In a shoeless world, a magical shoe drops in on two hobbits. According to a wizard, it’s an evil shoe formed from petroleum in the depths of the earth. So along with their Ninja friend, the hobbits and wizard go on a quest to destroy “The One shoe.” A band of school children pretending to be Orcs obstruct their path, and a certain “Dark Lady,” along with her evil Minion and Minioness steal the shoe from them. But eventually the Hobbits steal the shoe back, but we’re not sure if they destroy it or not.

Watch it.

As you can probably see, we had some issues during production. People talking in the background, bad micing of actors, wind noise. But it’s the biggest production E-Cubed has ever taken on. We had a script before we started shooting, used multiple cameras, shot scenes out of order, had several week intervals between shoots, and had the largest cast we’ve ever dealt with.

We started out in late 2006, came up with the idea as a group, Rena wrote the script along with help from Anya, and we casted the characters. The group then proceeded to start shooting. One of our biggest problems during shooting was keeping everybody else quiet. On our first day of shooting, out of about four, we shot the first three scenes, and the big fight scene. Our lovely fight scene choreographer, Arden, took care of setting up the fight scene, but it’s impossible to tell a group of kids “Ok, start practicing fighting, but be very quiet, because they’re shooting over there” The result of this is allot of chatter can be heard in the background in the scene where the hobbits first meet the wizard. In the very first scene, where the shoe drops from the sky it’s even worse (that’s why there’s no audio in that scene in the final movie) There’s a very audible “Magic Bolt” right before the shoe drops in.

The moral of my story is, don’t produce a movie with a large group. Have a core team of maybe three people and then find groups of people when you need them as cast or crew, and make sure they really want to do this, and realize how hard it makes the life of the editor when they make noise in the background. I almost want to do it all over, just to fix those problems, because I think it would come out even better, but I don’t have nearly enough time for that.