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.

I was fortunate enough to have an experience a few weeks ago shooting a complex and involved action scene for a film. I was kidnapped and pulled out of a building after a massive explosion, I got to kick some ass, run and dive, steal a van and peal out of a parking lot, get shot, inject a man with a syringe, and watch a man fall down a flight of stairs. This was the first time I had been a part of a shoot like this, and not only was it a blast, but it was done on a very low budget. Here’s how it was all done.

Explosions!

First of all, lets talk about on screen explosions. Or at least the one I witnessed. The scene called for a building exploding. Windows broke, the door busts open, and a group of scientists are pulled out of the rubble.

I watched the pyro team set up a big air machine in the doorway of a building façade on New York Street in the Manhattan Beach Studio lot. They filled it with a grey powder. When the director called ACTION they pressed a button and the air machine fired off a loud noise accompanied by a cloud of dust and debris shot out of the machine. The building itself remained unharmed.

Glass fell out of a window onto one of the actors as the explosion happened – this was achieved by a bucket of candy glass, which is small squares of rubber made to look like shattered glass, poured from above and thrown over the actors on the street below. The effect is surprisingly realistic, and avoids any harm coming to the actors, or having to worry about shards of glass for the rest of the day.

Fighting and falling!

The next sequence involved a team of assassins pulling me and another doctor through the smoke and out into the street. The smoke from the initial explosion had cleared as they set up this new shot, so in place of the grey dust from the explosion effect, they now set up a smoke machine in the doorway to mimic the previous shot. When all of the actors were set in the awning, they filled the doorway with smoke from a small smoke machine. When the director called action, I was pulled down the stairs by an assassin holding my arm. He had a gun to my ribs. I was grateful he was there with me, because I couldn’t see the steps to save my life, and without him to lean on and guide me down the stairs I probably would have fallen.

The stunt performer was wearing pads underneath his costume that were so thin they couldn’t be seen. Before we did the first take, the Stunt coordinator came to speak to us and talk us through the stunt that would happen after we got down the stairs. Basically, we would tussle a bit, and I break away and elbow him in the face. The elbow to the face was actually an elbow to the air about a foot away from his face, but with the right angle and correct execution from me and him, it looked like I had clocked him pretty good. At the moment I broke away from his grasp, the director yells “BANG” and the stunt performer who had grabbed me reacts as though he got shot. He throws himself up into the air and falls into the stairs, rolling down three of them and landing on the concrete. It looked incredibly painful and real, but he got up and performed the same action four more times without injury or complaint.

Gunfire!

After he fell down the stairs, I grabbed a vile from his pocket and ran down the sidewalk as one of the other assassins fired a machine gun after me. Bullets ricocheting on the pavement next to my feet as I ran. This was achieved by the stunt coordinator standing just off camera with a pellet gun containing dirt pellets. As they hit the ground they would disintegrate into powder, giving the effect of bullets chipping at the pavement and the ground. Even if one of them had hit me, it wouldn’t have hurt.

At the end of my run down the pavement, I had to leap and dive underneath a tree as another man took a bullet aimed for me. There was a pad hidden beneath the tree off camera to catch my fall, and the stunt team talked me through the movements to make the fall both safe and realistic. We moved through this sequence several times to get different angles, and then it was time for the work with the van.

Stunt driving!

I was nervous going into this sequence, because I had never driven a van before, let alone driven it while doing a 7-page dialogue scene and being shot at. I had a stunt double on the set who, in wider shots, did all of the more extreme van work. She would do the fast driving and peeling out. She slammed on the breaks and skidded to a stop before rounding corners.

When it came time for me to get behind the wheel, they had rigged a big square light onto the windshield directly in front of my face to light me for the shot. This made it incredibly hard to see out the windshield. The first action was me jumping into the car, grabbing the keys, and peeling out as bullets batter the side of the van, and one of them hits me in the shoulder. I didn’t have to drive fast, but I had to do a lot of fast thinking, acting and reacting very quickly, while also trying to steer the cumbersome van through the narrow lot and around the corner.

The camera, for my coverage, was rigged to the driver’s side window, and the director was in the back of the van with a monitor. We drove laps around the lot, me quickly learning the route and getting more confident in my driving, though still nervous about the bright light shining in my eyes. The lines, with all this action going on, were falling right out of my head even though I had them completely memorized. Because we were on such a tight schedule, we didn’t have time to spend on getting me comfortable behind the wheel before we were shooting. We were losing daylight, and we just had to do the best we could with everything being thrown at us all at once.

Injections!

