Previously, I wrote about how I learned how not to shoot a movie, but I left things on a bit of a cliffhanger…

Justin and I were in the car park of the National Film & Television School, where the DoP taught cinematography (in the NFTS not in the in the car park).

We’d unloaded every bit of mud-covered equipment from the box truck. Now we had to clean everything and get it back to Arriflex before midnight, or they would blacklist us and we wouldn’t be able to finish our short film.

The DoP gave us an old rag each and left us to get on with it. He and Justin had already fallen out during the long weekend of night shoots, so he wasn’t about to stick around and help us out.

As the sun went down, making it harder and harder to see what we were doing, we worked our way through the equipment. By 11.30 pm, we had everything loaded back into the truck. So we gunned across town as fast as we could.

Powers of persuasion

We were late. We missed the deadline by 20 minutes. But Justin’s powers of persuasion got the guy on duty to open up and we unloaded everything into the warehouse.

Next day, we got a message – some things had gone missing. We went back to the shoot location and dug around in the leaves and dirt, but no good. Another few hundred pounds added to the overspend we couldn’t afford.

We took the exposed film to the lab where they would process it and transfer it to digital tape for us to view. The cost was about £600.

Remember, our budget had been a total of £2000, with £1000 up front. In other words, we only had £1000 to spend. Justin and the DoP had run up a bill for about £5000. The DoP had walked away and Justin had gone though his overdraft, with many bills still to pay.

But was the footage any good?

A couple of days later, we got the tape back from the lab. We went to the office of the advertising agency Justin worked for to play it and see what we’d got. The place was empty as it was after hours, as we slid the tape into the digibeta deck .

We were banking on this footage being beautiful to behold, after all that effort and money we had spent acquiring it. But…

The footage was underexposed.

We went through the whole tape six times. Almost none of it was usable. We’d gone £3000 over budget and had nothing to show for it.

We only had £1000 of the funding, the other half would be paid on delivery of the film. A film we couldn’t deliver. Neither me nor Justin had that extra £1000 to pay the people we owed money to. We were both now broke.

Somehow, we needed to re-shoot this film, so we had something to deliver in two months time. Then we would get the 2nd part of the £2000 funding, so we could pay for the equipment we had hired to shoot a load of useless footage.

But how?

We literally had nothing to spend. Our overdrafts and credit cards were maxed-out.

Then it was that Justin came up with a brilliant idea…

Are you crazy?

We would re-shoot the entire film. But this time with no money.

At first I thought about bailing out. I’d already invested a lot of time and money and there was no guarantee this experience was going to get any better.

But Justin employed his powers of persuasion once more. OK, let’s do this!

Justin and I formed a crew of 2. He would operate the camera and direct. I would record sound again.

Justin borrowed a Sony PD150 DVCAM from an advertising company he worked for and a sound recording kit from a friend.

One problem was, almost the whole film was exterior shots at night and we had no lighting rig.

No lights?

Justin had a small photolamp he’d got free with a stills camera a few years before. It was tiny but better than nothing.

We also bought some battery powered mini strip lights from Homebase for £4.99 each. We bought a 10,000 candle flashlight from the same store. It was very powerful, but even when fully charged would only last for about 12 minutes. We had to be very economical with it.

In the town scenes, we found a small car park with just about enough lighting and filmed late at night so there would be no one there. But most of the film was set in country lanes and woods.

So, my car became our lighting rig. We would set up the scene by pointing my car in the right direction and turning on the headlights. We bought a 3 pin socket converter so we could power anything which required mains from the lighter socket of my car. We could also charge batteries from it.

Liberation

Rather than shooting the whole film in one go, we broke the film into scenes, shooting each one as and when we were all available.

There was only four of us (Justin, me and the two actors) so it wasn’t too hard to arrange.

What we actually discovered was, the scaled down nature of the production was very liberating. Without any crew and equipment to worry about, we spent almost the entire time being creative. All we had to focus on was making the film.

As you can see, a lot of improvisation went on. In some scenes, because there was no stand for Justin’s small photo light, I became the human light stand – holding it above my head and pointing it in the right direction. I was the living embodiment of the Statue of Liberty.

Piece by piece, step by step

In between shoots, Justin would edit what we had together, so we would get an idea of how it was looking and what further footage we needed. The whole experience was far more rewarding than the previous disaster.

The only issue was the deadline to deliver the completed film was approaching a little faster than we would have liked.

We had to get the last few shots. This included Justin modelling a close up of the hand of a dying man and putting it into a a really cool dolly shot, which we got by sticking the camera to the bonnet of my car and driving in reverse.

We also had to polish up the edit and the sound design and finish the music.

Running out of time… again

But the days had ticked past and there was now no way we could make the deadline. We wouldn’t get the second part of the funding and the film wouldn’t be shown at the Enfield Short Film Festival, with the other team’s films.

We’d now shot the film twice over and, through a huge amount of effort, come so close to delivering the film.

But it wasn’t quite enough.

Me and Justin sat silently staring at the monitor in the edit suite – we’d failed. We may as well go and get a pint and drown our sorrows.

But… with one last throw of the dice, Justin called the funding body to ask if we could extend the deadline. They’d been pretty insistent there could be no extensions, so we didn’t have much hope.

Justin explained everything to them – how the first shoot had been a disaster and how we’d re-shot the entire film again.

Justin’s powers of persuasion coming did the trick once more, and they agreed to give us a couple more days. If we pulled out all the stops, maybe… just maybe… we could get this thing delivered for the festival screening…

To Be Continued…