The Legend

Evidently a small percentage of my readership wants posts that don’t involve lingerie, and I’m here to oblige. That previous sentence will be the only reference to lingerie. Though this opening paragraph will likely be enough to cause my blog to come up in a lingerie search on Google.

On the opposite side of the spectrum from lingerie is The Legend. In the remote chance that some future employer would find this blog while searching for his name, I’ll simply refer to him as The Legend. In fact, this was the secretive name we used for the movie we made concerning his storied life. In fact because I wanted to keep the movie a secret from The Legend, none of you have likely heard any mention of it. He did unfortunately discover it before it was completed, and if I ever get my hands on the mole that told him . . .

The Legend is a fitting name for the man. He’s that guy that everyone knows that seems pretty close to perfect. Johnny Football Hero, Peter Priesthood, the complete deal. Some have claimed that I have a mancrush on him, but this is in fact a misconception. He’s not my type, even in the limited field of mancrushes. But I did decide to make a movie about his life, to explain The Legend to the world. I did some extensive research, then made up stuff to fill the missing dramatic holes in the story.

Personally I think it may be my best movie yet. Not exactly high praise, but I think it’s true. With every movie I have certain goals, and this one had the following:

1. The return of the narrative. I actually wanted this movie to be a story. Having a plot? Silly, I know. But I set out to tell a story, not just give an arbitrary sequence of events. I think this was pretty successful. There’s even a plot twist!
2. Special effects. I have always avoided scenes that would be difficult. This is pretty necessary considering I make movies with no budget and on random Saturday mornings. But I decided there were a couple effects I wanted and they ended up working well.
3. Rotating cast. Because no one person could play The Legend, I had 9 different people play him. I’d like to point out that I had this idea before I’m Not There. I was slightly upset that their movie made it to the theater before mine did, but what can you do.
4. On location. I normally film in just a location or two. It’s so much easier, in terms of getting your cast their and for controlling light conditions and audio. I didn’t travel to Morocco or anything, but I filmed in a greater variety of locals to further the plot.
5. Extras. I've always wanted to do commentary tracks, special features etc. This time I finally did a bit. A bonus theme song performed by ChrEte, a special Youtube compilation, the Buckeye Blast movie (The Legend started the charity) and a number of other extras actually gave people a reason to buy the DVD after seeing the feature presentation.
6. The voiceover experience. I wanted to try doing more narration. I’m usually pretty dialogue dependent, and I wanted more wide shots with voiceover. I thought this would make things easier, but in reality in made things harder. I also ended up using a bit too much, but you live and learn.

The movie ended up being 30 minutes, which I think is a good length. Though it is too long to post on Youtube, the 60 minutes film I made last year was a bit much for my ADHD audience. We debuted the film back in March to pretty positive reviews. Even The Legend himself gave us the thumbs up. And if he likes it, it must be good.