I wanted to make a film over the summer, and they have a performing arts group here, so you may think the rest just writes itself. Well, it doesn't really. They had put on a musical, it would translate really well to film, so I asked them, they said yes.
The amount of time to get the script off them just so I could re work it into a nice and easy film took three weeks. This is three weeks after they had performed it, and they hadn't written it out. I go it the day before principal photography (did you like how I dropped in an industry term?) started. The first day of filming went well, they all turned up, get ready and we filmed the first five minutes in about 90 minutes. It looked like it would go well, but that was the last day when every one turned up for filming.
Well, that was ok too. I was planning to film it Mariachi style, so I knew I could do pickups and work things out in the edit. I had a plan and the plan would work. I had a schedule, and that worked fine.
The problem was in organising the actors. There were too many days when the most important cast members didn't turn up, or the day where they were told they had to hand in coursework or fail, right before they were due start filming. I had told them coursework comes first, but they seemed to forget this.
My personal favourite was when one would bitch about another not turning up and not being professional, when the day before they hadn't. I should have gone all director on them, a massive screaming fit, but the fact was i desperate to make a film. I didn't care if it wasn't very good, the main thing was to make it so that I could get my bad films out of the way.
I should have realised that I had already made a lot of fils about lots of different things, so my mistakes were already covered.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I did make a film with them in the end. I gave the ones who turned up ten minutes to come up with an idea, then we would film it. They ended up using one of my ideas as a basis for it, they take some drugs, two go mad and kill the others. It wasn't quite my idea, but it had some of it, enough for me to call it my own.
We filmed for two hours to make a ten minute film, which ended up 25 minutes long.
It's shit, but it's a start. I'm going to post it on YouTube once I get the new music for it, now that they say I can post videos that are half an hour long.
If you watch it, just one thing. Be kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment