A Harsh Reality Check

Filmmaking is one of those things that we often underestimate. We underestimate how much knowledge you need, how many hours are needed, how much planning there needs to be done, etc. etc.

The reality is, after two years of filmmaking, I still have no idea what I'm doing. I know how to do a lot of technical and artistic things when it comes to making films, but it feels like the more I make or the more I learn, the less I actually know.

And work... so much work truly goes into this with such unsatisfactory results. After doing a little bit of math, I put in around 120 hours of work into making this film. 120 hours for 2 minutes of film.

That's 5 whole days of nonstop work, and it really doesn't feel like it. I think the problem lies in how we tend to underestimate how long and how hard something should be.

Something as simple as re-recording some sounds took me over 20 hours to do. Why? Because every time I recorded a sound, I needed to take an SD out of the sound recorder, plug it into my computer, import it into a document, import it into Premiere Pro, select the clip I needed, adjust levels, add effects, and then redo it because I messed up. I did this over 100 times, and, quite honestly, the audio was the weakest aspect of this film.

It's so easy to just point and shoot, but really putting in the effort gets you to produce a better quality product... or so you would think. Really the amount of work you put into a project is exponentially more than the quality of the product produced.

I just spent fifteen minutes making a really pointless visual, which further proves my point about engaging in fruitless, unnecessary labor. There were a lot of headaches and a lot of time spent making this project when it really only made such a small difference, and the more time I spent on it the less of a difference it really made. 

BOTTOM LINE: Filmmaking is hard... but I work harder.

Soundscaping

Foley is defined as: relating to or concerned with the addition of recorded sound effects after the shooting of a film.

In our film, that really means... ignoring to record any quality audio on set and worrying about it all in post production.

If you want to see me struggle for about a minute to get the sound of a hammer and a shower curtain check out these videos...

I wish I could scream at myself to take off that watch. It doesn't match the outfit, and worse, the ticking is going to ruin all the audio...

I'm talking to myself to make sure that when I'm editing I know exactly what was being recorded or why certain pieces and clips didn't work. This speeds up the editing process about a thousand times because I know exactly where to jump to when selecting clips. 

Post-Production is a nightmare...

The Resolution Problem

I made a stupid choice of shooting this intro in 4K, which is an absolutely enormous file size. When I edit, I am basically just guessing because the files and are so big I cannot playback what I am editing. I imagine this is what editing with real film looks like because I truly have no idea what the end result will look like.

I have exported it a couple of times to see what it may look like and I had some huge issues with adobe because the sequence I was editing in was 30 FPS for some reason I still haven’t figured out. This essentially ruined a lot of the edit, so I had to create a new sequence with the right dimensions and 24 FPS.

So far, this is taking me way too long to edit and I very much regret shooting in 4K.

Reshoots

Two of the shots that we shot during the weekend were super rough. One was a close-up of the teeth which came out very shaky and the white balance was off that it made the shot a little too green and yellow. The next shot with the boxes also came out completely out of focus, so I had to go in and reshoot all of this stuff by myself.

I am not going to lie, I should have been more adamant about using a tripod on set instead of trying to do these shots handheld. It would have saved me an enormous headache of taking out all my equipment and making a huge mess for literally four seconds of footage.

Color Grading

I can’t color grade. I just don’t know how to do it. I also have a really bad eye for these kinds of things, but it is essential to the project because it makes a huge difference in the picture.

I’m basically just fumbling around with the colors and just upping the contrast to make it seem like I know what I am doing, but I have no clue at all.

I’ve watched some YouTube tutorials about color grading, but I think the footage looks so ugly because it looks like a YouTube video, not like an actual movie.

Shooting and Issues we encountered on set

Shooting was pretty smooth. We had allocated a lot of time to make sure that everything came out smooth and not rushed. We had lots of time to make mistakes and to quite literally just take our time.

