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Now, when you’re shooting for editing, you can do so to various degrees. A prime example that’s often brought up when shooting for editing is mentioned, is Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi. Hear the director explain how he planned his shots with the final edit in mind.

This is obviously taking it to the extremes. With digital cameras, laptop workstations and powerful editing software, your options are plentiful, even on a budget. So let’s take a look at how director and co-writer of The Storyteller, Joe Crump, approached the shoot – knowing that he would also be editing the footage. Here’s our conversation.

Why did you decide to edit the film yourself? Pros and cons to this approach?

 

In filmmaking, the story is told three times, 1. by the screenwriters, 2. by the director and 3. by the editors. I wanted to be involved in all three parts of this process. I also love to edit and my co-editor was my daughter, Katie Crump – who sat by my side and helped me craft the story.

 

So the pros of doing it myself is that it’s a hell of a lot of fun and I got to spend a lot of time with Katie. I also had help syncing the dailies from Nick Andrews, Saxony Wynecoop and Emelie Flower… which made our job a lot easier since they had to be done manually.

 

The cons – I couldn’t blame anyone else for my mistakes as a director or not getting coverage. I was told by several people that I should let someone else edit it – that I was too close to it – and I suppose that may turn out to be the case, but I don’t think it has. In fact, I think being close to it might have helped.

 

Knowing you would be editing yourself, how did you plan ahead? Did you organize the footage in a certain way?

 

We had a wonderful script supervisor, Michael Blomquist. He kept amazing notes and handed us a very detailed log when all was said and done. We also had a sound log that was very helpful from our sound mixer Bud Osborne. We kept all the camera file names so it was easy to cross reference.

 

After that, we kept track of everything by the day we shot it. We then created sequences that were about 5 minutes in length – we’d break them up by shot.

 

We then nested each of these sequences into one long master sequence. Using nested sequences speeds everything up and makes it much easier to find the shots you are looking for on your timeline.

 

We used an Alexa Mini and our camera original files were ProRes 4444, which won’t play on a PC – so we ended up making proxies to edit picture. While we were editing, (we used Premiere Pro CC), Adobe upgraded Premiere and now we can play the camera original on the PC – we still can’t open those files on a PC in Quicktime without hacking the metadata – and that caused the software to crash… you gotta love Apple and their proprietary codec.

Did the fact that you knew how you would be editing the film inspire any of your choices while shooting? Shot compositions? Long takes vs short takes? Blocking and actions?

 

Yes, absolutely. I spent a lot of time creating a shot list before I started directing. This is my first narrative feature film, so I had a good deal of fear and trepidation going into it – thinking that somehow, when I got on the set, everything would go to hell and I’d forget all the important things I needed to include or watch out for in the film. My shot list was 100 pages of notes, 100 pages of location pictures and diagrams and 90 pages of script. I broke up my shotlist into binders that we broke up by location. That way I wouldn’t have to carry all 300 pages, just the pages I needed for that particular location. Yes, this was probably overkill, but it makes things a lot more relaxing when you are prepared and it made it possible for me to work with my Director of Photography, Dan Clarke to come up with some additional shots that were better than I had planned on my own. As the shoot went on, my expectations of what our shots should look like and do got higher and higher. I didn’t just want to tell the story, I wanted to do it elegantly – and sometimes, you have to be there on the set to see something, an angle, a space, a camera move, the right angle of daylight… and take advantage of it when it appears. This takes a calm set and an fully engaged crew.

 

I was expecting to have a lot more emergencies than we ended up having. I was fortunate to have a great production team keeping things moving, headed up by our Producer, Rachel Noll.

 

We have a lot of live music in the movie, but we don’t just stay on people singing, we tell the story while the music is being played – so Rachel Noll (co-writer) and I designed a lot of the montage sequences around these songs. We freely played with time, location, memory – all that stuff during the songs. We also had to estimate how long it would take for certain images and sequences to play – how much screen time they would take – and I designed the shots so that we only had to shoot the parts of the song that we would actually show. I would like to have had more time to shoot more coverage, but it all ended up working pretty well when we got into the cut.

 

How did the intended use of visual effects in certain scenes affect how they were shot – and how does this play into how you are now editing those scenes?

