We Saved Rabbits And Got Away With Kidnapping...All In A Day's Work!

Yes, it’s a been a fun start to the New Year. So just after getting the opportunity to shoot Cindy Taylor last week, I got asked to help a friend Produce and DIT (Digital Technician - an overly fancy term for downloading video footage onto hard drives) a short film. Though I spent close to a decade working on and editing videos and commercials and whatnots, it’s been a while since I’ve been on a film set and I must say, it wasn't too bad, one because I was working with friends, and two, well, my title wasn’t Production Assistant! No offense to my PA brothers and sisters, but, well, those weren’t exactly the most savory years of my working life...

Anyhow, the production was called Rabbit Season, a film by Director Jimmie Rhee from Defy Agency in Culver City. It was a bit of a dark story, which I’ll share here once they’re done editing and ready to release, but we had some fun on set. It’s not everyday that you’re getting paid to find a 65 Cadillac, a way to make a fake rabbit look like a real dead rabbit, deflect a police officer who got a call from a pedestrian who witnessed a scene in which a girl was being thrown into the trunk of a car but didn’t see the camera filming it on the mountain top above, and collect chicken bones from lunchtime catering to try to pass as rabbit bones on film.

Rabbit Season_Defy Agency_Wasim Muklashy Photography
Rabbit Season_Defy Agency_Wasim Muklashy Photography

In any case, Lacy Street Production Center was one of the locations (some of the films that shot there included "Catch Me If You Can" and "Saw”), which is that crazy dilapidated looking brick building in the pictures below. The other location was Singing Springs in the Angeles National Forest, which was particularly nice as, well, we got to be outside, in the mountains, all day long without any reception. And you all know how I like to be outside all day long! The picture at the right was my office for the day...

Anyhow, no special lesson learned here or any particular words of any significance or importance, just figured I’d share a few production stills from a few scenes and locations from that shoot, all of which were shot on the Samsung NX300 mirrorless camera.

And don’t worry, no animals were harmed in the making of this film. As a matter of fact, we ended up saving the life of a rabbit that was marked to be butchered for meat and pelt. We gone done a good thing!! What you see in some of those seemingly gruesome pictures are just a rabbit pelt being stapled to a fake rabbit cadaver from our friends at Dapper Cadaver (yes, there’s a shop that specializes in this madness…only in Hollywood…)

Ok then…