When we wrapped, of course, we had an enormous job in post-production ahead of us. We had over 30 hours of footage to on a large collection of mini-DV tapes. By then, I’d traded in the Powermac 8600 for a brand-new G4. I captured footage each week, once we’d watched our “rushes,” and I’d logged all the takes, but I did nothing more at that point until we were wrapped.
Mullet and I spent one memorable week sitting in front of that G4 trying to put together our first cut. It was sheer hell, so in a blaze of inspiration, we called it Hell Week.
Our self-taught shooting style came home to roost that week.
Our coverage was thin, so we didn’t have a lot of alternatives or any way of speeding scenes up—there was nothing to cut to. So… things had to stay as they were, usually as master shots. To match shots, we had to let things go on too long, and, to further complicate matters, very few shots matched perfectly (no continuity person to notice these things). We ended up using takes because they matched rather than using the best takes. That was the hell part of Hell Week.
There are a lot of first-time filmmakers who have made and who will make the same mistakes, but the silver lining is that we all learn more about putting moving images together when trying to solve problems than when something together easily (an equally important lesson is, of course, to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them the next time).
Today, we edit as we go, so as soon as we’ve shot something I start to put it together to see what we have. Otherwise, you’re blind to what you’ve missed, and your mistakes will likely not be fixable, unless your cast and locations are still available.
Another frustration appeared during Hell Week, something we couldn’t avoid that late in the project.
We’d started working on the project on with Adobe Premiere 6, which proved to be crash-prone and completely unreliable for anything other than crashing the computer at random moments. We had each scene in a separate project file to keep things manageable, but it didn’t matter how long or short the scene was—the software would crash regularly, and whatever work we’d done since the previous save was gone.
To be fair, we were probably demanding too much of Premiere. If we’d been working on a short, it probably would have worked just fine, but even keeping scenes in their own project files was probably too much at times.
Nonetheless, after the rough cut was done, I switched over to the first version of Final Cut Pro, which proved to be much more stable. I ended up using FCP to recreate the editing of a few scenes, and the rest I exported from Premiere as QuickTime movies. I stuck to the separate project files for each scene, but the crashing stopped and we were able to get through the rest of the process much easier.
Despite the obstacles, we had a 124-minute rough cut assembled by December, 2002. Technical errors, the lack of coverage, and the convoluted plot—for a first, student effort, I don’t think we did that badly. If you were to set a classroom full of first-year film students off and running for 8 months of Saturday shoots and the same budget, I think we would have held our own.
Some of the jokes were really good—a DVD gag played really well in particular, and we were complimented by a few people about specific gags that worked well. Some of it doesn’t work, and the story isn’t clear enough at times to make sense—we more or less walked away from the plot during Act 2.
The ending didn’t work very well, but it was because we made a classic rookie mistake when we reshoot parts of it to try to make it work. We didn’t reshoot the entire scene—just the specific shot needed. The retakes, naturally, didn’t match the original shots.
Lesson learned: any time you have to reshoot something, always look at the footage for the entire scene or sequence, print screen caps, and take them with you to the location. Or you can save yourself headaches by getting yourself a really good continuity person!
The project taught us things that we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
The team itself was well-balanced. Mullet has a lot more performing experience than I do, so in our live performances he did better than I did because I wasn’t as experienced in improv—and we improvised almost everything on stage. With a script, I could hold up my end of the stick better, and the team was much more balanced, something that has carried on in our following projects and live performances.
We both learned a lot about storytelling with video, and the old saying about telling a story three times (on the page, in the camera, in the editing) is very true.
It was time to show our project to an audience to start working on pacing and structure. We had a Christmas Party at the now-defunct Tim Sims Playhouse for the cast, crew, and some invited guests, and we showed them the 124-minute version with temp audio tracks and placeholders for some of the graphics.
I remember not wanting to be in the room while it was playing. Surprisingly, the cast and crew were still in the room when the lights came up.
It was useful to see it with a real audience, though. Audience reaction showed us where we had to make cuts, and so, a few months later, we had a second cut running 74 minutes.
I moved onto the audio. All of our onscreen dialogue was recorded with a shotgun mike directly into the camcorder so the audio was, in theory, synched with the video, although the software occasionally disagreed and shifted things. Otherwise, all I had to do to was adjust volumes for individual clips until they were consistent.
