A glutton for punishment

Alright I may have hit my limit.  Last week two of my friends and I were sitting around bemoaning the sturm und drang of making short films.  So we decided to get off our asses and challenged ourselves to shoot a film the next weekend for as little money as possible.

With that goal in mind we knew the concept had to be simple, the location had to be accessible, the cast had to be small, the props had to be minimal, there could be no dialogue and we had to shoot outside, in daylight and on tape.

So.  Here’s what we came up with - we decided the film would be called THREE DOORS.  We would each write a three-minute film about someone approaching the obstacle of a door.  The completed films would then be combined in to one nine minute short.  A short film trilogy.

We planned to shoot it all in one day - each of us getting three hours for our productions.

Here are the concepts…  One is about a man having a mid-life crisis who, after a hard night out, has come home to ask his wife’s forgiveness.  One is about a mother walking to visit the daughter she gave up years ago.  And mine is a comedy about a postman who has to deliver a letter but is desperately afraid of a homeowner’s dog.

We cast on LA Casting.  We found our locations by talking to neighbors.  (Yes, we knocked on doors and asked complete strangers.  Humans are actually mostly nice.)  We spent a total of $300 - on lunches, renting an old car from Rent a Wreck for our guy coming home from his hard night out, renting a postman’s costume from Sony for my dude and tapestock from Edgewise. Fortunately we had casting space at one of our offices and a camera that we own but those things could have been borrowed from friends.  In six days we were ready to shoot.

We started the morning with the guy coming home to his wife and it went really well.  We showed up to the house we wanted and other people had parked where we planned to set up our picture car (we didn’t exactly have PA’s to hold spaces the night before) so we had to work around that.  No worries.  We just shot the car interior stuff across the street where we liked the light better anyway and moved back later.  That was really the only bump in that shoot.  We lit minimally with reflectors and two dollar mirrors from Walgreens.

Then for the woman coming to meet her daughter.  Again, that shoot went really smoothly.  This one was the simplest of the three and went off completely without a hitch.

Just before we broke for lunch I took the rental car back - we needed to make sure we only had it for one day - and then met the guys for lunch near the third location.

And then it happened.  The one day of the year that it freakin’ rains in Los Angeles.  My first thirty minutes we sat watching it pour.  There was even lightning.  Grrr…  The rain finally stopped but the clouds didn’t clear which meant there was no sunlight left to reflect so the look was pretty flat.

But the big thing about comedy is the timing.  And it’s built from a combination of actor instinct and editing.  If you don’t have those things you can’t bring the funny.  It just won’t be there.

So.  With my decreased time and on the spot shot cutting I’m not convinced I have what I need.  It certainly wasn’t genius directing on my part - with the sun sinking fast the discussion devolved fairly quickly to technical, result-oriented commands.  It was a fun day and great to just make something but I’m procrastinating putting it in to Final Cut to deal with the reality of what I may have created.  But I’ll get around to it soon enough.

As they say, cheap, fast, good.  It’s your choice.  You can have two but never all three.  Annoyingly, I know I had cheap and fast.  Now I just have to bust my ass to see if I can force the third.