Movies You Made: “Cleetus Redbone: Apparition Apprehension”
March is Movies You Made month at Go Into The Story where we feature the work of some independent filmmakers.
Today: Cleetus Redbone: Apparition Apprehension.
Production notes from the movie’s director David McClellan:
essentially this was shot in 2 days at 2 locations — all with friends and people in my circle of filmmakers that I know. We were going for a web series type of thing — with Cleetus and Stump in a different job /situation every episode — pretty standard comedy fare. We quickly realized that this was not going to “go viral” any time soon — so as luck would have it — through one of the people who helped out on the set of Cleetus we ended up getting funding for a ULB feature (Death Factory) which we have spent the better part of last year making.
Stephen Durham plays Cleetus and is the creator of this character/series. We met at a buddies poker game and I ended up cutting and delivering our first movie “Bloodlines” for which I also received a Producer credit (it needed a ton of work). That was sold to Think Film (now defunct — and of course we got hosed…) in 2007 and distributed through Blockbuster (also defunct — and hosed). We have been working together ever since as a writing/producing team and Death Factory is our second feature together which I am co-director as well as co-writer and editor. Death Factory is cut and out at our sales agents as of yesterday.
My buddy Matt Mosher was the DP on Cleetus — we were neighbors when I lived in Hollywood — and I cut some stuff for him. Shot using his Panasonic HVX200 P2 camera with some of my porno lights and a few rented Kinos. Porno lights is an advanced industry term meaning “shitty left overs and old studio lights pieced together from years of people not putting away gear properly”. You throw all that together in some old production cases with some black wrap and gels and bam — your porno light collection is nearly complete.
The visual effects toward the end of the film were done by another of our poker buddies — brothers Rajeev and Elan Dassani who own Master Key Productions. Great guys who do visual effect work for film and TV both here and in Vancouver.
Casting was done by Debbie Sheridan — who is Stephen’s fiancée. Live sound was done by my other writing partner Martyn Eaden — who never did sound before. I just stuck a boom pole in his hand and slapped some cans on his head and told him what to do for 2 days.
The locations were Stephen’s house for a half day of shooting and then John’s house for the second day of shooting. John plays the actor with the haunted house and is, of course a friend of ours as well — though sadly, not a poker player.
I directed it, did all the editing, sound design, mixing and color stuff -
So i guess the moral of the story is — if you want to do this sort of thing — just grab all your friends and go do it. It helps to have lots of poker buddies and talented neighbors who are willing to do favors and assist you for free. If we didn’t do Cleetus — we would not have raised the money to make Death Factory — which was a script that Stephen and I had written and been trying to raise money to make as a follow up to Bloodlines ever since that one sold in 2007.
Here is the 9 minute short film: Cleetus Redbone: Apparition Apprehension.
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I asked each of the filmmakers in this month’s series to answer this question: What inspired you about this particular story to make it a movie? David’s answer:
We thought it was a fun and funny concept and that Cleetus and Stump would be great characters that everyone could somewhat identify with. Like Laurel and Hardy — or Abbot and Costello. It felt like a classic idea that had legs — so we went with it.
Here is the trailer for the movie Death Factory
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Tomorrow: Another Movie You Made.
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