“Art Sale” was the film that I made with my family. My dad was my Director of Photography. My brother, aunt and uncle served as our production assistant and extras. It was shot in my Aunt’s art gallery. It remains one of my personal favorites. It’s short, to the point and lots of fun.
I remember the day I wrote the script. I was riding high on life. I had just endured 3 months of doing very little but working tirelessly on the thing I loved most; making films. I was sitting in an editing bay waiting Avid to export my first documentary. I had just gotten the news that my first short film “Wedding Night” had been accepted into the Waterfront Film Festival. But all of that was about to come to an end. I had no projects on the horizon. So I did what I do whenever that happens. I created something for myself.
I wanted to do something completely different from “Wedding Night.” That film had been a moody drama about two people who were looking forward to their life together. In contrast I set out to make a comedy less than 5 minutes.
The story started with the setting. My aunt’s art gallery was on the square of a town in central Indiana that still seems right out of “Hoosiers”. I started my script about a man offering to buy a painting for a woman. In about 20 minutes I had scribbled what would be more or less the finished script on the back of a scrap of paper I had lying around.
A good friend of mine from high school was had recently graduated from Butler University with a degree in theater. I convinced her and another actor friend of hers to act for me. They were perfect but they were only available for two hours on the day I could get the gallery. (It was on this shoot that I learned how many more shots I could get with the camera was on a crane.) By the time the actors arrived and we had gotten through rehearsals we were quickly loosing our light outside. If we waited too much longer we wouldn’t be able to match any of our footage. We needed to be outside and outside fast.
We quickly relocated all our gear outside to the alley I was set on shooting in. We got our master wide shot but by then the light was gone (well blinding actually). Thinking quickly we grabbed all the umbrellas we could find and used them to shade our actors. We looked pretty silly in the middle of a 90 degree day holding up umbrellas in an alley way but it all worked out and you’d never know the difference.
We got everything shot on time including a few bonus shots. I had the film edited by the time the sunset and made it to a barbecue that evening with a copy of the film we’d shot not 6 hours earlier.
I eventually made a few minor tweaks; adding music, refining the sound etc. but it more or less remains the same film I wrote in that quiet editing room. So for the first time available to the public in it’s entirety is “Art Sale.”
