Making Movies

We recently finished shooting (filming -- I'll use "shooting" throughout this piece, so don't think I'm talking about using firearms) the short version of our motion picture. This short film is being made to make it easier for us to obtain monetary investments -- we show investors that we are capable of producing a quality product and they show faith by investing in the feature-length film. Another possible reward for making this short film is what I'll call "hype" -- we may market the film at film festivals, at which we could possibly win awards or at least become known in the industry; we will screen the short version multiple times in Nashville; and we will produce a limited number of DVDs to donate to friends and family, who will hopefully show the "short" to additional friends and family, creating a sort of Bernoulli trialish distribution/viewership chart.

I will tell you three things about making this short film:

1) It is hard, long work
2) Acting is fun
3) Parts of the process can be frustrating (aside from/on top of being hard work)

Hard, Long Work
We spent three days shooting this 15ish-minute short film. The first day, we worked from about 7am-midnight. The second day, we went from about 4pm-11pm. The third session, we toiled from 3pm-11pm. In sum, we worked 32 hours to shoot footage for what will be a 15ish-minute short film -- a little over two hours per minute yielded.

Our director and one of his editor pals have begun editing the film, which is expected to take about three weeks to accomplish (working about two days per week, since our guy does not own the editing equipment).

To give a detailed description of the non-acting-or-directing-related work that goes on at a set would take pages and pages of tedious prose, to which I am not about to subject you. I'll simply state that it is hard work -- setting up, tearing down, moving and setting up again, tearing down again, doing the click-board thing ("Scene 1a, take two" smack), holding the boomed microphone at weird angles from difficult positions so that we can hear the actors at all times, holding special handleless lights to provide "fill" light, figuring out how to get the correct lighting itself -- is tough labor. I was sore and tired after each session.


Acting Is Fun

Without getting into the script too much, I'll say that I had a blast acting out my part. I play a sarcastic jerk of a boss. My character gives an underling coworker a hard time for no good reason.

The thing I like most about acting is the opportunity to alter my voice to fit both my character and his mood. In my scene I attempted to portray mood-traits such as humor, sarcasm, anger, irritation/irritability and understanding (the last, briefly).

It was the third or fourth shot, of course, before I remembered to speak all of my lines into (or near enough to, in the direction of...) the boom microphone.


Frustrating
Setting up and tearing down a set is tough work, but the toughness of that is understandable. What was most frustrating (and oddly funny) about acting/shooting the film was having to deal with variables outside of our immediate environment.

For instance, the crickets and/or cicadas (whatever they were) were very loud at certain times during one of our shoots. We continued anyway, hoping that the microphone would adequately pick up dialogue and that we'd be able to edit out the background noise later. So far, there have been no complaints.

Secondly, there were several shots (takes) of my scene that were interrupted by Saturday-night patrons on Broadway. I'd be standing not two feet from my acting counterpart when, all of a sudden, someone would look into the window and manage to get his or her face into the shot, right between us. One guy knocked on the window and waved at us. Talk about weird -- we're staring back at the window laughing and muttering "Uh -- thanks a lot" at the same time.


This is not a term paper, so I'll leave without a more formal conclusion -- I'm not going to tell you what I told you, in other words. I'll end by saying that the whole film/shooting/short experience has been fun, and that we should have those DVDs ready in a few weeks.

Until then, au revoir.