Told You So

Told You So was my second home made film.  Unlike The Contract, it could not be done in one shot. 

Believe it or not, when I'm deciding whether to make a film or not, it has to pass my 24 hour is-it-still-funny test.  I can come up with all kinds of crazy ideas that crack me up, but a day or two later and the magic is gone.  If the idea still makes me laugh, I go for it.  This one passed the test.

The story is based on the truth, that our 12 year old Jack Russell Terrier "BJ" likes Pat more than he likes me, although I'm the one that has taken care of him since he was 6 weeks old.  We'll save that saga for another time.  And Pat genuinely does nothing to encourage the dog's affection.  Anyway, so BJ hangs out with Pat in her office, and she is always accusing him of farting.  I go in there and I never smell anything, and Pat just gets more annoyed.

I set all the shots up beforehand, and got some makeup from the party store.  Of course I wanted to give the impression of a skull face at the end, not so sure how well that turned out, but... sometimes bad can be funny too.  I tried to make my post-nuclear blast hair look like a mottled mess but it doesn't end up looking that different from how I look before "the incident". 

BJ ad libbed and stole his scenes, no surprise to me.

To my disapointment I discovered that using the Flip camera, when you piece together the scenes of a film, they dissolve into one another instead of a straight cut.  That was a bummer to discover.  I think there are ways around it but I'm not that ambitious!

This was Pat's first acting gig where she had lines and we actually see her face.  I think she did a great job.  I wanted her to be like Jeff's wife on "Curb Your Enthusiasm", just pure violent anger.  I had to make mean faces at her from behind the camera while I was filming her, to try to get her more Angry.  You can see how she goes from mildly annoyed to very angry during her lines.  Oh and this was about one month before Pat learned of her niece's cancer diagnosis, and about six months before her own.