Friday, August 28, 2009
Sacrificing The Art - Production Diary Sketches & Scribbles
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Camera Test - Color Reversal In Camera Effect
A Day In Hickory, NC - Camera Test from Garrick Lane on Vimeo.
Shot from sunrise to sunset to get some footage to do a commercial with. Then I got lucky with a great sunset for my second job of the night and went ahead and captured it too. (Football Game.) My goal was to hack my camera's scene files, (cpu) to get the custom settings to match or get close to what they do on CSI Miami. Granted I didn't have gradient glass or any other filters but I like the effect I pushed the camera to do. This is all done in camera. There are no special effects, color correction or pushing/pulling of any kind. This is exactly what I shot.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Sacrificing The Art - Chapter Four / Part 2- A Drunk A.D and A Slowly Swelling Eye
I’m driving the forty five minute route to the location and my eye was really starting to bother me. I’ve never had a stye but I’m going to assume my eye hurt like that of a stye. My stomach was growling as it had for the past 48 hours and counting.
I showed up on the set looking for something to eat.
Crackers.
Cheerwine.
Water.
Hot beer and microwaveable cheeseburgers---
Shit-- all of it. That day, the menu didn’t matter. I heated up the cancerous celled toxic cheeseburger and chugged a Cheerwine for my morning caffeine rush. I didn’t speak to anybody but the Director and went right to work. My Camera Assist was there with my daily Adderall. I was working on two days with less than 5 hours of sleep so I felt the caffeine may not last me the duration I needed. The first scene of the day was the good guys bringing one of the bad guys into the mold infested basement. The first set up was simple. One of the actors puts the bad guy over his shoulder and walks across the room, dropping him in a metal chair. We shot nine takes of it. From still camera flashes going off, to LATE crew and cast barging in upstairs making enough noise to wake a 90 year old, to lights being in frame, the day did not get started very good. My eye was getting worse and worse with every squint and bead of sweat leaking into it. I stepped off the set for the first of many 15 minute breaks to wring out my sweat drenched shirt. I walked by the computer table to find six half drank soda cans surrounding my two $4000 computers. On top of that the computers’ AC adapters looked like a noodle salad resting right on the edge of the table. There are light stands and lights on the ground underneath the Logger’s feet. I go looking for the A.D. Can’t find him so I have the Director’s brother, (one of the money guys,) and have him put a sign on the CPU table that stated, “NO FUCKING CANS OF ANY SORTS ON EDIT TABLE.”
I walked up to the lunch table to find the A.D talking with one of the Actors. The two had a cup of beer or a cup of piss in their hand. (The Home Owner had locked us out of the upstairs that morning because crew men were caught the day before watching his Friends Box Set while the real crew was down stairs working.) I said nothing. It didn’t matter. It was clear by this time that we didn’t really have an AD. Granted, we had “titled” somebody that but who were we fooling? The AD is normally the “asshole” on the set and I had clearly made a name for myself as that early into the shoot. I had already done the call sheets and called all the actors to brief them on times, location and wardrobe for the first week and we had no trouble getting them there. The A.D we hired or should we say titled was more a Producer, Location Manager and Logistics Guy. He was a creative guy who really knew how to fix anything and always came up with resourceful ways to fix problems we ran into along the way. Unless he could fix my eye, there was nothing he could do at the moment. He would come in real handy in a couple of days. For now, he was doing his job. I stepped back in the “oven” to shoot. From that moment on, I referred to me as the “Drunk AD” which was a reference to where I would like to be rather than being the “DP” that’s sober and sick of being “basemented.” Despite my nerve racking OCD about my gear poking at my focus on the matter at hand, the shooting was phenomenal. Every angle I shot on the “dark wall” without the drywall was fantastic. I had some dutch angles that put one bad guy in the foreground and the other in the background that were remarkable. The silver covered air ducts above the actors glowed with rich blues. The cinder blocked wall behind the subjects illuminated purple mixing into orange to convey electrical lights in the corner. The Director watched out his monitor, praising my every shot knowing I had thrown out his shot list for this scene that rivaled (in pages,) that of most Medical reference books. I began cutting in camera again and knocking off shots of pure brilliance for what we had to work with. As the day went on despite the quality footage I was capturing, the walls in that basement were becoming smaller and smaller. The heat of the 36 hours down there began to rash my skin. I had never been claustrophobic but something about the prolonged time down there began to get to me mentally. My volume and growl raised amps at a time. My temper grew shorter and shorter and the crud, sweat and heat punished my vulnerable eye like a Chinese Water Torture. I had gotten to the point where I just wanted to cut it out and be done with it.