The final shot of this sequence involved an actor dying from a gun shot wound and me injecting him with a vile of liquid. Tubing was rigged underneath his shirt with fake blood that seeped out slowly as the scene went on, giving the illusion that he was losing a lot of blood. After we stopped the van, they reset the shot and I jumped in back. There were two syringes in my pocket. One, a real syringe that I had to stick into a vial of liquid and fill, and then a fake syringe with a needle that would push up into the syringe itself when pressed against the actors neck and look like it was going into his body without actually hurting him.

I had to fill the real syringe, and then set it off camera, grab the fake one, and jab it into the actor’s neck. Because they were identical, the actor being injected held the fake syringe for me, so once I had set down the real one, I could grab the fake one from him and both of us would know I had the right one.

As this was happening, the pyro team had rigged a strip of spark lights along the back wall of the van. In sequence, they went off one after the other creating noise and white sparks that looked like bullets hitting metal.

There were a lot of moving pieces involved in this 13-page sequence – and each one essential in pulling it off in a realistic way. The stunts and pyro effects were incredible to witness first hand, and getting to glimpse behind the smoke and mirrors of some of these common and impressive effects helped me to see that there are ways to accomplish realistic effects on a lower budget. Doing some stunts myself, and then seeing the more impressive stunts done by the others was humbling and exhilarating.

It really is magical to see how a sequence like this is shot. What we see up on the screen is one big magic show – we are fooled into believing that what we are seeing is real, and that is the beauty and the magic of filmmaking.

Learn more about his projects by visiting his production company, Highway 9 Pictures.

We’ve all seen it, most of us might have had it, and everybody dreads it. The ‘White Wall Syndrome’. Here are a few thoughts on how to use inexpensive production design to make your story more dynamic.

One of the common traps that new filmmakers fall into – and I speak from experience – is something I’ve come to call White Wall Syndrome. The name references a specific challenge; the white walls that can overwhelm a frame if you’re not careful, but this is about more than that. White Wall Syndrome is my catch-all term for a lack of production design.

When I say production design, I’m talking about all the design elements you place in front of the lens: Your locations, set dressing, props, hair, make up, and of course, wardrobe. Whether your story takes place down the street or in a galaxy far far away, these elements help you establish the world of your story as real and lived-in.

Production design sells the illusion that the apartment where your hero lives really is her apartment and not just the one your friend is letting you shoot in. That the records on the shelves are what he’d listen to, or that the laser pistol she’s armed with is one she’s used for years, and not something ordered off of Amazon last week.

These elements convey details about your characters and their state of mind. It shows your audience who they are without dialogue or exposition, the same way you get a sense of someone just from seeing what their home is like.

One of the reasons why skimping on production design is such a shame, is that not only is it a powerful story-telling tool, it’s also a tool that us indie filmmakers can get a lot out of without necessarily having to spend a lot money. Provided, that is, you take the time to think about what your design should convey and what challenges it can help you conquer.

To help illustrate, I want to point out some of the choices I made in a scene from my web series The Further Adventures of Cupid and Eros.

Cupid & Eros is a comedy set in a world where gods from every pantheon co-exist and aren’t all that different from us mortals. Our main character, the Roman god of love Cupid, has been in a funk ever since his girlfriend dumped him. His best friend, the Greek god of love Eros (actually a goddess in our world), is determined to pull him out of it.

This is the second scene of the first episode and it’s the first time we see where Cupid lives. To save money, I shot the scene in the apartment I lived in at the time. Normally, it looked like this:

Because we’re still getting the audience up to speed, I wanted Cupid’s place to say a lot about him in general, as well as about where he is at this point in his life – dumped and still not over it. Check out the scene below to see how we used inexpensive production design to get the point across:

Cupid is home alone, eating dinner in front of the TV instead of being out on the town looking for new love. Rather than eating a home-cooked meal or some tasty delivery, we have him eating Spaghetti O’s straight from the can. It’s a small thing, but it’s another way to convey that his existence is kind of sad.

Working with our cinematographer, we also came up with a layout for our set that made the blocking and framing of the scene more dynamic and avoided the white walls I mentioned earlier.

First, we rearranged the furniture so that the couch was floating in the room instead of against the window as it normally was. Doing so created depth in the frame when Cupid is alone, and gave us a more interesting way for Eros to enter and interact with him. The shelves, pictures, and art on the back wall helped fill space behind them, but because they’re far enough away they aren’t distracting.

Lastly, despite the fact that our story takes place in a universe where the gods look like regular folks, we found subtle ways – the hearts on his socks, the reddish t-shirt, his bow by the TV – to reference his mythical nature.

