In this episode, Neil and Jason talk to American indie filmmakers Sebastian Pigott and Lizabeth Yandel about their latest film, Bring It All Back Home as it nears completion. They delve more deeply into the challenges Sebastian as the director and Lizabeth as the sound editor faced in production and then subsequently in post-production. It’s an experience to inspire all filmmakers!
(Explicit language)
Announcer Rosie:
You’re listening to the Apple and Biscuit Show with Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman.
Neil Hillman:
Hello and a very warm welcome to this edition of the Apple and Biscuit Show. I’m Dr. Neil Hillman…
Jason Nicholas:
And I’m Jason Nicholas. We’re two professionals working in film and television sound. The purpose of our podcast is to discuss the many ways sound is used in moving picture productions, to entertain, inform, educate and engage audiences.
Neil Hillman:
We’re a bit out of the ordinary with our backgrounds too. Whilst we’re both long -standing and current practitioners carrying out tasks for our clients, such as location sound recording, dialogue editing and being re -recording mixers, we also have strong academic links to the topic of moving picture sound; Jason with an interest in human psychology and me with a research background in sound design and its effects on human emotions.
Jason Nicholas:
So hopefully the content of our podcast and the guests you join us will prove enlightening to anyone with an interest in the medium and the part that sound plays in filmmaking regardless of their level of experience.
Maybe you’re a student just embarking on your studies, an industry newcomer or perhaps you’re an experienced professional, maybe you just love movies. Wherever you join us from you’re welcome along and we’re certainly looking forward to learning a thing or two from our guests.
Neil Hillman:
Today on the show we’re talking with Sebastian Pigot and Elizabeth Yandle. Sebastian and Elizabeth have produced a feature film called ‘Bring It All Back Home’, which Jason and I have been privileged to watch in its locked-cut, pre-graded, pre-mixing state. And that’s a rare privilege for any filmmaker to extend to outsiders.
It’s work in progress, and it’s not yet finished, so this really is an opportunity to get a glimpse behind the curtain of an indie feature film in post -production. And more importantly, to ask questions of Sebastian as the director and Elizabeth as the sound editor about the kind of decisions they made in pre -production and in production and how this influenced the post -production process.
It’s a movie in the truest sense of indie filmmaking, unfettered by external influences, made on an incredibly modest budget and in a guerrilla style that really suits the story.
So before we dive into the movie itself, let’s meet, ‘Bring It All Back Home’s writer, director and producer, Sebastian Pigott, and the film’s sound editor and producer, Elizabeth Yandel. Welcome to you both.
Are you well? And where do we find you today?
Sebastian Piggot:
Thank you so much. So glad to be here. Thank you so much for having us. we’re out in Oregon. We’re on opposite ends of the same house.
Neil Hillman:
I think it’d be helpful if you could give us a potted history of your background – Sebastian.
Sebastian Piggot:
For sure, yeah. I started out as an actor, and I was part of a theater company in Toronto, and I wrote plays. And then I started working as an actor. I spent a long time doing that, and I had a film that I wrote when I was doing theater called Two Deaths to Henry Baker.
It’s kind of a pseudo-Western, like really hyper-stylized. I was trying to do a Western version of brick, sort of, not in a high school, but the same kind of idea where you’re creating the genre out of the language and out of the story, but it’s set in the modern age and all that. And so I spent about 12 years trying to get that made, which was its own kind of film school. I did get it made. We got it made with Gil Bellows and my business partner who produced Bring It All Back Home and the new one, Body In The Trunk. His name is Felipe Mucci and he came out of American Film Institute and we worked together for four years trying to get the film made and we finally did.
And there’s just such a trade -off anytime you’re doing something as part of business. There’s a real trade -off And so I learned what that meant. Long story short, it led us to doing what we’re doing now because I had some strong ideas about how films should be made.
And at some point I’m like, all right, well, you know, if you’re going to sit around talking about how it should have been done, well, go do it. So I wrote this script in 2018, and me and Elizabeth met during the pandemic in 2020. I moved to Los Angeles full-time, and we were in the same building in this loft in the arts district and we partnered and made this film together.
