It's Rocco's first day on the job after being placed in witness protection for mob related activities. He wants to make a good impression on the boss. After meeting Rocco, the boss begins to regret her involvement in the "witness protection thing". She puts him to the test and asks him to round up the horses. She knows he will fail miserably.

Movies

1. Windows Media (20 MEGS)
2. QuickTime - High (11 MEGS)
3. QuickTime - Low (6.5 MEGS)

Cast

Crew

Production Notes

Pre-Production and The Shoot

The Wrangler was shot on Sunday April 25th, 2004 at The Ranch in Oakville. I was afraid that it wasn't going to happen.

Let me back up a little bit. Back in February of 2004 I decided that I didn't want to let another year go by without having shot anything. So I decided to shoot 3 shorts. The first one was going to be The Wrangler. I'm not sure why I chose this one but I did.

I managed to find a ranch who's owner was willing to let me shoot my film without charging me. I made plans with her a couple of weeks before the shoot to see the location and show her the script so that she could give me some input about what I wanted the horses to do. When I arrived at my designated time, she wasn't there. I scouted the site and figured out where I wanted to shoot the scenes.

About a week before the shoot, I confirmed the shoot date with the understanding that I would call the day before to make sure that there weren't any last minute changes. I called the day before but I was unable to get in touch with her. Unless I heard contrary, I assumed everything was a go.

We had an early call. Because the location was relatively remote, I had to make 3 pick-ups before heading to the location. The call time was 6:30am as we had to be finished by 11am. So I had to get up at 4am in order to make my first pick-up at 5am!

Since it was my first shoot where I was in charge of everything, I was a little nervous and didn't sleep too well the night before.

I made my first two pick-ups on time but the third was delayed. We also made a coffee stop since I wanted to do everything I could to accommodate my actors and crew.

Pete (actor) and Zoran (make-up artist) were meeting the rest of us on location and the rest of us arrived 20 minutes late. Great! The producer/director is late arriving at her own shoot!

It was a cold drizzly windy day. We got there and Zoran and Pete were already there waiting for us. Of course I felt like shit for being late.

There was nobody around. I went up to the house which is on the ranch property and knocked on the door. The dogs were there and they were barking at my knocking but nobody came to the door. I tried for about 10 minutes to get someone's attention, to know avail.

What to do, what to do? I thought, I can't turn back now. I've got to try everything I can to shoot whatever I can so that this won't have been all in vain. So I made the decision to shoot. Shoot whatever I could.

We started with the outside shots. It was very difficult because of the weather.

At about 8:30am, the owner made her way out and found us filming in the fields a little north of the stables. She told us we could start shooting inside. So we did.

Once we got inside, things started rolling (no pun intended) a little better. There was a horse in the barn which kept chewing and there were 6 week old puppies which pleasantly interrupted the shoot for a few minutes but all in all it went well.

Then we had to go outside again the get more shots with the horses. We had to work on our own and thank God Pete had experience with horses but we had a slight incidence with an electrified fence and of course the weather. It started raining and it was cold.

The best part was when we shot the horses running towards the barn. That part worked like a charm with the help of one of the wranglers at The Ranch.

And then we were done. We were all frozen but I was happy that I hadn't given up at the beginning. I had done it! My first shoot!

Editing

The editing was a lot of fun. After I got over the upset of seeing my dailies, I started working on the editing. It was a huge learning curve as I hadn't really used Adobe Premier before.

There were some issues with the sound when we were outside as the microphone picked-up the sound of the rain on the umbrella. So I had to do some ADR (re-recording).

It took me a while to muster up the nerve to write the music as well but I did it.