The last hour of the shoot on Day 3 found us at about 9 pm. Nearly, 14 hours of the “oven,” and the weariness of the dislodging of my gear all over a small Shelby Farm was about all I could take and we still weren’t finished. My skin crawled. Anger clouded my mind and there was still the biggest day down there.... The BIG FINAL SCENE to do the day after. So we’re down to the final setup. I was laying on the floor, shooting a couple of low angle shots where we had a couple of key shots where the actors talk “under their breath,” so clean audio was of the essence. The audio, I never worried about as long as my Camera Assist was running it. He had the boom mic and headphones and was not only a Pro Tools Professional but also a Hip Hop Artist so he could hear a penny drop in the next county through those cans where as I can barely hear when my wife is screaming at me from the next room. (They may be what they call selective hearing too.) It’s renowned that I’m very hard of hearing. From years of utilizing Surround Sound to watch films, to beating on drums, to listening to Pantera at volumes that added “wear and tear” to my ear bones, I was half deaf and not very good with multi-tasking to boot. So shooting camera and monitoring sound was not a good idea. I was cutting the film too, so I couldn’t be mad at anybody but myself if I had taken on that responsibility as well. So I depended on him. If he said the take had good sound, it had good sound, period.
So when Take One of the final set-up began and the first take was the best, BUT one of the actor’s lines was stomped on by a slow, long, rising growl of my hungry stomach, it was heart breaking. I had eaten lunch eight hours before, why would my stomach be growling, right? On the second take we got the same results so I calmly asked for two minutes where I asked somebody to go to the lunch table and get me something to whiff down real fast to stop the problem so we could wrap Day 3 up. Our Slate slash Makeup guy came back with, “this is all I could find.”
He handed me two packs of crushed Saltine Crackers. I then asked for ten more minutes. All the stress and bullshit of the past three days, (basemented aside,) spewed out of my pores. I handed the camera to my Camera Assist and walked outside without saying a word, only stopping by the Edit table to again remove two half cans of soda from the Editing Table while my Logger was watching Indiana Jones on one of computers instead of doing his job.
Trounced outside to the cool evening air. I didn’t noticed how nice it was this time, walking past four crew men all enjoying a cold Budweiser.
“Wow,” under my breath as I passed them into the field and in cool Tom Cruise fashion from a scene in ‘Rain Man’ screams at the world: “SUNUVABITCH!!!!!,” I began to yell. Although I think I said something much worse.
Minutes before I explode at the end of Day 3.
The Story Continues with Chapter Five - The Importance of Fuel
Sacrificing The Art - Chapter Four / Part 1 -A Drunk A.D and A Slowly Swelling Eye
Friday, August 14, 2009
Sacrificing The Art - Chapter Three - Smooth and by the Numbers
Day 2 was running smooth and by the numbers. My Camera Assistant had given me an extended release Adderall at the beginning of the day seeing that I was already worn out. At 10:30 am, the basement was muggy, a tad bit hot and cramped, but nothing I couldn’t adapt to. I had been on Porn sets that were worse. (The body odor had not kicked in yet.) The Adderall had completely dried my mouth out so on top of stank breath, I was spitting sweaters. On breaks between set ups, I would rush out and chug two twenty ounce waters only to find fifteen minutes later, my mouth was a hosiery mill again. It didn’t matter at this point. The pill had made me a monster. I could have shot scenes in Satan’s Judgement Chamber and moonwalked between takes with that amphetamine running through my veins. I shot and shot, dumping 16 gig P2 cards every 40 minutes loaded with good shots and takes. (When you are shooting 720p HD, you get one minute per gig on the card. Do the math on my ratio.) There were no storyboards and the Director like most first time directors had spent a month typing up shot lists that consisted of 150 shots a scene. Not even David Fincher on a 60 day shooting schedule would get that kind of coverage. We reverted to the “No Huddle” offense which is bad because there is no organization but can be good if you have a DP and or Director who has edited before. I was both those so I began cutting in the camera.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Sacrificing The Art - Chapter Two "The Last Hooray"
Jobbers was the most complex labor of love I ever had the displeasure, (and sometimes pleasure,) to make. It cost me over thirty stitches, (not all at one time,) thirteen doctor visits, a girlfriend, a couple of friends, a good landlord reference and a large chunk of my sanity. I'd give you the short story, but with this project... There ISN'T one.