That’s sort of the short version of the story.
Neil Hillman:
So is this the first film that you’ve edited?
Sebastian Piggot:
Yeah, I did a short film and I’ve done a lot of smaller things, but on this scale nothing close to this.
Neil Hillman:
And how about you, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Yandel:
So yeah, my background is more in music and writing. So I was a gigging and recording musician for about 15 years.
And when the pandemic hit, I couldn’t gig anymore. And I realized that I kind of had gotten led astray by the industry in ways that I really just lost touch with everything that I loved about playing music and so I needed to take a step back and kind of reassess that.
In the midst of that I met Sebastian and you know we started by playing music together and then he read some of my writing and encouraged me to start working in film because I tend to write in sort of a very image-driven way anyway.
So one day we were sitting on the front porch of our apartment and he said, “I think we should just start shooting Bring It All Back Home and just see what happens.” And we had no money and so we just started shooting.
I mean, of course we did pre-production and cast the movie and then we ended up finding investment and were able to complete the film over the course of about eight months I guess it took us to shoot it. We shot it in blocks. And that was my first experience working in film in any capacity. And it was exhilarating and terrifying.
And I did all the sound because we had nobody else to do it. And I was just learning as I went, basically.
Neil Hillman:
So with you saying that you were responsible for the location sound, and it was your first time doing the job, what did you learn from that?
Elizabeth Yandel:
I mean, during recording, I was really just doing my best to figure out how to get the best sound quality possible on very limited equipment.
And that was just a lot of research. I was just kind of figuring it out as I went. And so because of that, I think the post-production for the sound really ended up being a lot of restoration, which was trial and error, basically, until I met you. I felt like from there I was able to really start building on some, you know, creating a foundation for me myself to build on with the sound design; and I think as a writer, your encouragement to think about the storytelling elements of sound and the kind of the emotion behind sound, was really helpful for me to have all that writing experience, because it’s a lot like writing in a way, sound design. And that made it so much more exciting for me, to think about sound design in that really creative, world-building way, which I had never really heard anyone talk about before.
Jason Nicholas:
How much discussion did you have in pre -production? I mean, Sebastian, you said you had fairly strong ideas about how films are made. Did you have a strong idea of what you wanted the sonic aspect of the film to be?
Pardon me. Don’t get me wrong. I had strong ideas about it. Doesn’t mean I knew anything at all, especially about sound We created a lot of nightmares for ourselves on that end, but It’s kind of what we signed up for and it was our it was like Elizabeth I think mentioned you guys it Because it was kind of our education as well this film in that respect.
So We just dove right in but I think the thing that we understood from the beginning is that we were gonna have to build an aesthetic for the film that was gonna work practically.
We built a cinematic language, first of all, that was gonna work with what we had. And that had to extend to the sound as well. We did a lot of things that I don’t think we’ll do again and are probably unorthodox.
And Elizabeth’s got amazing ears. I’ve got a good ear. We just trusted that. But one thing we did is we got a shit ton of world sounds much more and much longer room tones than we’d normally get.
In the end, especially at the beginning, the first block of the film, we shot it in blocks. The first couple blocks of the film, we were using an old beat-up Zoom mixer that we borrowed, and I don’t remember the lavs, the boom, but so the quality of the sound was just really, so we built this world around it.
For months, we worked, we’d drive up to Lancaster, which is about 45 minutes east of Los Angeles. And we drive over there and just get sounds. And anyway, so we built a really thick world. And that was for practical reasons too, ’cause it let me hide shit. So when you open up these projects, they just look like a comedy, but it all works. Yeah, so I think that’s something we did well. Just embracing the aesthetic, making it part of the world of the film, embracing our limitations.
Jason Nicholas:
And did that world building extend to the music as well? Because you had original music for the film?
Sebastian Piggot:
The music, yeah. I mean, the music is just a credit to the talent of the people I know, which is a lot of the film is just a credit to the talent of the people I know because all those of bands, people I knew, a lot of it was music they’d had sitting around that had had a run of some kind, but it was basically sitting on the shelf and I was able to get it into the film. And I paid them all. They all get, everybody will get paid if the film makes money. But basically, just putting it in because they wanted to put it in.
