The Rat Activity House. Bum!

Today Natalie's friend Jake Bradbury, who I'd never met, came over at 10 am today and drove me and Bundo to his house of Mission Street.
He's shooting a movie called Rats, which involves an anthropomorphic rat singing. Most of the time it's a person in a rat suit, but for several shots he wanted a real rat, so Natalie hooked us up.
From what I can tell the story involves someone trying to eat rats but I think they didn't want to tell me that because they were worried I'd get upset.

He somehow gleaned that I like Firefly and spent the drive over asking me about my favorite episodes and then telling me about a series of scifi shorts he and his friends were making.

Then we arrived at his apartment, where I was introduced to two actors, a girl doing sound, and Jake's dad. He didn't actually tell me any of these people's names, but if he had I wouldn't have remembered anyway cause I'm a jerk like that.

Their whole set up was pretty impressive. That had lots of fancy lights and a boom mic and it kind of looked like a real film shoot.

There were a couple times I wasn't convinced they knew exactly what they were doing (like when Jake insisted on having people say their lines during a shot of Bundo that no one else was in and in where no sound was being recorded, and then wanted to redo it when they took too long), but overall, it was probably the most professional shoot I've witnessed/been involved with.

Bundo got really fickle and wouldn't eat the same food for any two takes. The most success was had by coating the piece of cheese the rat character was supposed to be eating in delicious peanut butter.

After they got all the shots they wanted, it was time for me to leave. The guy who was doing Bundo's voice was going to drive me, but ironically, he's allergic to rats, so Jake's dad drove me instead.

He was a pretty cool guy.

He talked about he'd always helped Jake with his movies since high school, and was willing to make the drive up from (I think) Berekely every time he needed help. He was one of the principles in Jake's science fiction "40-minute feature", which I'm now kind of curious about.
He also told me about how his older son is, "a rapper...he does nerd-core. Invented the genre, actually."*
Ok...

He dropped me off at home, where Bundo returned to her busy life of sitting on an old tear shirt and eating.

Jake told me that he'll upload the movie once it's finished, so look for Rats soon on an internet near you.

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*Wikipedia disagrees, but whatcha gonna do.

My charcoal thing for art class tomorrow. Photo courtesy of Jake Regal.