Hilarious moments in filmmaking

[AndrewLee]

Hey all, just curious as to some of your funniest filmmaking moments.

Mine has to be when I was filmming an interrogation scene a long time ago. I was interrogating my brother, and was supposed to fake punch him in the face. Well I accidently punched him right in the nose. Anyway it wasn't funny at the time but looking back it was hilarious lol.

Anyway looking forward to reading some of yours.

 

[Utopia]

I recorded a drama with 5 people in the booth at the same time.

I knew them all very well after having recorded over 500 hours of final material with them.

I took a recording of a cell phone and played it through an aux send to all of their headphones and added reverb to it so it sounded like it was coming from the room. They all stopped and checked their phones.

Then I put a sound effect of someone scratching their face. They all heard it while the show was going on and were searching for the culprit.

One of them finally blurted out "PHIL, STOP SCRATCHING YOUR FACE" and started a whole chain reaction of laughter.

Good times.

 

[Tinalera]

I was filming a scene for Delivery Day in the library. I had permission, and a librarian saw the main character and stared for a moment. I showed her the permission slip. Needless to say, the librarian's look was priceless....

Why stare? For those who don't know, the character wore a blonde wig and a plastic mask(complete with "makeup").

The rough footage is in the screening room under "Delivery Day" to see what I mean

 

[ICBAstudios]

Mine comes from the time my 9 yr. old son was so into his character, he fell over backwards as an alien shot him and fell directly onto the concrete in our basement in front of the bluescreen. NOT funny at the time! But as he got up totally unharmed, well it became kinda funny. He was so into character he almost did die... all on camera... his final video came out really good considering it was a first for me and editing bluescreen (maybe 3rd edit ever) and still amazes me that he did all the dialog off the top of his head and came up with the idea on the fly...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQy_is0wiCA

Learned alot from that little skit. Was very helpful.

 

[Utopia]

Well, not really filmmaking, but is somewhat pertinent:

I was mixing a live song from a band who did a rendition of a world-famous song.

In the studio I played it for a mixer friend of mine and throughout the whole song he was tapping his foot, nodding his head, etc.

After it ended, I asked him how he liked it and he turns to me and says "Well, it sounds like the version I mixed back in the 80's".


He had mixed the original version...

 

[apinehillproduction]

we were filming a documentary scene in which our character was going from room to room in a haunted hotel telling us what she felt in each. She and her friend were running around an awful bit so it was pretty hectic, and we personally have not experienced ghosts in any way but we had a few drinks with our character beforehand at dinner.

our set up was the camera guy, with an xlr running out of the camera into a shotgun mic, with an xlr running into a shure mixpre around my neck. then an xlr out of that mixer into the camera, so I am attached to the camera man, trying to get good sound and keeping all of my wires untangled as we run around in the dark.

I started to hear a really creepy reverberating noise in my headphones. I couldn't tell if it was coming from outside of the headphones or not so I kept trying to take them off and kept asking the camera man "do you hear that?" And he could also sort of hear something weird. We had just experienced some ghost hunters playing with something called "franks box" which is a radio that picks up extra frequencies in which you can supposedly hear ghost voices.

I kept hearing the noise and admit I was getting pretty terrified as we were entering the cellar of this old hotel in the dark with just some flashlights and the sound kept getting weirder and weirder.

It ended up being my conference badge rubbing up against the mixer and the more I messed around trying to figure out the noise, the more it would move around and make stranger noises. We were both really really freaked out at the time but rewatching the tape and listening to us is comedy gold.