The Trunk

I want to share an amazing experience I had working on the set of a short film yesterday. I belong to a “film industry” club on meetup.com, and the group occasionally asks for scripts and produces films. One day, the owner of the group solicited free help for a short film he’d be working on. Long story short, I offered to help, he made me the caterer, and after a bunch of people (including one of the actors) didn’t show up, he had me ACT in the film instead!

MAN, that was fun! I got pistol-whipped and I got to freak out about my “daughter” being kidnapped. The name of the film is “The Trunk” and I was the mom (the name of the original actress is still on the website, that’s not me, lol). I was playing the mom of a 17-year-old, which is a little bit of a stretch since I’m only 32, but the 17-year-old was played by a 14-year-old, so I guess it evened out.

What I really loved about this experience is that I learned a lot. I got to see professionals using real film equipment (a bunch of the crew were trained professionals working for free to get practice doing creative stuff, rather than commercial). The director, Randy, was an effective leader and kept things going smoothly and on time.

I spoke to the sound guy and asked him a ton of questions. That’s an area that is a bit of an enigma for me, and I know that you can sort of get away with cheap-looking video, but not with horrible sound. That’s the main reason I didn’t have any sound on my short film, just music and sound clips I got off the internet for free. He explained that when you use a boom, you get a more natural sound than if you use clip-on mikes, or just point a microphone at someone. When someone turns their head, they don’t cut out, for instance. I learned that you need a wind shield on your microphone, which in his case was a fuzzy microphone cover that was softer than my cat’s fur. Awwww….

They had a high-definition camera with a big LCD monitor to view the footage. There was also this setup that allowed the camera to travel on rails smoothly as it follws the actors. In a scene that showed a girl getting stuffed into a trunk, they had this see-saw looking thing with a weight on one end and the camera mounted on the other that allowed the camera to look down at the action.

They even had that clap-board thingie that you see in movies about movies, which I presume is used to synchronize the sound.

They have a lot of post-production to do on this film, using After Effects (there will be some special effects), along with the editing. It should be at least a couple months till the movie is finished, and I can’t WAIT!!