I've been tardy in getting the HV30 posts put together and online, but I've been busy with other stuff, too.
On or around Canada, or the 4th of July if you prefer, Miller & Mullet will be launching a whole bunch of stuff.
With artist Kam Gates, we're kicking off a weekly comic strip. Think of it as the Addams Family (the original Addams' strips) meets Ziggy, or Hitchcock meets Garfield. Something like that. At any rate, Mullet and Kam are coming up with some darkly funny stuff that works best in the 3-5 frame world of comic strips.
Alongside the strip, we're launching a tri-weekly radio series starring Miller and Mullet. I'm doing the post stuff on that project, as well as most of the writing. The nice thing about audio-only is that sound effects are a lot cheaper than visual effects, so we can finally put some ideas to work without having to worry about how much it costs. The radio show will be available on our website and will, hopefully, be available via iTunes as a podcast. Look for Miller & Mullet Radio.
And, as the third prong of our 2009 Extravaganza, we're posting our 2003 project, Babysitters, in chapters on Youtube and as video podcasts at iTunes. Each week, we'll release another chapter in our first major project. this will be the first time Babysitters has been seen since our rough cut screening at Christmas of 2002.
Back to work!
Showing posts with label Babysitters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Babysitters. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Characters with Hearts of Gold
I’ve been playing with Magic Bullet Looks, but I’m still working on the blog entry. My AfterEffects trial ran out before I could get into some serious work with it, so I’ll have to see if I can get a new trial installed to play with it. There’s a lesson for you: never install a trial until you’re positive you can actually get time to play with it!
Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.
I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.
I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.
Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.
Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.
Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.
The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.
There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.
Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.
I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.
There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.
Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….
Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.
I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.
I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.
Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.
Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.
Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.
The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.
There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.
Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.
I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.
There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.
Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
What’s Going on Today (or, Meanwhile back in 2007)
Now that I’ve updated what went on in 2001-2002, here’s an update on what we’re doing right now in 2007.
Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.
Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.
Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.
When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).
I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.
So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.
Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.
Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.
Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.
When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).
I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.
So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 7: Afterwords
When we finished our feature, I asked myself 2 questions: what did I learn from Babysitters? And would I do it again?
I learned a lot, things that I wouldn’t have learned by taking a class. I also didn’t learn things I would have learned in class, but, overall, I think I came out ahead with practical experience in no-budget preproduction, production, and post-production.
I learned 3 key lessons overall. There might be more, but I can’t think of them at the moment.
First: you need a strong script before anything else. Your entire project is at the mercy of the first telling, the script, and any weaknesses in that first telling will multiply in the second telling (production) and the third telling (post-production) unless you are fortunate enough to spot those mistakes and correct them while you can. Otherwise, you run the risk of having a plot or characters that doesn’t engage your audience.
Our shooting script was an unedited first draft because we did no story editing at all. This was a mistake—the script wasn’t ready, despite having some good scenes and gags in it, and the story was overly complicated and self-indulgent. We didn’t kill our babies, those bits we loved that didn’t move the story forward. I don’t think we were alone in making this mistake—I’ve seen other rookies do the same, and even the pros crank out crap based on bad scripts (Phantom Menace is probably the best example I can think of right now. It had some interesting ideas and new characters, but a good story editor could have cleaned up a lot of the babies that should have been killed in that movie—and still pleased both the kiddie audience and the hardcore fans).
We now spend a lot of time working on scripts—most of the time, actually. In the last 12 months, we’ve had 4 shooting days, but we’ve spent 5-6 months working on story ideas and writing scripts and story editing and rewriting and all that other fun stuff.
With Mullet working on the comic books, I’ve become the principle writer on our shorts, so he comes in only when I think the script is ready for him to see. He approaches the scripts as a story editor does, looking at the story first and giving notes on his reactions to it beat by beat. Sometimes, I have something he likes and we shoot it unchanged. Sometimes, I end up rewriting several times before we shoot it. But, most of the time, he doesn’t like it and I throw the script out.
Second, every hour you spend on preproduction will save you a great deal of trouble later on. We managed to shoot 120 pages of script with 2 dozen actors, countless shots and takes, on dozens of locations, on weekends spread out over 8 months. We did this equipped only with a handful of Excel and Word documents. Every hour I spent preparing shot lists, call sheets, and all the other logistical stuff saved us hours on shooting days, and saved us hours again in post-production. On later projects, I’ve started drawing crude storyboards (complete with my stick figures) to make sure I’ve got the visual stuff worked out. I’ve even done rough animatics with scanned storyboards and dubbed audio, just to make sure it works on screen. You can leave things to chance, but the odds are usually against you. It’s not easy putting a story onto film or video, so why make it harder to do so if you’re forcing yourself to make it up as you go along?