In 1999, I was a wrestling freak. I loved wrestling. I loved the story lines. I loved the larger than life aspect of it all. This craze had also help me change my life. I stopped smoking and started in hard on the gym thing. I had never aspired to be a wrestler, (more a behind the scenes kind of guy.) I had been toggling with ideas to make a Christopher Guest inspired "Mockumentary" of some kind for my next project. The three chip video camera had just dropped from the sky and everybody was suddenly doing documentaries on the Sony VX-1000. I had made a deal with the devil to get me one.
Well, I had a girlfriend at the time. One of those ones you only get to experience once or twice in a lifetime. She had walked by where I worked and I couldn't take my eyes off her. I had to have her and with a little persistence I got her. Had her for about three months and she dumped me. Heartbroken, I brushed it off... Well kind of. I used a bottle of Cuervo and my martial arts buddy, Justin that night to do so. After way too many we decided we were going to go down in the basement and beat on each other for a little while, Tyler Durden style. We beat on each other for forty-five minutes. So much I ended up in the hospital with twenty one stitches across the head. Here's where the story of my movie was inspired. We had filmed this whole ridiculous half wrestling, half fight and I had bloodied myself so badly I almost wasn't able to walk to the car to go to the hospital due to the loss of blood I had succumbed to.
HERE ARE THREE OCCASIONS WHERE PRODUCING, DIRECTING, STARRING IN, AND EDITING MY OWN FILM COST ME ALOT OF SKIN & BLOOD
On the way to the hospital, Justin swerving, me talking, I hit him with the idea of a bunch of educated older men getting together to back yard wrestle and were dead serious about it. How ridiculously funny, I thought it could be. Like Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman on steroids. Justin agreed. Heck, we already had a scene in the can. The carnage never ended and working with only an outline and needing more and more footage to tell the story, I kept shooting for two years while shooting porn to fund it and save little by little for an edit suite. With over 50 hours of footage I was going to have to have my own system. I could barely afford the two year production, much less rental time on an Avid suite.
POST PRODUCTION
I had only edited one other complex project in my life. I had 50 hours of footage and only a 40GB hard drive to do deal with. This was 1999, so fast externals drives were not heard of in those days so I literally had to capture three tapes at a time, put together the little clips from them and render them as Quicktime movies. (Thank goodness we shot the movie in sync or those tapes would still be collecting dust in a shoe box somewhere.) Every scene and shot had to be signed off on, a little at a time. I had to know what I was going to do ahead of time. No, mix and match. I had to do it all in my head or sketch out detailed storyboards, limiting the creativity to my first instinct. I decided to go the long way about it. Why? Because I had no money. I copied all the DV tapes onto VHS tapes and edited the movie from VCR to VCR like a crude telecine... Mixing and matching shots and scenes until I found the right mix and then I did the final cut on the Mac. Again, the non efficiency of the post production process came down to money. You’ll hear me bitch about this all the way through this book but ultimately it’s the thing that makes films better and faster. Forget what you’ve been told. A client told me one time, “I want my project done cheap, good and fast.” I told him to pick two, because whichever two he picked the third one it would not be.
So under that theory, Jobbers should have been the Cheap and Good. Honestly two years after the project began. It was only cheap so I guess I just squashed my theory.
The first run of Jobbers on the West Coast received less than average reviews. The first run on the the East Coast. (same movie,) got incredible reviews. I went home took some time off, then went back and made some major and minor adjustments, of course there were no minor adjustments because everything had to be reverse engineered and completely recut to make any changes. The second run was the exact opposite. The West loved it. The East hated it. What gives? So I cut back the major and did away with the minors and had a premiere. It was the night of my life. Then reality set in and I woke up two years later to have nothing. The movie was rejected from twelve film festivals, including the The Bad Film Film Festival. No shit and to add salt to the wounds, (literally,) my insurance refused to pay for my several doctor visits so I was stuck with $4000 in ER visits. I had starved for nearly ten years. During the Jobbers period and before, I had shot and cut porn to fund my films while using a trust fund and wages from the Olive Garden to pay my bills. (Neither income was enough to facilitate either life I was leading.) My father was tired of seeing me “piss my inheritance away” and quite frankly I was too. I was released from my job because my crappy attitude had carried over into my glamourous waiting tables job.
