This week’s LRR video came to us from the sketch comedy ether that is fan-submitted scripts. Starting way back in our early years -the dark days of 2003- we’ve always been open to scripts that we didn’t write. These, usually unsolicited, scripts not only give us a chance to knock off for a week, writing-wise, but they bring ideas we often haven’t thought of. As an added bonus, they present us with whole new production challenges, because they are written without our in-built knowledge of what makes a script easy for our workflow. What I’m saying is, they force us to try new things.
In the case of this week’s video, Spare Us, Gus (bonus points for a good pun title!) it meant finding a new shooting location and some unique props. Despite being largely identical to regular asparagus, white asparagus is considerably harder to come by in our neck of the woods, so we actually weren’t able to follow through on the unique props point. As mentioned in the above video, we’ve shot “meeting” videos before, and we usually use a room at the local university, since that’s where these groups tend to meet. But this particular group of oddball activists needed something more grassroots, like a basement or someone’s garden shed.
Turns out the “activity room” in James’ apartment building was not only never, ever used, but looked just like the sort of place the character of Gus would rally his pro-asparagus troops. Well, initially pro-asparagus troops anyway.
All in all it was a pretty standard shoot, so here’s some notes if you’re ever interested in submitting a script to us:
? It has to not suck. The suckiness is subjective to our taste.
? You own your script. We own the video, but you keep whatever rights to the script you desire.
? It is possible (and often quite likely) that we do not use your script. Please don’t take it personally. There’s any number of reasons that it might not work for us, and we’ll usually tell you.
? You always get credit for your contribution, even if it’s just inspiring us to write something different.
? We love getting scripts! Send them to [email protected]
