The big day arrived, the first day of shooting. I got up bright and early on Saturday morning, and called Jon to make sure that everything was OK, as we were filming at his place. I marked off all the equipment on the checklist, loaded it into the car, picked up Ted, Linda, and Simon, and drove to Jon's place. Picked up snack food and drinks from the supermarket on the way.
Alistair turned up on time, followed shortly by Carey. We got to work setting up the first shot. I handed out the scripts, and the actors started marking them up. Linda set the white-balance on the camera. Other people started putting the dolly together, and still others started taping the reflective sheets to big pieces of cardboard. The actors started doing make-up for each other - just a quick powder with a base to avoid shiny noses and foreheads.
I realised that I didn't have a long enough lead to connect the video camera to the monitor, and made a quick trip to an electronics store, which also served to calm me down a little. We were already kind of running late - although I hadn't set a time schedule for each day, the initial mucking around before you get the first shot done can take some time. What is needed in this case is a very firm Assistant Director. I should have worked with the short lead, gotten a bunch of shots, then grabbed the extension lead while everyone was having lunch. But there's a certain dread that kept me from making that start, and I suspect an equivalent bit of disbelief on the part of the crew that we were really going to do anything.
Anyway, we finally knuckled down to it, and had everything set up, ready for the first shot.
Here's a tip for the first shot of the day: don't make it a complicated one. I had an idea for a very sophisticated tracking shot, with the camera starting on it's side pointing at a bottle of beer, then following the bottle as it was picked up, rotating until the bottle was horizontal (and being drunk by one of the characters) and then following the action. To perform this, I had rigged a kind of tripod using a microphone stand and some hardware store components. The problem: there were too many degrees of freedom. The stand could rotate in a couple of different directions and the tripod head would rotate independantly. It wasn't very good - worse, I hadn't tested it out properly beforehand. We spent an hour or so working on getting the first shot going, got a couple of half-way decent takes, and then moved on. In reterospect, I wouldn't have tried the complicated tracking shot until the very last day, when everyone was familiar with their roles. We should have started with something simple.
I was both directing and doing boom-mike duty on the first weekend. It was tricky. I had the remote control for the minidisc recorder (we were recording separate sound and video, not recommended) and we went through the procedure of reading out the current time-stamps on the mini-DV tape and the track number on the minidisc for the Assistant Director to write down, Linda would "camera", I'd call "sound", then the assistant director would clap the clapperboard with the scene and take number, I'd call "action", the actors would do their thing, then finally I'd call "cut", put the boom-mike down, and tell the assistant director whether I thought the take was good or not. Finally, we'd decide whether to do another take or move onto the next shot. Phew!
It didn't take us too long to get into the routine, and by lunchtime we felt like real film-makers. I paid for lunch - it's only polite - and we got back into it with enthusiasm. At this point, we started trying tracking shots using our home-made dolly. This was a big wooden board with one fixed wheen and two free wheels. We attached a broom pole to the front via a piece of string, stuck the tripod on top, and there we have it.
The Dolly
It sucked. The whole short film takes place in a small living room, with the characters sitting around the table in the middle. We had only barely enough space to squeeze the dolly behind people, and we blew many takes by colliding with chairs or the wall, which would invariably cause the tripod to tip over (we tried gaffer-taping it to the dolly, but it just didn't work) causing everyone to leap at the camera to ensure it didn't collide with anything hard. By mid-afternoon, Jonathan and I were going through the scenes that required the dolly, and rejigging them to use stationary shots. Frankly, the big message here wasn't that dolly shots are bad (although they are much more time-consuming to set up and reset even when you have a good one) but once again - give your equipment a test-run beforehand. The dolly shots conspired to get us further behind, so that by the end of the afternoon, I was beginning to worry that two weekends weren't going to be enough.
The other big problem with the dolly shot was that Linda couldn't look through the camera at the same time as pushing the dolly - it was just too awkward. For a while, Linda took boom-mike duty while me and Carey pushed around the dolly. This lead to one ludicrous shot in which Linda, holding the boom-mike, is clearly in shot for a huge section of one big track. Nobody was looking through the camera - we just turned it on and went for it.
