Dylan Dugas
- Sep 5
STALE FISH EP. 18 SURVIVING THE LA RIVER
This was a project that started as an instagram sketch series with the two main actors. Will - the writer and one of the main actors - wanted to make something a bit beefier than the sketches and that's when I got involved.
The sketches were shot on iPhone, and that lo-fi aesthetic worked with the jankiness of the cinematic universe of the sketches. When I came on board, I took the iPhone and tried to max out it's potential with things like RAW recording and lens attachments, but I quickly realized it was too good looking for this project. There was an energy that was lacking from how it was being presented. That's when I realized we needed to go lower-quality and had the idea to shoot it on the classic skater-cam the Sony MiniDV VX2000. This made perfect sense. And all of a sudden every thing fell into place in terms of the tone of the short. Now I felt like I had the wind at my back.
There was only one other crew member in addition to myself, which was the sound person, and it's not the sound person that's on camera. And I did, in fact, hire a real sound person, full rate, to perform on camera and not record sound and for some ungodly reason. Racking my brain now, I simply don't understand why I didn't have the on-camera sound person actually record the sound and save myself the cost of hiring two sound people.
The first weekend we tried to shoot, we got through a few scenes and then the police kicked us out of the LA river and gave me a $1000 dollar ticket. Then we got a permit and finished it a few weeks later.
I love how weird this short is. I love that we titled it EP. 18 with no other episodes to speak of. I love that it's shot on the VX2. I love the visuals of the LA river. I love the soundtrack. I'm very proud of this film. I proved to myself that I could make something unique and I think the fuel that gave me is invaluable and its a fuel I'm still running on.
- Aug 30
I have always struggled to be a videographer. I can never seem to grasp the intention of what I've been hired to do. "Shoot this event". It really doesn't compute with me. A friend was having a jam-session and wanted me to capture it. I really didn't know what to do, so I surrendered to being okay with shooting it as weird as I could, and then figuring it out in the edit. I remember hearing a story that Robert Rodriguez was hired to shoot his high school football games, but got fired because he would focus on the wrong things like zooming in to get a cool shot of the football instead of the play. I embraced that spirit, even though the person who asked me to shoot this was pretty clear about how they wanted to highlight themselves as a musician - who incidentally didn't end up making the final cut - but I wasn't getting paid, so I told myself to have fun and shoot some interesting stuff. When I got to the edit, I had about 4 hours of footage from the night and no idea what to do with it. I began a purely binary process of removing all footage that I deemed unusable: repositioning the camera, framing up the shot, or just unappealing looking. I clearly had shot with a certain amount of intention to display a static or zooming frame, so anything that was not perfectly that, I cut out. This began what shaped my editing technique still to this day. Which is a process of elimination and of purely logical moves before needing to deploy creative decision making. It is most similar to sculpting. Starting with a block of marble (all the footage) and chipping away until you have something to show. Eventually I got it down to about 7 minutes of footage and all the while I was thinking, 'okay once I whittle it down to these selects then the editing will begin'. But because of how I had shot it, and how strict I was in trimming it down, I found that, what would normally be considered BROLL, turned out to be my AROLL. I slapped the title on it and called it finished.