One night, after all was bad, I called my father and asked him to send me $500. I was coming home. He showed up the next morning and drove with me back to North Carolina. I had thought at the time I was just taking a break, anywhere from six months to a year off and then I would go back. I promised myself I would train myself the craft of filmmaking while in North Carolina and when I returned to LA, I would be better prepared to work my way up the ranks on Motion Picture Studio Films. I had the gear at this point. I thought being back in North Carolina may inspire me or at least make it easier to make films than it had been in Hollywood. I began teaching myself the way of the samurai whether it be making little films with friends, doing documentaries, weddings whatever for pro bonno prices. I had lacked a mentor or a real job in the profession where I could learn from somebody better than me. I knew there were plenty of those guys out there; Just not in the small town I lived in. The best learning experiences I had were seasonal trips back to Los Angeles to help my partner in crime shoot and cut adult films. From editing techniques to lighting hacks, I learned a lot in those week trips. Well, that one year turned into six years and then I found myself in Orlando where everything “amateur” about me would change almost overnight. I compare the Florida experience to Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne traveled far and away to Ra’s Al Ghul’s temple to learn how to master his talent. Then Bruce Wayne would return to become Batman. Mike McDaniel, of Havin’ A Beer With Mike, a small late night television show would be my Ra’s Al Ghul. I learned everything about camera, editing, marketing, and all aspects of production in that short year I was employed by him. He worked me to the bone everyday all day. There were somedays where the sight of a camera would make me cringe in fear, but I learned it and my sacred talent that had been stirring deep within me peaked to the surface. To emphasize my talents, I got Final Cut Pro Certified. As I began making preparations to return to Los Angeles and claim my crown, my girlfriend, (wife now,) became pregnant with our daughter, so as quick as I found the confidence to go do this thing is as quick as I realized raising a newborn on Ramen noodles while Daddy chasing a dream in the biggest most expensive city in America, wasn’t the most realistic thing to do. We moved back to North Carolina where our support was. I thought getting a job in the area in my field would keep me tied down for the moment and I found a job as a Producer for an advertising agency only to lose it after it was offered to me because of a blemish on my background report from my senior year of high school. I went to work for myself and my work was glorious. Everything I shot and cut looked great. I had become a professional and knew it. It was my time. When I knew I was going to be in North Carolina awhile I decided not to wait any longer and began to plan making a film.
In the winter of 2003, I began writing Meter from a conversation I had with a disgruntled gentleman at a local bar in Hickory, North Carolina. Three years later at a chinese restaurant, I put the finishing touches on it and locked it down for shooting. Throughout those 3 years I had taken bits of conversations here and there I had with different people and incorporated it into Charles' or Randle's, (the two roles,) thoughts. As bad as it sounds I never really took Meter very seriously at first. I just wanted to do it to see if I had really learned anything from my crash course in Orlando. I knew it was a twelve page script of nothing but dialogue and in the grand scheme of things just thought it wouldn't be the sort of thing people would get into. I just decided to shoot it because I knew it would be cheap and it would allow me to an extent to “shake the dust off.” Everyday life and paying commercial jobs continued pushing back my "weekend project," I found myself worrying about making Meter a quality film as opposed to a straight to You Tube Video. My thoughts at first were just to con a couple of my friends with a bottle of liquor to go out in a parking lot somewhere and shoot it but the more time that went by trying to secure a schedule, the more I realized that if I was going to spend all this time on it, I might as well do it right. Of course I had no money because my daughter was seven months old and I couldn’t sell my wife on the fact that spending a couple grand on this film would be good for my already non-existent career.
On the coldest night of the year, November 4th, 2006, Two actors, and three crew guys went downtown and shot the film from 6pm to 5:30am in its entirety. We had all sorts of issues from lights catching on fire to people walking right through the shot during a solid take, to the bass of the band playing at the nearby bar messing up all my audio to the cab owner indian giving us the cab halfway through the shoot. On my way home I was dead set I had just wasted everybody's time. It was the first time where I felt that had I invested some real money into this film it would have been really good, but again I had none and had no idea how to raise it and well, had just froze my ass off to shoot it. I wasn’t shooting it again. As post-production progressed, I found (along with Phil’s great lighting and Freddy and Mark's excellent performances,) my years of editing since Jobbers were all getting ready to pay off. After over 60 days of Post, (most of it on fixing the audio and removing the now infamous faint bass thump from the nearby bar,) Meter was done. The leads, Freddy and Mark and I previewed it and when the credits ran I think for the first time we all realized that despite the $500 budget, problems with location, absence of direction from me due to lack of time and man power, we had made a very entertaining hard hitting film. I remember Mark turning around as the credits rolled with this look in his eyes as if to say, "Damn, we did that?"