Third: learn from your mistakes and practice what you’ve learned in the next project. I’ve made a few shorts to learn specific things that I knew I hadn’t grasped or tried in Babysitters, and I’ve read more books, taken a producing class and a directing class, and watched a lot of videos to further what I knew or didn’t know when we made Babysitters. We’ve completed two shorts and started on 3 others since that time, and the lessons we learned from Babysitters have paid off with these latter efforts. Each time I do a project now, I decide in advance what I want to learn from it, and I’d recommend that approach as I think it forces you to give yourself hands-on experience with a new skill. Why do something if you’re not learning from the experience?
With so many hours of production under our belts, Mullet and I have learned to work quite well as a team. We tend to approach comedy from a feel rather than anything mechanical, so we shoot until it feels right. We usually shoot our rehearsals as takes, but I think we’re much faster at finding the beats now. We’re much better at writing scripts and story-editing them.
Would I do it again? Yes. Without hesitation, I would do it again.
I should clarify that if I could go back to the year 2000, I would. Back then, YouTube didn’t exist and online video wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most video projects were more-or-less demo reels on VHS tape, with very few seen outside of filmmakers’ friends, video nights at comedy clubs or, even rarer, on a specialty cable TV channel. The means of getting video out to large numbers of people was there, but it was slow and cumbersome despite whatever format (QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real Player) you used. VHS was king! Streaming video was still in its infancy, and video files were too large even for downloads for the average user. DVD-R burners were just starting to appear on new computers (by the time we finished post in late 2002, however, the DVD-R had begun to replace the VHS tape as the preferred format).
For anyone reading this today, unless you have a time machine, forget trying to make a feature on videotape—stick to shorts until someone pays you to make a feature.
If we were starting out from scratch today, instead of a 74-minute feature, I think we’d make 15-20 shorts (5 minutes and less) instead, committing to a similar schedule. We would make mistakes early on, but the repetition of doing 15 shorts over a long schedule would help us find our feet just as Babysitters did. At the end, we’d have a selection of 15 shorts to choose to put online, on DVD, enter into festivals and competitions, or whatever future channels of opportunity emerge.
That’s the end of my look back to our “boot-camp” project. Thanks for reading, and watch for a taste of Babysitters on the Miller & Mullet DVD.
I learned a lot, things that I wouldn’t have learned by taking a class. I also didn’t learn things I would have learned in class, but, overall, I think I came out ahead with practical experience in no-budget preproduction, production, and post-production.
I learned 3 key lessons overall. There might be more, but I can’t think of them at the moment.
First: you need a strong script before anything else. Your entire project is at the mercy of the first telling, the script, and any weaknesses in that first telling will multiply in the second telling (production) and the third telling (post-production) unless you are fortunate enough to spot those mistakes and correct them while you can. Otherwise, you run the risk of having a plot or characters that doesn’t engage your audience.
Our shooting script was an unedited first draft because we did no story editing at all. This was a mistake—the script wasn’t ready, despite having some good scenes and gags in it, and the story was overly complicated and self-indulgent. We didn’t kill our babies, those bits we loved that didn’t move the story forward. I don’t think we were alone in making this mistake—I’ve seen other rookies do the same, and even the pros crank out crap based on bad scripts (Phantom Menace is probably the best example I can think of right now. It had some interesting ideas and new characters, but a good story editor could have cleaned up a lot of the babies that should have been killed in that movie—and still pleased both the kiddie audience and the hardcore fans).
We now spend a lot of time working on scripts—most of the time, actually. In the last 12 months, we’ve had 4 shooting days, but we’ve spent 5-6 months working on story ideas and writing scripts and story editing and rewriting and all that other fun stuff.
With Mullet working on the comic books, I’ve become the principle writer on our shorts, so he comes in only when I think the script is ready for him to see. He approaches the scripts as a story editor does, looking at the story first and giving notes on his reactions to it beat by beat. Sometimes, I have something he likes and we shoot it unchanged. Sometimes, I end up rewriting several times before we shoot it. But, most of the time, he doesn’t like it and I throw the script out.
Second, every hour you spend on preproduction will save you a great deal of trouble later on. We managed to shoot 120 pages of script with 2 dozen actors, countless shots and takes, on dozens of locations, on weekends spread out over 8 months. We did this equipped only with a handful of Excel and Word documents. Every hour I spent preparing shot lists, call sheets, and all the other logistical stuff saved us hours on shooting days, and saved us hours again in post-production. On later projects, I’ve started drawing crude storyboards (complete with my stick figures) to make sure I’ve got the visual stuff worked out. I’ve even done rough animatics with scanned storyboards and dubbed audio, just to make sure it works on screen. You can leave things to chance, but the odds are usually against you. It’s not easy putting a story onto film or video, so why make it harder to do so if you’re forcing yourself to make it up as you go along?