Neil Hillman:
So let’s turn to the film itself. Let me give the audience a summary. The film “Bring It All Back Home” centers around Eddie returning to an economically deprived small town after the opportunity to play professional baseball is cruelly taken away from him due to a knee injury.
The psychological impact on him is enormous and Eddie has nothing to fall back on other than his ability to hit a home run at the highest level of the game. It’s been five years and in the interim his own personal circumstances have changed for the worse, but importantly, so too have the people who were once close to him. His father is dying. His mother has a tendency to hysteria, and his younger brother owes a good deal of money to a local drug dealer.
His school friend, John, on the other hand, seems to have made a go of his life. He has a job. He’s married and seems resolute in resisting Eddie’s nihilistic crusade.
So, Sebastian, forgive me asking perhaps an obvious question, but is this intentionally a comment on Rust-town post-Industrial America?
Sebastian Piggot:
I don’t know if that would be intentional. There was a lot of stuff that kind of evolved out of living with the film for a long time. It definitely became one because we chose this town to shoot it in. And that town became a character in the film. And we just spent a lot of time out there.
It was originally supposed to be Chicago. that had no particular meaning except that I like Chicago which happens to where Elizabeth was born but I always had this thing about Chicago and then I moved out to the West Coast so it wasn’t gonna be that, you know, the cool thing about shooting a film in this way, over such an extended period of time, is you do have that experience of really living with it, you know, and we spent a lot of time out there; and it’s a weird place because it is rundown and it does feel like it could be an Albuquerque or something, but it’s only 45 minutes from Hollywood, which in a way is kind of where Eddie finds himself.
So for me, it became this weird sort of metaphor for what he was going through too, you know?
Elizabeth Yandel:
Yeah, I think we really tried to lean into the grittiness of the world and the characters.
It was a very realistic world and the aesthetic is just kind of, you know, it’s like very working class and kind of dirty, you know? And so that helped us with the sound because we didn’t have any, we didn’t use score and we did use music, but for the most part we used only practical music. There’s a few parts where we have diagetic? right, sound.
So yeah, I think that that, that was something that we kind of were developing as we were going, but I mean, I would be lying if I said I put thought into that to begin with because I had no idea what I was getting into.
Jason Nicholas:
Earlier in the interview, Elizabeth notes that Neil consulted with them on the sound of the film, and mentions his theories on the use of sound in film and television. You can read more about this in Neil’s book, Sound for Moving Pictures, the Four Sound Areas, published by Focal Press. You can find links to this in the show notes or this episode’s web page.
Neil Hillman:
Now let’s have a listen to some sound from the film itself, and hear what advice Sebastian and Lisbeth might have for beginning filmmakers. There are some bleak and dark moments running through the film, but there are some also genuinely laugh out loud moments.
Was this humor intentional or did that come about from the actors on set simply reacting to each other and developing the scene. I’m thinking particularly about the end of Act 1 where Eddie breaks into his old girlfriend’s house in the early hours of the morning.
We see him drunk and he’s wasted. And her husband assumes he’s a dangerous intruder. It’s funny, but it’s also sad to see the humiliation that Eddie’s subjected to when the husband spells out Eddie’s false hopes of rekindling love.
Let’s have a listen to that scene.
Film excerpt:
See? It’s not about you anymore. Does it hurt? You tell him. She’s got, she’s got nothing to say.
Yes. I already know. I saw it. I saw it yesterday. It was there. I don’t. They say time is a thief.
No, buddy, you don’t understand. You don’t understand what You were there, but you don’t understand, you weren’t there. No, you were young, you were young. That’s what it meant. You were young and you think it’s still there somehow, but it’s not, it’s gone, buddy. And let me tell you something else. Being young, it’s for pussies. See life.
See, you take what you love. You don’t even know what the fuck I’m talking about to you. You used to be a winner.
