Extras extras (and more extras) [20 May 2003|03:15pm] So some time ago Will and I went through the script and counted out how many speaking roles are in the movie. The total count: 31 (not including the four leads), a number which has since gone up a few as we tried to expand our script to ensure that it actually finishes at feature length. This number also does not take into account the number of people needed as non-speaking extras, which at a bare minimum would number 20. Of course we could use some of these non-speaking extras as speaking extras for other scenes. In any event it looks like, to be safe, we'll need 50 extras involved in this production over the course of our two day shoot. Of course we won't need them all at once. I broke it down scene by scene and we won't need more than 10 at a time for whatever scene we'll be shooting. Some scenes, thankfully, will have hardly any extras. The trick is that if we don't want to have them hanging around all day, we need to schedule as best as we can to estimate what time they'll be needed. This is something I hope to accomplish with Leland and Craig this week. In the meantime, there's the task of assembling the extras. Our first options have been to invite our own friends to see if they'd want to take part -- through this effort we've gotten 25 people to express interest. Not bad, that's half the extras we need. Next we invited those who auditioned, since we met them, we know what kinds of characters they could play. 19 responses from those ranks. Almost there. So as a final safety measure, I emailed all the people who sent their headshots and resumes who a) supplied their email addresses and b) were non-SAG. 160 people in total. I invited them to take part yesterday morning. As of now I have 50 responses. So it looks like I have a healthy pool to draw from. The next step I suppose is figuring out just who goes where and who should play what. Though we call them "extras" a number of these smaller parts are significant. So it will take me some time to sort this out... One idea I had, as a lark, was to invite these folks to come up with their own "lobby moment" -- what they would see themselves doing in the main lobby of an office building. If what they came up with was good, we could have them do what they described when it came to shooting. I might just ask them that to see what they come up with... The other issue is rehearsal -- I'm not sure whether I can do this or not, even if I want to, with time getting increasingly precious. Will it be enough to assign them roles and instruct them over email/phone as best I can -- or is it wishful thinking to think a rehearsal prior to the shoot won't be necessary? I'm sure we'll have to work it out a little during the shoot, but I'm hoping it won't take more than 10-15 minutes to get them to do it the way I want if they already have their sides handy. We'll see... post comment

It's good to end a day feeling happy... [20 May 2003|10:45pm] for once. Yesterday I kind of spoiled myself by watching a movie instead of doing anything movie-related... and of course it came back to bite me today when I realized how much there was to do. Well, at least I got to laugh my butt off to Stephen Chow's THE SIXTY MILLION DOLLAR MAN, one of the most insanely funny movies I've seen. It is Demented. It has nothing to do with ON GUARD which is just what I needed. (Incidentally Chow's latest film SHAOLIN SOCCER is due to be released any day now... it made a ton of money and won armfuls of awards overseas). Anyway, so I woke up at 6 this morning and read through the script to re-time it after Will's revisions. Clocked in at 65 minutes, er, just a few shy of the 70 minute requirement. And then that old feeling of dread so familiar to me in the past month sank in once again. So i spent the morning working over the script to see what could be expanded and came up with six pages (~ 5 minutes) of material. Of course the script may still undergo further revision and expansion through rehearsals with my key cast, but I wanted to at least get us to a point where any further work wouldn't be just to satisfy the time requirement. Sheesh, this is embarrassing writing about it -- but it's the truth so there it is. We're obviously not going to fulfill the 10-minute takes goal we set for ourselves, but at this point it seems like a foolhardy idea to push that far. 10 scenes avg. 7 minutes each seems like enough to get our point across, esp. if we're still going with the single takes (which I'm no longer sure we are...). In the afternoon I had a check-in conversation with Karin. Sometimes I have to brace myself when I talk with her because she'll come up with a dozen things I haven't been thinking of! But like a trip to the doctor, it's exactly what I need -- to get drilled on what's in front of us, and what's coming up. She thinks Will and I are doing very well in staying on top of things, but the truth is we probably wouldn't be if she weren't checking in. Discussion about what our start time should be -- crew call could be anywhere from 6am to 7am , with cast coming in no