The Dance

Link to the video. Watch this first

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gJ9-AUARMc

So recently I, along with the help of one of my fellow film class mates, made a movie. She needed to have it to submit for film school, and I just love making movies. So early on it was decided that she would direct and I was DP (be the director of photography, the guy in charge of lights and camera) we decided to do it this way because first off I want to go on and DP films as a career, and secondly I own a fairly expensive camera. This is about the time when we ran into our first problem, we had no story. We had to come up with a short script ( it could only be 5 min long), it had to be done in a short period of time, and our actor pool consisted of high school theater kids, so it had to be a film about high school students. Me being the generous and gracious type decided to let the director come up with a script. So she came up with a good solid idea (I posted the script just prior to this one). Once she finished writing the script it suddenly became my job to put it into the proper format, so I did and it took me all of like 10 minuets because formatting a 5 page script with limited duologue is super easy. So once I finished doing that I went and talked to my film teacher (if it wasnt for Mr. LaRue this film probably never would have been finished) and he told me that I needed to do a script break down. A script break down is where you go through your script and find out how many locations, actors, props, costumes, ect. are needed. So once again this kinda became my job. So while I am doing this our lovely director was supposed to be finding actors and coming up with a schedule so that way once i finished the script break down and the story boards done then we would be all ready to shoot with out having to wait for anything thus giving us plenty of time to get everything done. I get script break down done........ She hasnt started. I begin working on story boards...... hasnt started. I take like a week and a half to finish story boards..... she finally got around to asking some of her theater friends to act in our film, but no schedule. So I finished with all the pre production work by mid November, we get a random Thursday off from school so with the help of Mr. LaRue we shoot our first scene, and it looks really good (its the scene that starts at 1:04, where we see the three boys meet for the first time). To shoot a roughly :30 sec scene it took us over an hour from start to finish, I figured at this pace we would be a little tight on time but if we could get every thing done before Christmas break we would then have plenty of time to edit it. The next week we shot the first two scenes, besides the time we took waiting for out talent to show up it took us a like two hours. But thats when we ran into our second problem..... My camera deleted the footage that we taped that day. There was no trace of it. It was just gone. At this point we were on thanks giving break from school so we had a solid week off. I was hoping that in this week we could get virtually all of our shooting done. But.... no. We get one scene done, the one starting at 1:24 at the boys house (at 1:38 the bars across the screen were caused by a malformation in the tape that we filmed on, just one other thing that went wrong). After that we take the rest of the week off. Then another, and another, and another. And Another. By now we have two scenes and we have 1 week before Christmas break. 1 week before we had to be done shooting in order for us to have time to edit. So we started shooting as fast as we could. So that meant we didnt have lights, because “neither of us are going to film school for that” according to our director..... even though thats virtually ALL that a DP does. We didnt have a boom mic, we were just using a mic attached to the top of my camera, which picks up all the noise and vibrations of the camera its self. Also Mr. LaRue had loaned me a nice tripod because I only owned a cheap one from a place like target. But he needed his tripod back, so we were left with a tripod that i would not leave standing unless my hand was on it due to a fear that it would break because my camera was to heavy for it. So we were left with the ability to take one take of each shot, crappy sound, no lights, and a crappy tripod, and a week to get it all done. Wonderful. But we did it. We got there before finals started and shot, we would ditch class and shoot, we would stay late and shoot. It looks terrible, the focus is soft, which is caused by the lack of light. The color temperature changes every scene, which is due to the lack of lights. Its film at an angle, my crappy tripod. But luckily our actors were really good sports about it and if they did screw up they would quickly get back to were they were so we could restart the scene as fast as we could. So we get all of our shooting done and its now time to edit it. I volunteered to do it because if i did it my self i knew it would get done and plus I own the computer and the software that we needed to do it with (for those of you who care i have a imac and final cut express). But no..... “I need to be there just so I can make sure its good”. So I told her that i was free pretty much every day just tell me when a few days in advance and then come over. After like another week she finally comes over and sits there and tries to tell me how to edit even though she has no idea what she is doing and therefore it takes me a good solid 4 or 5 hours to do something that could have been done in half the time. But it finally got done, and considering everything that happened during the pre, production, and post it turned out pretty well.