Jack Daniels and fight scenes

Emailed designer Craig about the possibility of him creating a label… I wonder; how much is it a pain in the ass for him to do us a fake Jack Daniels label? By which of course I mean, a label of a fictitious brand of Kentucky bourbon?

We have a scene with our villain swigging from the bottle where I refer to his cousin Jack in reference to the drink. Because it turns in to a physical fight scene, we don’t want the actor to have to worry about cheating the label away from camera for the scene… our prop bottle is the litre size. I hope we don’t have to scan a real one for reference as our net/scanning etc access is limited here….

but basically we’re just looking for a B&W label for a litre JD bottle. We’ll print our own labels on the laser printer and apply it to the prop bottle. If he can do it, we want it to cost him the least time or headache… some slightly modified version based on the real label or some invented generic looking cheap tacky booze label, whatever!

This will be a challenging scene to shoot, though everything is going very well so far. It will be a very physical scene, shooting at night on the beach, and it will be just the actors in the scene (myself and Sean, playing Eddie), our director Chris, and Laura assisting.

Luckily both Sean and myself are physical actors with stage combat experience, and Chris will give us all the time necessary to work out the physical work for camera. I know from our partnership in this kind of work, he would never rush us.

Actually, it is our desire to pay attention to detail in the performances and the physical work that has led to the discussion regarding the label on the bottle. The characters in the scene are drinkers, and liquor plays a significant part in who they are and in the sexuality and the violence in their lives… we don’t want the bottle in this scene to be used as a significant prop and then be unable to use any shot that features the label due to a lack of legal clearance. Any and all no-to-low budget productions need to take such considerations into account.

(Postscript: Ultimately we let go of the label concern. The bottle never got featured in a way that any label was really visible and we cut ALL of the dialogue from the scene as originally written so it became almost purely physical. The dynamic between us was made very clear physically… dialogue was not really necessary. A page of it got reduced to I’m sorry and physical action. More telling.)
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