On a dare from me, Mullet composed a crazy patchwork of a score, ranging from solo piano to a wall of indescribable noise. Dave Pearce recorded some songs that Mullet had written. Scott McClelland, a recording engineer/musician/music teacher, mixed and mastered the songs for us, and I used Final Cut Pro 1 to mix the final audio together. I exported everything as QuickTime movies.
We showed the car theft scene at Second Ciné, a show hosted by Andrew Currie, at the Tim Sims. Each month, AC screened a number of short comedies, having the director and/or performers come up after the short for an interview.
The Second Ciné audience wasn’t moved to violence, and I even got asked about what camera we’d used, likely because of the clarity of the image when we were shooting through the windshield (a Cokin circular polarizer and an ND filter, which made my one-chip Ultura look a lot better than it should have).
AC nominated us for newcomer of the year for the season-ending awards, but we lost out. Still, it was nice to be nominated, and, no, we didn’t prepare a speech in case we won. We would like to thank the academy….
Next time, the financial aspects of a no-budget feature….
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 3: Life in Production
So, what’s it like shooting a feature movie on a no-budget project? It’s a lot of work, but with enough preparation, you can get an enormous amount of work done.
I was working full-time at my day job, so I did all my prep on weeknights. There were weeks where we didn’t shoot anything (we didn’t shoot on long weekends or for most of December and early January, for example), but for the most part the process took up the bulk of my free time once we’d started production. Every hour and minute spent on preproduction is worth it—don’t scrimp here or you’ll pay for it on shooting day.
Before we started shooting, I created a master shot list during my script breakdown process, plus the schedule itself. Each week, I updated the rough plans for each shooting day to prepare a call sheet to e-mail to our cast and crew, rechecked the shot list, made sure we had the locations lined up, props ready, cast contacted, and all the little details, like “Do I have enough makeup for next week?” or “where can we get a ceramic dog?”
For exteriors, I’d also track weather forecasts. Probability of precipitation [POP] was the key as we would go ahead whenever it was 60% or less. I used several local sources, just to build concensus on how the weather was going to turn out.
I spend my Friday nights pulling together everything together to make the day go as smoothly. I’d gather my bags of gear, charge or change batteries, made sure I had enough mini-DV tapes, went out and bought food and beverages.
I can’t stress the importance of checklists. Any time I forget something important, like camera batteries or blank tapes, it’s always because I haven’t opened up the bags and cross-checked with my checklist. When you’re tired and your head is filled with details of what you’re shooting, you will miss something crucial, like your battery pack or tapes.
For all shoots I’d bring a bag containing the camcorder, battery pack, microphone cables, daylight gels, clothespins, clamps, extra battery for the mike, desktop mike stand, duct tape, clapper, markers, chalk, camcorder shoe accessory adapter, screwdrivers, and pliers. For interiors, I’d add work lights, three 25’ extension cords, spare bulbs, and work gloves. In a padded 3-ring binder, I’d have copies of the script, pens, markers, shot lists, and continuity forms. I’d also have props and a cooler for food.
The day of the shoot, Mullet would get up around 6 a.m. and start getting ready. I’d get up at 7 to check the weather to make sure it was still a go. It was a very dry year and I think we only had one or two rain-outs, and one fog-out where I couldn’t see across the street.
Once we’d decided to go ahead, I’d check the mountain of gear in the living room to make sure I had everyhing. Mullet would arrive in his car by 8:30 or 9 a.m., and we’d head out to pick up the cast and crew.
We were usually at our first location by 9:30 with the first setup started by 10. Once we’d warmed up with some rehearsal takes, we’d get right into it, and our mornings were always productive—our best work was usually during that time. Our afternoons were usually productive, but once it started getting hot in that May-July period, our pace from mid-afternoon onwards wasn’t always as peppy.
On set, I set up the shots and gear with the help of whoever was our crew that day. Meanwhile, Mullet briefed the actors, ran the lines, and brought them in to do the blocking, giving notes as needed.
Since then, we’ve changed the way we work. It’s still collaborative, to be sure, but I direct the actors now, and with using filmmaking buddies on our projects, I don’t have to worry about setting up the gear as much (or even picking where to put the camera).
We’d shoot a couple of rehearsal takes just to find the beats and figure out the blocking. We’d then shoot a few takes as rehearsed, repeating until we got at least 2 good takes on tape (always have a safety take just in case…). If there was time, we’d start improvising a bit, just to see what else we could find. If a scene or shot wasn’t working, we’d rewrite on the spot, sometimes using improv but mostly huddling together with the script and a pen. Most of the time, we shortened things or adapted to take better advantage of the location.