Third: learn from your mistakes and practice what you’ve learned in the next project. I’ve made a few shorts to learn specific things that I knew I hadn’t grasped or tried in Babysitters, and I’ve read more books, taken a producing class and a directing class, and watched a lot of videos to further what I knew or didn’t know when we made Babysitters. We’ve completed two shorts and started on 3 others since that time, and the lessons we learned from Babysitters have paid off with these latter efforts. Each time I do a project now, I decide in advance what I want to learn from it, and I’d recommend that approach as I think it forces you to give yourself hands-on experience with a new skill. Why do something if you’re not learning from the experience?
With so many hours of production under our belts, Mullet and I have learned to work quite well as a team. We tend to approach comedy from a feel rather than anything mechanical, so we shoot until it feels right. We usually shoot our rehearsals as takes, but I think we’re much faster at finding the beats now. We’re much better at writing scripts and story-editing them.
Would I do it again? Yes. Without hesitation, I would do it again.
I should clarify that if I could go back to the year 2000, I would. Back then, YouTube didn’t exist and online video wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most video projects were more-or-less demo reels on VHS tape, with very few seen outside of filmmakers’ friends, video nights at comedy clubs or, even rarer, on a specialty cable TV channel. The means of getting video out to large numbers of people was there, but it was slow and cumbersome despite whatever format (QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real Player) you used. VHS was king! Streaming video was still in its infancy, and video files were too large even for downloads for the average user. DVD-R burners were just starting to appear on new computers (by the time we finished post in late 2002, however, the DVD-R had begun to replace the VHS tape as the preferred format).
For anyone reading this today, unless you have a time machine, forget trying to make a feature on videotape—stick to shorts until someone pays you to make a feature.
If we were starting out from scratch today, instead of a 74-minute feature, I think we’d make 15-20 shorts (5 minutes and less) instead, committing to a similar schedule. We would make mistakes early on, but the repetition of doing 15 shorts over a long schedule would help us find our feet just as Babysitters did. At the end, we’d have a selection of 15 shorts to choose to put online, on DVD, enter into festivals and competitions, or whatever future channels of opportunity emerge.
That’s the end of my look back to our “boot-camp” project. Thanks for reading, and watch for a taste of Babysitters on the Miller & Mullet DVD.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 6: Revisiting the Past
We sat down and watched Babysitters recently. I hadn’t watched it since some time in 2003 or 2004, so I’d forgotten a lot of things about it. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten about most of it.
I have to admit I didn’t look forward to seeing it again. I’d been grateful that we’d left it alone for so long. When you’ve advanced ahead in terms of experience and knowledge, it’s not easy to go back and see earlier efforts and not cringe at the mistakes.
So, as we started the movie, I waited for the cringing to begin.
The first part of the movie ran surprisingly well. From the beginning to the opening credits, the pacing helps to hide the flaws. So far, so good….
The first scene after the credits, featuring a well-known ACTRA and SAG performer who donated his time, is quite slow, but after the buildup to the credits, it felt right to slow down before starting to build up again.
The middle of the movie had a sequence that no longer made sense to be in the movie (Mullet had to remind me why it was there, actually: to fit one of the plot points in Gulliver’s Travels), so we decided to cut it out. The rest of the movie builds up a bit and comes to an abrupt end.
So, we’ll be recutting it again, from 74 minutes to something much shorter, likely still over the Academy’s 40-minute limit to qualify as a feature, but under an hour and with most of the leaden pacing removed. There are some things we won’t be able to take out or speed up, so there will still be some loooooong moments in there.
The audio is out of sync in a few places, so I’ll have to spend some time playing with that to fix it. Fortunately, with Final Cut Studio, you get a marvelous audio workstation program, Soundtrack Pro, which allows this type of finessing.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to not hate it as much as I had feared before the screening. For a first project for a couple of guys who hadn’t been near film classes before, it’s not that bad. So, for once, I realized that the effort we had put into it, all the work our cast and crew had put into it, was worth it.
I think we should be able to put the opening sequence on the DVD, just to show the world what you can do with two clown, a baby, and a camcorder.
I have to admit I didn’t look forward to seeing it again. I’d been grateful that we’d left it alone for so long. When you’ve advanced ahead in terms of experience and knowledge, it’s not easy to go back and see earlier efforts and not cringe at the mistakes.