Not anymore, little buddy. That’s a fucking mouth. That’s a fucking mouth. Not anymore. That’s a fucking mouth! (fades)
Sebastian Piggot:
The film is a tragedy, ultimately, and it’s an existential, you know, meditation on this fucking failure, you know, and he’s facing his own mortality. That’s heavy shit, you know, nobody, you know, you’re asking somebody to sit through two hours of that. So to me, it’s got to be funny, and we try to use humor throughout it. And a lot of that was just about the actors involved. They’re both really funny. I mean, Joe and especially in this movie, Zion, who plays Elvis, he really understood that. I think he really understood the theme of the movie and how to handle it from that character.
Because he’s a guy who reads the script over and over again. You know, some actors really, you know, I fuck their part. And he’s a guy who looks at the whole thing and he understood his role was to be the comic relief, but to embody the theme of the movie with like a comedy that comes out of having this unbelievable vulnerability. Like he’s going around acting as if, no, I’m not aging, I’m in my fucking sexual prime. You know, he’s popping three boner pills, you know, and he’s a joke, but he’s acting like he’s, you know, so yeah, it was all very intentional, but at the end of the day, it’s like getting people, once again, having a team where people understand what you’re doing and they got it across, you know.
Jason Nicholas:
Yeah, I really appreciated the scene where Elvis is getting dressed to go for a night out on the town and there’s this big score playing in the background.
And he’s obviously thinking so much of himself, but then as he gets ready to go out the door, you switch from the score to diagetic music and we realize, oh, all of this is just playing out on his crappy little phone.
Elizabeth Yandel:
Yeah, but with the music, you know, it’s exactly what you said. And the only time that it’s not, it’s non-diagetic, if I’m using that term correctly, where it’s not in the world is when it’s, when it has meaning, mostly when it’s when it’s Elvis, because he’s kind of dissociative, thinks that he’s something that he’s not. So you’ve got this score going and then suddenly we snap back into the real world and it’s just playing dimly on the radio or whatever.
Yeah, I think the town is a character, it really comes out because it is this down and out place and all the sound is kind of distant. Like any sort of industry like a train or the highway, you know, the train’s off in the distance. So the highway is going, but it’s just passing by, you know, no one’s stopping there. And it really speaks to the, the characters; there is sort of desolation or isolation, I guess. Yeah, absolutely.
That was something that, that I was developing because of Neil’s input, just really leaning into, yeah, the emotion of the emotion of the characters and kind of their hopelessness and that there’s really nothing waiting for them and nobody’s stopping for them.
Jason Nicholas:
And I think also, I mean, talk about difficulties with the sound, but it’s people in poverty or people in sort of down situations. They’re going to be living in rooms that have only a little bit of furniture and hard surfaces everywhere and it closed and boxed in and echoey.
So I think you’ve got some leeway there to kind of like, well, this is the setting and kind of a documentary sense.
Neil Hillman:
Sebastian, there’s a different kind of bleakness in the desert, isn’t there? An empty bleakness that’s contrasting with the urban, penned-in houses and the streets of the town. What did you want the audience to feel by choosing these two very different environments?
Sebastian Piggot:
I was trying to create a sense of claustrophobia at times for the characters, and then a sense of alienation. And so certainly, especially for the desert, the desert scenes, we’d use these extreme wide shots to really almost lose the characters. And Eddie’s always in danger of being lost within the environment. And then we contrast that with this invisible man we called it, which is the handheld, that kind of falls obsessively the whole time. The desert, it just simply represents the bleakness of his situation, what he’s come back to. And then, Elizabeth built this audio aesthetic with the trains, especially, and the dogs. And there’s the cicadas. Is that what you’re using at times? Which was just awesome, and that all was really Elizabeth’s idea.
Jason Nicholas:
Elizabeth, what would you say were the sonic landscapes that you had to play with between the desert and the town. Your atmospheres contribute to emphasizing that difference between the built-up and the wide-open, don’t they?
Elizabeth Yandel:
Well as far with the desert I was really thinking more about Eddie’s like desperate need to find something, like not really knowing what it was that he’s looking for, but out there looking for something. And there’s all this all this kind of hidden life around in the desert.