For scheduling, we’d always try to have the cast wrapped by mid-afternoon, leaving any Miller & Mullet-only shots to the end of the day if needed. Most of the cast didn’t have to give us a full day, but those who played the more important characters, like Marcel St. Pierre, generously gave us a full day’s work. Marcel volunteered for 4 shooting days, with one of them being cancelled due to dense fog. One way to pay back for your cast’s generosity is to not waste their time and get them done as early as possible.
We’d normally wrap by 4 o’clock, but sometimes we went to 5, and I think we had a couple of 6 p.m. finishes. We also had a couple 2-hour shoots where we wrapped in time for lunch. Your schedule will vary, mostly depending upon cast and location availability.
Usually that same night, Mullet would come over and we’d watch our rushes. I’d take notes on what we liked or disliked to add to the spreadsheet I’d set up to use during editing. This saved a lot of time when we sat down to edit, and for anything with more than a few shots, I still do it today.
I also made notes on the bad takes, indicating what went wrong, just in case we could use part of a bad take and edit around the mistake with another take. Otherwise, we would have had to watch all the takes for a particular shot when we were editing (we did do that a number of times, of course, but not as frequently as it would have been otherwise).
Our Saturdays were long, usually 12-15 hours by the time we watched the rushes. But we only did we two shooting days back to back once—the last scheduled weekend we shot both the Saturday and Sunday, all exteriors, during the hottest weekend of the year. I don’t even remember what we shot on the last day.
Sunday mornings, I’d log the tapes in Adobe Premiere and let the computer batch capture all the footage to my hard drives. Because I’d made my notes the night before, I didn’t need a lot of time to do the logging, and I’d leave the computer to do the capture itself.
On Monday nights, I’d start the process over again. Even if you're shooting a 5-minute short, you should expect to have a similar workload. Being a producer is the unsung role of no-budget filmmaking--no executive mansions or fat paycheques....
Next time, post-production.
I was working full-time at my day job, so I did all my prep on weeknights. There were weeks where we didn’t shoot anything (we didn’t shoot on long weekends or for most of December and early January, for example), but for the most part the process took up the bulk of my free time once we’d started production. Every hour and minute spent on preproduction is worth it—don’t scrimp here or you’ll pay for it on shooting day.
Before we started shooting, I created a master shot list during my script breakdown process, plus the schedule itself. Each week, I updated the rough plans for each shooting day to prepare a call sheet to e-mail to our cast and crew, rechecked the shot list, made sure we had the locations lined up, props ready, cast contacted, and all the little details, like “Do I have enough makeup for next week?” or “where can we get a ceramic dog?”
For exteriors, I’d also track weather forecasts. Probability of precipitation [POP] was the key as we would go ahead whenever it was 60% or less. I used several local sources, just to build concensus on how the weather was going to turn out.
I spend my Friday nights pulling together everything together to make the day go as smoothly. I’d gather my bags of gear, charge or change batteries, made sure I had enough mini-DV tapes, went out and bought food and beverages.
I can’t stress the importance of checklists. Any time I forget something important, like camera batteries or blank tapes, it’s always because I haven’t opened up the bags and cross-checked with my checklist. When you’re tired and your head is filled with details of what you’re shooting, you will miss something crucial, like your battery pack or tapes.
For all shoots I’d bring a bag containing the camcorder, battery pack, microphone cables, daylight gels, clothespins, clamps, extra battery for the mike, desktop mike stand, duct tape, clapper, markers, chalk, camcorder shoe accessory adapter, screwdrivers, and pliers. For interiors, I’d add work lights, three 25’ extension cords, spare bulbs, and work gloves. In a padded 3-ring binder, I’d have copies of the script, pens, markers, shot lists, and continuity forms. I’d also have props and a cooler for food.
The day of the shoot, Mullet would get up around 6 a.m. and start getting ready. I’d get up at 7 to check the weather to make sure it was still a go. It was a very dry year and I think we only had one or two rain-outs, and one fog-out where I couldn’t see across the street.
Once we’d decided to go ahead, I’d check the mountain of gear in the living room to make sure I had everyhing. Mullet would arrive in his car by 8:30 or 9 a.m., and we’d head out to pick up the cast and crew.
