Mean Man & The Ruffians

How long has it been since the last Ruffians? Three months? . . . Nope. Just checked Vimeo. It's been four months. For a project that I said I wanted to shoot one a month, why's it taken me so long to follow up the third episode?

Two words: Mean. Man.

We filmed the short in the summer of 2007 and due to a long and convoluted story, it was never properly finished. That's been nagging at me for the past four years. Knowing that there was a project out there that I had begun, that I had invested time and money into and it was just sitting there, not being finished, it drove me a little crazy. So I decided that I was going to include snippets of Mean Man in episode 4 of The Ruffians. I was going to reveal that Charlie was something of a writer, working on a spec script in-between kills. It was going to be a somewhat lighthearted episode that would have ended in someone's homicide.

But I couldn't make it work. For the past four months, I have wrestled with this thing. I have tried to make it work and . . . it just couldn't. Mean Man kept trying to take over the episode and this episode of The Ruffians was suddenly no longer about Charlie, Alexander, or their hit list, but about this strange story that Charlie was trying to tell. It didn't make any sense, it didn't fit into the story, but I was relentless.

Until I relented. I finally admitted that it was just a bad idea that needed to go away. I slapped together a montage of the short film and posted it on Vimeo. That way, people could see what we worked on. I could get out from under its shadow. I could move on with my life. And, no kidding, within 24 hours of me making that decision, episode 4 of Ruffians opened up and revealed itself to me.

It's still going to be something of a strange episode, but I love it. It makes much more sense. It's internally consistent with the rest of the show. It's a little metaphysical (something I wasn't counting on), it's a little out-of-the-box, but I like it. I'm moving into pre-production now.

So stay tuned. There's at least two more episodes of The Ruffians headed your way.

Logan's Mean Music Montage

So here's a little something I worked on one sweltering weekend in 2007.

Due to a great many production problems, this is probably all you'll ever see of it -- which is probably for the best.

Editing episode 4

I'm putting it together and keep shaking my head.

What were we thinking?

Crafting Episode 4

Episode 4 of The Ruffians is going to be very Charlie-centric. The original idea for the show was that we would alternate every other episode as an Alexander-centric episode or as a Charlie-centric episode. But once the story began to evolve and the characters became better defined, I realized that every-other-episode wasn't going to be the case. Which really doesn't disappoint me at all. I like the direction the story has gone and the next two episodes are really going to be quite fun.

Episode 5 is basically already written (a first draft at any rate) and it concludes this story. There may be more Ruffian stories down the line, but after episode 5, we'll be done for now. I always knew how I wanted to end the story, so I wrote it before I wrote episode 3 or 4. And there were things that came in episode 5 that are now informing episode 4.

I haven't written episode 4 yet, but I've been feverishly working on it. I actually already have hours of footage that I'm working through and editing that will play a big part of episode 4. Once I see how all that edits together, I'll sit down and write the episode and then we'll shoot it. Quite looking forward to seeing the finishing product on this one. We're going to see Charlie's home life in these next two -- which should prove very interesting.