Mean Mikey - Film log/diary and airing dirty laundry

Hey,

joe_momma and have been working on our own project for about 8 or 9 months now. Our working title is Mean Mikey. It is a slasher horror flick.

We work together and often discussed horror movies. Joe's main hobby is special effects, blood, gore, casts and such. We threw around the idea of making our own movie. So, I went out and blew all the money I had on equipment and we began to write an outline and gather resources.

Before our first 'official' film shoot, we had gathered:
-Canon XL2 with accessories such as a nice fluid head tripod and wide aftermarket screw on lens.
-Camera crane, Glidecam, boom pole and mic.
-Old abandoned cabin location.
-Downtown wine bar location.
-Complete cast.
-The Rebel’s Guide.

So, for history sake we have never made our own movie! Joe has worked on 2 films as the special effects guy. I have had a few film/editing classes in college.

On this forum thread, we will outline what has gone well and what hasn’t. If we air our dirty laundry, perhaps someone else can learn from our mistakes.

First Shoot

Camera was delivered and we rushed out to film our first shoot. Totally rushing ahead of ourselves. (My fault.)

I had read the Rebel Guide before even having a camera, so hadn’t had a chance to put any of it into practice, other than setting to 16:9 and 24P.

We got our cast together and headed out for the woods to an off the road ‘camp’ site.
First 2 mistakes:
- Saying “Oh sure, bring whoever you want!” We ended up with many very noisy children. Lots of our footage will need sound work.
- Getting drunk with the cast. Partying with your cast is a great idea when you’re not shooting. It builds relationships and you have fun. Getting loaded yourself, when you are supposed to be filming = not much usable footage.

This entire scene was basically improvisation. We knew that we wanted to capture people hanging out around a campfire. So, we ended up with no one saying anything the first night, which was okay since I was too loaded to film anyhow. The next night, one of our cast members saved our bacon. He came up with an idea to film a drinking game around the fire. He also came up with the idea to hurl on film and it turned out GREAT!

This time, I didn’t get wasted. This scene is our only usable footage from the weekend. We are happy with the footage as well.

The next day, we set up an after the camp was massacred scene. The actors performed well. Unfortunately, we were too inexperienced at this point and our footage was way too bright and washed out.
-Things we learned:
Learn how to work the camera before running off to shoot.
Do not trust the Automatic feature on a camera.
Film your important action type scened on the first day of a weekend shoot, before people are tired and less interested.

We are coming up on our next shoot this weekend. This is at one of our real locations, the wine bar. We have learned much from our previous shoot and hope that this one goes a lot better. We are nervous as hell though, we have extras and this is a set someone was kind enough to open up for us when it is normally closed on Sundays.
Our script is much tighter and we have actually planned out our shooting schedule.

-We had an emergency this week as a cast member dropped out. This would either require a complete rewrite or a fill in. We chose a fill in, ME!

Good post Jeremy! Information on how to do stuff is great but I find things like "How I screwed up" to be invaluable education tools. I'm sure we'll make more mistakes as Mean Mikey progresses and I for one am more than willing to share my follies in an effort to help others to not repeat my mistakes.

_________________
Joe
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Spill the Blood!!!

... Last edited by Gage on Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:50 am; edited 1 time in total

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Last edited by Gage on Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:50 am; edited 1 time in total

The shoot last night at our bar scene was great fun! Everything worked a lot better this time. The only problem we had was running out of time and daylight - for our balcony scene.

No worries on this part however, the owner of the bar had so much fun that he agreed to let us do more shooting at a later time. Having him play the bartender in the movie worked out great.

Tonight, we are going to view our raw footage and see how it all turned out.

... Last edited by Gage on Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:50 am; edited 1 time in total

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Last edited by Gage on Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:50 am; edited 1 time in total

I'm tellin' ya Gage. Do it all greenscreen, and let CG fix it in post.

ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, man, that's so not funny. At least not for me, cause I've been on the receiving end of that comment. "Ok, we have a green box, and the kids are going to play with it. We need you to CG that into a teddy bear. Make it cuddly!"

I think it must be more difficult to get any cooperation in L.A., just because everyone out there knows someone in the movie biz, and they think there's major money on any production. It's probably an aspect where the less metropolitan areas have an advantage.

GageFX wrote:

	Quote:
	the owner of the bar had so much fun that he agreed to let us do more shooting at a later time.

Wow. Great. This is actually one of the things that killed our production. Aside from just being in LA and every store owner here knowing the business and wanting a full budget sized location fee, the bar owners that I do know all had bad experiences with film crews so they didnt want to allow shooting again. Of course, this was after they all jerked me around for 4-6 months saying they would let me, just let them know when. Great that it worked out for you.