We were usually at our first location by 9:30 with the first setup started by 10. Once we’d warmed up with some rehearsal takes, we’d get right into it, and our mornings were always productive—our best work was usually during that time. Our afternoons were usually productive, but once it started getting hot in that May-July period, our pace from mid-afternoon onwards wasn’t always as peppy.
On set, I set up the shots and gear with the help of whoever was our crew that day. Meanwhile, Mullet briefed the actors, ran the lines, and brought them in to do the blocking, giving notes as needed.
Since then, we’ve changed the way we work. It’s still collaborative, to be sure, but I direct the actors now, and with using filmmaking buddies on our projects, I don’t have to worry about setting up the gear as much (or even picking where to put the camera).
We’d shoot a couple of rehearsal takes just to find the beats and figure out the blocking. We’d then shoot a few takes as rehearsed, repeating until we got at least 2 good takes on tape (always have a safety take just in case…). If there was time, we’d start improvising a bit, just to see what else we could find. If a scene or shot wasn’t working, we’d rewrite on the spot, sometimes using improv but mostly huddling together with the script and a pen. Most of the time, we shortened things or adapted to take better advantage of the location.
For scheduling, we’d always try to have the cast wrapped by mid-afternoon, leaving any Miller & Mullet-only shots to the end of the day if needed. Most of the cast didn’t have to give us a full day, but those who played the more important characters, like Marcel St. Pierre, generously gave us a full day’s work. Marcel volunteered for 4 shooting days, with one of them being cancelled due to dense fog. One way to pay back for your cast’s generosity is to not waste their time and get them done as early as possible.
We’d normally wrap by 4 o’clock, but sometimes we went to 5, and I think we had a couple of 6 p.m. finishes. We also had a couple 2-hour shoots where we wrapped in time for lunch. Your schedule will vary, mostly depending upon cast and location availability.
Usually that same night, Mullet would come over and we’d watch our rushes. I’d take notes on what we liked or disliked to add to the spreadsheet I’d set up to use during editing. This saved a lot of time when we sat down to edit, and for anything with more than a few shots, I still do it today.
I also made notes on the bad takes, indicating what went wrong, just in case we could use part of a bad take and edit around the mistake with another take. Otherwise, we would have had to watch all the takes for a particular shot when we were editing (we did do that a number of times, of course, but not as frequently as it would have been otherwise).
Our Saturdays were long, usually 12-15 hours by the time we watched the rushes. But we only did we two shooting days back to back once—the last scheduled weekend we shot both the Saturday and Sunday, all exteriors, during the hottest weekend of the year. I don’t even remember what we shot on the last day.
Sunday mornings, I’d log the tapes in Adobe Premiere and let the computer batch capture all the footage to my hard drives. Because I’d made my notes the night before, I didn’t need a lot of time to do the logging, and I’d leave the computer to do the capture itself.
On Monday nights, I’d start the process over again. Even if you're shooting a 5-minute short, you should expect to have a similar workload. Being a producer is the unsung role of no-budget filmmaking--no executive mansions or fat paycheques....
Next time, post-production.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 2: Preproduction
(Continues from Part 1)
Mullet moved back to Toronto that fall, when the script was nearly done. He lived in my living room for a month, until he found a job and new home, which definitely made it easier to lock the script and start pre-production. I did breakdowns of the script, figuring out shot numbering, preparing shot lists, figuring out what had to be shot on specific days for specific locations and specific actors, and then roughing out a schedule.
While I took care of the scheduling and planning, Mullet did the casting, putting a lot of TheatreSports improvisers in most of the roles. We held an audition for the remaining roles, where we managed to fill all the remaining roles with a cold read of a scene from Taxi Driver. In total, we had two dozen actors in the movie. Unfortunately, some of those actors were members of ACTRA, the screen actor’s union in Canada. By doing so, we’d unknowingly made our project largely unusable for self-distribution. This is a classic rookie mistake—always check out guild and union rules before using their members on your projects!
Crew, of course, is usually harder to find than cast. There are not a lot of people outside of film students interested in working behind the camera for free on someone else’s movies, so you end up working on your buddies’ projects as a trade of labour. Amazingly, we ended up with 3 people who donated a lot of time over the next year, none of them film students: Kasia Czarnota, Jeff Orchard, and Nic Pearson.
