The Sunny Side of the Street

Enci Box just reposted one of our favorite Fringe promos on Bitter-Lemons.com today; I thought I’d use the opportunity to provide a little “behind the scenes” information.

First off, this is the only promo not filmed in Hollywood (shudder). It was a rainy day in December 2009 – we all congregated very early in a wonderful space near the Downtown Arts District to shoot. The idea was to produce a promo that featured local artists. Obviously, this one was slightly challenging to coordinate, if for no other reason that artists usually don’t like 7am on a Saturday.

Ken Peterson, who directed the promo, made a whole lot of boiled eggs. I don’t know why I remember this so vividly – there were A LOT of boiled eggs. So much so that the artists involved finally needed to ask me to stop pushing the eggs on them between takes. Director: “Cut, reset!” Ben: “Anyone want a boiled egg?”

Julisa Smith, the hidden talent behind the Blue Freak (the most playful and fun loving of the bunch) was there right on time. Let me just say, Julisa is an amazingly good sport. We have dragged her around LA in spandex across so many shoots and events and she was just amazingly easy and wonderful the whole time. Cast her in your next feature film, Mr. Scorsese.

A couple other critical artists weren’t so prompt – leading to some interesting “oh god, what now?” questions and one Festival Director pathetically standing in the pouring rain peeking into every car racing by for our missing performers.

Dave McKeever had bought the new camera and constructed a makeshift dolly out of a piece of wood and a handtruck we had just purchased at Home Depot – worked like a charm. We actually refer to this promo as the “dolly shot” promo when speaking of it.

The song is the same as the title of the promo: “The Sunny Side of the Street” an oldie but goodie. The Petrojvic Blasting Company (amazing band) actually pre-recored the song in the kitchen five minutes before we started shooting. Two takes and we had it – the acoustics were actually surprisingly good, I imagine we will have more kitchen-based recording studios in the future.

And so the dolly began … past the band, into Scarlett’s feather dance and, past the Kinetic Theory contortionist, across LA Contemporary Dance/KDub Dance, beyond the folks of Need Theater and Rogue Artist Ensemble, and finally back to the band again. The mirror (which was initially a pesky problem) turned into an interesting “artifice moment” when you saw the Fringe production team (Ken, Dave, Stacy, Ben) reflected with the band moving to their second position behind us. Brecht would be so proud.

You also might notice (this promo is worth a few re-watches) that two of the band members have switched instruments in the final shot. Took us a little too long to figure this out in the editing room.

It was a pleasure to produce this promo on a rainy LA morning in December. We ended up with a whole lot of boiled eggs.

Ben