Article Contributed on: 9/24/2007 9:29:24 AM
When I first moved back to Boulder after attending film school at NYU, I had the feeling that things weren't going to be quite the same. For one, I was still living with my parents. Secondly, the release of my thesis film had not been immediately been followed by the wave of studio offers and directing contracts that I had imagined. I had no car, few friends in town, and to make matters worse, shortly thereafter
Arrested Development was canceled. The whole world was falling apart!
After quite a few months of sitting around all day in my underwear and flirting with depression by binging on
Ingmar Bergman films, I knew it was time to start another project. I had a furtive meeting with my dad (
Vic Shayne) who has been my co-writer for years - and we decided that a web sitcom was the way to go. We'd had some success on
YouTube with a couple of short comedy videos earlier in the year, and one of my NYU films had just aired on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) after it had been discovered online. We put our heads together and for once we didn't hear a hollow noise - instead we came up with a show idea that I knew all too well - a comedy about a promising (and dashingly handsome) young filmmaker who is forced to move back home with his parents after college when his feature film deal falls to pieces.
The title:
Lowered Expectations.
We began production on the first episode this summer. The cast consisted of my parents, my younger sister
Tasha (a student at CU), my good friend
Tyler Mark,
Rachel Griego (a film student) and myself. I shot half of the episode in Boulder and flew to New York to shoot the other half with several very talented actors I had worked with on previous films - notably
Erik Gratton,
David Ovies and
Sara Friedlander.
The entire production was run-and-gun, on a zero budget, with a two-man crew - one man of which was myself - the other my friend
James Darling who worked as cameraman and was visiting from New York. Shooting a film this way is a lot of fun because it frees you from some of the stress of managing a larger team, however there were occasionally some ripples in our plans.
For example - at the beginning of
Episode 01,
Josh (that's me!) arrives in Boulder from New York. I'm supposed to step off the Airport Shuttle in front of the
St. Julien Hotel where my sister is picking me up. So, early on a Saturday morning, we go down to the hotel. We set up the whole shot, waiting around for about 20 minutes for the shuttle to arrive with everything carefully planned. We see the shuttle coming down the block. I signal to the cameraman to start rolling and hide behind a fountain (so that I can step out and it will appear as though I've just stepped off the shuttle). However, just as the shuttle is arriving, one of those obscenely large black SUV limosines starts to back out of the
St. Julien driveway right toward my cameraman. It was either get the shot or wind up flat as a pancake. The choice was obvious -- to the cameraman at least. He leapt out of the way and the shot was ruined. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
From there, we sent the footage to our editing lab (my room), had the original score composed by
Erik Desiderio (an NYU friend of mine in L.A.), held a test-screening at a local theatre (my basement) and then sent it off to our distributors (me again) and received worldwide release (the internet). Within hours, we were all over the internet. People were watching from as far away as Bangladesh and as close as Kalamazoo. The demand was overwhelming - we had to produce more episodes or face international riots, boycotts and hunger-strikes!
Rallying our crack-team, we leapt into production on
Episode 02 - Easter Island. This episode signaled a big step up in production values for the show.
Jason Lange, a Boulder cinematographer, came aboard as our official director of photography and we were able to spend a bit more time planning out our shots and working on production design. The episode featured both yourhub's own
Brit Horvat and giant home-made
Easter Island costumes.
The world had received their second episode, but still they craved more and more! We received demanding emails from the international community - letters from Tokyo, from Vienna, from Longmont all saying things like: "
When is Episode 03 going to appear?" and "
What about Episode 03?" or as one particularly anxious fan wrote, "
Make Episode 03 quickly or I will resign from the head of my multi-national corporation to become a puppeteer. I am very important and this will throw the economy into a shambles. Please, don't make me do this!"
The last one had us worried - we hurried to comply, but our ideas were getting bigger and bigger. Remember the stock scare over the last few weeks ? We believe that was because post-production took us so long. You see,
Episode 03 was quite the bear post-production-wise - it involved some complex animation (cartoon planes and clouds and blue-screened 1930s pilots and such) and a bit of fancy editing tricks. But it's finally done and can be viewed online. Our gift to the national economy.
We hope you enjoy and try not to be too demanding about Episode 04 -- there are so many of you and so few of us -- it will come soon, we promise! Thanks for watching.
Episode 3, the Dream Analyst, just premiered on the Web on Sept. 22. featuring special guest star
Vanessa Barcus and a special farewell to our comedy hero -
Tyler Mark.
You can view the current episodes online at:
www.floatinglightbulbfilms.com/loweredexpectations