The Louisville 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

The Louisville filmmakers share stories from their wild weekend of filmmaking. (Blogging ended shortly after the filmmaking weekend.)

Hootenanny

Hootenanny is Crazy Monkey's second 48 Hour Film Project entry, following last year's debut film, "Fashionably Dead." The problem with that one was that, while it had a couple good shot sequences and some good photography, it didn't work as a story. I could show it someone and immediately ask what had happened and they would have no idea.

So the idea this year was to stereamline: One scene, three characters, as little dialogue as possible. Movies are a visual medium and we needed experience telling a story visually.

We also decided to use looped sound instead of live mics to cut down on the amount of environmental noise in the film. More on this later.

Writing the script was easy. That's one of the benefits of surrounding yourself with talented people: There are so many good ideas is that the challene is not coming up with one, it is choosing the best. We finally settled on one we could actually shoot with the actors we had and put pen to paper at 11PM Friday. At 2AM, only two pages were complete. But I knew that the script would evolve once it was in the actors' hands, so I retired and got some sleep.

I got up at 8AM to prepare for the team's arrival. I gave the actors the script as it existed and let them start rehearsing. The others loaded tables and collected the items that would comprise the yard sale where the story took place. I took the script back from the actors, removed some of their changes (I wanted to believe Ty and Rocko were about to fight, not that they were becoming new BFF's), incorporated others, and fleshed it out to a full five pages. I then broke the script into individual shots and Kathryn storyboarded how each should look. By the time we migrated to Russel's house (where the shooting would take place), I had a good idea of how the finished movie would play.

We didn't start shooting until 3:30, by which time it had cooled off slightly. The head was in the mid-90s and I had to keep a bucket of towels nearby so the actors could dry off between takes. Rocko was especially uncomfortable in his stunning white track suit. Spirits were generally high, though; the script was funny and we moved fast. 23 shots in 4.5 hours.

The hardest shot of the day was the last. This is the scene where Rocko and Tyshaun are running side by side when the convertable pulls into frame alongside them with the owl looking at them from the passenger seat. They see the owl and try to grab it but Stephanie accelerates out of frame. We tried this one about 13 times. Rocko and Ty were exhausted from running in the heat and Stephanie nearly crashed the convertable into a pole, but eventually the shot came off nearly perfectly.

(Rocko kept suggesting that we cut to a close-up of the owl when Stephanie drives up, but I insisted the shot needed to be continuous. In the final version, you'll notice the close-up is indeed present. The repeated close-ups of the owl throughout the film really tie it together, and it works better than the continuous shot. Rocko has not yet forgiven me for the extra mile(s) he had to run to get the unused take)

Immediately following each successful take, we went inside to record audio. Kate did an incredible job of keeping a detailed shot log. She noted which video and audio takes were the best for each shot and kept track of any words that were changed by the actors so they could repeat exactly what had been said (she even ran alongside the truck during the jogging scene with notepad in hand to track any changes made by the actors during their running dialogue scene!). The audio in the finished piece is still far from perfect, but I much prefer varying audio levels, questionable lip-syncing, and a slight echo to wind noise, planes flying overhead, and whirring cicadas.

We finished shooting at 8:15. Keli showed me the poster she'd created from some stills she'd taken earlier in the day. The quality of the poster was phenominal, better than I could have possibly hoped. I left to get the sound effects and music. I delivered everything to the video editor. He asked I leave him alone until noon on Sunday, so I went home and got some sleep.

Sunday was an emotional roller-coaster. The version of the time we submitted wasn't as tight as I would have liked: there are no titles, a couple shots go on far too long, there's no music at the end, the credits are unfinished, and the audio is messy. But the film is funny and coherent and about 1000x better than Fashionably Dead. The wrap party was a blast, and several of us stayed outside talking about the weekend until 3 in the morning.

Life hasn't been relaxing since the wrap. Keli delivered a stack of fliers Monday and the posters yesterday. I've been papering Bardstown Road with the fliers. I've also been sifting through the 15 GIGS of behind-the-scenes footage to compile bonus features for the DVD. I've also been collecting ephemera from the shoot (storyboards, marked-up scripts, notes, etc). People bring them to me sealed in plastic bags as though they were evidence from a crime scene.

And yet, even with a movie and volumes of backstage footage and a blog post that is now far too long, the real story of the weekend somehow remains untold. Those are the pieces you can't capture: The distinctive blend of interpersonal drama, tension, and heartache possible only from your good friends at Crazy Monkey!

Chad Thomas
7/24/08

- Chad Thomas, Crazy Monkey

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It's the Journey, not the destination

Along the way, I think we might have an entertaining movie, but it was the by-product, and not the point.

Background: This is our second video project, the first having been a 5-minute video that my older son and I shot for KinoLouisville. Neither of us have any significant photography or video experience. We had no idea what we couldn't do, so we just jumped in and figured out ways to make it work. Maybe if we were smarter, we'd have been too fearful to have jumped in this way.

