“Scene”

Even though I haven’t posted in three months, much has happened to me, filmmaking-wise.  In December, someone in my part of town started a film club with the goal of making one short film per month for a year.   A handful of people showed up to that first meeting, and by the time the meeting was over, we had a script, cast and crew ready to shoot the first film.  I was the director.  And we shot it a few weeks later.  I’m not gonna say it was a masterpiece, but it was quite an adventure, and we learned a lot.

As of now, we’ve shot three films and are doing pre-production on a fourth and fifth.  Two are completely done, and I’ll post the second one shortly.  You’ll see a huge difference between the first and second film, which shows how fast we are learning and growing.

Here is our first short film, “Scene.”

Here are my some random tidbits of what went on behind the scenes of this particular project:

• For this project, we didn’t have an experienced cinematographer.  The guy that did the cinematography was more of a sound guy, but he knew a guy with a good camera.  The big difference in productions values that can be seen in the second video (which I will post shortly), is due to a lot of things, and this is one of them.
• The actor who originally played the son quit a week before we shot this.  This was our first lesson in making sure we hire reliable people.  In fast, starting with our third film, we started doing casting calls.  I find that experienced actors tend to take acting more seriously and are therefore more reliable.  I was lucky I was able to convince my co-worker Lucas to step in at the last minute.  And he really stepped up, came to rehearsal, and had all his lines memorized on time.
• Unlike anything I’ve done before, we used actual studio lighting here.  I really like how the lighting turned out here.  None of us were lighting experts, but I think we did a pretty decent job.
• We should have gotten a larger crew.   As director, I was moving things around myself, and that was exhausting.  Now that we’re in pre-production on our fourth film, it’s become more of a well-oiled machine.  And it turns out there are always lots of people who want to help out, which is great.
• One thing that made this shoot simple was that the first scenes were supposed to imitate a father and son making a youtube video.  So there were no closeups or a ton of shots that had to be taken from different angles.  The difficult thing was, there were two looooong continuous takes, and it was hard to get even a single take without any mistakes.  I think one of them had like 14 takes.
• We had this great inside joke about the chandelier.  …which doesn’t make a lot of sense if you weren’t there.  The chandelier had these plastic things hanging off of it, and we removed the lower half of them because they were getting in the frame.  So when Kristen ad-libbed about them messing up her “fucking chandelier,” that’s what she meant.  I have a bloopers reel that I’ll post that has a whole “fuckin’ chandelier” segment.  Anyway. It’s not obvious in the final film that there is anything wrong with the chandelier, so it doesn’t make much sense.  Should have left a few of those plastic things dangling on the bottom.
• Getting the fake blood right was quite a task (ask Tena, who is one of our producers, who did all the work).  Later on, we realized we could have just bought fake blood on the cheap.
• We also had to worry about getting blood on the floor and walls of the nice lady who let us film in her home.  In fact, the script has the mom yelling about them getting it on her walls and floor.  But we didn’t want to ACTUALLY destroy her house, so we just had them get it on some sheets on the floor.
• Figuring out how to get the dad and son to wrestle safely was tricky.  Luckily (producer) Manny has some wrestling experience and showed them how to do it without anyone getting hurt.  We had a mattress there for them to fall on.
• Between the wrestling and blood scenes, we disguised the fact that we have a cut (where we let Lucas get up and out of the way, and where we put blood on Omar’s hands), by simulating the camera falling down and getting all static-y.
• We had to get Omar two identical shirts so we could get exactly two takes of the scene with him getting blood on his shirt.  Man… that was nerve-wracking.  If we hadn’t gotten that, I’m not sure what we would have done.
• When my husband watched this, he observed that the actors sounded like they were just waiting for the other person to finish speaking in order to deliver their lines, rather than having a natural conversation.  And he’s right.  And the blame for that is on me.  I’m very proud of the actors in this film–they worked hard, did a great job, and were wonderful to work with.  But I did not direct them well.  After we did this shoot, I attended a seminar on how to direct actors, and I discovered many ways in which I could have directed them better.  Anyway, I am confident that April’s film (directed by me) will be much better in this regard.