You can hear bugs and birds and stuff, but you don’t see much life and sort of just really playing up the sound of wind and the emptiness also. I guess I was thinking more about that with the desert and still maintaining this like the really distant highway to amplify just, yeah, this sense of like being lost, like looking for something that you’re never gonna find, really. And in town, I guess, you know, we already talked more about like amplifying sort of their class and this the feeling of being trapped there and left behind.
And also I used the dogs, the sound of dogs barking a lot whenever there was like men fighting or trying to prove themselves, trying to be manly, basically.
Neil Hillman:
Let’s have a listen to the wide -open spaces of the desert. This clip is where John wakes up and finds that he’s somewhere in the desert, having been taken there by Eddie, and to find out that he’s somehow quit his job. It’s all thanks to Eddie taking John’s phone.
Film excerpt:
What the hell’s going on?
Eh, you quit your job.
What?
Oh, and your wife’s called, shit, six times, fuck
Where the fuck are we?
Uh Nevada more or less
What the shit dude you said we were gonna drive around a bit.
Yeah, you fell asleep You missed the whole thing. Well, this is more than a bit plenty of road John plenty of road.
What is that?
It’s food food. Oh, fuck, close. Real men kill food.
That’s one of the troubles with our generation.
You gotta turn around, dude.
Well, it’s too late for that.
Eddie, I’m serious.
Don, look, you got no job.
Yes, I do.
You left your wife?
No, I didn’t.
Well, she’s not here.
You can’t, what are you gonna hold me hostage? (fades)
Sebastian Piggot:
In a practical sense we would end up having all this stuff that would just come whether we wanted it or not.
Then we would have to work with that. So like outside the outside the bar for scene 31 when Elizabeth’s character comes in, like we had cars coming by playing music at times.
We had people in the bar and then of course everything shut down. So all of a sudden now there’s no music. It became once again part of the aesthetic and it was the same when we were shooting in LA, I mean, shooting in Los Angeles is, we had a few scenes we shot in downtown LA. And so once again, it’s about building an aesthetic that’s gonna embrace all that stuff.
Scene 12, the scene in the alley where we first meet Elvis’s characters, one of my favourite scenes in the movie and it was just fucking chaos. And so at some point we embraced that, you know, and I was like, great, great, that’s what the scene’s gonna be.
And it worked great. And then on the other hand, in the desert, you know, it was more a matter of having a canvas to work with because there’s nothing to this blank canvas.
Jason Nicholas:
Do you think it’s fair to say that, I don’t know, five years ago, this film wouldn’t have been possible for you to make, well certainly not in the way that you have or for the budget that you have. The technologies really helped. How did that influence the way you approach making the film, Sebastian?
Sebastian Piggot:
Well, like you said, it made it possible at all. And there was actually a change in the SAG agreements also that made it possible. It happened at exactly the same time as we were making the movie. I think it came into effect 2021. They brought in the micro budget agreement. So it was really just a magic time. And I think that’s, that’s kind of, I don’t know if that’s the, it was the beginning for me, you know, but there’s just this magic kind of golden age we’re into. So I don’t, I didn’t know shit when I went into it, except I bought, I bought this laptop. I’ve now made two films and two features in a short film on I think it’s a 2016. I bought it when me and Elizabeth started the company in 2021. That’s just unbelievable, you know, that I can do that. So I can’t say that I knew specifically what technology had become available. But I’ve come to learn, you know, on this film on bring it all back home. We bought it, we ended up buying our own six track zoom mixer, but that’s all we ever had. And you know, we had to, we had to fix some stuff because you’re going to have to.
But even that, I came to learn how Da Vinci specifically, you know, because that’s all that’s what I worked on. What I was able to do to repair audio that Elizabeth, I didn’t do shit, that Elizabeth was able to repair using this new programs. It was just unbelievable stuff. Like we had, And I’ll turn it over to Elizabeth, but just to finish we had all this stuff that we shot in the car that you know. At the in the final act 80 % of the final act take takes place in this car, and I figured that we were gonna have to ADR the whole thing. Which we did, you know, and it really sounded like shit, because it was just ADR.