Nic brought along his Canon GL-1 and shot our interiors in glorious 3-chip colour, although he did insist on using his camera light, which made white makeup glow hot enough to blow out any detail (another rookie mistake). Nic dropped out during the winter due to cancer and stopped returning my calls (he actually died of cancer the following summer, something we didn’t find out until months after the fact, when I Googled his name and discovered he’d dropped us to direct a Fringe play and, presumably, didn’t have the time left to help us out.). Jeff gave us the most time, starting off as our boom operator, and then doing everything from setup to being our DOP, to driving actors home at the end of the day. Kasia helped out a lot, too, starting with script supervision and eventually becoming our 3rd DOP as she had the most interest in visual arts of any of us. All three gave us a lot of long Saturdays for nothing more than tomato sandwiches and abuse from Mullet (he was a hard-ass on set).
Our first shoot was on a cool autumn day in October of 2001, and we wrapped in July, 2002 on the hottest day in the history of humankind. We shot on Saturdays, using Sundays our rain days (I think we only missed 2 or 3 Saturdays in total). We also chose one of the hottest summers in Toronto history in which to shoot exteriors, giving myself and 2 of our cast sunstroke during our last weekend of shooting, a grueling Saturday-and-Sunday-super-shoot weekend, which took place during a month-long heat wave. I remember we wanted to get a shot of one actor on a hill looking down on the city, but the smog was so thick the cityscape wasn’t visible in the shot….
Next time, how a typical shooting day unfolded.
Mullet moved back to Toronto that fall, when the script was nearly done. He lived in my living room for a month, until he found a job and new home, which definitely made it easier to lock the script and start pre-production. I did breakdowns of the script, figuring out shot numbering, preparing shot lists, figuring out what had to be shot on specific days for specific locations and specific actors, and then roughing out a schedule.
While I took care of the scheduling and planning, Mullet did the casting, putting a lot of TheatreSports improvisers in most of the roles. We held an audition for the remaining roles, where we managed to fill all the remaining roles with a cold read of a scene from Taxi Driver. In total, we had two dozen actors in the movie. Unfortunately, some of those actors were members of ACTRA, the screen actor’s union in Canada. By doing so, we’d unknowingly made our project largely unusable for self-distribution. This is a classic rookie mistake—always check out guild and union rules before using their members on your projects!
Crew, of course, is usually harder to find than cast. There are not a lot of people outside of film students interested in working behind the camera for free on someone else’s movies, so you end up working on your buddies’ projects as a trade of labour. Amazingly, we ended up with 3 people who donated a lot of time over the next year, none of them film students: Kasia Czarnota, Jeff Orchard, and Nic Pearson.
Nic brought along his Canon GL-1 and shot our interiors in glorious 3-chip colour, although he did insist on using his camera light, which made white makeup glow hot enough to blow out any detail (another rookie mistake). Nic dropped out during the winter due to cancer and stopped returning my calls (he actually died of cancer the following summer, something we didn’t find out until months after the fact, when I Googled his name and discovered he’d dropped us to direct a Fringe play and, presumably, didn’t have the time left to help us out.). Jeff gave us the most time, starting off as our boom operator, and then doing everything from setup to being our DOP, to driving actors home at the end of the day. Kasia helped out a lot, too, starting with script supervision and eventually becoming our 3rd DOP as she had the most interest in visual arts of any of us. All three gave us a lot of long Saturdays for nothing more than tomato sandwiches and abuse from Mullet (he was a hard-ass on set).
Our first shoot was on a cool autumn day in October of 2001, and we wrapped in July, 2002 on the hottest day in the history of humankind. We shot on Saturdays, using Sundays our rain days (I think we only missed 2 or 3 Saturdays in total). We also chose one of the hottest summers in Toronto history in which to shoot exteriors, giving myself and 2 of our cast sunstroke during our last weekend of shooting, a grueling Saturday-and-Sunday-super-shoot weekend, which took place during a month-long heat wave. I remember we wanted to get a shot of one actor on a hill looking down on the city, but the smog was so thick the cityscape wasn’t visible in the shot….
Next time, how a typical shooting day unfolded.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet 1: Writing the script
Quick: the summer of 2001—how did you spend your time? How about those dark days after September 11? And that hot summer of 2002? Know what I did? I spent a lot of that time writing and producing and directing and performing in and editing a feature called Babysitters. It was our first video project. And it was a feature-length video project.
Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.
We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.
Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.
First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.
Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).
In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.
Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.
The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.
The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.
Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.
Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.
We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.
Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.
First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.
Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).
In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.
Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.
The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.
The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.
Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.
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