Owen and
Kris, playing all the roles, and doing all the massive amount of editing which would be necessary. Other friends of theirs heard about this idea and wanted in. Soon enough interest had gathered so that the original idea of two people remaking a film of many characters had dissolved. Enough talent had drawn together and it was decided that we would write our own film.
This is an interesting assortment of guys, with varying degrees of memorization skill, wit, and discipline. Unfortunately we didn't vary in gender, so in order to shoot the few scenes with female roles, we had to convince girlfriends to enter in. Scouting talent would have been much more difficult and time consuming. There are only three women in the film, Joe's ex-girlfriend (though he was pretty whipped at the time) and mine... Cripes, doesn't anything last..? ...And Jenny, who's still with Kris. Anyhow, we definitely needed a female once, and Angie (Joe's) reluctantly filled that role. Later on Christine (mine) started hanging around more and even though it wasn't necessary we tossed her in a couple of scenes to shut her up for a while. (If we weren't still friends I wouldn't say that) Jenny was around when we needed a miscelaneous crowd shot for the ending sequence, and she was Ian's make-up artist for the big business deal scene. (Calm down, Ian, it's not like I posted the picture of you in a dress...)
The writing phase of MOSS lasted about a year. As high school students, we'd write bits and sketches during class. About two thirds of the film came from
Ian and I in the back of pre-calc, so we gave Chris (the teacher) a cameo appearance. Anyway, after we thought we had a good two hours worth of sketches, Ian and I sat down one evening to arrange them into a plot. This was pretty difficult work, as our bits were all across the board. Several scenes were cut at that point since they simply couldn't be worked in, at least not in any clever manner.
Next came the year-long process of shooting. Summer break, some weekends, some after school, some during school, we slowly collected in order of what would be convenient to shoot at the time the shots we needed. Over the course of this process several scenes changed significantly, some were replaced, and some dropped altogether. A few artifacts of this on-the-fly rewriting remain in the film.
Now I use the term "film" loosely, because I'm in no financial position to shoot a full-length movie on professional material. No, what I wound up with was 20 hours of video tape in various formats (you'd think we could at least have used the same types of cameras throughout) waiting to be whittled down to an hour and a half.
Most of those twenty hours were botched takes, of course, and ten minutes worth of them were funny enough to tack on the end. Actually about half the footage we shot would have been excellent outtakes, but no audience wants to sit through that.
I was done producing and directing (and acting here and there) and since I'm the one with the full-blown video editing suite in my basement I was also the editor. Actually I'd began editing about halfway through the shooting process, but since we didn't shoot in sequence, I'd run into scenes we hadn't done yet and quit for a while. Our goal was to have the film completed before graduation so we could show it to anyone in our school who was interested, as its big-screen debut. (Large group instruction rooms make great theatres!) So, one whole day shy of the deadline, I was done. Anyone who's ever used linear editing equipment with no time keys knows it's a lot of sleepless nights before an hour and a half comes together.
When the movie was done, I was a bit disappointed in its lack of theatrical flare. Orchistration was there but not teriffic, environmental shots were usually not possible, the audio was as noisy as you'd expect second-generation VHS to be, and the 4:3 screen ratio and overall flow of the film makes it feel more like a long television show than a feature motion picture. So, after less than a year of recovery, I've brought it upon myself to do another motion picture...