We did in my closet, and then Elizabeth, I think working with you, she was able to clean all of that audio and we were able to use all the original audio. Which to me just saved the movie, because having a whole act of the movie done with ADR is not great, but yeah, Elizabeth can speak to all that stuff way more than I can, but it’s amazing. It’s an amazing time to make movies for all that reason. It makes a lot of things possible. Yeah, I think just having access to DaVinci for free is incredible.
Elizabeth Yandel:
We shot it on a Blackmagic 6K, which the DP brought with him. He’s an AFI grad and he’s just a fantastic shooter. But having access to that program for free and then learning about iZotope, which was on sale and totally affordable, I just got the basic package. But with that, I was able to restore almost everything that we recorded.
Like I said, I have no experience prior to this, but it did feel like we kind of hit a rising wave right at the exactly perfect time.
And I think just having the courage to just start before we even had funding really sort of like gave the whole thing this kind of magical momentum. And we had so many just incredibly amazing opportunities that like things that made it feel like we really were making a movie that needed to be made.
Like, for instance, one time we were shooting, we needed to get a shot of Eddie’s car driving down the highway, and we went up on this bridge to catch his car driving from under the bridge down the highway, and there was at no point a break in the traffic ever, until right before his car came down, there was no cars for like, you know, 30 seconds, his car rode past, and then all the traffic came back again. And I mean, closing it out in a highway like that would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars.
Sebastian Piggot:
It sounds smaller, it was actually unbelievable. It was actually unbelievable because we were chasing the sunrise, so I had to drop off my DP on the bridge. And I just hit the gas and then hit the on ramp and I’m on the highway and then I fucking get off the highway and pick him up and we’re off to the next location with no consideration for anything.
And then when we got in to look at the footage. It was just thick with cars. There was literally no break until all of a sudden at one particular moment, I’m like, oh, suddenly there’s no, you see this one car. And to the point that we went back to get audio at like 5:30 in the morning, and we couldn’t get it. We literally couldn’t get it. We must have stayed there for 20 minutes and we couldn’t get, we couldn’t get the audio clean on this highway to use. It was just wild.
Jason Nicholas:
Yeah, I think the whole thing is something to really be celebrated because, I mean, Sebastian, you’ve got a firm footing as an actor in the industry, but this is your first time out of the gate doing a full feature like this from top to bottom.
And Elizabeth, I mean, you’re coming from this from the music side of things, which is kind of a tangential move. But yeah, the tools we have available now are just incredible.
I mean, Neil and I started in the industry cutting actual tape to do this, and from there, which is only 20-some years ago, to now to be able to do the whole thing on a laptop would have just been inconceivable, we wouldn’t have even thought of that.
Sebastian Piggot:
No, they were still using film when I was acting, I mean, we’d have to stop while they changed the roll. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago.
Jason Nicholas:
I mean, we’re at this crossroads right now, especially in post -production, and we’ve talked about how you felt kind of empowered to do this, but what are some things you maybe ran into where, you know, the more traditional process of having the whole crew and the whole post production process, with all the people where you would have had Foley and sound design and ADR and re recording and all that; if you had the budget for any of these things now, what would be on your wish list to kind of finish off the film in a different way?
Sebastian Piggot:
I mean, this is going to sound, it’s convenient that I have this point of view for this podcast, but to me, like, it’s so much of the shit that we spend on a production is unnecessary. I would have wanted the whole kit and caboodle, dude, like, for the sound and the sound post production, that’s one part. Like, the ADR, we went and did ADR in the same fucking place. I’m in the same fucking place with the same actor, with the same mics. And you can’t get it to sound right.
And it’s weird, you know? Sound is just really, really fucking difficult. The thing is that the labor that me and Elizabeth have had to put into it, it’s just so much of that could’ve been better spent elsewhere, it’s in an education, but like, I know shit doesn’t sound right. So right now, for example, I’m going through and I’m finding each syllable, like syllables in a line of dialogue that are popping a little bit too high. And I’m just literally cutting it and then dropping that down. You know, and it sounds beautiful when it’s done, it takes me so like weeks I’m spending doing this. I’m sure a professional to do that in 10 minutes, put a limiter on that. That’s all I’m doing is putting a limiter on it, right? So yeah, yeah, we would have loved to have that. And we will never do it like this again. I love this movie, I think more than I’ll probably love any other movie I made. I think it’s got a real personality in there.
