I am supposed to post this new music video, “Be Like a Duck,” tonight, under the arbitrary and profoundly unfair rules of this irritating-overexuberance-of-youth 12in12 enterprise. HEY! I just discovered that if you type 12in12 with the caps key accidentally depressed, it reads !@IN!@. Which is certainly apt. How can these guys expect any reasonable person to shoot and edit a film in just five !@IN!@ days?
Okay, I really did think that’s how I’d be feeling at this point. But it’s 6:10 PM on Sunday and the film is, astonishingly, DONE! How? Here are my insider tips so that you, too, can make a movie in no time at all:
1. Find a perfect Director of Photography. If the images look great, the audience will forget all about mere logic.
2. Have perfect children. I recommend four. Then, whenever possible, cast them in whatever show or film you do. (Your children won’t be nearly as perfect as mine, but that’s okay.)
3. Enlist the perfect sound and image editor.
4. Locate one great dancer, and give him or her a solo.
5. Get great support people.
6. Include frequent if obscure duck references, and invoke — without explanation or apology — Edward R. Murrow.
7. Give Mike Lavoie his own show.
In the case of this project, the perfect photographer is Derek Van Gorder, of “Spirits”/“Moving Pictures”/”Magic Marker” renown. My perfect children are Caitlin McEwan, Keith Boynton, Devin McEwan, and Darcy Boynton, who together comprise 2/3 of this great cast. I truly adore and thoroughly admire them, though I do wish they’d clean their rooms. The perfect editing partner is my great long-time collaborator in all things music-based, Michael Ford. That one terrific dancer is the incredible Nick Brentley. The superb and tireless support people are intrepid camera assistant Al Gonzales, trusty production assistant Evan Downey, elegant behind-the-scenes videographer Beth Andrien, and my perfect husband Jamie McEwan. And it was indeed thrilling to imagine bringing Mike Lavoie’s show to grateful viewers all across America.
I want to enthusiastically thank all these fine fine fine people. What a great pleasure this was. And thanks of course to those 12 Films 12 Weeks visionaries who were so gloriously naïve last June.
One last note: In 1979, I directed a young actor/dancer, Mark Frawley—then 19 years old—in Noel Coward’s “Tonight at 8:30” for Dartmouth Summer Theater. I was 25. Mark soon went on to Broadway glory. In 2005 — I was still 25 — I tracked Mark down to choreograph a number of my songs, among them “Be like a Duck”, for a performance at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. It’s that subtle and elegant Frawley choreography that forms the basis of this video. And it’s creative collaboration and friendship that make all things worthwhile. And coffee.
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© Sandra Boynton. All rights reserved.