Director's Diary - Part 1: A hard day's night

"Fucking amateurs!" - Walter Sobchak

The very first thing you learn when making your own movie for the first time is that you'll have to make A LOT of compromises and accept the fact that the movie won't turn out the way you want it to. Two friends and I already realized that in the preproduction for our little student-film project.
We already faced a couple of problems organizing everything we thought we would need. If you have no time and no money, you don't have a lot of choices. If, on top of that, you don't have any experience in film making (aside from a little theory maybe) it is a really rough time.

All we had was an idea for a ten-minute short. What (extra) equipment are we gonna need? How much can we afford? Where will we find actors? And more importantly, who will want to work for us and spend time and effort without anything in return? Where would we shoot? Especially when you need a very specific location - as we did - this is a tough question. What other techical challenges might wait? In our case we had not chosen the easiest setting for this first introduction to film making. An extended sequence of two people interacting only via webcam while the camera stays in the protagonist's room throughout. How go about it? Shoot in real time? How to direct both actors who sit in two different rooms miles away from each other? How to record the sound in both rooms when only shooting in one? Just a few of many, many questions we had.

Gladly our cinematographer (the one who does the camera, lighting and such, you know?) had the connections and he was the only one with a little bit of experience. He had been into photography for quite a while and generelly had more technical understanding than the other two of us. He recruited the actors and came up with a lot of good ideas for the technical implementations. The film would not have been made at all, if it weren't for him, I guess - at least it would have been a total disaster.

So while I was writing a terrible script in three days and then reworking it in details (even until we were shooting along with the actors) time was running and running and we were all doing other business for university alongside (at least we should have done so). Suddenly, it was like two weeks before we wanted to start filming and still we didn't really have the right location(s) and no actor for one of the smaller roles. It was hard to coordinate the timetable anyways. There was no way we could rearrange things. Filming was set to be about four days and it had to happen that week. Fortunately, a friend told us about a room of one of her fellow students would be living in a fitting location. Finally, we had a place to go and the first day of shooting was near.

So, we decided to shoot the part of the leading actress first without counterpart. With only 5 people in total working on set, even now that was just enough. Our leading actress already arrived with us. But we were still figuring out how to frame the shot and how to light the scene. We could have done that a day earlier, yes ... if we, and the people living where we wanted to film, all had nothing else to do ...

It was a tight schedule. We had to get this sequence done on that day. We arrived at 9 a.m. and had to be done at 6 pm. That may sound like a lot of time but it was less than we thought. If you do it for the first time things just need a little longer especially with such a complicated setting
Firstly we had to do the whole sequence in a take since we needed the video of it within two days to play all the way through in one shot; also it was useful for the other actor reading his lines.

Of course there were unexpected technical problems. Since the actress had no actor to interact with, one of us had to read the lines of him. BUT of course the one couldn't be in the same room since we needed the actress' sound alone, also the "correct" parts in between her lines. So we decided to get our guy (in this case a girl too) upstairs and talk to the actress over the computer with in ear headphones. It just didn't want to work right. The connection was instable and took a long while to be fixed - and later reoccured. Along with other problems and preparations we then started shooting the first take at around 12.30, if I remember correctly... probably even later.

Our lead actress was a friend of one of my collegues. It was quite impressive that she had memorized almost the whole sequence in one day since we had called her last-minute when we knew we were going to start shooting. She is a very extroverted person. Also, she's coming from theater where everything usually is a lot more impulsive and dramatic by nature than it is in film. I think she did a very good job for the more intense parts. But we had a few problems with lines in quieter moments. We shot the sequence three times in its entirety. Then we continued with additional takes on specific lines or parts that we weren't quite happy with.

I was doing kind of the "director's job" even though it is a collective work of course. Everyone of us would contribute to the direction and all that, but most of the time it's better to have clear assignments of tasks and responsibilities just to work more efficient and economic. Our camera man stated himself that he was so focused on that, that he couldn't really concentrate on the actors at the same time for example. Now, I dreamt of being a director one day anyways - who doesn't. But I found out that I am probably not a natural talent. It was quite hard to put into words what I had in mind sometimes. Some of it led to misunderstanding between myself and the actress, but I guess she forgave me. Also I had problems with being too fussy about things. Of course you want to get it as close to "perfect" (which I had told myself in advance would mean 'acceptable') as possible. But I really had problems with pointing out on things I didn't like. I just didn't want to offend anyone or be too "selfish" about things. Of course I know that she wouldn't have any problem with me complaining about the way I want the things to be. I guess, this is something you'll be able to handle better with more experience.

I think in the end for total amateurs like us (like me, at least) it turned out just fine. Even though I had abandoned the desire to get it perfect in the first place ... and it would be a lie if I told you I was 100% satisfied. But even professionals usually aren't - at least from what I read, so what the fuck.

When we finished shooting, preps for the next day began. What would we need? What have we forgotton? What problems could be solved beforehand? When I finally arrived at home I realized how tired I actually was. I cooked meal as I, like everyone else in the crew, hadn't have proper lunch. Then eating, relaxing, packing bags for the next day. Setting the alarm to 6 a.m. And finally, sleeping.

No wait! First I have to finish writing this entry. So, last but not least, after all the complaining I have to point out that this first day was a really great and interesting experience and that I (we) had a lot of fun with all the people and funny takes and accidents.
I can't really say that I am looking forward to tomorrow though, because it will be a very hard day again, quite a bit more complicated than today. But hey, we willingly brought this onto ourselves, we wanted the trouble and now we have to deal with it. In that sense, good night!