The actor was really chill and worked well with us. We managed to get him in and out of the set in like one hour and fifteen minutes, so I consider that a success. Usually I have a hard time getting what I need from actors and they have to stay for long periods of time, but we were very timely for this project.

Despite the shoot being quite successful, we did encounter a few issues.

1) A loud family. My dogs kept barking and my parents and siblings love to talk like they are in a concert, so virtually all the audio we recorded needs to be foley in the edit.

2) Fake blood is hard to make. It took us an enormous amount of time to make the fake blood. It was very hard to try and get the right consistency and color.

3) Low-Quality lights. Some of the shots were useless because of horizontal lines that formed on the screen. This happens because I have very low quality LED lights that cause flickering if we shoot at a shutter speed faster than 1/50. A couple of shots had to be tossed.

4) Makeup does not stick. For the wound on the victim, Andrea needed to apply special effects makeup, but it kept sticking to her hands and not the guy’s stomach. It also dissolved when we began to shoot.

5) Focus. It is hard to pull focus on a tiny little display and a tiny little focus ring. This caused a lot of issues in the close up shots because the actor would move slightly forward or backward and completely ruin the focus, but I couldn’t really catch it on the camera’s display monitor.

Production Design and Art Direction

We are going to need lots of props to make this setting and story come alive, besides hair and costume.

To stay true to the era of burnt lungs, we bought fake cigarettes that are used in real Hollywood movies. These are the same cigarettes used by a young Natalie Portman in Leon: the professional.

We also neeeded to get fake teeth because after he kills the guy, he rips up his body and stores the stuff he can keep. We got some weird resin teeth off Amazon that were absolutely great.

Last but not least, we needed boxes to pull of the very last shot of Trevor with his victims. This was going to be hard because boxes aren’t exactly cheap and we needed lots of them. Our solution came out of pure luck. We went to Office Depot to buy boxes, but we saw a ton of boxes just lying around that they were going to throw away. We asked if we could just take them and they said yes. That saved us like 15 dollars, so we were really happy about that.

We also got creative with the names and made the first letter of each name spell out a word, but it didn't actually matter because my body blocks most of them in the final cut.

For the bathroom, we designed it in a way that made it look very 70s. The walls are painted with very muted beige colors, and we picked out a shower curtain that has that same feel with the stripes and circles.

We also decided to use a hammer instead of using the axe like I had originally written in the script because we didn't know where to get one and we did not want to come across as weirdos trying to buy an axe. A hammer had the right balance between very painful, and kind of normal to carry around.

Equipment

I have accumulated a lot of pretty low quality equipment over the years that will do the job just fine for this short film.

As my camera I will be using the LUMIX g7.

For lighting, because we are shooting in a bathroom with lots of mirrors and white, I really only need one powerful light, so I’m using a Husky work light.

For audio, I will use the Rode videomicro.

There are a lot of limitations with this equipment, but, like I said it does the job very well and the project will be really good quality.

Trevor's Costume

Since the movie takes place in the seventies, we wanted to make sure the costumes and environment look and feel like they are from that era. We turned to pictures from magazines from the time period to help us.

We really liked the idea of a turtleneck and a large jacket because it encapsulated the era and it looked really cool.

We went to Goodwill to find some cheap clothes, and after trying on a bunch of outfits, we narrowed it down to this combination.

It cost us about 20 dollars total, but I know I will make use of the jacket in the future because it is still pretty stylish even for today.

By the way, I do realize how dumb I look in these photos...

We felt as though he also needed aviator glasses to really complete the look, so we are going to get some in the near future.

The hairstyle was also something we kept in mind. I had been growing out my hair for a while because of a bad haircut, but I wanted to get it cut again. however, after I signed myself up for this role, I am going to have to leave it long.

We looked through a bunch of hairstyles, but we didn't know if they were going to work until we tested them with my hair.

We tried a variety of 70s hairstyles, but ultimately stuck with the Ted Bundy comb-over.