Sacrificing The Art - Chapter One/Part Two "The White Walled Basement"
Then there is “The Illusionist” who’s basic theory is “we’ll fix it in post.” They think plug ins like Magic Bullet, Nattress, or software like After Effects and Color are the answer to all their Photography problems. Yes, a good Editor and Colorist can do wonders with good or bad footage. But, the misconception “The Illusionists” and most young filmmakers have is that they can just shoot the footage “normally” and achieve or should I say “copycat” the look of another film when they get to the post production stage. It is not that easy. Trust me, I tried many years ago. I’m not saying you can’t do it this way and the look can’t be achieved but it is still easier to shoot the footage right the first time around. Why spend hours and Terabytes rendering that in turn just degrading the pixelation of what you captured? Why spend dozens of man hours creating “fabrications” of what you shot? If you shoot footage knowing you will turn the footage black and white, then you need to light the scene, wardrobe the actors appropriately, and use color schemes with lots of reds in your original set up so when you drop the Monochome Color Mixers when the time comes to get your various grays. Then the footage will look like you shot it in Black and White. If you shoot footage dark and rich in color you can’t “blow it out” in post. If you shoot footage, “blown out” you can’t make it dark and rich in post. It’s a fact. It doesn’t work that way. You’re shooting HD for goodness sake. Utilize your color palette. If you want a scene to look green and seedy, light the scene green, boost your contrast in your camera and shoot it green and seedy. I guess now you know which person I am. HERE ARE TWO SHOTS. ONE THE PURIST WAY & ONE THE ILLUSIONIST WAY. CAN YOU TELL ME WHICH IS WHICH?
See the full gallery on posterous
I get asked all the time, “What software did you use to make it look so good?” My reply everytime is, “It ain’t the software, homeboy.” That’s the camera work and lighting. So where am I going with this you ask?”
For the basement, I went for dark and harsh shadows to cover up the blandness of the wall. Halfway through the day, I realized it didn’t work but there was no going back. Our schedule didn’t permit me to reshoot this large scene. (Not to mention, I didn’t want to discourage the cast and crew by revealing that the D.P didn’t know what he was doing.) I stayed late after the first day trying to come up with a way to relight the basement for the scenes following without reshooting. I looked at the footage and realized mild color correction would fix what we shot but I didn’t want to continue with that lighting scheme, nor did I want to become an Illusionist suddenly so now I was forced to either, find time in the busy schedule to reshoot the four scenes we shot and redo the lighting which was doubtful like I already said considering we were already behind or come up with something on the fly to justify a change in lighting.
Due to my obsession of scheduling sequences to be shot in order even if it inconveniences the actors or production I was able to easily fix it. In Independent filmmaking I feel if you shoot everything out of order you will miss something. Your actors who are all up and coming with many years needed to learn to “do the exact same thing” in each take, sometimes have a hard time finding a momentum if sequences of scenes aren’t shot in order. The performance tend to be uneven from cut to cut, scene to scene. It’s a given. It’s nobody’s fault but it disrupts the flow of the film. So I always try to shoot scenes that take place in the same location yet may be sandwiched by other scenes in order. That little practice would pay off here. The scene shot the first day was the scene in the film where the gang of four brings their first captive to the depths of the basement. They then figure out that they have kidnapped the wrong guy and two of them leave the basement to go get the right guy. The scene following is the two guys leaving the house. That is what we shot the first day. The scene following is the slow kid and the wrong captive having a conversation where the wrong captive tries to talk the slow kid into letting him go. That scene would be the first scene of the second day. A light bulb went off, literally. We had unscrewed the house overhead lighting for the first day to achieve the dark look. I thought what if the slow kid didn’t like it so dark and while the wrong captive was trying to talk him into letting him go the slow kid found a light bulb and screwed it into the overhead to give the room more light. Hence, the change of lighting for the scene following and all the scenes there after. (Again, only able to do that because we shot the basement sequence in order from first scene to last.) This trick worked and although it just added emphasis to the flat white wall, the lighting on the actors’ faces got me to the point of not having to color correct in post which made me a very happy camper. Now if I could come up with a tweak in the script to have one of the boys get furious and tear down the drywall on the white slab, I may have a scene my colleagues may not puke in a bag while watching. Nevertheless, my quick adjustment saved a day of reshoots that we didn’t have time for. Maybe, just my “bare bones” experiences from the past brought me to a quick resolution of adding house light to the scene. Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe the idea came from my desperation of my word that every frame of this film would be perfect due to my theory that this was my “last hoorah.” That was probably the answer. Yes, I am sure of it.