So, as we started the movie, I waited for the cringing to begin.
The first part of the movie ran surprisingly well. From the beginning to the opening credits, the pacing helps to hide the flaws. So far, so good….
The first scene after the credits, featuring a well-known ACTRA and SAG performer who donated his time, is quite slow, but after the buildup to the credits, it felt right to slow down before starting to build up again.
The middle of the movie had a sequence that no longer made sense to be in the movie (Mullet had to remind me why it was there, actually: to fit one of the plot points in Gulliver’s Travels), so we decided to cut it out. The rest of the movie builds up a bit and comes to an abrupt end.
So, we’ll be recutting it again, from 74 minutes to something much shorter, likely still over the Academy’s 40-minute limit to qualify as a feature, but under an hour and with most of the leaden pacing removed. There are some things we won’t be able to take out or speed up, so there will still be some loooooong moments in there.
The audio is out of sync in a few places, so I’ll have to spend some time playing with that to fix it. Fortunately, with Final Cut Studio, you get a marvelous audio workstation program, Soundtrack Pro, which allows this type of finessing.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to not hate it as much as I had feared before the screening. For a first project for a couple of guys who hadn’t been near film classes before, it’s not that bad. So, for once, I realized that the effort we had put into it, all the work our cast and crew had put into it, was worth it.
I think we should be able to put the opening sequence on the DVD, just to show the world what you can do with two clown, a baby, and a camcorder.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 5: No-Budget Finances
Compared to most student features, Babysitters was an inexpensive project, but for two people putting up all the money themselves, it wasn’t cheap!
With the purchase of computer software and hardware, video equipment, supplies, props, and the mandatory on-set food and drink, I put around $5500 CAD into it (equivalent of about $3600 US in 2002). Mullet put in $2000 CAD, so our budget for Babysitters for 2001-2002 was $7500 CAD, or about $4900 USD in 2002 dollars (all dollar numbers below are in Canadian funds).
So… what did $7500 buy us besides 74-minutes of hilarity?
Most of that money went into fixed assets like computers, software, extra hard drives, a tripod, shotgun microphone, etc., so the money we spent on Babysitters has saved considerable money on subsequent projects. We can now make a short for the costs of blank tapes, food, beverages, gas, parking, office supplies, and the occasional new prop.
For Babysitters, as a general strategy, we decided to buy inexpensive gear rather than rent better stuff since we had a lot of single shooting days spread out over 9 months. If we’d scheduled the shoot to take place within a single block of time or two, the rental option would have made more sense, so your schedule will dictate your finances a great deal.
We never prepared a budget beforehand, which is something we should have done, in hindsight. If we had done a budget, though, we would have revised it constantly as we came across new expenses that we hadn’t anticipated—every rookie mistake will cost you money.
We averaged about $100 each day for food, beverages, props, gas, parking, and supplies like mini-DV tapes, and that has been our typical budget ever since. We’ve always been able to borrow cameras, so we’ve never had to rent one (about $200/day for a DVX100 or similar camera in Toronto these days).
We also don’t pay our actors or crew anything. This means we don’t use people who belong to the acting guild in Canada, ACTRA, as we can’t afford the minimums that the guild has in place for its members. If we did use guild people without following procedure, we would never be able to sell the project to anyone, so it’s not worth it. ACTRA does have a low-budget program, but they’re still pretty big bucks for anyone at the no-budget level. The guilds in your area will have similar rules and policies that you should know before starting a project.
Any decent film school has an introductory producing class, so I’d recommend taking one before plunging into shooting. If I didn’t live near a dozen film schools like there are in Toronto, the internet has leveled the playing field—you can get just about any book on film and video producing, and there are a lot of good websites, lists, and blogs on the topic as well. I’ll post an entry with some links at some point.
You also want to budget your time. For longer projects, you should anticipate the demands on your time during all phases of production. A good production management book or course can give you an idea of how much time you’ll need to do things (and it will always take longer to do something than you’d think it would…).
We saved money where we could with gear. Instead of buying a microphone boom pole, I modified a $15 window-washing extension arm with a PVC collar and mini-bungee cords to create a shock mount (this guy had a similar idea). We used a $5 desktop mike stand for most of the shoots—putting the mike at the feet of our performers just out of frame with the mike aimed up. I bought 3 sets of halogen work lights for our interiors, using gels to convert them whenever needed to sunlight-balanced light. I built camera stabilizers (to make handheld shots easier) with raw materials from Canadian Tire (after seeing how much a pro stabilizer cost). All of this stuff may look cheap and crappy, but with a little work, it does the same job as the pro gear at a fraction of the cost.
