For better or worse.\u00a0 Hopefully more of the former and less of the latter.<\/p>\n
Sunday afternoon we completed filming the final scene of “Shenandoah Treasure Hunt<\/a>,” which happened to be the second scene chronologically in the script.\u00a0 The penultimate scene filmed was the fourth scene in the script.\u00a0 Filming out of order has me worried I might have missed something important.\u00a0 Indeed, last Saturday I forgot a scene, somehow crossed it off my list even though we hadn’t shot it.\u00a0 Crystal commented earlier in the week, when I sent out the call sheet, that it wasn’t on the list, so thanks to her we got it worked in on Saturday.<\/p>\n Saturday, once again, was beautiful, with clear, painfully blue skies while we were shooting the day-for-night scenes.\u00a0 Then, naturally<\/strong><\/em>, when we switched to the actual daytime scene, it got cloudy and dark.\u00a0 Fortunately, the DP was on top of things and compensated beautifully.<\/p>\n I got some production stills from him, but stupidly forgot to copy them to my portable hard drive, so won’t have access to them until next weekend.\u00a0 I intend to collect a few together and create a web page.\u00a0 No doubt the actors have taken quite a few, probably even videos, but we didn’t make arrangements to get copies to me.\u00a0 Now they’re off to the four winds.<\/p>\n Once again, I suffered acute depression on the way home Sunday.\u00a0 I feel better today, but on the ride home I was pretty convinced I never wanted to do this again.\u00a0 So many compromises, so many things that felt rushed.\u00a0 Averaging 10 pages a day seemed so easy before, but I think it’s much more realistic to aim for a max of 10 pages and accept an average of around 7-8 per day instead.\u00a0 There were many times where we simply didn’t have time to do more takes, as then we wouldn’t be able to get in the rest of the scheduled scenes.<\/p>\n I think if I had some expert helpers and extra lighting equipment we could go faster.\u00a0 Nate had to do 99% of the work himself; about all we could do is fetch and carry for him.\u00a0 But if we had dedicated crew who knew how to set up lights, they could be working on the setup for the next scene while we’re filming, which should help make things more efficient.\u00a0 Of course, that also makes things more expensive, so all sorts of trade offs.<\/p>\n On Sunday, I was confident by the end of this week I could cut together a rough version of the film, to identify any missing scenes or scenes that simply do not work (for technical reasons or otherwise).\u00a0 Yesterday disabused me of that notion.\u00a0 I have over 600 files that total almost 126 gigabytes (and take hours to transfer!).\u00a0 I estimate a total of 700 minutes, or a bit more than 11.5 hours.\u00a0 Which need to be edited into around 80 minutes.\u00a0 That’s actually a pretty good ratio (perhaps too good, meaning not enough coverage for optimal editing), the usual is 10 minutes filmed for 1 minute in the final cut.<\/p>\n My new estimate for a rough cut is around Thanksgiving, which is barely a month away (how fast this summer has gone!).\u00a0 Then I need to catch up on beta reading I committed to back in spring(!) and, finally, deal with my own writing I have queued up.\u00a0 We typically take the week between Christmas and New Years to hang out at our place in Virginia, but I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll be doing editing most of that time.<\/p>\n I’ve looked at a number of the ‘dailies’ and been pretty happy (indeed, looking through clips last night — so I can label them with scene\/shot\/take so I have some prayer of getting started with editing — helped lift my mood).\u00a0 Unless there’s some egregious errors that are impossible to work around (e.g., I only one usable shot of a certain scene, and the boom mike is clearly visible in the corner of the frame; but I think I can crop it fairly easily), I don’t intend to do any reshoots or pickups.\u00a0 Partly because the actors all insist they need additional compensation, despite what I made clear when this project got started, but also because they’re all busy and it might very well be January or even February before we’d have time to get everyone together.<\/p>\n While ‘watchable’ is a fairly low bar, it is, nonetheless a challenge for a first-time writer\/director.\u00a0 I tried to minimize that risk by having experienced script editors help me with the story, as well as experienced cast and crew, but it still needs to be edited together.\u00a0 If my attempt at a rough cut is deemed inadequate (I hope not, but kind of expect so), then I will lobby my executive producer (wife) for some funds to hire an experienced editor to see if they can come up with something watchable.<\/p>\n As I work on cutting together the movie, I’ll also be thinking about material for a trailer.\u00a0 Hopefully I can have something interesting by the end of the year, if not by Thanksgiving, and will be sure to make it available here.<\/p>\n Any lessons learned at this point?\u00a0 Schedule fewer pages is number one.\u00a0 Get the contracts signed before filming is another.\u00a0 I’ve tried to look through the camera (well, look at the camera’s monitor) to see how the DP is framing things, but largely failed to do so.\u00a0 I think that’s a major mistake on my part.\u00a0 I focus on the actor’s delivery, but since I don’t know what’s in frame most of the time, I might not be catching something important.\u00a0 I think, at a minimum, a shot list is important.\u00a0 I had a list of all the scenes scheduled for each day (though somehow marked one off mistakenly, so even that’s not guaranteed), but missed a few shots I needed to get and had to remember to get them later.\u00a0 If I had the shot list going into each scene, then I could check them off as we go and know nothing got missed.\u00a0 If I continue with movie making, I’m going to hire an artist to do storyboards.\u00a0 I think that would go a very long way toward assuring the vision in my head got captured, because I could show the DP what I had in mind.\u00a0 I expect the DP to come up with better ideas, but they can only be better if he knows what I had in mind in the first place.<\/p>\n No doubt when I finally start getting the editing going I’ll identify other weaknesses, but these are the ones I know about so far.\u00a0 This movie was intended to be a learning experience, and it has certainly lived up to that goal.\u00a0 I think there’s a reasonable possibility, once I’ve got the movie assembled, that I’ll get excited again and want to continue, but as I type this, I’m straddling the fence.\u00a0 Which is better than on Sunday, when I was firmly on the f-this side of the fence.<\/p>\n On to editing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For better or worse.\u00a0 Hopefully more of the former and less of the latter. Sunday afternoon we completed filming the final scene of “Shenandoah Treasure Hunt,” which happened to be the second scene chronologically in the script.\u00a0 The penultimate scene filmed was the fourth scene in the script.\u00a0 Filming out of order has me worried … Continue reading “Principal Photography is Done!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-treasure-hunt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}