The Reflectors
And there was another problem. The reflectors sucked. I had gotten a roll of smooth silver foil when I got the light filters (or "gels"), and we cut it into large pieces and stuck it to cardboard. The only lighting from the film was from the chandelier directly above the table (and I'd replaced all three bulbs with 100W lights) - so the light was fairly harsh. We used the reflectors to fill in the shadows under the eyes, and so on. And because we really didn't have enough crew to go around, it was typically the job of one of the actors not on-screen to hold the reflector boards. The problem with the reflectors was that they had accummulated dents and crinkles through time, and the light that they sent out looked like a reflection off water - there were hotspots of light, and some areas with hardly anything. We had to hold the reflectors *just so* to get a decent fill light, and the actors couldn't move much or it would become obvious that they were, apparently, underwater. Also, we had only the chandelier's light to reflect from, which meant that actually getting light onto the reflector was sometimes tricky. In reterospect, I'd have used what I have now - bit sheets of white polystyrine, lit by a separate light source. Much less time-consuming.
We finished up by 10:30pm. I was too exhausted by this point to spend any time looking over the footage, so we just packed up and arranged to reconvene early next morning.
Sunday
The next day was a considerable improvement. We started the day by viewing selected footage from the previous day, and were cheered to note that it wasn't nearly as bad as we were suspecting. Although I was still on boom-mike duty, the whole procedure had become smooth, and we were working quickly. The actors were reading their lines well - Alistair was giving considerable flair to his role as the villain, Ted was getting perfect, naturalistic readings by the second take, Jon was easily handling the pedagog role, and Simon's pathos was coming through nicely. By this point, I for one was feeling optimistic. I can remember very little of the second day's filming, except that by the end of it we were exhausted, tired out by the warm weather and the stuffy apartment with eight people in the living room. I was wheezing from the dust and too much talking. Also, we had terrible sound problems, as there was a church nearby with a band practicing on Sunday night. We cursed them loudly, and started trying to work out which shots could be done without sound. Here's another hint: In your shot list, mark shots that don't require sound. If you're shooting indoors, sound is your biggest variable - sometimes there's nothing you can do except wait. If you have a list of shots that don't require sound, at least you're not wasting your time.
The Second Weekend
A week passed, and I finally sat down to review the first week's footage, spotted a couple of snafus, and finished putting together the shot list for the second weekend, including the re-takes that we'd need to cover the snafus. The second weekend went smoothly - Jonathan started taking a more active role in assistant directing by looking over the shot-lists and working out what could be changed to speed things up. In fact, Jon started taking the role of stressed-out guy, leaving me the rather more pleasant role of "rather relaxed director" - particularly because in between the first and second weekends, I'd managed to get Jimbo Versace to do the boom-mike operation. Luxury!
Continuity
I'd used a polaroid camera to take pictures of the set and the appearance of the actors, and at the beginning of the second weekend (and on Sundays of both weekends, for that matter) we used them to make sure everything was exactly in the same places as before. We organised the pretzels and the corn-chips on the table *just so*, and in the end, nobody noticed. Here's another recommendation. Keep your set simple. That way you have fewer continuity issues to worry about. On the other hand, when you're making an amateur film, continuity is the least of your hassles. None of the actors dared to eat a single pretzel or corn chip through the entire film, and nobody would have noticed, or cared. The levels in the beer bottles were practically invisible on the final product anyway, so we needn't have carefully marked the levels.
The Whiteboard
The whiteboard proved particularly handy on the second weekend, because most of the longer speeches occured then - we wrote mnemonics for the actors in big letters, and they performed admirably, allowing us to compress several shots into one, and saving us a bunch of time.
Getting lazy
By the last day it was clear that we were going to make it, and by mid afternoon we'd done all the acting shots, and just had a bunch of shots of character reactions to go. At this point, we started getting lazy, something I really regretted when it came to editing. We needed to get reaction shots of characters for cutaways, and when it came to Simon's turn, we were laughing most of the way through. When I finally came to review the footage later, it turned out there was very little that was useable, and I was forced to use the one barely adequate shot on several occasions.
Finally
We were exhausted by the end of it, though satisfied and happy. We'd made a bunch of mistakes, but none of them were fatal to the film. I knew that we could pull something together from the footage. In two weekends - by professional standards, lightning fast - we had put together the raw material for what would be a 33 minute short film.
