Actor/Filmmaker Adam Bradley: When I was getting started in the film industry somebody shared a phrase with
me that has stuck with me for the last 23 years. Fast, cheap and good: pick two. My
name is Adam Bradley and in 2012 I wrote, produced, acted in and edited a no-budget
feature film called Yesterday Last Year. Yesterday Last Year is a mumblecore
sci-fi film about a love triangle that gets more complicated once a
time-machine enters the picture we shot it in nine days with three actors in one
location for 3500 bucks a couple of months ago it was released on Amazon
Prime and Vimeo on demand so in this video what I want to do is share my
experiences the lessons that I learned and the mistakes that I made creating
this work there's a lot of information out there about making your own work but
not enough people talk about one of the central challenges involved in making
your own work which I believe is this unless you have a lot of money to spend
you're going to be the one doing a lot of that work and when you are writing
and producing and acting and editing and maybe even directing additional
challenges come into play for me everything boils down to one key
rule once you're actually on set you're going to be under the gun and everything
has to be done fast which means now you have to choose between cheap and good if
you've spent your time in development and in pre-production planning properly
you can get a lot of quality for not very much money here are some of the
things that I've learned first you have to have partners and you have to have
partners who are in it for the long haul you got to have people who are right
there with you on day one and who will be there all the way through til the
bitter bitter end but you need to pick those people carefully you have to trust
them and you have to like them you have to be able to disagree with them and
resolve those disagreements without throwing shit at each other and in
addition to that you want skillsets to complement each other in my experience
there are people who are really good at making things happen and then there are
people who are really good at getting things done people who can make things
happen these are the sort of people who can
walk into a luxury hotel asked to speak to the manager and 15 minutes later
you've got yourself a suite and use of the rooftop bar once it closes for the
night people who get things done these are the sort of people who will pay
attention to every single dollar and where it's going who know what the
actors schedules are who know who has what sort of dietary restriction who can
look at the schedule and say yeah this makes sense no we need to move this
scene over here you need both of those skill sets and if you're writing
something because you also want to direct and produce it then you need two
other partners who are going to handle those details while you're busy
directing or acting in your project the nice thing is people who make things
happen when you're shooting they become producers of marketing and distribution
right get them thinking about the big picture get them thinking about sales
get them thinking about distribution get them thinking about festivals so they
should be heading up behind the scenes footage photographs interviews all of
that stuff the people who are good at getting things done they become the
production managers and so while you're on set directing or acting they're
overseeing the logistical details of the next location you're going to or what's
coming up for tomorrow because you can't be doing both when you're writing right
for what you have available and yesterday last year the whole thing is
set in a garage and when the director came on board he had his own garage
which was fantastic great problem solved except that then he
dropped out so we lost that location but that's fine because our production
designer he had a workshop so great a garage and a workshop they look
basically the same we're gonna shoot in his workshop
except that then two weeks before we started shooting his mom scheduled a big
family vacation so he had to leave and we lost that location as well four days
before were scheduled to go to camera I'm walking around in my neighborhood
trying to find a garage and everybody that had one we was either too small or
it had too much stuff in it or they wanted too much money but fortunately
our director Jeff Hanley and our first ad Yousef Audrey they found a garage
that was owned by a couple of ex film students who were quite happy to let
shoot there and more importantly they'll shoot there let they let us borrow their
bathroom they let us borrow their kitchen and they let us use their power
but this came about because I wrote something that required a specific
location that I didn't have access to and it almost ended the project you want
to do an early read-through when the script is as good as you can get it on
your own get some friends over get some people that you trust and have them read
it out and have them read it out word for word you want to hear what your
language sounds like on the page and then ask them questions and not
questions like did you like it did you not like it what did you like what did
you hate but more specific questions when were you engaged when did you first
get hooked into this story when were you bored did anything happen that popped
you out of the story did anything happen that confused you did anything happen
that made you feel like yeah more more and more give me more of that please
those are the sorts of questions that are gonna let you know when your
audience is engaged and when they're not then once you've cast the film you want
to do a second read-through with the actual actors who are going to be
playing the roles and this time let them paraphrase if they want to the script is
there you can always go back to the script and insist that they do it as
written but if you let your actors play around and you let them paraphrase they
may come up with a phrase with a word with a way of expressing an idea that
you hadn't thought of that's actually better than what you had thought of
because once you've cast it these are the actors who are going to be bringing
your characters to life for better for worse they are the characters and if
they have a slightly different take on how this character might say something
give it a shot you really don't have anything to lose okay so now I want to
talk about some of the things that I learned about production when you're
making your own work and playing more than one role the bottom line is no
matter what you're doing on set whether you're acting or directing or producing
you have to be flexible you have to be willing to take that plan that you've
spent months coming up with and throw it out the window it is a lot easier to
shift from one clear plan - another clear plan than it is to walk
onto set with no plan or a vague plan and try and come up with a clearer idea
right then so the plan that you spent months coming up with wasn't wasted it
has set you up to be able to improvise that's the purpose of the plan if you're
acting show up off-book and show up off-book prepared to jump into any scene
at a moment's notice this is particularly helpful if you're only
shooting in one or two locations because we might need to jump to scene 12 and
then to scene four because hey Scott was late or Amy had to leave early never
ever ever yell cut if you're the actor and you make a mistake figure out a way
to keep going if you're a director and you're actors make a mistake make them
keep going don't yell cut as soon as somebody
screws up a line force them to figure it out there's nothing more exciting than
watching somebody on camera actually figure out how to solve a problem this
scene is my favorite scene in all of yesterday last year you went back and
then came right back here how do I do that well the Machine brought you back