 

We tried to use practical effects whenever we could. Dan put an LED light on the end of a wand and we floated it into the scene for the fairy effect. Some of the shots we don’t have that effect and you can tell because the light being cast from the LED gives a wonderful look on any object or person near the fairy – when we didn’t use it (usually because of time constraints), we had to fake the glow on their faces in After Effects. That worked too, but it was time consuming in post and never looked quite as nice.

 

We also shot a lot of Day for Night. Our main actor was a 10 year old girl (Brooklyn Rae Silzer) and because we shot under SAG Ultra Low Budget rules, we had to limit the times and hours we could use her. Most of the work we did in the woods was day for night – same with the work we did outside on the Fairy Bridge. Dan Clarke, our DP, also did most of the VFX work on the film… some of the effects have 35 or 40 layers in 3D space.

35-40 layers of effects in 3D space is a far cry from the simplicity of the shots described by Robert Rodriguez in the video at the top, but both approaches share a common goal: Making the best film you can with the means available to you.

For more on shooting day-for-night, check out our article on the subject here. And if you would like to take a peek behind the scenes of The Storyteller and see how some of the VFX shots were created, here’s a video of an early visual FX test.

If you have never heard the term ‘Day For Night’ before, here’s an ultra-quick primer. One of the main luxuries afforded to you as a filmmaker when shooting during the daytime, the sun, literally disappears come nighttime, so shooting good-looking, non-grainy footage will suddenly require massive lighting setups to cast just enough light on your subjects and backgrounds to make them stand out clearly on camera without making it look like the scene has been lit at all. This is because cameras generally can’t shoot in the dark. What your eyes see at night is not what the camera is going to pick up – hence the unnatural lighting needed. To cut costs (and for many other reasons, like scheduling, location/talent availability, safety, etc.) filmmakers throughout the ages have resorted to the ‘Day For Night’ technique, wherein you shoot your nighttime scenes during the day while taking certain measures that will enable you to pass the footage off as genuine nighttime shots. Some is done in-camera, some is done in post.

Many articles have been written about how to achieve a good ‘Day For Night’ shot. Most focus on a few key parameters, such as avoiding harsh shadows, lowering your exposure, avoiding showing the sky in your shot, using polarizing filters and taking your sweet time in post-production. All valid points, but since you’ll find more than a handful good articles on these subjects elsewhere, we’ll gloss over them without going into too much detail. Instead, we’ll focus on a more mental aspect of the ‘Day For Night’ effect.

First, the classics:

#1 Avoid harsh shadows

To avoid hard shadows in your shot, which is a dead give-away that your scene was shot during the day, be sure to backlight your subjects and try, if you can, to shoot on cloudy days or in the shade. Moonlight casts some light, so it’s not necessary to avoid shadows all-together, but aim for a soft glow around your subject, rather than a long shadow on the ground behind it. Here’s a more in-depth look at different challenges with different, natural light conditions.

#2 Lower your exposure

There’s less light available to you (whether your camera or your eyes) during the night, so have your camera help you a bit on the way to achieving the ‘Day For Night’ effect by lowering your exposure. You definitely don’t want anything in your shot to be blown out or super bright, and you also don’t want to lose too much detail, so manually adjust your exposure to be just a little lower than you normally would have it. The rest you can take care of in post.

#3 Avoid the sky

If you don’t know anything about color-grading, using masks or key frames, you may want to completely avoid shooting the sky. A bright sky in your nighttime shot screams DAYTIME and there goes the suspension of disbelief out the window. That said, a night sky can be eerie or beautiful or set up your shot perfectly, so if you know how to effectively edit the sky in post, go ahead and shoot it. Just keep in mind that in moving shots or action with the sky as a backdrop is going to require a lot of careful editing later. If you can achieve the same results for your scene without having the sky in the shot, you’ll be off much easier.

#4 Use a polarizing filter

Think of the polarizer as a safety net. If you have to shoot against a surface with a glare, such as a body of water or a shiny building, the polarizer will help you avoid anything too shiny to remove in post. You can even leave it on your lense for the duration of the (‘Day For Night’) shoot and not even think twice about it. It’s not going to hurt your shots and it will help if you miss accounting for a shiny surface in your shot setup.