later than 8... this is standard, but on the other hand it's saturday. there's still uncertainty as to how much time the shooting will take -- the logic is that we really don't want to do more than 3 or 4 takes of each scene because frankly we don't have that much time to log, capture and edit all that footage... better to spend more time rehearsing and then shoot. Leland thinks we can bang out scenes at an avg of 2hrs each, which would place us well under our 12 hour a day sched. Others aren't so certain... I'm okay with 15 hour days if others are... So then in the evening I met with Leland to map out our shots for each scene -- let me just say right now that this man is gangbusters. He's fast, he's thorough, he's creative, he's cooperative, and he's challenged and expanded my visual approach to the shoot while at the same time respecting the philosophy and practicality behind my initial aesthetic ideas. The key shift in approach has been to go with multiple cameras. Many DPs we've spoken with have proposed this but Leland was really the one who convinced me that this was both desirable and doable within our time constraints. To wit: - He expressed skepticism that any one static camera angle can retain an audience's interest for 3 minutes, let alone 7. Upon further consideration I realized that even the long-take filmmakers I had cited in the initial proposal (Kiarostami, Tsai, Akerman etc) kept their long takes well under 3 minutes on average. It's still an idea I'd like to try in a future film but it may be something I'm not quite prepared to undertake with this feature -- I feel like I would learn more about what I really want to do by exploring alternative options that in the end may be more feasible. -I guess I had also figured that I wouldn't have enough time to edit multiple camera coverage into a film in one day, so the single camera longtakes was the way to go. This idea defintely made sense in some respects but it also seems both overly conservative and overly risky at once. Overly conservative in that I may have more time to edit than I think, especially if I have somebody log and capture media at the same time as we're shooting (which is what I've noticed other projects say they plan to do). Overly risky in that I'm banking everything on one shot, one take, and if it flubs at any point then the take is ruined, I have nothing to cut to. - If we go through the script (as we started doing today) and look at what shots we want for each scene, we'll have prepped ourselves for what we want to look for in the editing stages which should speed along the process. So he's proposed using three cameras for most of the scenes: one Canon XL-1 as the main cam, and two GL-1s for coverage. He has done a phenomenal job of making this proposal convincing -- mapping out the shots such that the cameras don't get in each other's view, and going through the script and marking which shots are best for each point in the script. I still hold my breath a little at the prospect of having all these cameras and all this footage to sort out, but he's made it sound very manageable -- just log as much of it as quickly as possible, then just lay out the multiple camera tracks for each scene side by side in the Final Cut timeline, and go wild. As I said before, I've balked when others have proposed the multi-camera approach, but what made me agree with much of what Leland has proposed has been that he really seems to understand the motivations behind my shooting strategy and is offering an alternative that speaks to those motivations. We agreed that our camera technique should be inspired by the aesthetic of the surveillance camera, and in doing so we have come to the agreement that overt camera movement is not pertinent to the idea of surveillance that's central to the story. Surveillance cameras don't track and they don't move through space -- we agreed that these kinds of movement bring too much attention to the camera. At most we'd do panning shots but only when absolutely necessary -- the effect we want to give is a view of this lobby space from multiple surveillance camera angles -- unobstrusive, probing, composed in such a way that it doesn't seem composed while subtly leading the viewer along in interpreting each shot. In many ways Leland has taken this shoot to a new level of professionalism beyond my initial expectations from a month ago. There's going to be some serious fancy footwork involved in coordinating these cameras from take to take, scene to scene. But it all makes a lot of sense and his confidence is contagious. Hopefully his cold isn't -- the poor guy has been fighting a nasty bug for the last week, so I hope he recovers in time for a grueling weekend shoot. Anyway, I left our meeting today feeling like, Yes, we can really do this! Let's see if it carries over as we continue shot listing tomorrow... I need to start getting Craig's AD duties started -- pass on all the contact info I have so he can create a call list. Craig, if you're reading this, get on my case! 1 comment|post comment

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