Second shoot is in the can!

I've been really tardy in getting posts up. I wrote one in April after our first shoot but didn't realize I hadn't posted it until I finally logged in to write this post. Yup. Been one of those months....

After having an all-star director the last time, this time we went back to me directing, and my fellow Ryerson film certificate student, Jeff Brown, helping out (basically by setting up the shots, shooting the scenes, and throwing bags at us --more about that later). Jeff is in the middle of post-production for his Production 3 project.

Ryerson's Continuing Ed program is really good. The film certificate is geared towards getting you some core courses (the 3 Production classes being the centrepiece of the program) plus a long list of electives to customize your training. I've taken 2 electives thus far, the introductory producing class (with Jim Murphy, a long-time Canadian film veteran), and Directing Screen Performance (with Robin X, who teaches the Meisner technique over 8 months in a demanding but rewarding class). The program runs in a specific order of prerequisites, so if I were to aim to do Production 3, I'd have to start with Film Technology 1 and then do Production 1. I haven't done so, nor am I thinking about doing so. Making these homemade shorts instead of doing the certificate certainly saves me a lot of money, gives me hands-on experience, but I'm probably missing out on things I should know. I might take another elective, the Film Theory course, or maybe Image Theory over in the Image Arts program. I'm trying to compensate for not having a great visual arts education, which I think affects how I choose and set up shots, as well as in planning and editing.

So, Jeff, fresh from work, came over to my apartment, where he joined Mullet and I as we shot a scene from a short with the working title Dressing Room. I picked up a cold this week, and by the time Saturday noon rolled around, I had full-blown laringytis. So, we dropped my closeups (I'm not skilled or experienced enough to sync looped voicetracks in post) and shot a sequence that takes place in a small space.

On paper, I broke the sequence into 3 scenes, but when we were setting up the shots, Mullet was aggressive in trimming a lot of stuff, and it's really merged into one scene. The space was smaller than what I'd had in mind when I wrote it, so there wasn't the room or, in hindsight, the need for a lot of the gags I'd put in (including Mullet in a Santa suit --it wouldn't have been visible given the narrowness of the doorway and the position we were forced to put the camera in. As I type this, I haven't seen the rushes yet, but I'm sure it'll end up a much tighter and funnier sequence as a result.

Like with Can, what was on paper didn't automatically make it to tape. There was judicious cutting, based on location, lighting, etc. Am I comfortable with this? Sure. We've come up with better stuff than what was written. It's a collaborative process, and the accidents caused by different people, surroundings, and random events of the universe can create magic.

Clown training, like that of improv, prepares you for just about anything to come your way in performance. With creating these projects, I've had the same approach. There are times where this has created crap on tape that seemed better in the room at the time (and those are, guaranteed, the moments where you wish you'd shot alternative footage without the gag to make the editing easier), so there is danger as well as reward in dropping the script and finding something else. So, as we were cutting the 3 scenes down, I kept thinking about how I would cut from one shot to the next. Once I capture the footage and watch the rushes, I'll have a better idea of anything we missed.

Given that the location is in my apartment and we're going to shoot my closeups later on, anything that's missing when viewing the rushes will be quite clear. I'll put together a rough assembly of what we shot just to see how the scene plays.

With other locations, we don't always have the option of revisiting and reshooting, especially if it's a rented space, so in those situations, I need a lot more time to think about changes to the script, just for safety's sake.

I've gotten so far way from my biweekly updates that I'm going to start posting whenever I come up with something to say. Hopefully that's every two weeks....