Tag Archives | #gonedoggygone

DAY 3- Stunts, Dogs, Car shots = TIME

The one thing every indie filmmaker wishes they had more of is TIME.  You hear it over and over. But when you’re new at it, you don’t have any reference for what that means.

Brandon and I are first-time directors and when people warned, “Don’t do that, it’s gonna be really haaaaard”, we did what most first-time directors do and thought, sure it’s gonna be hard, but I love hard! Hard is what I live for. If it’s not hard I don’t even wanna do it! And that’s how we came to Day 3.

Lesson 1: Don’t do stunts with your leads the first week of production. Why? Because for the rest of the shoot, make-up has to cover up your lead actress’s bruises so she doesn’t look like a rotten banana. And even with make-up it’s not pretty and will limit the takes you can use in editing. Even worse, a sprained ankle, or a broken bone could put you out of commission permanently. Dumb.

Stunt rehearsal. Kasi Brown and Brandon Walter.

Stunt rehearsal. Kasi Brown and Brandon Walter.

Luckily for us, the stunt portion of our day went swimmingly (despite the bruises), but took up way more time than we anticipated even though we had rehearsals the week before. This left little time for every other scene we scheduled on this close to 7 page day. We thought if we busted ass it would work out, but we also had a dog on set this day like almost every day. A dog IN the stunts. Yeah, I said it.

Lesson 2: Dogs. Avoid them. If you’re the writer as well as the director like we are, you have no one to blame but yourself. And although the doggy star of our film was my own dog (whom I had the luxury of training on my own time) like children, they have a very wide margin for error and take more… time.

They also like breaks, and snacks, they’re easily distracted, they take a long time to go poop, and even if it’s your own dog, the Humane Society shows up to protect the interests of your dog. More time and patience required. Which brings me to a very important point.

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Laila and her “stunt double”

INDIE FILMMAKERS TAKE NOTE: The Humane Society no longer offers it’s services for free through SAG-AFTRA. They now (since January 01, 2014) charge $500/day for union and $1,200/day for non-union whenever you have an animal on set. Read about it here Humane Society Rates 2014 . Had that been the case when we shot GDG, we never would have been able to shoot it at all on our budget. If you’re poor and writing an indie film, start scratching out that animal role now.

So, we’ve survived the stunts and the dog, the sun is going down and we still have two scenes (1 1/8 pages, 4 actors including the directors)…in the car. There’s a couple challenges there, but we’ll stick to the car and talk about having directors as lead actors another day.

Lesson 3: Shooting dialogue in cars when you have no money for fancy stuff like process trailers and awesome camera mounts (complete with the CHP you need to maneuver the streets of LA legally) is asinine. Our good friend and fellow indie filmmaker Denis Hennelly, warned us about this early on in the screenwriting stage of production. He had some great advice. Any time you can write the actors getting out of the car and talking on the side of the road, or anywhere else, but in that car, DO IT. Why?

There are only so many seats in the car. If you have 4 actors, or 3 actors, there’s room for a sound guy (maybe if he’s tiny), or a director, the camera guy has to be there, so who is doing the 3rd and or 4th actor’s lines that you kicked out of the car? Someone has to drive and act at the same time. You can see the problem here, right? Bad sound, Bad direction, Bad acting, Compromised safety??? Take your pick. For the next 17 days we got schooled.

 Rehearsal Car Scenes. Edward Winters, Kate Connor, Kasi Brown, Brandon Walter.

Rehearsal Car Scenes. Edward Winters, Kate Connor, Brandon Walter, Kasi Brown.

Having been through a day like that, I can honestly say I am much wiser for it. From now on when I write a script I will pause before I write a stunt, a dog, a child, or a car scene. I’ll politely remind myself of Day 3 and write for the budget I am working with, so that more time can be spent producing quality. And maybe someday I will be lucky enough to have one of these!

Process Trailer

Process Trailer

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Day 1-Directing Richard Riehle

I’m gonna shout it to the world. Richard Riehle is THE most fantastic actor to work with. For those of you who don’t know him by name, he’s one of those guys where you go, “Oh yeah, I love him, he’s in everything!”

This is my first feature film and I was lucky enough to have the honor of scoring such a seasoned pro through my hard working producers. From day 1, Richard showed up on set with a smile on his face and a hello for everybody. He never complained about the ULB rate, that he didn’t have the luxury of a trailer, he knew his lines to a t (with improv on top),  and he was generous to his fellow actors. He also addressed me and my co-director Brandon in such a respectful way that it hit me on day 1, “Oh crap. I AM the director of this thing”. He made me want to be the best director I could be and I was honored to have him and his talents to cut my teeth on for the next 17 days.

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Richard Riehle ‘Stan Janson’ is comforted by his ‘Secretary’ Rumi Murakami.

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Casting for Gone Doggy Gone in Full Swing

Laila auditions actors

Laila vets actors

Remember how the character of Becky Connor on Roseanne was played by Lecy Goranson and then inexplicably replaced by Sarah Chalke without so much as a mention. Remember how that made you feel? Well, we’re not going to do that to you. Here at Gone Doggy Gone, we are going to tell you what happened to the cast that originally was to play three of our lead characters, so you can understand why they are on the Indiegogo video we produced back in September of 2012, but not appearing in our movie. Allison Summers who was to play Jill moved to Atlanta to pursue a different career and became unavailable to us. Kim Kenny (Kat) also got another job that conflicted with the amount of days we would need her and Matt Lowe (Dan) moved on to pursue other interests in the time that lapsed in acquiring our funding. While we are sad to see our friends in comedy go, we understand that this is the nature of independent film. People come and go when funding isn’t in place for a lengthy duration.

We are now auditioning actors to fill those roles as well as day players. It has been awesome witnessing all of the talent there is out there and we look forward to working with some amazing actors.

 

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