This is the story of how I learned how not to shoot a movie.

Normally, your production manager and 1st AD plan everything in detail. Every scene is accounted for, every actor, every prop. Extra days are included for contingency, pick ups and re-shoots.

With Third Contact, we used a different method. One which suited the micro-budget filmmaking set up. I’d learned to work this way after being involved in a short film shoot which went disastrously Pete Tong.

Many years ago, Justin, a director friend sent me a short script about a man who gets obsessively jealous of his wife, while she’s returning from a night out with a friend. I liked the script, but thought it could be better. It was a dark, comic tale of misunderstanding and miscommunication, but the script only showed one side of the story. I suggested the audience should see both sides, so they would be aware of the misunderstandings and therefore drawn into the plot’s tragi-comical twists and turns.

Re-write

Justin asked me to write the other half of the story and we ended up with a pretty cool short film script. We applied to the Enfield Film Fund. But they rejected our application for being “too professional” (really). But when one of the selected team’s projects collapsed due to their inability to get it together, we were asked to step in.

The deal was £1000 up front, and another £1000 on delivery. The original idea was to shoot the film on DV (there was no low budget HD at that time) and keep everything scaled down. But the DoP persuaded Justin to shoot on 16mm, offering to supply the film stock. The DoP called in a crew of about 7 or 8 volunteers.

The whole film was set at night and exterior, which meant it all had to be filmed at night. I was going to be sound recordist and generally assisting the production.

Nighttime exteriors

Justin scheduled a 4 day long weekend. We’d shoot through the night and sleep during the day. Theoretically.

Much of this noirish thriller was to be set in the woods. So how to light it?

It was decided we’d use a Leelium Balloon. On the first day of the shoot and Justin was in the queue at the bank, trying to withdraw the funds to pay for all the equipment. There was an issue and he called the whole shoot off.

It wasn’t going to happen.

But a half an hour later I got another call. Now he’s got the money, the shoot is on!

We arrive at the location and the DoP has gone a bit crazy with the equipment and lights, which need to be transported in a box truck (for a £2000 film?). Needless to say, already the whole production had spiralled out of control. Well over £2000 had already been spent.

We have a dolly track and a thing called a Universal Car Mount (UCM) which allows you to mount an Arriflex camera to the car. You can only hire a UCM if you also hire a qualified Arriflex grip.

So we hired one. £500/day (I think we haggled him down to £250/day).

The generator

First night of the shoot, our generator broke down. This was at 3am on a Saturday night. Of course generator hire company was closed.

So… no generator, no lights, no movie.

While the rest of us huddled inside cars to keep warm, Justin set off in the truck to seek a new generator.

Several hours passed.

Finally, he returned, but the new generator was no good. By the end of the shoot we managed to acquire four different generators, before finally finding one which worked. But we’d lost a quarter of our shoot time.

We need to close the road off? Uh…

We came to shoot the car shots with the UCM.

“When is the road going to be closed off?” asked our trained grip, not unreasonably.

“Closed off?”

“That’s a £30,000 camera. The mount will be 4 feet off the side of the car. You have to close the road off.”

Paraphrasing Justin’s reply into one word: “Oops.”

The UCM guy dug his heels in – it’s not happening. But Justin’s powers of persuasion saved the day (night) and the crew and cast set off down a pitch black, narrow country road, with an expensive lump of metal hanging 4 feet from the passenger window… at decapitation level. The UCM guy was now sucked into the spirit of anarchy, even calling the actor to put his foot down!

Goodbye DoP

Well, we got away with it. The shots were in the can and no passing motorists were slaughtered. Result.

But come the morning of the final day, the troubles with the generator meant we were some way from getting all the shots we needed.

The DoP had quit and gone home. Justin, operating the camera himself, was frantically trying to get the last shots, like a man possessed.

But we were past ‘the sun’s nearly up’ phase. The sun was well and truly up.

It was now day.

There was no two ways about it, the shoot was over. I suggested to Justin we wrap, send the film off to be processed and see what we had managed to film. After 4 nights without sleep, we crashed out for the rest of the day.

Emergency call

I was woken at 7 pm by a phone-call from Justin: we had only a few hours to get all the equipment back to Arriflex. But it was covered in mud after the shoot, so we’d have to somehow clean it all before returning it. Also, the crew had abandoned us, so we’d have to do it alone.

Pretty clearly, we weren’t going to make it and after a hopeful call to Arriflex, we were told if we didn’t get their equipment back by midnight we would be blacklisted. Which meant we wouldn’t be able to hire the equipment to shoot the rest of the film.

With a couple of old rags and a hosepipe, Justin and I threw ourselves at the task. The sun was setting and the midnight deadline was fast approaching. We had to clean everything, load it back into the truck then drive it across town back to Arriflex. It just didn’t seem possible, but we had to try, we had to keep going…

To Be Continued…