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Clocking The T

VisibleEvidence/sandbox
Directed by	Michael Thibault
Written by	Michael Thibault Pedro Jimenez
Produced by	Michael Thibault Erika Thibault
Starring	Jana Nawartschi Ben Hicks Lee Simonds Chantal Lashon Rebecca Reaney Eric Lauritzen Asheford J. Thomas Reina Guthrie
Cinematography	Michael Thibault
Edited by	Michael Thibault
Music by	Gideon Freudmann
Production company	Visible Evidence
Distributed by	Filmhub
Release date	August 8, 2024
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$88,000.00

Clocking The T is a 2024 romantic comedy-drama film directed by Michael Thibault and co-written by Michael Thibault & Pedro Jimenez and currently distributed by Filmhub. The movie is about Dave and Candace, who meet online and keep each other at the arm’s length of commitment. It stars Jana Nawartschi, Ben Hicks, and Lee Simonds, and co-starred Chantal Lashon, Rebecca Reaney, Eric Lauritzen, Ashford J Thomas, and Reina Guthrie.

The film was produced by Michael and Erika Thibault. It premiered at the Orlando Film Festival on October 21, 2018 and played a month later at the 2018 Studio City International Film Festival where it won awards. It was released on streaming on August 8, 2024.

Plot

Dave Matters is a professional internet troll--an ‘astroturfer’--who combats bad reviews against the people and companies who hire him. He is seen defending a local Assemblyman, bad appliance manufacturers, and even a bakery. Dave lives a lonely, single life, sleeping during the day and working through the night. One morning he gets a call from Bill Stanfield, a theatrical advertising executive at a film studio, who wants to hire him. A major summer movie franchise, a comic book movie called “Triple Helix 3: WarFlare: Fall Of The Phoenix,” has been accidentally leaked from their studio. Though still incomplete it is getting terrible reviews online which threaten the opening box office in another six weeks. With the promise of a $35,000 payout Dave takes the job, and with his astroturfing crew of Rob, Trevor, and Steve, begin making plans for weeks of twenty hour days refuting every bad review. He is interrupted by an alarm on his phone, “Candace,” and slumps: This couldn’t happen at a worse time.

Dave soon arrives for a ‘coffee meet’ with Candace Mack who’s not too impressed with his wrinkled appearance and being distracted on his phone. It doesn’t take long for their introductory meeting to sour and Candace drives back to work where she is in charge of Human Resources at a diagnostic blood laboratory. Soon after, her manager, Megan Burrata, slams a file on her desk and demands that an employee be terminated. When Candace asks, “Why?” it becomes clear she’s on thin ice herself. After work, she drinks her sorrows away at a wine bar with a co-worker, Avaline Daly, and they commiserate about the lame quality of men they have dated. Candaces sighs, “I never should have met a guy named Dave, That’s a losername.”

The next day Dave sees Candace’s online profile, still open on his computer desktop. He sighs at the lost opportunity. Across town Candace is in the L.A. River when her phone dings: A series of texts from Dave charms her into giving him another chance. That night they have dinner and Candace explains why she doesn’t think they’re compatible giving a long ‘No List’ of the types of guys she won’t date anymore. Despite the fact he’s eating a cheeseburger in a Mexican restaurant, and has a problem with the way it’s prepared, he’s cute enough to win another date.

Stanfield calls the next morning, pleased with the results of his trolling work, and presses him for an additional 500 posts a day. During this call Dave’s computer chimes with a message from Lilliana, a girl who hits him up with a flirtatious, “Hi, cutie!” Dave and Rob confer at lunch whether a 1,000 posts a day is even possible given the size of their crew. But the discussion turns to Dave’s dilemma: Should he date this new girl or continue to pursue Candace or both? Rob rolls his eyes like he’s heard this a thousand times and tells him to choose the job they have instead.

Dave and Candace meet that evening just to hang out. He continues his work on his phone while she watches the movie “Triple Helix 3” on her phone. It is a sci-fi comic book movie with a hero named WarFlare, who can ignite his fists into lethal balls of plasma and blow up entire city blocks... which he does. The next day Candace confides to Avaline that she probably shouldn’t be dating Dave but there’s no reason not to either. Soon after, the two go out on an ‘official date’ at a bowling alley which ends with both of them in bed at Dave’s place. In the middle of the night Candace wakes and finds him missing. She tip toes to the living room where he is lost in his work, so much so that he does not hear her talking. When he snaps out of it he realizes she’s left and over the next week ignores his calls and texts. During this time, Megan wants Candace to fire another employee, Dan, for a twenty-five cent discrepancy in the vending machine profits.

