The Seven Evil Challenges - Being on a (Tight) Roll

Today, our crew mastered an entire day of filming by covering four different scenes and two different locations. This in and of itself might not be a reason to be proud for seasoned filmmakers, but for us as beginning filmmakers, it was a tremendous success, especially since we were on an extremely tight schedule, experienced heavy snow and technical issues with the slider, and our crew did not have access to proper call sheets.

But first things first.

Our day started off with the arrival at the pickup point of our equipment before we headed off to the first location of our day. Since our crew's car broke down after last Saturday's shoot, we decided to carry the equipment to the first filming location by ourselves. This posed as a challenge in and of itself since we had to trudge through snow and terrible weather conditions (even for British standards) for 15 solid minutes before we finally arrived on location - half an hour later than initially planned and already physically exhausted.

As soon as we arrived, I set about to set up the necessary equipment when we encountered the second challenge of our day. Our producer who was responsible for the call sheets, had only managed to finish them mere hours before the actual setup and as we assessed the copies he had brought in last minute, it quickly turned out that he had not only brought the wrong call sheets on location, but that he had also confused half of the actual scenes we were supposed to film today with half of the scenes we can only film tomorrow.

For we have access to the location on two days, but one of the rooms that we need - a bedroom - is only available for us tomorrow. So when select shots of that room appeared on the call sheet but some shots of other rooms were missing entirely, we knew that we had to come up with an alternative to salvage what was left of the day and to still get as much footage covered as possible.

This is when the director and I sat down to create a new master plan out of the shot list and storyboard we had at hand, structuring the shoot according to location instead of the order of the storyboard on the fly.

After another 10 minutes, we were set up and ready to go, deciding to start off with the scenes that only consist of single shots but are important for the story nonetheless. So we decided to go for a tracking shot in what we called the 'bathroom scene'... just to realise that when I wanted to set up the slider, the slate was jammed shut to it. Our crew lost another 10 minutes on an already tight schedule to unjam the slate but it would not come off without using brute force.

So again, after that third challenge of the day, we decided that we would postpone that scene until we got that slider fixed. Luckily, the owner of the location we are filming in was also versatile in filmmaking and decided to help us. So while that much more experienced filmmaker was happily engaging in solving our problem, we started off finally filming our first scene when we encountered the fourth challenge of the day:

Our sound op was still missing.

Due to the car being broken down and the harsh weather conditions on that day, his train did not make it in time for him to be on set, even more than after an hour behind schedule. So our producer ended up posing as a sound op for the first third of today's filming until our sound op finally arrived.

Regarding this sheer combination of issues, both the director and I were more than delighted to realise that we actually covered more ground today than we could possibly expect to. For we not only managed to film all the important scenes that were possible on that day (even later in the CCAD conference room), we were also able to alter and thus cover three shots of tomorrow and add five additional samples of b-roll for cutaway show.

So when we finished our shoot for the first location, we packed up, returned to CCAD and took a quick break before I made safety copies of our footage so far and went to the next location to film a conference scene.

This posed for another set of challenges along our way since we were - initially - not only struggling to be let into the building we booked a room in (this was due to one of our lecturer's not being able to come and let us in because of the weather), but we were also lacking that one extra that came out of all the casting calls I placed over the weeks. So we lost another half an hour trying to hunt down people so that we could start filming the rest of today's footage.

So when challenge no 5 and 6 were averted, I was confronted with the fact (challenge no 7) that the conference room only offered fluorescent light, which I personally hate on camera. I tried experimenting with the light settings on location and on camera and ended up with different qualities, all of which I disliked personally.

But since time, again, was of the essence for the two crew members who were not local and needed to leave on time to be able to return home safely in that weather, I decided that this, for once, was a matter of post-production, and that I would strive to make the footage evenly and inconspicuously lit so that our editor would still able to experiment with colour grading without the footage looking too tacky afterwards.

So after the appearance of the seven evil exes (*), um, challenges, I can definitely say that I am not only proud of our abilities to flexibly cope with so many issues arising at one single day AND still being ahead of time (a wonder I would never have believed in), but I have once again experienced how important a mindful and correct pre-production can be in saving not only the day (and the budget), but also the nerves of everyone involved.

References:

(*) Wright, E. (2010) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World USA et al.: Universal Pictures