Be sure to post some frame grabs when you upload the footage.

-GageFX

Come up to southern Oregon Gage. People here haven't become jaded by the Hollywood Machine and people actually get excited at having their place in a movie

_________________
Joe
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Spill the Blood!!!

Well, my perception of things going well is not the same as DarkFiend's. (I love you man!) Jeremy was in the scenes so I had to operate the camera, and the sound and direct. Before we got to the shoot I was totally Steven Spielberg but when we got there I instantlly devolved into Homer Simpson. While I felt pretty good about the composition of most of my shots I blew the lighting, there was washout, glare and lens flares everywhere. The sound was horrible. We watched the raw footage at Jeremy's place last night and I was nearly suicidally depressed. I tried to hide my disapointment but Jeremy saw right through it and it bummed him out too. After I left he spent a few hours chopping up the footage into a rough cut which he gave to me this morning. After viewing the rough cut I felt much better. It still didn't look or sound great but it does what it was meant to do. Establish characters. This was actually a very good thing for me. While Mean Mikey may not become the great film I had grandly envisioned a few months ago it will tell the story I was wanting to tell. We're going to have fun with this and learn how to make a movie by the time it's done.

_________________
Joe
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Spill the Blood!!!

... Last edited by Gage on Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:50 am; edited 1 time in total

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Last edited by Gage on Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:50 am; edited 1 time in total

One of the biggest challlenges is planning REALISTICALLY for your shoot. Now that you've done a couple of weekends of work, you have a better idea of what you can and can't achieve in that sort of time frame. My experience is that people try and pack far too much into a day, especially when they're starting out. The concern is typically that if you don't get it done quickly all your people will get bored with the whole thing and drop out.

My experience is that if you don't try and do too much, tempers don't fray, people have a good time and they're more than happy to do it all again. If they leave the set exhausted and angry, you probably won't be seeing them again - at least not on set.

No one is going to have the kind of commitment that the director/creator has. Unless you're paying them they're probably doing it out of friendship or because they think enough of your vision that they think there's a good chance their career will be helped along if they're part of the crew. But it's all a very fragile thing. So make sure everyone is having a reasonably good time. Don't yell at them. Feed them. They aren't pros so don't think everything is going to go smoothly. Even with pros it doesn't, so it's safe to assume that it's going to take even longer with non-pros. Plan your shoot days accordingly. Better to have more shorter days than fewer longer days. Assume it's going to take a long time to get everyone together on a semi-regular basis. Promise (and deliver) a REALLY GOOD wrap party that no one will want to miss.

Finally, plan a film that doesn't tax the realistic capabilities of you and your cast and crew. When you've successfully created one film that everyone admires, you'll find a lot more willing participants the next time around.

Arthur

Our biggest problem on this shoot was the abundance of windows. The sun was very bright outside, but the interior was a lot darker. So, in a lot of our shots, there is bright blow out from the windows. As for sound, there were fridge/cooler motors running and the bar is sort of echo prone. Our exterior shot was on a balcony, which is basically on the roof. So, we ended up with lots of air conditioner noise.

However, the cast had lots of fun, were fed lots of pizza and had free drinks. We have already decided that we need to have a return to the set for stuff we didn't finish. If we can keep everyone happy enough, we might even be able to do re-shoots with the windows either covered from the outside or shoot at night.

One of our key actors has a very short part, but he was very nervous and I'm not sure we could get him back down there again.

The biggest determining factor of any of this is our friend the bar owner. He is extremely busy with a full time day job and then works the bar at night. The bar is closed on Sundays - which ends up being his only day off. So, using this location will greatly depend upon how he feels.

I will try to find somewhere to post a few captures so you can see what we are talking about. (Although we are rather embarrassed to do so.)

Please keep in mind that these have been converted to JPEG.

Our worst blow out:

The sun was going down:

An example of one we like:

We haven't done any post work on any of these yet. That is something else we need to learn more about. This is definitely a learning experience for us!

I think these look like they will be good once you've had a chance to CC them properly. The blowout is bad BUT you've got an okay exposure on the foreground, which means that you can still make it work. I kind of like the way it looks - you've got some nice light wrap going on the foreground character. Spend some time playing with CC - you may surprise yourselves.

Arthur

Was the gain setting on in the camera? If so, you may want to switch it off - I'm seeing a good bit of noise in those shots.

Aside from that, Arthur is right - with some good CC, these shots can certainly be usable.

_________________
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Standing Strong Productions

Yeah, I saw the noise too but I was putting it down to the JPEG conversion.

Arthur