Break a Leg

 

Today I thought I'd actually put forth a minor effort (unlike last week) and get back to blogging for a change. It occurs to me that I'm the only FILF involved with Break A Leg, and as such might have some helpful insights into the mind of a father and family man that is also a world-famous internet celebrity.

Everyone must set priorities in life, even the incredibly wealthy and incredibly powerful, because we all share the same limitation: time. Time. Did I say that already? Yes, time. Damn, I keep saying it. I have a little bit of OCD I think, because sometimes I keep saying the same thing over and over until it sounds exactly right in my head.

Yes, time. The invisible thieving whore that steals not just one hour of sleep a year unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii, but also steals that most precious of commodities: time. Damn, I did it again.

So you know that feeling after you've oh, I don't know, read one of my blogs? Like you know you'll never have that 5 minutes back that felt like two hours? Right, that's what I'm trying to get at here. Time sometimes moves quickly and sometimes slowly, or we at least perceive it to speed up and slow down, but it never actually reverses and gives us a second chance at anything.

You know that other feeling in those microseconds after doing something incredibly stupid, so unbelievably idiotic that all you really need is less than a second to reverse it? Like the time you maybe stuck your tongue on a hot iron for no apparent reason at all, but even as you did it you were thinking "What in god's name am I doing?", but you just did it anyway because even though you hadn't done it quite yet your nerve impulses were already committed?

Well after having a child, those things don't happen that much. Children actually have the power to stop time in its tracks, yet still allow it to move at quadruple its normal rate. Take these examples:

• An infant crying for 4 hours straight.
• A toddler vomiting every 20 minutes for 8 hours.
• A two year-old in a race-car bed today, when only yesterday there was an infant in a bassinet.

Not only that, but they can also completely erase your memory, bad sci-fi  style. My wife and I cannot for the life of us remember what we did with our lives before our son was born, and that was only 2 1/2 years ago. We think food, movies, and perhaps even other people might have been involved, but nobody's too sure anymore. Our friends don't even seem to understand the question when we try to press them for information.

So to help you kids out that may someday be heading down this road, I put together a short list of time-management tips for the would-be parent. Take what you can and ignore the rest, every child is an individual and what works for me may not work for you:

1. Take lots of pictures, especially in those early months that you are prone to taking for granted. Twenty pictures per day for the first three months is par for the course, especially since all of your friends will want to look at each every photo.
2. Along that same line of thought, document every milestone. It’s so easy to forget! I read online that Gmail is a great tool for documenting those little things you may want to look up later, because it stores everything forever. Just create a mailing list with all of your friends and family and send out a daily log to each of them, that way you can just search the "Sent Items" folder when you're trying to remember when Junior first got a sip of Daddy's beer. If it's too hard to decide who to send the daily log to, just send it to your entire address book.
3. Grandparents are a great resource for advice, since they've probably been through all of this before. Leave a list of questions for them to answer while they're babysitting for you every Saturday night.
4. Television is not a great babysitter: it is a friend, mentor, and life coach. Introduce your little guy (or girl!) to all of the essentials early and often.

That's all for now! See you next week!

 

 

Happy Jenday, everybody!

 I have to keep saying that or else when I'm famous nobody will know.  Anyway...

 This week, and indeed for the past month or so, I've been gearing up for War.  I know I talk a lot about this, and in truth, this Jenday session is not about that.  This one is about something my co-star Jimmy Scotch has recently and indirectly touched upon, albeit from a state of unpossessing.  And that thing is Leisure Time.

 I am not the busiest person in the world.  I am single.  I am not in a relationship.  I work 9-5:30 M-F.  My hobbies are minimal.  I am the definition of Bachelor. 

But I do have this one thing I do.  I'm an actor.  

 This is not so much a choice as it is just something I have to do.  As I must eat, sleep, drink, and go #2, so must I act.  Every single person involved in Break A Leg has this compulsion.  They do it.  Not just because they love it.  Because they Need it.  You might as well say "Hey, why not try going without air, gravity and friction?" as trying to get one of us to stop.  And it is exhausting, have no doubt. 