The Good: Our Friday-night plot & story collaboration session had a wild disparity of political views, personalities, and ages. It went amazingly well. By midnight, we had a solid story, with good understanding of the various characters, simple staging, and something that would fit the 7-minute limit. I stated early on that I would much prefer for us to have a great story, marred by technical issues than to have a technically excellent presentation of a mediocre story.

The Better: One of our crew members loves to cook, and agreed to provide meals for all three mealtimes on Saturday, and they were FULL meals, including coffee cake & cheese & sausage grits Saturday morning, humongous burritos for lunch, and sandwiches with Oreo cheesecake to end the day. She had veggies, sweets, snacks... you can't imagine a Hollywood production having better food on the set. Really. I was blown away.

The Best: In spite of having nobody on our team having any significant experience with film/video projects, I split people up into three teams: Script/Story Development, Cinematography/Storyboarding, and Props/Supplies. I let everyone start working, and went to scout locations, based on the plot. I did this because after a few minutes, I realized that they didn't need me looking over their shoulders, and my presence just slowed them down.

Because of some casting and technical issues, we didn't start filming until 3:30 PM on Saturday. However, by 9:00 PM, we had all of our video except for the one indoor sequence, and we shot that with just a couple of people involved. Or script/story team had not only come up with the dialog and stage directions, a teenage member of the team had used some public-domain software for formatting everything in traditional "movie screenplay" format. We ran off copies for the entire crew, so everyone had this wonderfully formatted document with all the important details of the story.

Around midnight, my son and and I started editing, taking turns getting sleepy and getting all the audio & video tracks synchronized. We used iMovie for NLE, which probably made things more complicated than if we'd used Final Cut, but ultimately, all we really needed were some simple transitions, and the ability to bring together video clips, a single channel of external audio, and the music/foley track.

One of our story collaborators was also our music composer, so by midnight on Friday, he had a decent idea of what we were doing. Unfortunately, he had commitments on Saturday that kept him from doing anything until late Saturday night. (This is the SAME guy who is our church's worship leader.) He started working around 11:00 PM on Saturday, and had all the music done by 1:30 AM. Unfortunately, I had his Macbook Pro, so he wasn't able to convert the songs into MP3s and email them. I picked them up around 7:30AM on Sunday, came home to do some more editing, and then we went to church, brought fast-food lunch home, and had a decent cut on tape by 4:30. My son and I spent the rest of the time tweaking things. As someone later told us, "you're never finished, you just get to a point where you have to stop."

The only things I would really do differently next time relate to video and audio.

First, I should have given my son (the Director/Director of Photography) more time to get used to the camera (a Panasonic DVX100A). He had to learn on-the-fly how to adjust the built-in ND filters, iris settings, and so forth, while having almost no photography background at all. (Prior to this he had only used consumer camcorders that do everything automatically.) He also could have used a good shade for the LCD, but there was only one scene where that was really an issue.

We shot in 24P w/ neutral white balance set prior to each shot, and with the chroma and gain settings set for a softer "film look." We also took advantage of the camera's "Zebra" option to highlight overexposed regions. Once he figured out some of those things, shooting went a lot faster.

In terms of camera handling, we shot some things from a vehicle that might have worked better from a dolly/track, but we didn't have enough PVC pipe on-hand for the distance we had to cover! Our homemade dolly, jib-crane, and steady-cam all seemed to work well enough for this type of project (and they were fun to build!). For the future, I'll probably plan for more dolly shots, and add a couple of grips to the crew for the setup of that kind of camera motion.

Our audio wasn't bad, but could have been better. We fed the output of a boom-mounted AT55 shotgun into an M-Audio MobilePre USB interface, and then used BoomRecorder on a Macbook Pro to save the files. The software is amazing, as it keeps a report that tracks scene/shot/take names/numbers and generates an XML file that lines that metadata up with the filename of the corresponding audio. The "pro" version does multi-track, but the non-pro version does two tracks, and records them into separate WAV files! As much as it might be simpler recording to a Fostex or other digital recorder, the ability for the software to keep all the metadata made the editing process MUCH easier. I'll never do a serious video again using in-camera audio only.

The biggest audio issues surrounded training our boom grips to hold the boom with their fingertips instead of in the palms of their hands. We had a lot of handling noise on a couple of shots, and we couldn't edit it completely out. A secondary issue is that the AT55 has a higher noise floor than higher-end mics. If we had done significant indoor recording, it would have been noticeable, so I'll be watching for a better mic. If we can give our boom grips a bit of training beforehand, and make sure they've got good headphones (isolating outside noise) to help them spot problems as they happen, we'll go a long way toward better sound.

One of my best friends says that the right way to do something involving a team is to make sure you've got the right people on the bus, and THEN decide where to go. I was fortunate to have a LOT of smart people, which made the whole weekend a lot of fun.

- Tim Gooch, Fools & Film

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