Film: “Tea Man, Steep!” Intro & Story
Written By Eliaz Rodriguez
May 12th, 2010
Wood Sugars Film is focused on producing films with great stories. Our motto is “Entertainment 1st, Comedy 3rd.” If Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture, and it has a scene with a kid drenched in shit, is it far fetched that we couldn’t win it one day?
Figuring out our direction
When we sat down to think of what we would should do after our video (Bee)tnick Poet finished it’s run in the “So You Think You Can Funny?” contest in December of ’09, we started to come up with a new video the typical way, riffing ideas at a meeting. This is how Side Jobs was concocted; a couple of guys in a room tossing around ideas that make each other laugh. There can be some really funny stuff tossed around, although the problem when approaching a story that way is that, even though you can be laughing your ass off at the idea, it doesn’t make it a good story or even a story at all, it’s normally just a situation. And most of the time it’s only funny in that moment, then the next thing you know you’re saying ‘cut’ as the actor delivers the punchline on set and it’s not funny anymore. If you pay attention, it can be painfully obvious when you watch an internet comedy video which was based around 1 ‘funny idea’. Like how they had these kittens act like they were hungry and be noisy. Yeah it’s a funny idea, but 2:19 long? I’ll give it to the gray one for really selling it at the 8 second mark, but from there on it was just redundant. And no cuts? What is this The Atonement?
Deciding to make “Short Films”
For the majority of our videos, up until late 2009, I pretty much acted as a one man film crew. From first shot to the final cut in the editing room. Since I was teaching myself all of the processes as I went along, this would lead to videos being released once every 4 months. It was no longer worth it to spend so much time on a little idea. Plus, throughout our history our small ideas would normally end up being longer because we’ve always had the movie mindset as opposed to the sketch mindset. [For (Bee)tnick the sketch contest restriction was 2 minutes, so in Wood Sugars fashion we went into the shoot with a 6 minute script. "Let Eliaz fix it in editing," writers Jeff & Donny thought... The fuck?!]. So I wanted us to go straight for a “bigger” idea this time around. I wanted to make a Film in the ‘Filmmaker’ sense and get accustomed to terms we never used before like ‘Pre-production’ ‘Set Design’ & ‘Crew [made up of crew guys and not friends]‘.
I had already been reading up on the processes of filmmaking and bought a couple of books, so I had a sense of what the magnitude of work ahead of us. We have never been short of ambitions.
“Shit, where do we start?”
In real time, this was around a point where Donny was spending a lot of time getting his feet wet with Stand-up, so I approached actor/writer/Wood Sugar Jeff with the idea of putting on the breaks for the next video (which we had hoped to have out in 2-3 weeks) and actually taking the time to produce a short film in the amount of time it would deserve. He was all aboard.
This was also the first time I was going to take a major stab at writing. There were certain approaches to our shorts that we had never tackled before so I wanted to get the ball rolling on the writing process there.
Theme- “How about we say something this time,” I thought. “Let’s send a message of something we’re really passionate about or something which is always on our mind & bugs us. Then maybe the research will be therapeutic & we can stop bitching about it so much.” We came up with about 3 themes, but the one that stuck out the most was “immaturity”.
Character- What type of character haven’t we really tackled before? What type of person would be fun to go through this long experience with? Thinking about our video library, I realize we never took a stab at creating a really “likeable” character. Someone who gives you no doubt of whose side you’re on. A really nice guy, more like a Ned “Kingsley” Plimpton-Zissou rather than a Steve Zissou, for example.
What is the character in to?- I also had the idea that I wanted to go all out on visuals with this next short (the picture above is a good representation), and one of the ways I wanted to approach this was, simply put, having a character who was “really into something”. Obsessively into it with a large collection. Like how the character Rob Gordon in High Fidelity was really into vinyl and had tons of records. Or like in Boogie Nights how Dirk Diggler was really into having a big dick and he had a large dick.
We also started to think of where this character would work and how his work place would relate to what he’s in to. More importantly, what could we actually pull off filming wise? What types of locations would never let us shoot? What places may we have a chance to shoot at? All these ideas centered around cool looking coffee shops, or having the character collecting an abundance of coffee. Eventually (and you can probably tell from the title) we changed it from coffee to *SPOILER* tea.
Story- So, by mixing the elements of the theme, having a likeable character with a big collection and understanding his basic surroundings, we were able to build the foundation of our story. The outline came pretty easily and next was the 1st draft…
Writer’s note: At the time this production journal was published TeaMan, Steep! was 95% filmed and 40% edited with about 2 months of post-production, including Foley & scoring, ahead.