Chapter Two - "The Last Hoorah" continues....
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Sacrificing The Art - Chapter One/Part One - A White Walled Basement
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Sacrificing The Art - Preface
Preface
I’m a dreamer and sometimes unrealistic about what I can and can’t do. If I am anything, I am stupidly fearless. My answer to most that ask something of me is, “yes I can.” This problem sometimes gets me in trouble. Sometimes it brings opportunity I could never imagine. If you know me, with the exception of my children’s well being, I am a high risk low reward kind of guy. BAD A$$ KILLERS, I knew was one of these opportunities. The closer we got to Principle Photography, the more I was worried we had bitten off more than we could chew. The budget I laid out for BAK was as bare bones as it could possibly be. (Maybe too little for what we were about to embark on.) During the “crewing up” process we had met with many people that had several years of experience on film productions, the only problem was they would work for our “rock bottom” rate but we couldn’t afford to put them up for the two week schedule which meant, if they weren’t within forty five minutes of the locations, we couldn’t use them. Now if you know where we were “casting” and “crewing” from then you know our “pickens were slim.”
On top of this, the Director and my schedule were completely opposite making it hard to really location scout. We more stumbled across, and then settled with the locations we decided on. (This problem will come into play later on in the story.) With a week before Principle Photography began I had simply adopted the theory, “the more people we have, the better off we are.” So flyers went out trying to recruit anybody that was sitting at home wanting to do something. I targeted out of work people who had been home collecting unemployment checks and were just bored out of their skull. At this point in time, I thought we could spend a day showing them what we needed them to do and it would be better than not having anybody there at all. Should have known we were in trouble when none of them showed for Production Meeting 3 days before shooting began. From there, it would be up to our 1st Assistant Director to keep them busy during shooting.
The 1st AD hired, was hired soley on his performance on Jeopardy. Jeopardy was a whole different monster than BAK entirely. Jeopardy was a 4 day non-stop shooting schedule that was very contained within a 7 man crew and a couple mile radius. (Not to mention everybody including myself were stuck in 3 hotel rooms for the duration of the shoot, so it wasn’t hard to keep up with everybody and the needs of the production. With Jeopardy we needed things fast and on the fly. BAK, wasn’t so fast and furious. It was more planning a day ahead of time. I was a little weary, but he had done a lot of pre-production work with the Director so I figure things would be fine despite the little reasons I worried. **The 1st AD is basically the first guy on the set and the last guy to leave. He keeps the whole production running smoothly and knows where everybody is at all times.
As we came within 72 hours of Principle Photography I got a terrible feeling. It was so bad I actually had my phone in my hand with the Director’s number keyed in to call him and tell him we needed to push the shoot a couple of weeks to give us a little more time to ASSURE we had everything covered. I held that phone to my mouth for nearly ten minutes, thinking it over. All the schedules had been sent and since we were doing the old school production board way of scheduling, rescheduling would have been an undertaking. “What if one of the actor’s schedule didn’t mesh?” “What if one of our Day Labor guys found a job in that week we had pushed the film back?” “What if the delay took faith away from us?” I hung the phone up. All the equipment from Camera, to Editing, to Lighting was mine. We weren’t renting nor did we have production insurance which was ultimately my biggest worry. If something would happen to my computers, camera, anything, I would pay out of pocket to have it fixed because the pay check I was getting wasn’t enough to clear a button on my HD camera. I couldn’t back out. I had given my word. I could only hope I had enough time to police my gear all over the production. So I committed, never expressing my worry to the Director, deciding to go with the original schedule, knowing we had short cutted way too many little details but said, “We’ll figure it out as we go.” That was not a good theory to have for filmmaking, but, trying to do a feature film in two weeks on a $15,000 budget wasn’t such a good idea either....
To Be Continued in...
....Chapter 1 - A White Walled Basement