 And when I'm not working on BaL, I have a couple different community theater companies that I love working with, and that love working with me.  Lately its been Sonoma County Rep, which is about a 45 minute drive depending on traffic.  Last year I did 4 shows with them, plus a couple of local shows and The Nutcracker, which I do every year.  Each show is usually about 3 months from the beginning of the rehearsal process to the final curtain.  Add to that working 8 hours a day, that's a good chunk of time.  I really cannot fathom being a parent and trying to live that kind of lifestyle.  My beret is off to those that do.

 So when a moment comes along where you can suddenly do anything you want without having to worry about being someplace in an hour, well those moments are worth savoring.

Last night (Tuesday) it occured to me that I had nothing I had to do.  I had meant to do laundry in preparation for War, but there is only one laundry machine at my apartment and we kinda lost the key to the door (don't ask).  I was supposed to meet up with a fellow pirate to work out supply logistics, but that wasn't going to be until later.  I had prepped and packed everything that I could possibly have done.  My room is a mess...but its ALWAYS a mess, so I feel no pressure to make it otherwise.  

And suddenly...I was hungry.

If you live near any microbrewing companies, I highly suggest you enjoy their patronage as soon as possible.  I live near a good one: The Marin Brewing Company.  Actually, I live in an area where micro brews are pretty popular, so I have access to a lot of good beer, but the Brew Co (as it is called in the parlance of our locale) is just a 5 minute drive from my house.  Its got a nice pub atmosphere: lots of wood and brass, eclectic paraphenalia on the walls, a crowd you can easily loose yourself in. Usually I'll only go if a group of people are going, because if you try to eat like that every day you'll end up rounder than a keg and short an unfortunate number of denaro.  But every once in a while, I like to go in there with a book, have a few beers order something of the starter menu, and just...leisure.  Leisure is not a conjugal verb (or a verb at all, for that matter) but if it was I like to think it would conjugate as "leise".  I just looked up "liese" on dictionary.com (today's word in umbrage) and the definition that came up was "under one's breath".  Yeah, I think that's right: a thing barely said, no effort made, the slightest of breath...liesure.

Now, at the Brew Co. they have wings.  You can either get them Buffalo style, or you can get them BBQ style.  By accident a few years back I got wings that were mixed in both sauces..and they were truly fantastic.  I always ask for them that way now, but sometimes they just bring me a plate with half of one and half the other.  This is ok, because if you eat them fast enough it's almost as good.

 

And as I always say: the beer helps.

 

I won't be around to post next Jenday, but the week after, I promise a photologue of War (as much as is decent, anyway)

 

Cheers, ya buggers! 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Unfortunately, like Dashiell says, this video has been a technical nightmare for us. I'm not sure why or how but what should've taken a couple of hours to shoot and edit turned into 10 hours of disaster. Yay! As you noticed, it's still not on our website, but it is on YouTube, so, check it out there.

NOTE: It's fixed! It's now on our website too. Yay. 

Now on to Dashiell's blog:

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Mint and Tahko's First Vlog - Day Spa!

Mint and Tahko are back and doing original material, and they're looking for you to give them suggestions on what to do next. In their very first "Mint's Mint Condition Web Video Blog Original Content Web Video Blog" or just "Day Spa" for short, they cover a variety of Genres from Reggae to the Blues.

Check it out right here, under "Episodes" or on YouTube, where as usual we ask for your love support and precise motor control to click and type our way into a 5 star rating and a vast sea of comments the likes the web has never seen.

Thanks everyone for watching and remember, if you like what you see, send in your suggestions and comments, Mint and Tahko are more then willing to make your musical and lyrical dreams come true (sometimes both).

