The iPhone lavswere too tricky to organize – everyone was emailing their files to a shared email account at the end of the day – that would work for a short, but for this amount of footage it just wasn’t practical — so Sam and I bought some Sennheiser G3 lav on eBay for $800. If you’re using lavs and don’t have an expert sound recordist on set — make it absolutely clear to whoever is listening to audio that if anything sounds off sound-wise — they have to speak up.

On indie film sets, everyone is always trying to act as they’ve been on a million film sets. We’re all a little insecure in some way or another. If someone doesn’t know how to do something, they’re likely to act like everything’s fine. As director/producer, your job is to make everyone feel like it’s always safe to speak up if there’s a problem.

The shoot trudged on.

We shot a scene on the third day we’d been planning to shoot since the start: in order to get closer to each other, our characters have a threesome with Izzy’s character; one guy feels left out, the other guy falls in love, the girl has to navigate this strange situation while also trying to find meaning in her own life.

This was by far the most interesting and alive scene, so we completely changed course and decided to make a film about that. Izzy had a small part in the beginning, but after her first scene, where she basically broke down crying in the middle of a threesome, we were like, fuck, how can we make this person way more central, she’s incredibly special. We restructured the rest of the film around this narrative and planned on tossing the first two days. (We ended up using that early footage as promotional material).

When we figured out our main story, we also got a better sense of how we would shoot this thing. Because so much of it was improvised, and we only had one camera, we had to figure out how we’d cover the story. I listened to some podcasts on how Joe Swanberg shot his movies, and again talked to Alex.

I’d let the actors (often including myself) play around in a master shot for twenty minutes or so, and then when we’d cut, we’d discuss what resonated, and we’d go in for roaming close-ups and inserts. A lot of this stuff would come together in editing. The mentality I had was that we needed to just throw everything up against the wall. We really only needed 5% of the footage to be good, the rest could be uncomfortable and bad, that was okay.

At night, between shoot days, Sam and I would microwave Trader Joe’s dinners and exhaustedly discuss what was working and what wasn’t. We’d often change stuff up at night for what we needed the next day.

Post Production on an Indie Film

We finished our 10 days of shooting just before New Years. I went to NYC to visit my mom and her new boyfriend, spent a couple weeks alternating between watching porn and spending too much time in front of the screen editing, and by the end of it, I had my first rough cut.