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.