So this episode had its moments…
For this episode I enlisted our fight choreographer Aaron Alexander to play the martial arts instructor to Adam Matrix. I had always wanted to shoot a training montage, as I hate how, in current martial arts movies, the fighter is already an expert with nothing new to learn, which flies in the face of even old-school Shaw Brothers kung fu films where the hero wouldn’t be strong enough to fight the main baddie until he became a better fighter himself. I shot those sequences in Bear Creek in Austin, but I should have scouted the area better, as we were eaten alive by bugs of every kind, and especially and particularly chiggers. I looked at the aesthetics of the location, but didn’t consider the time we shot at, the weather conditions (hot and humid), or the possible bugs that might be confronted. I did my best to keep the cast and crew happy, but this was probably the some of the most difficult days of the entire shoot. As always I was blessed with great actors to work with and a great crew and no one complained. I owed everyone pretty big for this day. Still do!
The scenes in the police chief’s office was shot in the supply closet of a local high school! We cleared out the closet, and then we decked out the desk with supplies from said closet. The camera angles and lenses made it seem like there was much more room than there actually was which was pretty cool. I wish I could have shot in an actual office location, but we made the best of it, which is really the primary challenge of making an extremely low budget/no budget film; how to get around the limitations of working with no money! But really, I wish I could have crowdfunded this, rather than make a go of it this way, but I would do that for my next production.
Michael Moore Productions 