you can do that you said it did know according to this it's a one-way trip I
mean it's not logically impossible that you could do a return but the way it's
set up here that would leave you with it with no number there the line as written
is according to this it's a one-way trip it's not logically impossible to do a
return but then you'd end up with an imaginary number here which is nonsense
that's what the script says Scott gets partway through and loses the line and
stares at the board hoping praying that it would come to him it doesn't so he
spits out something that's basically like what the line is I'm standing right
next to him and what I'm thinking is oh shit he's lost his line how can I help
all right I'm just gonna say my next line how did you get back here and I say
it at the exact time that Scott figures out what he's supposed
say next and so those two lines overlap and then we stop and we stare at each
other and there's this moment of are you gonna talk am I gonna talk how are we
gonna this is not the way it's written I mean it's not logically impossible that
you could do a return but the way it's set up here that would leave you with it
with no number there well then how'd you get here in arsons well you almost leave
your Donald that only happened because neither Scott nor I pulled the ripcord
we both stayed in the scene we both kept working and Jeff the director he didn't
yell cut he let us figure it out so whether you're acting or whether you're
directing don't let your mistakes throw you figure out a way to keep moving and
move through them because you can always do another take as soon as the camera
starts running you're on I can't tell you the number of times that we got a
look or a shift or a brief little movement that made it into the final
film and if you actually listen to the audio of that take and the scene hadn't
started at that point but it's this beautiful honest simple moment that is
in the movie that footage is golden and you're gonna want that footage when you
get into the editing room don't schedule your most important stuff at the top or
end of the day if you're not paying people you can't guarantee that you're
gonna get exactly the same crew every single day so it may shift it may change
you'll probably have a core group of people that show up all the time but
then you may get a different grip you may get a different script supervisor
you may have a different boom operator top of the day people are still figuring
out how this crew works how this set works if you put the most important
stuff up first it's going to be a little wonky and nobody's really in the groove
yet no one's had their coffee nobody's fed so start with something fairly easy
so that you can bang it out get some momentum going everybody feels really
good because hey we've been here now and we've already got three shots off
fantastic don't schedule it for the end of the day either because I guarantee
you're gonna get to the end of the day you
gonna be under crunch you won't have enough time to do it properly and then
your most important scene is going to suffer on the same note because your
crew may shift and change from day to day know what the key positions are
where you need a continuous presence that is likely going to change with
every project you wouldn't think that having a different script supervisor
every day would be so problematic but when you're making a movie about time
travel and when you're shooting it out of order if you look at this scene and
you compare the tighter shot to the wider shot if you look really closely
you can see that my shirt is different now we punched in to try and cover that
but we shot these on two different days and nobody was playing close enough
attention to what I was wearing because we didn't have a dedicated wardrobe
person and because we had a rotating script supervisor we had three different
script supervisors because we couldn't pay one person to show up every single
day shoot on the highest resolution you can afford we were originally gonna
shoot this movie on DSLRs and then about two weeks before production one of our
gaffers said hey I know a guy who has a red and he's willing to rent it to you
the entire package for 800 bucks I can't tell you how many times that saved our
ass in post-production because we had all of this additional resolution that
we could punch into and make singles we're originally there was a two-shot a
dolly in when actually it was static we were able to do that digitally in post
because we had this 4k footage that we could punch into one of the things that
I am most thankful to Jeff our director for is he said look let's not rush this
we don't need to get this done by 2014 what we need to do is make this as good
as we possibly can because we only get one shot so use your purpose use your
vision to figure out which festivals your
four and then work your way backwards don't look at their final deadline
because by their final deadline they've probably already started to make
decisions and slot some movies in so look at their early deadline and maybe
it's not their early deadline 2020 because if that's three months away you
do not want to rush through your post in three months early deadline 2021 you're
much better off taking that extra year and making your movie as good as it
possibly can be yesterday last year took four years to go through post some of
that was just syncing up the Ford separate audio tracks with the video
some of it came about because we cut the whole thing together in a linear
chronological way which is how it was written and then when we got to picture
lock Jeff said you know this movies about time travel why we don't need to
tell it in a linear way let's tell it out of order let's start with scene four
and go for five six and then loop back to scene one okay so we did that and we
spent almost another year re cutting the film reorganizing a tree cutting the
scenes that we were both really really happy with it and excited this was sort
of new and exciting and then we got to picture lock and we screened it for a
couple of people and then editor friend said look it's really interesting and I
enjoyed watching it but I spent most of my time trying to figure out what the
sequence of events was whether this scene comes before or after the scene
that I just saw and so what I'm not paying attention to is the love triangle
I'm not tracking the emotional entanglements of the three characters
and as soon as he said that Jeff and I both went yeah shit because that's the
core of the movie right this film really is about a love triangle it's about
betrayal and forgiveness the time machine is just
there as a complicating device to make things worse for the characters once the
movie becomes about the time travel it's no longer really being successful so we
went back to the draw we reorganized everything back into
linear fashion we took another six months to put it back lock the picture
and then cleaning up the audio took a year simultaneously we were getting the
score done that took about a year but we took that time because the movie is much
better now than it was in its first incarnation making a movie on a
well-organised film set is an amazing experience there's nothing else like it
in the world when the whole team comes together and everybody knows what story
they're making and why they're making it and what they're doing and you're firing
on all cylinders because everything's really well prepared and the crew is
being taken care of and the actors are bringing their a-game and the directors
are bringing their a-game and the producers have all their shit together
there's nothing like that in the world so go out plan your shoot properly so
that when you get into the thick of it you can throw everything to the wind and
improvise I'm Adam Bradley thanks for watching