Do you have your mark? — Will Springhorn Jr.

The Spirit Machine

Recently I booked my first narrative film through my agent. It was also my first film since last year (see Pablo on Wheels). Needless to say, I was stoked. Here’s a brief description of the film from the perspective of a Kickstarter page:

Spirit Machine Kickstarter Page

We started shooting on the 14th of August, and we finished on the 22nd. I've never had so much fun waking up before sunrise for 8 days straight.

I continued to grow out the widows-peak “Beiber” hairdo that I so carefully cultivated for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, in order to conform to the description of my character, Randy. I also grew out the beard. Randy also has a sixteen-year-old daughter, a wardrobe of Hawaiian shirts, and drives a truck. So I pretty much nailed it with this hair.

The amazing and talented Andrea! And her “dad,” who is terrified of killing the camera (crew).

The first shot of the first day was driving away from the beach in a beat-up (and beautifully art-directed) Ford truck. The truck was a stick shift, and they backed it up to the edge of the cliff overlooking Poplar Beach in Half Moon Bay. So all I had to do was not stall it, and not roll back into the dolly and rented camera and lenses and knock them off a thirty foot cliff. All of this was under the watchful eye-rolling gaze of my fake daughter. No pressure. I did stall on the first take, but not the second, and I also got very good at backing up to within six inches of the camera at an exact angle. (Precision driving, indeed).

Our first two days of shooting were on the beach in Half Moon Bay, and at the Yerba Buena Nursery in Woodside. Both locations were beautiful, both very cold in the morning and extremely hot as the day wore on.

Don't want to give away the plot too much, but the script required the sort of subtlety and focus that isn't normally needed for the industrials that I typically work on.

Here's a cool shot of the crew, when I didn't know half of their names or what they were doing. I know them all now. Oh boy, do I know them...

The Spirit Machine Crew, making it look like an accident.

Speaking of the crew, it only took a few days for my normal impish self to come out. There was constantly the question, “do you have your mark?” A perfectly innocent and reasonable question, to be sure, but for some reason the twelve-hour days and the early call times made this unbelievably hilarious to me. I had to eventually find and display to the camera crew pictures of famous Marks. Wahlberg, Ruffalo, McGuire. To my delight, Jeremy, the 1st AC, decided that this was a game that two could play. As the shoot went on, we progressed through several other names, leading us down the path of obscurity and silliness that is still reflected on our respective Facebook pages.

The second day we really got up against the clock with a shot that required me to pull the truck into frame and then have a conversation with Andrea, the aforementioned “daughter,” about what we were going to do next. It was the most dialogue that we had done so far. It had been a long, hot day, and we were getting everything set up in a real hurry. I took that frantic energy on in my performance, and really didn’t give what we were looking for. Timothy, the director, was very clear and patient explaining what he wanted, and I feel like that really set me up for success going forward. I got “dialed in” and was able to deliver the performance that we had talked about and rehearsed.

A screen capture of the sort of professionalism that was the hallmark of the Spirit Machine set.

Andrea, on the other hand, was dead awesome the entire time. She had the most difficult scenes, right on the knife’s edge of panic and catharsis the entire shoot, and she really brought it. Every time. So proud of her!

This young lady can bring it.  So proud! — This young lady can bring it. So proud!

We spent the last six days of the shoot in the basement of the Old Mint at 5th and Mission. 6am call times made for getting up well before the sun and walking to BART. It was beautiful, but a little surreal. To be inside all day, and then to come outside when the sun is already going down, can be really strange.

It seemed as if we really got into a stride once we got to the Old Mint. All of the equipment was right at hand, and we were all in relatively close quarters. The energy was really positive. Whenever things got frustrating, they were always solved with a breakfast burrito. But all joking aside, these people are pros. For sure.

The experience was one of pure joy. I certainly could have kept going for another few months! It was an interesting intermediate amount of time, eight days. Enough to really have some laughs and get to know each other, but not enough for anything to be monotonous or repetitive. I know that when the full feature gets made, and it will, it will be this guy, but until then, I will just be joyous that I was a part of Spirit Machine!

A shot where I look like an actor who isn’t going to screw up an entire film.