Perrita Perdida: Production Slate

Recently I’ve been editing a short film. The piece, called Perrita Perdida, was written, directed, and recorded by my good friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer Jason Outenreath here in Nicaragua. I thought it might be cool to share a little about the project and generate some interest even though it’s still not finished.

A little over a month ago I went to Camoapa (Jason’s site) with my camera and tripod and we shot this little movie in one long and tiring day. Jason had written the script and sent it to me some time before, so I had an idea of what to expect, but like any production, we had a fair amount of challenges to deal with.

And like any production, the biggest challenges were posed by the actors and the weather. We shot the first few scenes in the morning with minimal problems, took a break for lunch, and were planning to finish filming in the afternoon and early evening, which we did, but there was a period of time when we thought we might not be able to…

The script was short, thank gawwd (about five pages long), which meant that the cast was also going to be extremely small; there were only five actors involved, BUT, during lunch, as we were preparing to shoot the only scene that involved conversational dialogue, the girl who was cast in that scene called Jason to say that she didn’t want to do it. This was maybe an hour before we were scheduled to shoot.

Qué mala onda, right? Correcto. SO, obviously we were kind of pooping our pants for a while, scrambling to find a replacement. To be fair, it was Jason doing most of the scrambling since all of the actors were from his site and he knew them—I was just living the dream, along for the ride— anyway, he called our lead actor Diethdrich to see if he could help us out.

Diethdrich, playing the part of the smooth leading man on AND off camera, assured us that there would be no problem and that he could whip up a replacement easy. And sure enough, at the snap of his fingers (after he made a few calls of course) a replacement actress stepped out of a taxi and began looking over her lines.

Now when I talk about “actors” this by no means is to insinuate that these people had any kind of prior acting experience. I really just mean that for that particular day, they had to act in our movie.  This absolute lack of acting experience made the job of directing quite a challenge so I tried to help Jason out as much as possible.

Okay, so we have our two actors. They’ve rehearsed their lines a bit. We’ve got the equipment ready: the camera, the tripod, the microphones, the headphones, the cables. We set out for the location. As we arrive on the street corner Jason had picked out for the scene (depicting a chance encounter between the protagonist and a female acquaintance, perhaps ex-novia), we hear a loud thunderclap announce itself from the hills. The dark clouds advance quickly and a few moments later it’s pouring down rain. We take shelter under the roof of a nearby house, the four of us, maldiciendo our bad luck. There was no rain in the script.

We waited there by that house for a good 45 minutes, hoping for the rain to stop. It’s times like these, the apparent low points, which can really be the defining moments of a production and ultimately an entire project. You can let the setbacks get you down and watch as your negative attitude spreads like black ink in a glass of water, or you can look at the situation as an opportunity to exercise some creativity, improvise a bit.

We went for the latter. From the stoop Jason started getting some cool shots of the rain: the clouds, a kid on a bike, a guy on a horse, the water dripping from rooftops… We started talking about how to work the rain into the story. For our patience and tenacity, the fates rewarded us: a beautiful arching rainbow right over the house we were using as shelter.

So we changed the scene a bit. Instead of running into her as they both turn a street corner, Diethdrich walks through the rain and happens past the acquaintance sitting in the house. She calls him over and they have a short and awkward conversation. Diethdrich continues on. This all happens under the arch of the rainbow.

There were some other challenges later on that day…all the walking we had to do to the different locations in the city, the crazy dog we had to try and get to act, the race against the rapidly diminishing light in the evening…but the rain was definitely the defining moment of the production. I’m proud of the way we were able to spin a potentially debilitating setback in our favor, and hopefully end up with a better movie for it.

So right now at this moment I’m finishing up the final cut of the film. It will be the third cut (unless Jason has other crazy ideas he hasn’t told me yet, in which case there might be a fourth). Like production, the editing process is often times a big puzzle as well. I originally edited the film to this great salsa tune called Tu Cariñito but we realized that if we ever want to submit this project to a festival, we’ll either need to buy the rights to the song (on a Peace Corps budget??) or come up with some original music.

So I took it upon myself to write some tracks. For the last 3 weeks I’ve been recording these little songs on my laptop in the evenings. The featured instrument in these songs is a seven-note finger piano (kalimba) that I brought with me to Nicaragua, but I also used a simple thumb flute made of cane (which I also brought with me) and found items like a cracker wrapper and an old wine bottle. For the majority of the beats, I just kinda tapped on my computer.  You can listen to the tracks here.

The editing of Perrita Perdida will be finished for good in the next week or so, then we’re going to send that final cut to the States around Christmastime for sound mixing and color correction. We’re looking at getting the finished product back sometime in the beginning of February. We’re pretty excited to see how it turns out!

Watch the trailer on YouTube! --> Perrita Perdida (Lost Dog) Trailer
The premiere at the 2012 Palm Springs International ShortFest