We only had to pay for locations three times, when we shot scenes in rehearsal spaces. We used both our apartments, interior and exterior, for as many distinct locations as we could squeeze out of them, and we used someone’s apartment for another location. We found and used a deserted lot downtown, and we used public property elsewhere. We didn’t build sets, which is another big expense even for something small.
We were fortunate in that we avoided the debt like a lot of filmmakers get into with features, so I don’t have any advice to others on how to manage it. Just avoid it if you can. After all, no-budget means no-money….
With the purchase of computer software and hardware, video equipment, supplies, props, and the mandatory on-set food and drink, I put around $5500 CAD into it (equivalent of about $3600 US in 2002). Mullet put in $2000 CAD, so our budget for Babysitters for 2001-2002 was $7500 CAD, or about $4900 USD in 2002 dollars (all dollar numbers below are in Canadian funds).
So… what did $7500 buy us besides 74-minutes of hilarity?
Most of that money went into fixed assets like computers, software, extra hard drives, a tripod, shotgun microphone, etc., so the money we spent on Babysitters has saved considerable money on subsequent projects. We can now make a short for the costs of blank tapes, food, beverages, gas, parking, office supplies, and the occasional new prop.
For Babysitters, as a general strategy, we decided to buy inexpensive gear rather than rent better stuff since we had a lot of single shooting days spread out over 9 months. If we’d scheduled the shoot to take place within a single block of time or two, the rental option would have made more sense, so your schedule will dictate your finances a great deal.
We never prepared a budget beforehand, which is something we should have done, in hindsight. If we had done a budget, though, we would have revised it constantly as we came across new expenses that we hadn’t anticipated—every rookie mistake will cost you money.
We averaged about $100 each day for food, beverages, props, gas, parking, and supplies like mini-DV tapes, and that has been our typical budget ever since. We’ve always been able to borrow cameras, so we’ve never had to rent one (about $200/day for a DVX100 or similar camera in Toronto these days).
We also don’t pay our actors or crew anything. This means we don’t use people who belong to the acting guild in Canada, ACTRA, as we can’t afford the minimums that the guild has in place for its members. If we did use guild people without following procedure, we would never be able to sell the project to anyone, so it’s not worth it. ACTRA does have a low-budget program, but they’re still pretty big bucks for anyone at the no-budget level. The guilds in your area will have similar rules and policies that you should know before starting a project.
Any decent film school has an introductory producing class, so I’d recommend taking one before plunging into shooting. If I didn’t live near a dozen film schools like there are in Toronto, the internet has leveled the playing field—you can get just about any book on film and video producing, and there are a lot of good websites, lists, and blogs on the topic as well. I’ll post an entry with some links at some point.
You also want to budget your time. For longer projects, you should anticipate the demands on your time during all phases of production. A good production management book or course can give you an idea of how much time you’ll need to do things (and it will always take longer to do something than you’d think it would…).
We saved money where we could with gear. Instead of buying a microphone boom pole, I modified a $15 window-washing extension arm with a PVC collar and mini-bungee cords to create a shock mount (this guy had a similar idea). We used a $5 desktop mike stand for most of the shoots—putting the mike at the feet of our performers just out of frame with the mike aimed up. I bought 3 sets of halogen work lights for our interiors, using gels to convert them whenever needed to sunlight-balanced light. I built camera stabilizers (to make handheld shots easier) with raw materials from Canadian Tire (after seeing how much a pro stabilizer cost). All of this stuff may look cheap and crappy, but with a little work, it does the same job as the pro gear at a fraction of the cost.
We only had to pay for locations three times, when we shot scenes in rehearsal spaces. We used both our apartments, interior and exterior, for as many distinct locations as we could squeeze out of them, and we used someone’s apartment for another location. We found and used a deserted lot downtown, and we used public property elsewhere. We didn’t build sets, which is another big expense even for something small.
We were fortunate in that we avoided the debt like a lot of filmmakers get into with features, so I don’t have any advice to others on how to manage it. Just avoid it if you can. After all, no-budget means no-money….
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 4: Post-Production
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….
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 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.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
End of Summer (almost) Roundup
OK, my biweekly promise has gone the way of Paris Hilton's dignity. I can't even remember what I wrote the last time, so I'm probably going to repeat myself from earlier posts here.
So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:
1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).
2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.
3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.
4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.
So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.
The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.
Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.
So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....
So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:
1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).
2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.
3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.
4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.
So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.
The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.
Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.
So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....
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