Hour before Morning - First Shoot
Jun. 20th, 2009 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiWe had our first shoot for The Hour before Morning on Wednesday.
It was inspiring, my first experience of what I always imagined would make it fantastically personally fulfilling to work on a collaborative project like a film: everyone coming together, working hard, having a blast, and leaving in very high spirits, eager to go on.
We had about a billion misadventures, which was inevitable given that:
* We are amateurs doing this ourselves on the off-hours when we're not at our day jobs.
* Two out of the three of the main crew members quit within the last two weeks before the shoot, leaving yours truly to find a crew, all our film equipment, and get our sets built. This I barely accomplished. On the evening of the shoot, we had to assemble the camera, buy 4 extension cords, move the set into position and figure out how to set it up (not easy), and figure out our entire lighting strategy. We only had sound and a script supervisor by the grace Greg and Joel volunteering to come help at the last minute. We also picked up our now new sound guy, Quinton, about 2 days before shoot. He was very helpful as a PA.
Many people said, "Put it off," which might have been the correct thing to do... but organizing a bunch of volunteers who all have at least 3 major life responsibilities that take precedence over this film is sufficiently like herding cats as it is that, every instinct tells me, after having the date set for the first shoot for almost a month, canceling it would have lost us crew and actors (with one of our very good actors about to leave the country for a month). I think it would have branded us as flakes in a way that would be hard to recover from.
Really, our choices were 1) do a rushed shoot or 2) push back the whole project a long, long way (including recasting - casting has not been easy). I think we did the right thing to go through with it. And hopefully, we will never have last-minute rush and chaos on this order again.
As it is, we ended up with:
* Disadvantageous lighting
* Poor continuity
* Shoddy-looking sets (created by Brett and his best friend, Molloy, purely out of the goodness of their hearts at the very last instant and significant personal inconvenience).
* Makeup that didn't work as well as we'd hoped
* Who knows that the sound will end up like? (We haven't replayed it yet.)
* A hand-held camera because the tripod we had ended up not working
But we also got some very good performances out of Trisha as Meravyn and Eugene as the Wounded Man. And we did get some good shots. And we did a stellar job of creatively planning around our troubles. The massive street noise may work for a scene that is all chaos and confusion, explosions, and people running for safety. The poor lighting can probably be swung to represent dawn, which is actually a reasonable time for desert people to be up and about. And our storyboarder, Matt, who came by just for fun, ended up being perfect as the second extra we needed (in a story where race/ethnicity matters, extras really need to have a certain physical appearance, which, happily, he had).
We also experienced what I fondly think of as the Miracle of the Wall. With all the last-minuteness of our wall construction, nobody considered that to move it out of my yard into the alleyway, we would need move it under my carport. There we were with about eight burly fellows barely managing to carry this way-too-heavy item, suddenly finding themselves stopped by this low crossbeam that seemed destined to doom the whole proceeding. But there was no panic. With perfect calm, Jake (our AD), marshaled everyone into formation and with much canting and tilting and not a little sweat, they made it through the carport all of 3 inches to spare. This, to me, is a Tolkienesque miracle, the type that settles subtly over those who have done everything in their power to accomplish a task that is beyond their power. In that final extremis--sometimes--the universe steps in and helps. And while, please understand, I say all this as an agnostic without any concrete belief that God decided to help me with my movie, I think we are fools not to give thanks for serendipity. It restores our humility and faith in happy outcomes.
The attitude everyone showed was phenomenal. It was all about problem solving and no complaining whatever. This is the cast/crew I want to work with the rest of this project. They are amazing, one and all.
It was inspiring, my first experience of what I always imagined would make it fantastically personally fulfilling to work on a collaborative project like a film: everyone coming together, working hard, having a blast, and leaving in very high spirits, eager to go on.
We had about a billion misadventures, which was inevitable given that:
* We are amateurs doing this ourselves on the off-hours when we're not at our day jobs.
* Two out of the three of the main crew members quit within the last two weeks before the shoot, leaving yours truly to find a crew, all our film equipment, and get our sets built. This I barely accomplished. On the evening of the shoot, we had to assemble the camera, buy 4 extension cords, move the set into position and figure out how to set it up (not easy), and figure out our entire lighting strategy. We only had sound and a script supervisor by the grace Greg and Joel volunteering to come help at the last minute. We also picked up our now new sound guy, Quinton, about 2 days before shoot. He was very helpful as a PA.
Many people said, "Put it off," which might have been the correct thing to do... but organizing a bunch of volunteers who all have at least 3 major life responsibilities that take precedence over this film is sufficiently like herding cats as it is that, every instinct tells me, after having the date set for the first shoot for almost a month, canceling it would have lost us crew and actors (with one of our very good actors about to leave the country for a month). I think it would have branded us as flakes in a way that would be hard to recover from.
Really, our choices were 1) do a rushed shoot or 2) push back the whole project a long, long way (including recasting - casting has not been easy). I think we did the right thing to go through with it. And hopefully, we will never have last-minute rush and chaos on this order again.
As it is, we ended up with:
* Disadvantageous lighting
* Poor continuity
* Shoddy-looking sets (created by Brett and his best friend, Molloy, purely out of the goodness of their hearts at the very last instant and significant personal inconvenience).
* Makeup that didn't work as well as we'd hoped
* Who knows that the sound will end up like? (We haven't replayed it yet.)
* A hand-held camera because the tripod we had ended up not working
But we also got some very good performances out of Trisha as Meravyn and Eugene as the Wounded Man. And we did get some good shots. And we did a stellar job of creatively planning around our troubles. The massive street noise may work for a scene that is all chaos and confusion, explosions, and people running for safety. The poor lighting can probably be swung to represent dawn, which is actually a reasonable time for desert people to be up and about. And our storyboarder, Matt, who came by just for fun, ended up being perfect as the second extra we needed (in a story where race/ethnicity matters, extras really need to have a certain physical appearance, which, happily, he had).
We also experienced what I fondly think of as the Miracle of the Wall. With all the last-minuteness of our wall construction, nobody considered that to move it out of my yard into the alleyway, we would need move it under my carport. There we were with about eight burly fellows barely managing to carry this way-too-heavy item, suddenly finding themselves stopped by this low crossbeam that seemed destined to doom the whole proceeding. But there was no panic. With perfect calm, Jake (our AD), marshaled everyone into formation and with much canting and tilting and not a little sweat, they made it through the carport all of 3 inches to spare. This, to me, is a Tolkienesque miracle, the type that settles subtly over those who have done everything in their power to accomplish a task that is beyond their power. In that final extremis--sometimes--the universe steps in and helps. And while, please understand, I say all this as an agnostic without any concrete belief that God decided to help me with my movie, I think we are fools not to give thanks for serendipity. It restores our humility and faith in happy outcomes.
The attitude everyone showed was phenomenal. It was all about problem solving and no complaining whatever. This is the cast/crew I want to work with the rest of this project. They are amazing, one and all.
