Storyteller: McCracken Episode 1 - The Unplanned Shoot

McCracken wasn't initially intended to be a web series, but only a one off skit for Wayne Bradley's online sketch comedy series. I had approached him with the character, McCracken, which he was willing to give it a shot as long as I organized the shoot. I needed a location that resembled a trucking companies office. My girlfriend works for a landscape sales company and she said their old office had been abandoned up the back of their site and I could use it. Perfect. I scoped it out and it was full of dust, falling apart and just basically shit. It would have to do.

Now I had to find my crew. Seeing as though I only had a couple of days until we shot and no money, I called upon a colleague called Abe who owed me a favour from a film course I did. I was happy to do it as long as I fed him. He would take care of sound too. Sweet! I had my crew - Abe.
So we all met up at this crappy office abandoned at the back of a landscape yard and set up inside the office. Wayne (who plays Boss), Abe and myself (who plays McCracken. None of us really knew what we were doing. Wayne decided to direct and set up a basic two shot of us sitting down doing the scene. It was a while since I had done any proper acting so it took me a while to get into it, and Abe talked too much but besides that it went pretty smoothly. There was no power up there so we had to rely on natural light through the windows. We only had one mic so we had to alternate depending who the shot was on. After four hours we were done. I ordered subway sandwiches for lunch which cost around $20 and ended up being our entire budget.

Wayne's normal editor had moved overseas and I couldn't afford a proper one so Wayne was good enough to teach himself final cut pro whilst editing the sketch. What a legend!
He put a rough cut together and after getting some feedback from a real editor he polished it up pretty good - for a first time editor I'd say damn good actually.

Then the complications came. First Wayne's collaborating partner didn't think the production value was high enough to be part of their sketch comedy series. Of course, myself having created this character, took it personally thinking it was "me" that was shit and not the "production value". Subsequently I went on a bender. I had completely returned to my own pattern of behaviour and had to go to rehab. On top of that I found out Abe was in jail detained over an alleged murder charge… next time I will research my crew a little more thoroughly.

So here I was - in rehab, my sketch and character having failed, and I still had to break the news to Wayne that our cinematography was a potential murderer. Thankfully Wayne took that news quite well. He also lifted my spirits back up expressing that he liked and believed in McCracken. He said he wanted to post it on his own Youtube channel and possibly make a little series out of them.

While this both excited and frightened me at the same time, I set about writing several more episodes whilst in rehab.

Episode 1 still remains one of my favorites, purely because of the rawness of it and the fact it kick started the whole journey. It currently sits at about 30,000 hits on YouTube since September... Not bad for a cast and crew of three and budget of twenty bucks! You can view Episode 1 here: