We had been working on this short film for a month, and we still needed to find a crew,
sort out costumes, and a whole range of other things before we could start filming. Welcome to pre production.
So we’ve already got our script, our main actors, and found some
pretty good locations, which we showed in the first part of this behind the scenes series.
So the next priority was to find a crew - our producer handled all of this, and on such a low budget,
we really had to prioritise, ending up with a crew of seven people. Essentially the process
for finding these people was to google the name of their job, and where you are filming,
and then from there you can get email addresses, and then start telling people about the project.
You check out the other projects they’ve worked on, and then see if they are available,
and if you can afford them. Carl also used facebook groups and filmmaking
forums, where you can usually people who are keen to get some on set experience. I already
knew JP who was our director of photography from before the project, same with Carl our
producer and Emily our costume designer, but literally everyone else involved with the
project I was meeting for the first time. So although we did work with some professionals,
you don’t always have to - Emily who I knew from school is pursuing a career in costume
design, so she was keen to help. We talked about some ideas, using the mood board pictures
as reference - it was more this kind of clothing than this sort of thing, or that sort of thing.
She scoured through eBay, and found us a bunch of stuff that really worked well for our characters
in a rough area of manchester. Things to pay attention to are the colours, the styles and
types of clothes, we talked about greys and darker colours, mostly with a sporty second
hand style and lots of hoodies, jackets that kind of thing. Then we combed through the
script making a list of every object - Johann who wrote the script was able to borrow most
of the props we needed and I made some fake money by stacking up some paper, and putting
real money on either end. Meanwhile Carl had been getting in touch with a catering company,
who were fairly expensive, but could prepare and deliver tea, coffee and food to us for
each meal on set. So here’s literally all the filmmaking equipment I’ve purchased
since the beginning of this project six months ago - we didn’t allocate any of the budget
for lights, cameras or lenses. I did take a day trip to london to meet some of the guys at
VideoEurope who provided us with a two week rental of a Ronin Stabiliser. They really
went above and beyond getting it setup and calibrated, which would have been a huge headache
without their help. They also rented us a laptop, and monitor to go with the Ronin.
Now we were going to be using fake guns and knives out in the middle of the street, so
our producer looked into the laws around all of that, and he found that here in the UK,
it’s perfectly legal, but the police did want us to let them know exactly when and
where we’d be filming in case someone got the wrong idea. We also had a few mini stunts with
tackles, falls and kicks, so we decided to have a rehearsal day to practice them before
the shoot. Carl got us set up with public liability and employer's liability insurance-
which is supposed to cover you in case someone gets hurt on set and they’re looking for financial
compensation. Now the director is responsible for the safety of every single person on that
film set, so if I was thoughtless enough to put anyone in danger, or just simply forget
to take enough safety precautions, then yes, it’s true I could get sued, yes it’s true
I might never work as a director (again), but really that’s not the point. Reading
through a 200 page insurance contract about what would happen if someone got hit by a
car, or if someone got killed because of my film set, it really began to sink for me,
why safety is the number one priority on a film set. Now as we got closer and closer
to the shoot there were basically a thousand little things to do, and lots of mistakes
to learn from: Firstly we paid way too much for Travelodge hotel rooms since they basically
jack up the prices if you leave it until the last week. Then one of the actors got a TV
job in the middle of our shoot, and I thought it was a disaster I thought we were gonna
have to find another actor at really short notice. But talking to Carl about it we realised
we could just switch two of the scenes in the schedule and it meant he wouldn’t miss
any of his scenes. A few days later me and Johann were making changes to the script,
without realising that it was gonna affect our shooting schedule. So when I finally told
Carl about it, he had to find out whether some of our crew could do an extra shooting
day, again at very short notice. Which could have been a huge problem, so I
know for next time to always keep the producer in the loop! I called up a takeaway restaurant
to see if we could film there, they said no and I quickly found after calling ten others
that this was going to be very difficult. I should have asked Carl our producer to handle
this, but it’s not always easy for me to share out the work. After genuinely calling
twenty seven different takeaways in the area, I was kind of panicking.
We were supposed to be filming that takeaway scene in less than a week. But after ringing
the 28th takeaway in the area, this finally happened:
“um so you can, uh use the place” "Bye."
“see ya mate” “yes. that is so, so nice, so nice to hear.”
Then I spent a couple of hours doing lighting tests, since I’ve never really filmed outdoor
scenes at night, and I was a bit concerned that it wouldn’t look natural. So when I
arrived in Manchester, we had a few days to make the final tweaks on the script, go back
and revisit the locations, and finally get my storyboarding ideas down on paper. My goal
was to design shots where the characters move around rather than just cutting to loads of
different angles or having the camera glide around static people. At the same time doing
my best to consider when we should use wide shots, and how much we could pack into each
frame. Sticking the boards up on the wall like that can be helpful to see the bigger
picture, but mostly it just makes you feel like a really creative person. On the day
before the main shoot, we had our rehearsal, to focus on getting to know the main cast,
and working out the blocking of the two scenes with stunts. I was feeling much better about
those scenes once we had the chance to experiment and the actors were comfortable with the crash
mats. So here’s how I’d sum up those last few weeks before the shoot. There was one
point where I was reading a book, and I realised that I’d been staring at the same page for
half an hour without reading a single sentence. Because my mind was racing with all the things
I was supposed to be doing, all the problems we were encountering. We had so many logistical
problems with actors, crew, locations, props, and each time i’d get more and more stressed
because we were getting closer and closer to that shoot. And then, in the middle of
our rehearsals, I answered the phone to find out that our production assistant didn’t
have a car. Now, there had been a huge communication mix up, and we were basically planning on
him driving everyone around all week, since I don’t have a car, and a lot of the crew
were coming up from London on the train. So less with less than 24 hours until the shoot,
we had to find someone who was up for getting up bright and early to bring a bunch of people
and all this filmmaking kit to the shoots, and do that all week. But this time I was
actually quite relaxed about it. By this point we’d had so many things go wrong, but you
know what, every single time we would either solve the problem or we’d find a work around,
and sometimes it would even just fix itself. By this point we were used to things going
wrong, so there’s no point worrying about it.
We’d solved them before, so the question was, what we gonna do to solve this next problem?
My name’s Simon Cade, this has been DSLRguide and I’ll see you next week.