First, let me say where I found my actors. I was at Backbooth dancing and saw this kid that looked the part so I went up to him and yelled over the music while him and I were dancing "Can you act?" He said "Act? Yeah I can act." I said "Cool, wanna be in my film?" He said sure and I got his phone number. Apparently he thought it was just a cheesy pick up line to get his number and he was a little confused when I texted him the next day about it. But it worked out. I found Lacey through the audition. She was the only one who was silly enough.
On the first day we lost most of our footage when Cris Mertens tried to transfer the footage of the P2 card so that was a set back but I didn't freak out, I just figured out when we could re-shoot it. We barely had a crew all 4 days and it was people coming and going to class the whole time including my actors. No one had a position, everyone was just doing what had to be done. I even did sound and slate a few times. My actor Jonathan was pretty much a crew member and we filled his van with equipment. Yes, it was very rag tag. And I loved it. I worried the whole production would fall apart. But it didn't.
Cris and I made an excellent team and I had no idea we'd hit it off so well. And I loved my crew, even though it was whoever I could get at the time, they were all so helpful and giving me all the time they could. It was a lot of wait around, hurry up. At one point we were sitting under the shade of a tree in a park eating sandwiches and at another point we were just barely grabbing one last shot at magic hour with the sun going down.
We definitely got a lot of great footage and we were able to experiment and improvise and just have fun with it. That's what I think made these last 4 days chaotic but amazing, there were so many locations and it was all beautiful shots and really fun scenes. I'm so happy with the script I wrote and I've never had so much fun while under so much pressure. It took like 4 hours to get the straight down overhead of the bed shot but it was totally worth it.
I couldn't have made this film without my friends. They let me borrow all their cool clothes for the wardrobe and they showed up early to be extras and I put a hole in my best friend's framed silk screen. That sucked. But through all the chaos and getting little sleep and making calls to all the locations and being totally freaked out everything was going wrong, by the last day, I was so happy to have it over with that I realized how amazing this experience has been. Seriously. I feel like this is exactly how it's supposed to be and all my hard work will result in hopefully an awesome film and definitely has been the best experience.
And I don't think I spent more than $200 when my budget was $1500. Nice.