One day Candace is on the phone with her German speaking mother, flipping between English and Deutsch, and talks about Dave, telling her mom he’s not Mr. Right, “more like Mr, Right Now.” Afterward, she calls him and they meet at a coffee shop and semi-reconcile, laying out ground rules for their relationship. Shortly thereafter Candace tells Dave that a friend of a friend worked for the same studio and never got paid. This worries him, especially after Stanfield calls him and berates him for the offensive fake usernames Dave and his crew use as sock puppets. At the blood lab Candace hears Megan crying and offers to help her, unknowingly agreeing to fire the guy responsible for the missing 25¢ from the vending machine. While at a farmer’s market, Dave & Candace commiserate their woes when Lilliana suddenly passes and Dave stares at her, gobsmacked. This leads to an argument where Candace reveals she has HSV-2 and has been struggling to tell him.

Again, they reconcile, and in an effort to get past each other’s personal force fields, Dave buys MDMA from an online darknet market and they spend the entire night rolling balls and revealing themselves. Candaces describes how she contracted herpes, but still reticent, does so in German, which Dave doesn’t understand. Things seem to be going well between them and Dave even deletes his online dating profile, symbolically committing to Candace. Out of the blue, Stanfield calls and wants to come visit Dave’s “top secret setup,” unaware that it’s just a dumpy apartment in Koreatown and not some high tech facility. This sends Dave on a spiral of worry and he ends up embarrassing himself in front of Candace’s co-workers. She starts to have second thoughts about the relationship, again, and that night it is revealed that Dave is seeing Lilliana on the side.

In the morning he drives to Rob’s house in the nice part of town which he will pretend is his ‘office’ when Stanfield visits. But he never arrives, leaving Dave and Rob confused and worried about the job. Meanwhile, Candace sneaks into work on her day off, opens the vending machine, and plants a quarter inside. At work the coin is ‘found’ and Megan is enraged that Candace is rehiring Dan back.

Six weeks has passed and they go to the theater and watch “Triple Helix 3” on opening day. It is terrible. When they arrive home Candace finds a condom in the bathroom trash, presumably from Dave’s trysts with Lilliana, and the couple break up. Dave eventually gives up pursuing her with endless text messages. Sometime later, Stanfield calls Dave at his new office and tells him the movie underperformed and he won’t pay him the $35K. Although the movie made $85 million its opening weekend, Stanfield reveals the studio bought the tickets to prop up their stock. Dave is stiffed by the studio, just as Candace warned him.

Across town, Candace dips her toe back in the dating pool with one demoralizing date after another. Finally realizing that maybe before she can be honest with others, she has to be true to herself first. She deletes the ‘No List’ from her online dating profile and posts that she has HSV-2, along with a long list of things she likes in life, her new ‘Yes List.’

Cast

Jana Nawartschi as Candace Mack

Ben Hicks as Dave Matters

Lee Simonds as Bill Stanfield

Chantal Lashon as Avaline Daly

Rebecca Reaney as Megan Burrata

Eric Lauritzen as Rob Lassan

Lisa Wharton as Iris Whitman

Ashford J. Thomas as WarFlare

Reina Guthrie as Kateri

Nardeep Khurmi as Trevor Armstrong

Chris Labadie as Steve Summers

Charlie Abraham as Nicholas Durant

Kathrin Beck as Ursula Mack

Sam Aotaki as Lilliana Guen

Julia Farino as General Gage

Tony Herbert as Viktor

Production

Starting in 2013, there was a two year period of writing and pre-production, during which the original producer began ghosting the production and was replaced by the directors’ wife. Casting took months, with over 13,000 submissions, reviewed only by the director and producer. Principal photography began on April 6, 2015 in Los Angeles. The twenty-four day, four week shoot went surprisingly well, especially considering the crew was only eight people. Filming was broken down with the first two weeks being filmed in Dave’s apartment, and the Cypress Park Library, subbing for the blood lab, on consecutive Sundays. The third week was various locations around L.A. and Glendale, CA, and the fourth week was a minimum cast & crew (usually four to five people) in a rented van driving around the greater Los Angeles area to film scenes. Though the production might film only three scenes in a day, as most of the time was spent in traffic, these were the Big Money Shots that made the film feel less low budget and more cinematic.