-Dashiell

P.S. on a side note this weekend was interesting for a variety of reasons:

A. My right arms looks like someone took a cheese grater to it, Justin's does too, but to a slightly lesser degree. This is why you don't grind your arm against concrete with a short sleeve shirt on, but hey, these are the sacrifices you make when you're making an independent online sitcom right?

B. At one point during the shoot on saturday where Justin and I were horribly mutilated (See A.), we also had to halt the production due to Bee attack. Surprisingly Bee attacks plague 90% of film productions, this is important information for all you independent's out there. Here's a helpful tip for the future, don't chose a location where you have to jump repeatedly onto the ground when the location isn't so much ground as it is a Bee's nest/hive (do Bee's normally make Hives on the ground? I thought they were of the hanging variety...). This is generally not a good idea and usually leads to most takes ending with "Oh god! Bees!"

C. Don't ever, ever take shortcuts in filmmaking. Thinking "nah, we don't need to use our fancy highly priced camera, we can just use a laptop camera, it's supposed to look like a webcam right?" is probably one of the worst things you can do, as it could very possibly lead to you staying up till 4AM trying to edit something that should have been finished about 8 hours ago, slowly diminishing your will to live.

D. If you do decide to take shortcuts, be prepared to be mocked by the forces that be. For example, hypothetically, if you were to use a crappy laptop camera that made your editing night into a nightmare, when you go out to dinner, you'd most likely be witness to a scene such as the following. Two girls holding a very phallic balloon screaming at you to come into the bar because "there are like really hot girls in bikini's taking jello shots and it's soooo fun!!!" (I think it might be mandatory for drunk sorority-ish girls to speak with a minimum of three exclamation marks). This leaves you forced to reply with "Um... sorry, we have to edit", slowly diminishing your will to live.

Anyhoo, lesson learned!

... and I can't even really talk about it. Shucks.

I was going to talk today about the amazing shoot this weekend, and how much fun we had, and the astounding incompetence demonstrated by all. Unfortunately, nobody was truly incompetent (except for an incident with a missing firewire cable and a 3-hour delay waiting for video to download off the camera) and the shoots went relatively smoothly. Not only that, but the location we used is so amazing that even if Yuri did allow me to talk about it, he deserves the opportunity to reveal it. It’s that fucking amazing.

So instead I worked on a Google Map full of all of our shooting locations to date. Mainly full of my shooting locations to date, and I have invited Yuri to invite everyone else to pop in and add to it. You search the Google Map directory for Break A Leg Shooting Locations, or just click that "hyperlink" thingyhoo instead.

Also, here's a couple non-revealing pictures from the shoot.

Note the voluminous extras!

Voluminous in numbers, not in individual size. Except maybe a couple of them.

 

Note the red feathers being placed in my hair!

Note the dashing hat, and the man in the wetsuit...?

Editor's Note: If you haven't seen it yet (because I haven't had time to post the blog), what Chad speaks of below is the newest Conversation entitled, "Jen-Avenge" where Jennifer demands justice by challenging David to a duel.

Check it out on YouTube (where we ask you to please, please, please favorite, comment, rate, and subscribe) or right here on our website, under Episodes.

Enjoy and here's the blog:

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Well, as you can see, we've been busy here, at Break a Leg.  Let me tell you what the shooting of the recent conversation Jen-Avenged consisted of:

First, let me re-iterate that I am a whiner and let people know when I feel put-upon.  Now, I usually try to convey that I am kidding when I do this, because I really really am, but I know it doesn't always seem that way.  Anyway...

 It was early Saturday evening when I headed over to the Swambler house to work on the script and the fight choreography for the next day's shoot.  I was planning on spending the night at the house because we were going to get up really early to go shoot.  I pointed out to Yuri that I was giving up gaming with my pirate crew to come do this so he had to get good and drunk with me.  We worked on the script, we had some dinner, we had some drinks, and then we deicided to go play with swords.  The guys live half a block from the VA Hospital in San Francisco and they have a nice big lawn, so we decided to go there are work on our moves.

