Tag Archives | #kasibrown

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 2 – The Bar and Kent’s Apartment

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Garrett O’Brien (DP), Brandon Walter & Kasi Brown set up for a shot with actors Shaina Vorspan and Will Mulligan.

Continuing with the theme of location scouting – the bar was found using the same divide and conquer technique

  1. find a location close to your other locations to keep you on schedule
  2. make sure it fits your script
  3. make sure that it opens later in the day.
  4. make sure they have parking for the truck and street parking for crew cars.
  5. BEG them to allow you to shoot there.

If you cannot afford to ‘shut the place down,’ as we could not, then start shooting at 5am if they open to the public at 12pm.

On this particular day things didn’t quite go as planned however. Our first day cruised by ahead of schedule and on time. Our second day started with a big fat monkey wrench thrown in it as our location rep, aka bartender, over slept. Luckily the owner was able to rouse him when he didn’t answer our phone calls. Five hours later and its a wrap as the bar was opening to the public and we had another location to shoot that day #ambitious #indiefilmmaking!  As with all days on a limited budget, the schedule is always the hardest to overcome.  But all in all – shooting out four locations in two days was nothing to shake a fist at!

Thank you again Nate for letting us shoot at your place! Luckily our cat sized dog #dogsizedcat didn’t tear up the place in a war of ultimate cuteness! Can’t wait to hear more beat-boxing from our actor @J_Hendricks20 check him out – especially at 1:38 when the beatboxing begins!

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Director, Kasi Brown measures her Teacup Yorkie Laila to a giant playful cat.

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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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Production Begins Today!

Today is our first day of shooting our feature film. It’s been a long journey and we are very excited to begin. We’ve assembled a great crew and awesome cast. We’re going to be shooting some office scenes today with Mark Teich We decided to start the week with days that we are not acting in so we can just be directors and get used to it.

Pictured below are Kasi and Charles (1st AD).

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On Surfing and Independent Filmmaking

I cannot help but compare my recent introduction to surfing to my current experience in Independent feature filmmaking. When Brandon and I mused about the possibilities of producing the feature we wrote, I told myself that this time I would sit back, be creative, direct the film, act in it, but NOT be involved in the mind numbing, brain splitting, production end of things. I’d done it before for a short film, ‘A Woman Reported‘ (Sundance 2004) and it was rewarding, I could do it, but this time I was going to just be an “artist”. I pictured myself mussing up my hair over endless cups of coffee, making script changes, worrying over character choices, but never scheduling, budgeting, number crunching. NEVER AGAIN is what I said. Ha! As the weeks closed in and no lowly paid “passionate about the project” producer showed their face, Brandon and I realized that if we wanted to go forward with the film, we’d have to  buck up and take up the reigns.

Which brings me to the surfing. Being an athletic person, I sort of pictured myself paddling out into the great blue yonder and effortlessly taking smooth waves toward white sandy beaches. Wrong. It’s more like paddle, paddle, gasp, paddle, paddle, Holy Shits a huge freaking wave is cooommiiiing— Oh, I’m on top of it and I might be fine…nope glugluglgluglgluglgug. Oh my God I’m alive! And back we go again in case it’s not so bad next time. That’s how the producing hit us. We had no idea how to use any of the programs (Movie Magic Scheduling, Budgeting) but people were asking us questions like, “what’s your budget”? and “if I give you money, what’s my investment”? Also, actors we respect were reading the script and loving it and asking what their time committment was going to be.  Just as we learned one thing, we’d realize we’d scheduled it wrong and have to start over. It was exhausting and more than one nervous breakdown was had, but we are both wholeheartedly thankful that we were shoved into the swell and forced to learn the hard way, because only through drowning do we understand what we are getting ourselves into and truly appreciate the ride.

 

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