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.

My name is Rachel Noll, and I’m the producer and co-writer of the film, as well as one of the lead actresses. I look forward to sharing our ongoing journey with you as we move into pre-production and production on the film. With this online production diary, which will likely be passed between key crew and cast members to add their perspectives throughout, we hope to give you all a window into the process of producing an independent film from start to finish. Along the way, we encourage you to ask questions in the comments section below. We’ll happily answer.

The Storyteller began as an abstract idea that Joe Crump, the director and co-writer, brought to me. “What if” he said, “we explored the story of a young girl who is immortal? What would it be like to live for hundreds of years? How lonely would that be? How would the world change?”

The goals of this film were threefold:

1. Create a feature-film we could shoot for under $100K in Indiana, where Joe resides.
2. Create a story that contained elements of magic and the fantastical.
3. Bring in a musical element that would help tie the story together and unite the characters, as in movies like Once and Begin Again.

Joe and I have often discussed how creating a script is like putting a puzzle together… You have a table full of pieces, and it’s our job as writers to figure out how they all fit together into one compelling picture.

I would sit down and write 20 pages to send along to Joe, and those 20 pages would inspire us to completely rethink a character or a key element of the script. And back to page 1 we would go. By the time we had a completed first draft, it hardly resembled the original concept we had outlined. It had become something else entirely – a rich, complex and multi-dimensional story about people finding their way back to themselves, with a clear message about creating the life we want on our terms. It felt like the story had taken us by the hand and lead us where it wanted to go, guiding us gently scene by scene.

The writing process often feels like this, in my experience. We come to each draft with our own ideas and notions of where it should go, but more often than not, the characters and the story dictate to us where they want to go next, not the other way around. There have been times when Joe and I have sat with a scene and had no idea what was coming next… and then an inspiration would strike one of us, and all of a sudden the world would open up again.

Writing a script is truly a process of trust, openness, patience, collaboration, and a willingness to try things. Like improv – sometimes it’s just saying yes to the inspiration, wherever it comes from and however it shows up.

In the end, what was born was a story about Abby, a young girl believing herself to be immortal who helps to heal a dysfunctional family as she explores a world teeming with magic to escape the traumas of a dark past.

Now that we have a shoot-ready script, we are moving rapidly into the pre-production phase. There are two elements that we felt we needed to nail down early on; one being the main cast members, and the second being the musicians we will be collaborating with on the music for the film.

Currently, the script is out to a handful of talented indie musicians. We want to find the right fit – someone to help us write the music, collaborate with the actors who will be singing and playing on screen, and create a soundtrack that we can promote and sell along with the film itself. There are two original songs in the film that need to be written, and a cover of the old spiritual Wayfaring Stranger that needs a unique update. The musicians are working away on songs as we speak.

Simultaneously, I put out the film’s first casting call on Breakdown Services, and received submissions for the main four roles from actors all over the country. Technology is amazing; it allows us to see and experience the talents of actors we might not otherwise be able to see. Due to our budget constraints, we are only able to consider actors who can work as Indiana local hires. The number of talented actors who live and work there blew me away!

We wanted to start the casting process early because the roles we need to cast are rigorous and require specific talents. Our lead actress, Abby, is a 12 year old girl with wisdom and maturity well beyond her years. She has to carry the film on her back, and we know that finding the right fit for this role is make or break for the movie. Two of the other lead characters have to sing and play instruments with skill in a specific style. This also requires a very particular kind of actor and collaborative attitude to make it work.

We have seen and narrowed down our list of actors and are holding callbacks in the next couple of months to find our cast. Once we have our cast, and have settled on musicians and songwriters to collaborate with, we will be able to lock in our shoot dates for 2016, begin working on the music with the actors and the musicians, and start preliminary character rehearsals.

In our upcoming blogs, I will be taking off my writing hat and putting on my producer hat to talk you through the pre-production checklist in real time, so you can get a feel for what happens when, and how to make sure your checklist is complete before you go into production. Until next time!

Got any questions about the writing or casting process? Post them below!

When Rachel Noll made Don’t Pass Me By almost every part of the process was a learning experience. Here are some of her thoughts on how to make the most of your inevitable loss of complete control.

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