This whole post will be spoilers, but since it's on the second page I figure it doesn't matter at this point!
Dude, was that real turd you used? Eew!
No - it was Baby Ruth! And some yellow food coloring. We were inspired by the pool scene in Caddyshack... which, it turns out, is total bullshit! Pun intended, of course... we just assumed since the Baby Ruth floated in the pool in that movie it would float in the toilet. It was getting close to midnight after a long shoot when we dropped the first one in the toilet and it sank like a rock. Since our final joke depended on it floating we scrambled a bit to get it to work - we tried hollowing them out, hanging from strings, etc. Finally our AD found some wooden coffee stir sticks and rigged up stilts to hold the bars at water level, then we threw in some toilet paper to hide the stilts. Based on some of the reactions we got from viewers I think it worked out pretty well...
My only other reservation is that is that the final twist (the two women discussing the buoyancy of turds) didn't quite worked. That was a good idea but that was a very difficult joke to pull. Maybe that was just too complex (is that even true that meaty turds tend to float?). (...) Maybe the dialogue here was too explanatory.
I know what you mean, that's one of the hardest parts of comedy, or even filmmaking in general - if you explain too much you'll bore the audience, too little and they may not get the joke or what you mean. We're always going back and forth on that kind of thing, there's several examples in this movie in fact. A good one is the 'asparagus clause' line... in the original script he mentions that in the very first scene, asking if there are any exceptions, like an asparagus clause. We shot it that way, and even then the actors thought it might be too obscure a reference. So we let them improv a couple takes where they actually spelled out why there needed to be an asparagus clause, even though I knew we probably wouldn't use it. Once I got the rough cut together I confirmed it was too much explanation and took it out - but then I started thinking maybe the whole first discussion of it was too much as well. So I cut it out entirely - I knew some people wouldn't get it, but for those that did it would be better to have it be new, and sudden, rather than rehashing an earlier joke.
For the last joke we decided to be a little more literal for a couple reasons. One - I have no idea if that's even true. We found some online reference to floating turds meaning you were getting too much fat in your diet, and a semi-militant pro-vegetarian site discussing the environmental impact of eating meat, so we sort of made the connection ourselves - if it turned out she was 'really serious' about the environment she'd know (and care about) things like that. But since we don't even know if it's true we have to assume most people would have no idea what we were talking about. Plus, I just thought it was funnier to have this quiet, somewhat dramatic scene in which one girl just blurts out 'not if his shit floats!' On the other hand, we left her final line unexplained, although we didn't quite shoot it that way. As shot the line goes something like "5000 gallons of water per pound of meat, not to mention the greenhouse gasses! How could he do that to the earth?!?" But after watching it it just felt too long, too literal, it weakened the final scene, and we figured it's much more common knowledge that raising livestock has a large environmental impact so we didn't have to spell it out.
Anyway - that's the constant battle we go through with everything we shoot. We have an idea, we spell it out, then we go back and forth on how much to leave or take out right up until it's done. Sometimes we've had jokes that we stripped down so far they get completely missed by the audience... and other times I've sat in the audience cringing at something that just goes on too long. I have to say though that that's one of the great things about getting to see your work with a large audience - their reaction gives you a concrete answer to whether you got it right or not. It's one of the things I like most about these timed competitions, and one of the reasons we tend to mostly do local ones - you get to see your film screened theatrically with a full audience within a week of finishing it.
I liked the titles and how they interact with the action. I'm a big fan of that type of stuff. Like Zombieland.
Thanks! That's the one thing we didn't get done in the original 48 hours, we ran out of time and just submitted it with a static title card - although it didn't take long to add, so if we'd planned a little better I think we could have done it.
I need to watch it at home. (Since I have no speakers here at work)