And we’ve gotten to learn every part of how to make a film to some degree, you know, to fucking, you know what I mean? Or at least had a taste of it and gone, fuck, I don’t know shit about that. I wouldn’t want to do it again this way with the sound.
The sound is a big one. I wouldn’t want to do with the sound this way, color, you know, lighting. You really learn, man, I learned to appreciate lighting, making a fucking feature.
Neil Hillman:
Sebastian, I can assure you that dialogue editors are perfectionists, and they do take that amount of care and effort that you’re doing too! So that’s how you’ll understand, firsthand, what a dialogue editor goes through!
So what’s next for bringing it back home and what about the next project?
Elizabeth Yandel:
Yeah, right now we’re looking, we’re just kind of sorting through our options for how to get the sound to, you know, an industry standard level. So I mean, that’s my number one wish, you know, and so I’ve reached out to, I reached out to Vancouver Film School, there’s a production house in Portland that I reached out to.
And we’re gonna keep doing that, hopefully hoping that a distributor will see the value here and realize that it wouldn’t really take much money to get it there, I don’t think.
Sebastian Piggot:
Yeah, 100%. I think like instead of if it would be great to get a company instead of giving us an advance or an MG, have a company $5,000 or $10,000 into doing polish on the film would, I think, be money better spent.
Neil Hillman:
And you’ve got another project in the works.
Elizabeth Yandel:
Yeah, so the next one, “Body in the trunk,” we shot in a month, so not in blocks this time.
And we had a slightly bigger crew, which felt very luxurious, but it was still very much a skeleton crew. And we did that out at our property in Oregon. So we just kind of lucked out and found this amazing 42 acre property that has two houses on it.
And it’s kind of our own back lot in a way. So we shot the whole thing out here and we had an amazing lighting team, which was one guy. And so yeah, we’re going to go into post production on that. But we wanted to make sure that we got “Bring It All Back Home” as far as we could get it before moving on. So that’s where we’re at with that.
“Body In The Trunk” is more of a thriller. It’s definitely more stylized than “Bring It All Back Home,” which was, you know, very realist. And I’m excited to get into the sound for this one too, because there’s just this really absurd kind of manic energy in this film that I’m excited to play with and we’re going to score it, which is going to be very fun for me as a musician.
Neil Hillman:
Sebastian, Elizabeth, thank you so much for being our guest today on the show. I do think that this is a very important film. I’m so glad that you’ve made it and you’ve been able to make it in the way that you have. It’s a real achievement to how technology has put, if you like, the tools into the hands of the artists. But also you’ve captured a spirit of the age, I think, with the tone of the film. I would really hope that we can get some attention and even some seed capital to help just get this film over the line to,
you know, to just put the finishing touches to allow the film to fully reach its potential.
Sebastian Piggot:
Thank you. It’s a really cool time to connect about this one because as I say, like I’m in the final stages of getting it out to distributors and you know, it’s not done, which is to say we really would like to get some professional hands on it, get a real polish done on it. But just getting it to that point of getting it out the door to distributors, that feels like a big milestone. So it’s good to get that one done before we move. We didn’t want it to get in any way lost as we finished this new film. You know, we wanted to make sure we got it really polished up.
Neil Hillman:
Well, I’m hoping that you’ll allow us to check in later on the progress of Body in the Trunk.
Sebastian Piggot:
Yes, please. Absolutely.
Neil Hillman:
Thank you so much, both of you, for being here today.
Sebastian Piggot:
Yeah, thank you so much guys. It was just an honor to be on the podcast and thanks so much for having us.
Elizabeth Yandel:
Yeah, thank you for including us.
Jason Nicholas:
See links on our show notes page for further information about Bring It Back Home. Also, there’s a glossary of terms used in this episode.
It’s our goal with the podcast to educate listeners about industry standard terminology and further develop a language that film makers communicate with each other about sound and film and television. If you like what you heard today please be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave comments if you can about what would be helpful to you in your work and who you’d like to hear from on the show.
