Kisses And Caroms Discussion Board

Kisses And Caroms Discussion Board: How did you do it in 5 days?

Bono09	Monday, December 08, 2003 - 04:04 pm How the hell did you get this thing done in 5 days? Reading the journal to see if I can find out how... but that's cool. That was my goal, 5 or 6 days of filming to get it in the can, but on indieclub.com they think that's unlikely. so how did you do it?
Vince (Vince)	Monday, December 08, 2003 - 05:13 pm How did we shot 92 pages in 5 days? It was easy. Really. FIRST - Script. You need a doable, one location screenplay. SECOND - Storyboards. If you haven't seen mine, they are here. Follow the guidelines in my storyboard Journals. Start here and hit previous to read them all. After drawing the storyboards, I got people together and recorded a live read of the script. Then I scanned the boards and edited them to the read. The result was a finished storyboard movie that I could watch over and over. When I got on set, I knew exactly what shots I needed without having to reference the storyboards because I'd seen the movie a ton of times. Also, I knew how long the flick would work out to be and if K&C worked. The bonus to this is, when I do the DVD for K&C, I'll have a storyboard to screen comparison and it'll be fun to see how it evolved. THIRD - Production Boards. I just realized that I never put the pictures of the boards online. Here is one pic of them. I'll try to get the better ones online tonight. Here's a link to how they were made. We would look at a scene and figure out how many pages it was. Lets say 3. That means a 3 minute scene. If we had 2 actors in it, that would be one 3 minute master, two 3 minute OTS or POV's. So that's 9 minutes of shooting. Double that for safty. 9x2=18 plus 10 minutes to setup. 28 minutes to shoot. That's the basic formula we used and we played with it a lot. We then tried to group the board according to set up's. If we were shooting the restroom we would put all the restroom scenes together. This lessened our setup time. We no longer needed 10 minutes for each scene, just 10 minutes for the restroom. Next we grouped the scenes to keep the actors together. No sense in bringing someone to the set at 10am and their next call was at 3pm. Sometimes that is unavoidable. Then we broke everything up in to days. We placed showroom and exteriors first so we would have daylight then finished the days in the stockroom. This way we could shoot at night. FORTH - Casting. We worked hard to assemble a cast that was great, fun, and friendly. DO NOT EVER HIRE AN ASSHOLE. I don't care how good they are. They will bring down your set. Here's the criteria, Do they look the part? Can they act the part? Would I be friends with them? If the answer was No to ANY of those. I wouldn't hire them. We then rehearsed a lot. We blocked everyone and every scene. You can never have enough rehearsal. This was where I really directed. I worked with the actors on delivery and placement, ect. We worked through how things would happen. One rehearsal day, after dinner, We told the actors they must be off book and have all their lines memorized. There would be no excuses not to. I explained that this movie was going to be done in 5 days. I flat out said, "I would rather have a finished product then a perfect one. So, we'll shoot the master first and if you Fuck it up, we'll do it again, and again untill it's right. Each time we do it, it takes away from your close up. If all we get is the master and we need to move on, we will without your close up." That scares actors, they want the close-up. All the actors showed up off book. Finally, have plenty of good food and hot meals and TONS of RedBull. Oh, and always say Thank you. You can't say it enough, even to those you are paying. That's it, that's the basics of how to shoot a feature in 5 days.
Bono09	Monday, December 08, 2003 - 06:17 pm Good stuff. That's what I want to hear. I guess having actors that don't F up a lot, helps.
Vince (Vince)	Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 12:33 am Yeah that adlib bullshit it for the birds. Let them ad lib then you'll realize how fucked you are in edit. Stick to the lines!!! When you are on a 1 mil budget and you have plenty of time, then they can adlib.
Bono09	Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 01:56 am I'm a writer first, so the idea of "no script" just go pisses me off. Saying 90% of the lines and having the actor or whoever think of a new line of great dialogue works for me.
Bart	Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 09:43 am Speaking of "no script" -- another film I did ("Hacks") had just that. The dialogue was improvised. Luckily it was filmed in DV because there was about 59 hours of tape. Took a year for them to edit it. The DVD will be out Dec. 16th through FILMTHREAT.COM <== shameless plug.
Jay	Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 07:33 pm One other thing you need in order to get it done in 5 days is a strong First AD. You need someone who knows what they are doing and is willing to be the bad guy and keep everyone on schedule. As much as I didn't want to, I fell into this position for K&C. After casting and producing, I just wanted to show up and schmooz everyone for 5 days. It didn't work out like that. There were times I really had to push people and I pissed a couple of people off at times. The bottom line is that since I was being the prick, the director was able to be the good guy and not have to worry about all that other stuff. You need to have the director be the good guy that everyone likes and wants to do a good job for. If he has to be the prick, people will walk or do a shitty job. So, get a good 1st AD.
Vince (Vince)	Tuesday, December 16, 2003 - 01:46 am True about the first AD, but Jay's always a prick. At least, he's always touching one. :-) Jay kept us moving and was a huge part of making the flick happen. Now if he'd just sell the damn thing.