At the end of the last update we hadn’t yet screened our 48 hour run ‘n’ gun film unit one! Yet The Gala this past weekend was an amazing night thank you again to all of the folks at “This is a spoon productions!” You did an amazing job we can’t wait for next year! For those that haven’t Seen unit one click here! to check that out. We also had a brainstorming meeting where we all sat down and worked out what our next production is going to be. As I said before this a great group of folks to work with and we want to take advantage of all the amazing talent we have here to do really Really awesome things. While the details are kind of a surprise! The plan is to start filming over the next few months a number of shorts that are loosely connected around a single idea that I had at the end of the LAST CENTURY. That is the Basic plan without giving away too many details and ruining it all for you.
The plan is to be shooting as we’re writing and taking on some of the more complicated parts filmmaking that we haven’t necessarily done before. That way we can learn some great things without having to worry about impossible deadlines and as well with the ability to redo it if it all goes horribly wrong! and then know that we can do it so then we can plan around what we know can be done. To that End last night we started shooting our first Short script that we are calling Max and Sarah – Its a warning title. This shoot involved rigging our truck for filming people while they are driving. Now normally you would put the truck on a trailer and drag it around behind another truck with the film crew on the trailer to film it. But we only had one truck, we don’t have a trailer and our film crew was me & Noah who was there to shoot the behind-the-scenes. So we instead did this! Seriously while it looks like Gross hack job or a sick eruption of plaid that is just missing the duct tape, the camera was really secure and stable as relative to the truck, and that is all you really need to get smooth vehicle footage is have that camera as rock solid to the vehicle as you can. That was if the Car bounces around the camera is bouncing the exact same way. To be fair this means you are locking off your camera but really I don’t think that a slider/dolly rig would add much to this shot anyway :) Rigging it this way also meant we had to shoot with the window open mostly because my Windows are all scratched up and you can’t really shoot cleanly through them and I didn’t want to go super wide wide to be able to put the camera in the truck so the truck window was slightly open. This brings our next film maker challenge! ADR!! Yeah something I have never done before. I’ve always tried very very hard to get the sound live on set in a usable manner which we also tried to do here but on reviewing it i have come to the conclusion that I have a loud truck.
Now this sound is usable but because this is short and we have time equipment and manpower we are going to give ADR a try. This is a perfect scene to do this with as Shannon and Sean were basically bang on delivering their lines the excaxt same way each time as it was. We will try that late this week and let you know how it goes. For filming this scene we needed a lonely section of road that we could drive over and over and over so we could do take after take of one actor and then change the rig and take after take of the other actor. We choose Waterfront road behind our studio. It is a lovely hunk of road with all the things we needed. Places to pull over in case we need to stop, no large trees or buildings to make for even consistent lighting, and colourful interesting backdrops. What we didn’t have however was a permit. Waterfront road is as we found out part of the port authority, and they need you to get a permit & permission (which the gentlemen said they most likely wouldn’t give to us) So while we got the main dialogue 90% done, we didn’t get everything that we needed (things like closeups & inserts or Establishing/closing shots) we will have to find a similar location and see if we can cut these in with out issue.