#5 Take your sweet time in post-production

Carefully adjusting your hue, saturation, colors, exposure and shadows will get you far, but it will be your attention to detail that will really sell the shot. Adding artificial light sources, like headlights, streetlights, the glow from a window, the speckle of lights from the windows in a high rise, and so on and so forth, will create the nighttime setting – more than turning of the blue’s and turning down the red’s will ever do. Post-production is where the technical magic is going to happen when you’re shooting ‘Day For Night’, so take your time.

More on the post-production process can be found in this tutorial by Video Copilot.

Which brings us to the point I really want to make:

#6 Tell the story right

As a filmmaker you’re first and foremost a storyteller, so don’t get hung up on technicalities like polarizers or blue hues in post, just to then forget about your most powerful tool of all: the power of suggestion. This is what will take your shot over the finish line. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Say your character is driving all night to meet his lover on a dock four hundred miles away, so they can skip off to a tropical island together. What will make the scene feel like night may be the quiet music on the radio, the coffee he’s drinking to stay awake and the empty road. Or say your character is running through the woods to escape a cloaked villain. Quick cuts to other creatures of the night, being disturbed by the chase, may sell the fact that it’s night: an owl, a critter, a fox, a couple of eyes caught in the glare of a flashlight. Or say you’re shooting an action movie – nothing says night more than night vision.

All this to say that you have more in your tool box than filters and color-grading. Use the power of story to help people believe that it’s nighttime.

Need a good example of a movie that primarily shot ‘Day For Night’ scenes? Check out ’28 Weeks Later’ – because one of the film’s lead actors was too young to legally shoot through the night, most of his scenes were shot ‘Day For Night.’ And it looks perfect.

We started with an article on the rather lofty subject of Ideas – Which to Pursue and How to Start Writing. Since then we have delved into subjects like copyright, music licensing, film financing, casting, locations, script breakdown, scheduling and more, giving you an honest and personal look behind the scenes of the production of an indie film. It’s a long process. One that takes blood, sweat and tears, all before that magic moment when the director first calls out “…and ACTION!”

That moment has finally came and went for The Storyteller, which is currently shooting in Indiana. We’ll continue to follow the process through our article series and we encourage you to follow along behind the scenes on the film’s Facebook page.

Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions for the production team or if there is anything you would like us to focus on in future articles.

You can find all the articles related to The Storyteller here.

Stock footage archive Filmsupply have partnered with music licensing service MusicBed for a contest where the objective is to use video and audio clips from their respective services to create either a spec ad, a trailer or a title sequence. And hey, even if you don’t win, it’ll still be good practice, right?

Find the complete set of rules and get your starter kit here.

Now, before you get the printer going, know that any contract you use in your production may have more of an impact on your current and future business than you care to think about, so always consult with an attorney to make sure the contracts you use are up to date and covering all your bases. If this is your first production and you’re DIY-ing as much as you can, you should also consider creating an LLC for your production company, which will help protect you and your assets, should your production get into legal trouble down the line. Check out FilmmakerIQ’s introduction to forming an LLC.

FilmContracts.net has put together a very comprehensive directory of production contracts (and other assorted paperwork), all available for free in the super annoying FlashPaper format. For these documents to be of any use to use, you will need to find each document you need, then Print/Save as PDF, open in your PDF editor (such as Preview on Mac) and fill it out there. It’s always a good idea to also print out a few extra, blank copies for any on-the-go changes. Here are a few examples of what you can find in the FimContracts.net directory:

• Script Breakdown Sheet
• Cast & Crew Call Sheet
• Cinematography Pre-Production Checklist
• Production Requirements Checklist
• Location Contract
• Use of Still Photographs Release
• Product Placement Release
• Original Music Licensing Agreement

In addition to the forms found on FilmContracts.net, always make sure you fill out all appropriate union paperwork, which you can obtain directly from SAG-AFTRA, WGA, DGA, and so on and so forth.

You can – and probably should – of course also enter the digital age and handle a bunch of your paperwork in apps like ShotLister, Celtx and SyncOnSet.