So this is the scene: a couple of increasingly less-sober guys standing on the edge of a government-owned lawn around ten at night weilding swords at each other.  I should point out that these swords are part of my personal collection and are just for show: they have no sharp edges.  They are also pretty shiney and fancy looking, because you have to have style.

Suddenly a bright light flashes and a voice over loud speaker says in a not-exactly polite way "Drop the weapons and get down on the ground!" We all just kind of froze. The increasingly impolite voice continued his mantra and I heard Yuri say "Is he serious?"  Turns out he was.  Two other vehicles showed up, not black and whites like first, but a couple of trucks with only marginally less official looking gentlemen than our primary spokesman.  They told us we could sit up, took our IDs and asked us just what the hell we thought we were doing.  We confessed to being actors and were working on a scene.  Some of the iron came out of their postures at this and one guys even confessed to having done some bit roles with a few community theater outfits.  I was afraid he was going to start trying to re-enact one of his lines.  Finally they let us go with the belated blatantly obvious admonition of "don't swordfight on government property."

So we went back inside and wilded the night away.

Suddenly somebody was shaking me.  Wow, was it 5am already?  Yes.  Yes, it was.  We got up, showered and generally prepared to get on with the days work.  My mind still wasn't quite awake at this point.  It would only occur to me later that getting only two hours of sleep before a physically demanding shoot was a really dumb thing to do.  We rolled out, got coffee and pastries, and headed up to the Marin Headlands to get to work. 

 If you have never had the opportunity to explore the Marin Headlands, you are missing out on some seriously awesome childhood fun and some pretty amazing vistas.  See, there's all these bunkers and stuff left over from World War II.  There are also some absolutely stunning views of the Bay Area.  It's all a National Park so it's open to the public to go and check out and take pictures of to put in the scrap book.

What it ISN'T open for is people to stand around thinking about filming something for an independent project.  After having been there for about an hour or so, while we're still working on choreography and running up and down stairs, before we've even shot a single second of footage: a park ranger shows up and gives us a ticket for something along the lines of Conspiring To Perform Actions Requiring A Permit Without Having A Permit.  Which is, to use the indecadent street patois of Jimmy Scotch: curse word.

So, we thought about where else we might go do the scene.  I suggested the rolling foothills of Terra Linda, a suburb of San Rafael.  After stopping for some food and sunscreen, and then tromping around in poison oak for about an hour (good call, Jen) we couldn't find a place that worked.  Then Justin aka Chase suggested a place he knew in the Novato just up the street from where he grew up.  This, Finally, turned out to be a great place to shoot. 

We shot for 5 hours.  By the end of that time I could barely lift the 10lb saber I was swinging so wildly at David.  At various points throughout the shoot, Yuri almost impaled Dashiell, Mint felt like he was going to throw up, I could barely stand let along swing a sword, and Tacho started trying to hit on a turkey.

Editor's Note: I did almost impale Dashiell and it was a little terrifying. I was standing under the tree branch and he was sitting on top of it. I had the sword out, waiting to rehearse some of the moves when Dash decides it'd be a good idea to SWING down toward me -- not realizing I'm there. As he swings, we both realize in the span of a milisecond that the tip of the sword I'm holding is pointed right at his belly. At literally, the last second, I manage to move the sword sideways so it grazes his side. We laughed and joked but for a good moment there I was in mild shock because I think I came, literally, within a second of running him through.

Ohh, swords are fun!

Don't try this at home, kids. Back to your regularly scheduled blog...

 Then it was time to go home.  By this time we were so far from where we originally intended to shoot that we were actually closer to my house.  But Smart me: I had ridden with somebody else thinking it would be easier to shoot in the city and then just grab my car and drive home.  Now we had to drive for 20 minutes just to get to where my house is, then another 30 minutes to get back to the Swambler house where my car was parked, then drive another 30 minutes to get back home.

Blessedly, there was beer when I got there.

 And now, your weekly EvsG...