7 posts tagged “production”
I'd heard rumors of Film Arts Foundation being in trouble. Now, it looks like SF Film Society is taking over Film Arts functions. It's unclear to me whether they will rent gear the way Film Arts used to but they are taking over the fiscal sponsorship role for those of you who need a fiscal sponsor to channel your funding through. They are also launching a couple of interesting programs: grants, and filmhouse residencies. Details and applications will be published in September but it looks like there will be money and free production offices available to local filmmakers. Nice, eh? There will also be a monthly networking/conference event for filmmakers starting in Nov.
Cheers,
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Wow, that was my longest break from the blog. Here's a quick summary of what's been happening this summer:
1. Iowa - hot, humid and fun. I made friends. I wrote. I wrote. I wrote. James McPherson is writing me a recommendation. To what, I don't know yet -- but it's handy to have a recommendation letter from a Pulitzer Prize winning writer in case I want to apply to some program somewhere that requires recommendations. I wrote/ revised 5 stories while in Iowa. I think I would have written 6 but for the fact that the 5th is the one we committed to submit to the anthology. Turns out it's harder to write on cue than we anticipated. I've written 3 completely different versions of the anthology story and am still not happy with any of them. Haven't given up, though.
2. 48-hr Film Fest - just participated this weekend. I was assistant director on this project. Amazingly, we wrapped in one day. The script was written Friday night. We shot on Sat. Today, the editor was locked in his room all day, making sense out of what we shot.
3. DIY Days - spent the day today at this awesome conference. Wow, I was impressed. It was free, cutting-edge, informative. More on this later.
Cheers,
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
A few people have asked about the striped lighting effect on Psychopath. The story took place in a closet and I knew I wanted lights to stream in through slatted closet doors. I know those types of closet doors are common but when I looked for them, I couldn't find them anywhere. Then when I had almost given up, I happened to notice that there was a storage closet with slatted doors right where we held our audition!
The slats on the doors slanted the wrong way -- the lights would stream up through the slats, not down. So we unscrewed the doors and put them in backwards so the slats would slant down where we needed them. If you look carefully in the film, you can see that there are handles on the inside of the closet.
We perched a single 250W work light on top of a ladder just outside the closet. It was left undiffused and streamed in through the door slats, blanketing the kids in stripes. When the door was opened, it gave a perfect showering light pattern behind Cheyenne, giving the white wall texture and Cheyenne an angelic glow.
On the left is my trusty old
250W light from Home Depot mounted on a cheap tripod. On the right is my new 1000W light from OSH, on sale this weekend
for $33 out the door. It can vary from
250W, 500W, 750W to 1000W. Stand is
adjustable with a max of 70”.
I thought it’d be a perfect lighting solution but it’s not quite. The screw adjustments aren’t perfect and they sometimes let the stand height slip down when it’s moved. The next problem to be tackled is that these are not as tall as the pro lights and they cast shadows that show up in the frame if the actor is standing in front of a wall. Not sure that the 1000W stand is solid enough to put on top of something for added height… let’s find out!
Forged by sheer stubbornness with help from Illustrator and Windows Paint. Took me seconds to come up with a rough draft, followed by days of grappling with Illustrator to get it to look just right. I finally cheated and used Windows Paint (the free software that comes with Windows) to do some basic stuff. Illustrator can do all of it but only if you know the secret voodoo incantation and make a blood sacrifice to the Adobe god…
Pretty, isn’t it?
I played Craigslist roulette last week and came out in one piece with my arms clutching a shiny, almost new Panasonic HVX200.
The seller was a junior in college. He drove up to Starbucks in his convertible BMW roadster with my future camera in the passenger seat. Four months ago, his parents had bought it for him for $2k more than what I was paying him. He barely knew how to turn the camera on. He had played with it for a couple of hours when he first got it and it’s been sitting in its case ever since.
Lesson for the day: if you can’t get that rich guy to invest in your film, get to know his kids.
A few weeks ago, I talked some folks into helping me shoot a 2-page thriller, “Psychopath,” that I wrote to test out the filmmaking waters. I had no gear but it turns out that in the tech-savvy area of San Francisco, finding someone with gadgets was not a problem. Practically everyone seems to have a camera and a mic.
Because my script was only 2 pages (which translates to about 2 minutes on screen), it needed some compelling elements. In this case, they were children, a mouse, and blood. I had vaguely heard that directing kids and animals is challenging at best and a disaster at worst.
What’s a film shoot without its challenges, right?
The first challenge came before the audition. Parents bombarded me with questions. I spent hours on email explaining that there’s violence but it’s probably okay for kids above 12. I gave up and sent my script out to every parent who showed interest to let them decide for themselves.
During the audition, the room was flooded with kids. I had scheduled auditions in 15 minute intervals but several families showed up with 4 kids. So it was hard for the little actors to focus. They giggled, they squirmed, they looked at me with blank stares. The older ones were better but clearly coached by their parents. In the end, I picked out two and hoped for the best.
On the day of the shoot, as I was driving to the site, I got a call from the little boy’s mom. Little Romario (6) was crying and refused to come. But, but… we couldn’t do the shoot without him! Could she please try to get him to come? Okay, she’d try but no promises. As I arrived at the shoot site, I got another call. No way was Romario even going to come for a visit. His brothers had been teasing him about being in a movie and he wanted nothing to do with it.
Now what?
We set up as if everything was fine. Why? Because we’d spent $50 to use the apartment clubhouse for the shoot and were expecting 5 crew members, 4 actors (minus Romario), a month of organizing and prep and we weren’t going to let Romario’s ten-year-old brothers bully us out of our shoot, dammit. So maybe the 2 minute thriller would now be a 1 minute experimental piece…
Luckily, Romario was a true artist – he had his attack of nerves before the shoot but in the end, showed up on time. He was amazing. And so was Cheyenne (12). I was blown away by how responsive they were to direction.
Their reactions look real, don’t they? That’s because they are. :-)
Top photo: they knew a man was going to yell but they thought he’d yell from across the room as described in the script. I secretly asked the guy to stand just out of sight from them and belt out his lines. The result was a genuine startled reaction.
Bottom photo: fake blood was dripping on her jeans and I caught her reaction through the scene.
Overall, it was a blast to work with kids!