Now, if I hadn’t done any of this, the scene may still have played OK. But if I hadn’t considered the design, I would have missed those chances to add additional layers that convey who Cupid is in our world and where he’s at emotionally when our story begins.

None of this was costly. All the furniture was mine, and we created the mess using my clothes, papers, and mail that I held onto in the weeks leading up the shoot. The pictures of Cupid and his ex were photos of our actor and his wife, that they let us borrow. In fact, the only design elements that I spent money on were a brown sofa cover and enlargements of artwork I’d created for the walls. A lot of production design bang for virtually no buck.

So when you think about your project, try and give as much thought to the production design, as you do to the shots you’re going to compose or the soundtrack you’ll add in post.

What kinds of spaces do your characters inhabit? Are they messy or neat? What books would be on their shelves? What kinds of clothes would they wear and what colors would they be partial to? How can you use the space you have available to you in ways that will keep your shots free of distractions while still feeling interesting?

You might not get as many compliments on your production design as you do on your cinematography or the performances you bring out of your actors, but trust me, your audience will have noticed.

There’s still hope, people.

Even so, $4M is a far cry from what most of us have tucked away in the mattress. As a new filmmaker looking to get your own, first project off the ground, “low-budget” shouldn’t even be in your vocabulary. “Micro-budget” or even “nano-budget” are much more descriptive of the financial route you’ll be taking. So let’s look at how you make the most of the least.

IndieWire recently rounded up a handful of their archived articles on how to make feature films on a micro-budget and there are lots of good, little nuggets of advice in there.

One particular article points to the importance of building your story around available locations (not the other way around), utilizing the vast pool of film making talent on Craigslist, and adhering to the old mantra ‘time is money’ by optimizing your shooting schedule to stretch every dollar:

The number of shooting days have to be kept to an absolute minimum and you have to shoot with no lighting whatsoever. The cinema-verité shooting style allowed us to shoot every scene without lighting. We even had a nighttime scene that was lit only with candles and one practical. You would be amazed at the low lighting capabilities of new DSLRs – they can handle anything you throw at them. Shooting without lights saves you lots of money but it also saves you lots of time so it allows for a very short shooting schedule.

In another article, Jennifer Westin talks about the importance of making proper financial arrangements with your crew and cast, getting creative with your use of locations, and making sure your $0 footage looks like a million bucks:

In today’s world of $3,000 pro-sumer cameras which produce images that look shockingly good, there’s no excuse for a movie that looks like crap. People always come out of my work-in-progress screenings bowled over by how good/big/real the movie looks. If you’re going to go through the tremendous effort of making a feature, it had better look and feel like a “real” movie. That’s the minimum barrier to entry to be taken seriously professionally, and without that your movie simply will not be commercially viable. You don’t have to shoot on an Alexa (not once has a sales agent/distributor asked me what camera we used) but the finished product does need to look professional.

First-time director Joshua Overbay also shares his experiences and points out how marketability should be the least of your concerns, how important it is to keep managing your time during post-production, and how to embrace your limitations:

In the documentary, “Under The Great Northern Lights,” Jack White of The White Stripes discusses his philosophy of creativity. His thesis is that creativity can only exist when limitations abound. While on stage, he implements this methodology by using crappy guitars and placing instruments on opposite sides of the stage. All of this is done because it forces him to work hard for the outcome. For the micro-budget filmmaker, you don’t have to manufacture limitations. They abound. But what White reminds us is these limitations must be viewed as opportunities to test your creativity and respond to the problem. These limitations will not only be financial, but also creative – such as the need to shoot almost exclusively at one location to stay under budget.

See the red thread here? Locations, locations, locations. Consider what you have available to you and embrace it. Learn to love the fact that your 1-bedroom apartment have to make do for now. Heed the advice in the rest of the articles in IndieWire’s roundup – and something like this may be up next:

For your first, ultra-low budget feature film, storyboarding artist might be a “nice-to-have”, not a “must-have”. But don’t fret. I came across this inspirational little video from Indy Mogul, that shows you that, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you can actually put together a very effective storyboard for your project – even if your hand drawn version of a car looks more like a rock.

Check it out below and be sure to let us know if you know a lot about storyboarding – we may want to hire you to do an even BETTER instructional video here on 20 Questions Film.

If drawing a storyboard still sounds like a daunting task, you can also opt to do a storyboard with photographs. You may not be able to find locations or props or actors that exactly match the look you’re going for, but at least you will a visual representation of the scenes you need to shoot. That’ll be an invaluable reminder when you’re on set.