Little Miss Sunshine II

Posted on October 22, 2008

A couple of weeks after I did Clip This! for the 48-Hour Film Project, I attended a coffee talk hosted by casting director Beth Sepko. I happened to sit next to Charley Devaney, one of the partners in Burning Ranch Productions, who directed one of the top ten films in that competition, Delivery. We started talking, and a couple of weeks later I was co-starring in Burning Ranch production called Little Miss Horsesh*t, their entry into Filmmaking Frenzy’s Unnecessary Sequels competition. I wish all my networking worked out like that.

Anyway, we shot this short over the course of a weekend. There were seemingly insurmountable hurdles, like always (among them were a shy child and an unwilling horse), but the dedicated cast and crew somehow surmounted them, like always. We actually shot enough footage for a 10-minute short, so Gregg Moore (camera guy/editor) made a trailer for the competition and a full short just for fun. Charley then organized a screening in a room at the Austin Film Society and invited a bunch of colleagues and decision-makers in Austin’s film scene. The screening featured both versions of Little Miss Horsesh*t and included other shorts that members of the cast and crew worked on.

To top that off, Charley actually mailed me a DVD of the finished product(s), something that always promised and rarely fulfilled. The film is of a quality that you would expect from this sort of competition, and on a par with the best of the entries. All in all, a good experience.