My leading man Leon Laubscher in the back, my director Christo Crafford front left, and D.P. Warrick McLeod.
It’s been a week now that I’ve settled down since the first two days shooting my psychological thriller short film INSIDE. I’ve purposely avoided writing too much about it, or even thinking too much about it, as it’s really still in a somewhat pliable stage with one more shoot day to go.
I will however say a few things that stand out for me from the whole experience… things that will likely become standalone blog posts soon, and then I will continue to share my thoughts once we’ve wrapped the final shoot day.
Back to School.
I really feel like I’m in film school. I’ve never been to film school, I studied to be an engineer.
But this experience has highlighted how much I am learning, and how much I am absorbing that I will need to process for months before it is assimilated fully into my approach to future projects.
You want to make a film, steal a camera, steal film stock, sneak in to a lab and do it.– from Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Last year I shot Daydream… on three 400ft cans of 35mm film with a borrowed camera. I didn’t have to sneak into the lab because I worked there… but you get the jist. I basically followed Werner Herzog’s recipe.
“Daydream” doesn’t quite flow for me yet, it’s all beginning and middle with a weak payoff at the end, but it is a good little story. I will end up re-cutting it until I am happy, and then I will tag it onto the end of INSIDE as a little extra feature. At that point it may only be 30 seconds long. I was focused on creating visuals, not directing and it shows. I was D.P. and I am proud of my shots. End of story, lessons were learned.
Daydream – Lesson 1: Don’t spread yourself too thin… don’t think you can D.P. and direct, one will suffer and you can’t afford that.
Daydream – Lesson 2: This one is subjective to me, but I learned that I can confidently handle a camera… any camera, film or digital, even a 35mm motion picture camera. Technically I understand optics, I understand the physics of light. I understand the chemistry of celluloid (and what’s going on with a digital imager)… I know what’s going on inside the camera, why and how to control it to produce the results I see in my mind’s eye. I also learned I can translate the shots I see in my mind onto film. I can choose lenses, I can pull my own focus, I can achieve a perfect exposure every time.
Yeah... it's my film, I carried a typewriter.
Those two lessons had a huge impact on how I approached INSIDE.
Firstly, I wasn’t going to do everything myself (although I was tempted… it was originally the plan). As soon as I had opportunity to bring a D.P. and a director on board, I stepped back into a producer role and let go of the technicalities to others. I knew I could shoot if I wanted to, and had nothing to prove to anyone.
I jumped at the chance to work with Christo Crafford as he is co-writing and will be directing “The Investigator”, but I don’t feel he really had the opportunity to shine… you can’t bring a director on board at the last minute who doesn’t know the story, has had no input, and no storyboard. Maybe that can be my lesson number one from this shoot. Still, his input was absolutely invaluable and I wouldn’t trade having him part of the team for anything.
My hands full... um, not.
On the shoot, I didn’t do much. I was concerned mostly with risk mitigation, time keeping and doing everything I could to make sure we’d end up with a film at the end of it all. Most of these stills are mine. I wanted to make sure my team had what they needed, I wanted to encourage and facilitate. I was a runner, I fetched lenses and ran back and forth from the car to set. I enjoyed this immensely. It was still my film, my script, my vision but I could trust professionals to do a better job than I could. I wanted them to be happy and have fun.
D.P. Warrick basking in the sun on a mid-winter's day, and director Christo.
I enjoyed seeing Warrick McCleod, my fantastically capable D.P. enjoying what he was doing. I enjoyed the shots I was seeing, and I found that what I wanted was simple, good solid cinematography… and that for the most part he could shoot off the script with no shotlist or storyboard (not an approach I would recommend normally… I will get to this on it’s own later). I am not sure how his normal experiences are, but I imagine I was pretty easy to please compared to some people he has worked with. I decided early on that I wanted his signature in the shots, so I gave it totally to him… here’s the story buddy, you’ve got a blank canvas.
Structure vs Organic Co-Creation
What happens when you have a script… and a fairly loose one at that, locations that are not the original locations envisioned in the script, no shot list (actually that’s not true, we just didn’t use it), no storyboard, and a “blind” director and D.P. brought on at the last minute?
You either have a recipe for disaster… or in our case a recipe for fantastically fluid co-creation. I loved it! and we all had fun, but this really is a very risky approach. I will not take this route again on any more demanding type of film, especially where time is more of a pressure than it was for us. Maybe we just got lucky… the small team and mutual respect for each other combined in our favour. This time, it worked.
Here’s some more photos from the shoot – http://www.flickr.com//photos/richlackey/sets/72157627256092182/show/
Some great looking photos there.