Cast & crew reunited the next year for pick ups, which almost didn’t happen as shortly after principal production wrapped the lead actress’ visa expired and she had returned to Germany. It was during this shoot that the parts of Trevor and Steve were shot. These scenes had purposefully been left off the principal photography schedule so that their parts could be custom rewritten to how the movie was edited (which they were). In addition, a new scene was written for Dave & Rob that clarified the plot threads launching into the backend of the movie. The filming of the “Triple Helix 3” sequences was left for a separate shoot as the production struggled whether to reconceive the movie-within-the-movie as another genre, possible a horror or spy film, which would cost less and be easier to produce. Filming was complicated by the impending Writer’s Guild negotiations of 2017, which the industry feared would result in a labor strike, resulted in productions filming en masse, all over town and booking every location possible, as the major studios tried to bank as much filmed entertainment as possible to last through a possible work stoppage. Ironically, this turned out to be a lucky break for the filmmakers. The few locations left that were available and affordable essentially suited the original comic book style movie. Ultimately, the “Triple Helix 3” scenes were filmed at the LAX Theme Building, an undeveloped area at the end of the LAX runway, and the spaceship stages at Laurel Canyon Stages in two days of shooting in April of 2017.

Post Production

Although originally planned to be finished within a year of filming, “Clocking The T” suffered through massive setbacks in post production. This includes discovering that the new HD components in Avid Media Composer had a bug that spontaneously changed timecode in certain codecs. This made it impossible to export a final cut list that could be mastered upon finishing. This shut down editing for three months while unsuccessfully teching the issue. Ultimately, the production re-transcoded the entirety of dailies and overcut the ninety minutes of scenes already cut. Waiting on the lead actress’ visa issues to resolve also slowed production and backup plans were being made to shoot her scenes in Germany until she was granted re-entry into the United States.  

The biggest problem was when the productions’ distribution deal derailed because the final audio mix had missing elements or incorrect masters and were not to required loudness standards for delivery. Though the production returned to the audio mixing facility six times to fix issues, the facility eventually shuttered and went out of business. Unable to find another sound house who would be able to remix the movie, with one re-recording mixer who declined to get involved with a succinct, “The problem is that it is a shi**y mix.” Out of options and money, the director (who was also the editor) learned to mix audio himself. This was a long, laborious, and painful process that forced him to learn a skillset he was completely inexperienced in. Almost on cue the COVID lockdown occurred and that time was spent remixing “Clocking The T” in his garage and revising over a hundred visual effects to conform to streamer requirements.

Although the story is seemingly a simple romantic dramedy about two characters, there are over 600 special effects shots and graphics. These include everything from titles and texting graphics to spaceships and alien planets to license plate removal and general image clean up and removal of boom poles and bystanders.

Over a year was spent trying to find the right music composer, with the first being let go for posting parts of the movie to a company in Mexico City while trying to double sell the cues for a telenovela being produced there, the second for not having a feeling for the material, and the third for producing only twelve cues in a month, none of which were useable, some of it a copyright violation of other people’s music. The production eventually found Gideon Freudmann’s music online, tracking him down through the Portland Cello Project. He eventually scored the music from his home in Portland, Skyping with the director to spot, approve, and lock cues. Likewise, the songs by Zack David were found online and he also was contacted and contracted to use his music in the movie, including providing arrangements and revised lyrics for an extended version of his song “Being No One” for the ending of the movie.

“Clocking The T” was accepted to four film festivals, including the Blow-Up International Arthouse Festival and another festival which dumped the movie unceremoniously when the producers tried to negotiate a better time slot. It premiered at the Orlando Film Festival during a disastrous screening where the dialog wasn’t presented. After a half hour of troubleshooting and walkouts the screening proceeded from a backup of the movie the director had on a flashdrive in his pocket. Although nominated for multiple awards at the festival, including Best Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Poster, it won none. The film had better luck and a better screening a month later at the Studio City International Film Festival where it won three awards, including Best Romantic Comedy.

Awards

Winner Best Romantic Comedy, Best Screenplay, Best Original Song at the Studio City International Film Festival, 2018

Nominated Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Poster at the Orlando Film Festival. 2018

Reception

Film Threat gave the film a positive review.

External Links

Clocking The T Official Website

Clocking The T at IMDb

Clocking The T at Twitter

Clocking The T at Threads

Clocking The T at Instagram

Clocking The T at Medium

Clocking The T at Facebook

Clocking The T at YouTube

Gideon Freudmann at cellobop.com

Zack David at zackdavid.com