Haven't heard from Cliff, but I'm hoping we can shoot the rest of his scenes tomorrow evening. We've got a plan on where to shoot the hallway scene, hopefully we can get that done as well, and hopefully, if it doesn't rain (major if there), we can shoot some more stuff with Steve.
My goal is to shoot the kitchen scene on Tuesday. To do that, we need to find a kitchen. First Ross Bible's kitchen was our kitchen but they bailed on us because the movie's about murder and they're puritanical hypocrits. We had 2 kitchens sort-of lined up to shoot that scene today. The Black River Cafe, which is on Main St, said we could shoot there today but then they flaked on us and the only available time they can do it is probably not going to work. The Vintage Tavern was our other option and there was some confusion as to who was supposed to call the owner and when, so that fell through. But, even if we can't film tomorrow, my goal is to secure a kitchen to get those 2 scenes we need to film in there, shot.
The biggest hurdle to get done before Steve leaves is the first scene, Introduction of Nick Adams. Steve and I discussed it last night, and it won't be a hard scene to shoot, just a lot of work to get done, although I've been thinking of ways we can make it easier (natural lighting outside, single shot indoor scenes) so we'll see. We need to find 2 people to have flowers delivered too, and then we've got to actually get the flowers, or fake flowers, or whatever and do that. That needs to be done probably Wed and Thurs. I'd like to get Steve's scenes done by the middle of the week so he doesn't have to worry about that stuff his final few days in town. I just hope we don't have to reshoot anything, and if we do, I'll need to find out fast what needs to be reshot.
Last night Steve, Todd and I were hanging out at Steve's friend's house and Todd and I started discussing potentially starting another project once this one is done. We both had the same idea: a stop-motion/live action mix of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" but the key to it would be to get Steve to help. He thinks he could do the same work from Portland that he'd do here, but I dunno. Gotta finish this one first before we move on to the next project. Either way, we got Steve to agree to stay in Port Huron if we could get 100 signatures on a petition for him to do so...as of now we have 5.
The one thing that I've been thinking about lately, is what I would've done differently with this film, and what to correct next time around. So far I've come up with the following:
1. Have much more time to rehearse before shooting. It's rather unfortunate that by the time we finished shooting Max and Al's scenes, Micki and Jim had finally gotten into their character's skins. It kind of makes me want to go back and reshoot some of the earlier stuff, but that's just not feasible.
2. Have a widescreen monitor. Or shoot in full-frame. There's already been a few scenes where I can see something in the very edges of the frame that shouldn't be there. A book-bag, a light stand, a bounce sheet, etc. They didn't show up in the monitor because it was squishing the video format and it's hard to pickup tiny stuff like that in the small monitor in the camera. I still think we were able to compose some really interesting shots, and there's a lot of geometry going on in the framing, but it'd be nice to have a widescreen monitor next time around.
3. A better grasp on sound. The only thing that worries me is some of the dialogue that we don't have many takes to choose from might be tied to other audio, like a chair moving, and we cant do anything with it in post. That's something that I'd like to work on next time around.
4. Storyboarding. I've always thought storyboarding was kind of stupid and a waste of time when you can sort of picture the shot in your head anyway. What I discovered is that, even if you can get that same shot, it'd probably be a lot better to have them drawn out so you know how the shot's will transition. That's one thing I didn't plan on, particularly because in pretty much everything I've done, filmmaking-wise, in the past, I've never had multiple takes/angles of stuff, it's all been live shooting, no retakes, etc. When you edit that, there's a certain flow that helps decides the cuts, you have to stay in somewhat of a linear fashion. With this project, not so much, and so while we got all the shots I wanted when I foresaw the film, I don't know how well they're going to splice together. We'll see about that.
5. More time to shoot. The whole thing has been rushed a bit, between having only 22 days from the start of the film until my lead character leaves the state, and only having x amount of days in the B&B. I would have liked for us to be able to really take our time and only focus on getting 1 scene per day, but that would've required 23 days of shooting. While I don't think any of the shots, etc. were rushed (except in the case of when the soundman was literally trying to rush through stuff), it would've been nice to really take our time and instead of getting 2 or 3 good takes and 1 perfect take per setup, we could've gotten 4 or 5 perfect takes per setup and maybe even do 2 or 3 variations of the scene within each setup.
There's probably more, but I need to lay down right now. I've been sitting at this computer all day, capturing video to my harddrive in seperate files, broken down into scenes and takes, etc and my back feels like I've got giant fish hooks digging into it and someone's trying to reel me in. Fun times.
Here's some stills from some of the footage I've captured:
Nick Adams trying to convince the Swede to leave town.
"What about the bright boys and the Mexican?"
"Do you go to church?"
Shot.
Counter-shot.
"You, Mexican, stand right there." "Whatever."
"Use yr head bright boy."
Max and Al about to leave.
No comments:
Post a Comment