Last year, a very good friend of mine asked me to help out on her ‘first time’ indie film shoot. They were making a short movie (always a good place to start) and asked me to help because i have done lots of that kind of thing before. Now, because I have helped out on many people’s first time film projects i have come to loathe the very idea. Most first time filmmakers think they have everything under control, and %100 of the time, they dont, and that first few weekends with them on set before it all falls apart are usuaully a terrible experience. I try to avoid terrible experiences. Anyhow, this friend of mine from above, she is a really good friend, and one that i can be frank with, so i told her basically that i would help, but only if they had their colelctive shit together. To make that process easier, I offered my own brain for picking previous to the shoot day. What resulted was a nice list of sincere questions and my answers in a long email exchange that came to be known as the ‘Handy List’.
I am going to post those email exchanges here as i clean them up so that other beginning filmmakers can also check them out.
Here is the first installment: They are basically stream-of-consciousness, so that is why they are so strange.
Stripe Your Tapes! i dont care what you are shooting with, make sure the tapes have timecode written on them already, (ie record black over top of blank tapes) This will make it so that your timecode is unbroken through your whole tape, and if you have to stop and rewind on the camera to see something (dont do this, use a secondary recorder for video assist if you can) then when you come back you dont have to worry about broken timecode.
Sound - keep in mind ADR (additional dialog recording). be VERY critical of your sound. above everything, if it looks like ass but sounds good, the looking like ass bit will seem to be on purpose. it it sounds bad it will look like a home video. I presume you are mixing down and recording onto the video. which is fine. recording to DAT is better, but is essentially the same as recording to the audio track on the video if you are never doing more than two channels. not only do you need to make sure that you are checking the levels on the mixer, you need to be sure your levels are good on the camera as well.
video playback - need a monitor on set -> bigger than the camera lcd. You will not see most of the bad things on the camera LCD. If you are using a firewire camera (and you probably are) and someone has a laptop, then you can use that. (i use my little mac lappy and imovie as a monitor, works great, and goes nicely with the on-set-editing i mention later)
Lighting - no-color blue and no-color orange gels if you can get them. diffusion, cloth works but it has to be THIN, diffusion gels are better.. - reflectors: one side white one side shiny, i fyou cant borrow real ones, get white cardboard stock (or white gatorboard, even better) and do one side with foil. these things make all the difference when lighting peoples faces. If you can get some bright portable lights of some sort, that is also very nice.
Coverage - for every story board have a note as to what you could use to replace that shot with. ie cutaways, whatever.. then plan to shoot all your coverage. often it is a quick take right before you move on.
Story boards - shot lists, etc… be sure to know the order you are shooting them and know exactly what you want from a shot so you know when to move on. put it all in a big 3 ring binder.
Oh! and go through all your boards and make sure that you never break the 180 degree rule, and that your reverses are all consistently placed in the frame (ie bob is on the left side and sally is on the right side, even if they get up, and move around)
Slate - slate every take, no matter how lame it seems. the slate will double your productivity in the edit room, even if you never actually look at the notes on the slate, just having one to delineate between takes is a godsend. Do NOT just let the camera run willy nilly while people re-shoot the scene. That is unless you have endless time to edit. even if you do just let the camera roll, try to get a slate in there whenever the action re-starts. so important. so many first time indies do not slate, and editing is a total bitch.
Line producer -> someone needs to be in charge of the shot list, and keep the production on track. this person should also be taking notes as to which take is a good one, and what the timecode is if possible. Often this falls on the director in a small crew. this is fine, but make sure that someone has the shot list and is marking off what you need.
Random Thoughts - some productions i have been on (and all big budget films do something like this with the video assist stuff) actually edit a rough cut as you go. in order for this to work, however, you have to have your whole movie already edited in story-board form. I always do this with still shots of my boards (which are usually crap-ass stick figures with camera movement arrows like dolly, pan etc..) then i put all that into some cheapo editing program (i usually use iMovie for this kinda stuff because it is so easy) and then do a quick edit of the movie, and then i do the voices over top. this is a big part of my own process to make sure i have everything visually i need to tell the story. if you are really on the ball, you will write the shot numbers onto the boards before you digitize them and then you basically have a moving video-shot list. you can quickly see which shots still need to be shot, and how everything flows together.
anyhow, it basically goes like this: the on-set editor is sitting in front of a laptop that is hooked to the camera, whenever rolling is called, they also start recording the live feed into the editor. (which already has all the storyboard shots edited and placed in the timeline) every time you shoot a take you like, the editor simply drops it in on top of the still storyboard. this isn’t meant to replace the editing process (although i know some people who do that, and basically have a near final cut at the end of a shoot) but more to augment the filming process so you dont have to keep everything in your head. not to mention you can see really quickly how the transition between shots that you visualized so nicely in a storyboard actually looks terrible, and you really need to pan off the face, or start with the actor offscreen, or let the car drive out of frame, instead of cutting on the action, etc..
The other nice thing about having a secondary recording machine is that if you want to review your takes (and you do) then you wont have to use the camera to do it, which is so much better. (and faster)
anyhow, i think that not enough indie crews do the above (ie rough cut on the day) and as a result are often much less polished, not due to lack in talent or vision, but simply because you didn’t realize that the shot you had wasn’t as good as another version until you saw it in the context of the scene. And since most indies cant afford to return to a location or simply cannot reproduce a scene after the fact when you have figured out you really needed a shot of the main actor walking away from the camera to make the editing flow properly, you will be able to catch those things before you leave set.
