jarratt behind the camera. its the first time we’ve worked together on a film since ’99 I think, and his expertise has grown – he does this sort of thing for a living after all. The rest of us could have put our heads together and got the material down to about 3′ 15″, but the only way we would have made the required 3 minutes was by cutting out jokes. Jarratt was able to apply years of experience to slice it down to 3 minutes without losing anything important, finding just the right way to compress information. That is highly impressive to me.
Directing was shared between everyone, even me for a bit (is this the first time I’ve directed since the nonsensical Morgue’s World project of ’92?) and in fact everyone pitched in all over the place. Lovely crew made a very busy shoot a delightful experience. I had some doubts when I arrived in the morning that it would all get done but it did, and while it was hard work it wasn’t unpleasant. Good fun times were had, pizza was scoffed, and baby Hurricane made numerous behind-the-scenes appearances.
Speaking of Baby Hurricane, here’s his application, the work of Debz (the assessor in the Embezzler vid) and Matt C (who spent most of the shoot wandering the streets with the leetle super hero). It’s a treat as well. Good luck to them both!

6 thoughts on “Evil League of Evil”

  1. I have to admit, I think I would hire the evil Embezzler based on this spirited application. 🙂

  2. I think the timeline of the shooting day is worth mentioning.
    Intended timeline:
    Start at 10am, film in the middle of the day (when everyone was available), finish most of the filming by 4pm, with extra shooting with a reduced crew after that.
    Actual timeline:
    Readthrough 10amish.
    Making costumes, gathering props, tweaking/rewriting script 11am – 3pm
    Bulk of Filming 3pm – 6.10pm
    Extra stuff after that.
    When it got to 2pm and we hadn’t started shooting I was a little nervous about getting it all done in one day. While we did have the option to do some more filming the following Saturday, that would mean editing on the day of filming which would not be easy.
    I was very impressed at how quickly filming of the main scene progressed (in my absence).
    I was also very impressed by how successfully the various suggestions and ideas were drawn together into a final script. I think this was helped hugely by the fact that it was JB’s script, his character, his submission (and his apartment). We were all there to help him achieve his vision, so we were pitching our ideas to a particular audience (JB), and his sayso was what we were aiming for.

  3. I also liked the incremental step process we had for locking in the script. A suggestion would come up, and it would be locked in. As a step on a path to an ending it sometimes implied further story, other times was a jumping off point for a number of possibilities. We had to back-track a few times to get what we wanted, but there were a few defining moments I can remember when a suggestion surfaced and we recognised that it was a key plot point, something that needed to be in the script. That, combined with the fact that we were starting with an excellent and complete script by JB (for a 6 or 7 minute film) gave us what we needed to succeed.
    Examples
    ‘talk to my lawyer’. When the suggestion popped up that the Devil’s Advocate could be on the phone, that helped alleviate a number of concerns whilst accomodating the very strong desire of many parties to keep the DA in there.

  5. Yeah.
    Part of the running around on the day was based on the fact that I thought we were cutting the “Lairs” scene, so hadn’t prepared anything for that. I think we actually started filming about 2pm, but yeah, I was worried we wouldn’t get it all shot. It was useful that we didn’t fluff around much between takes. If a take was bad, we knew it, and we just went straight back and did it again. If we wanted to try something a bit different, we just did it. That probably contributed to us having over an hours worth of footage.
    It was great fun, but man was it tiring.

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