This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of working on yet another project with the Urban Mountain Media folks and director Harrison Reeder. The short film, aptly titled Guy Meets Girl, features an aspiring screenwriter (my character) who enlists the aid of a fellow writer (Billie Jo Konze) to help with a typical ”guy meets girl” script he wants to write, and they argue over how the story should play out. During the course of the film, the story they’re writing jumps from genre to genre and is played out onscreen.

The first part of Saturday’s shoot took place at the wonderful Café Oliver, which currently inhabits the former location of Acadia Café at Nicollet and Franklin. In addition to being extremely friendly, accomodating and supportive of our scrappy little film shoot, the owner also whipped us up some incredible apple crisp on the house. We had lunch there as well, and it was very good. They have won us as customers. And hey, they’re in walking distance of my new apartment!

Harry always runs an efficient set, and the Urban Mountain crew is good at what they do. This shoot was a lot of fun, particularly the “action” sequence, which will hopefully make me look more masculine than I really am. Also, there’s the horrifically stupid (in a good way) “foreign film” chunk of the film. See my costume below. Note the incredibly stupid drawn-on mustache. During that scene, as with the other parody segments, we were all worried that passersby and café patrons would think we were being serious.

We also couldn’t stop laughing at the intentionally ridiculous “porn” segment which we shot at a crew member’s apartment later that day.

“Here’s your meat lover’s pizza. You ordered extra sausage?”

We’re going to shoot the rest of it later this month. With aliens!

[Photos by Jess Dalbec.]