62 Actors!

Not everything at filmschool is right brained. Is right brained the creative side? If not, then not everything at filmschool is left brained. The beginning of our third week began with a lecture on Pre-Produciton. Essentially making a movie is broken down into three parts. Pre-Production, Production/Filming, Post-Production. As I mentioned, pre-production was our focus. Before we shoot our first film we have to generate a pre-produciton package for our film. A bible or a battle plan. By the time it is complete it will contain the following:
-Lined Out Script.
-Shot List.
-Breakdown Sheets.
-Storyboards.
-Call Sheet.
-Overhead Diagrams of Camera Blocking & Lighting.
-Shooting Schedule.
-Crew Rotation List.
-Log Sheet (to be filled out on day of shoot)

We spent a big chunk of our week generating our production packages and reading through and revising our scripts. Writing is re-writing! We did a lot of work-shopping on our scripts and I love this process. Sit around in a big group and spitball ideas about yours and others projects. As long as you stay on track I find that this is incredibly productive.

Next up was a lecture on Directing 101! Shots, reasoning/psychology of shots, shooting dialogue, storytelling, working with actors, blocking, etc. The meat and potatoes (a term I hear a lot at school) of being a director on a film shoot. This was another jam-packed lecture.

The big deal this week was AUDITIONS!! On Thursday night we all met out at school and 62 actors came out and auditioned for us. Sixty-Two! How the process worked was that the actor would walk in, place his/her headshot on a table, say their name and then give a line-reading of their choice. It was a long and surreal night. Just after three weeks of filmschool and now we are supposed to know enough to cast actors for our current and future films. If we saw someone we liked but couldn't use for this project we were encouraged to write a project for that actor for the future. The actors ran the gamut from just starting out to having their SAG (Screen Actors Guild) Card and years of theatre (note: snobby spelling) experience. I left school with a general idea of who I wanted for my short but needed some more input...

To wrap up the week we worked on a coverage exercise. We took a scene of two actors playing chess and having a conversation and we filmed it from all angles in order to capture everything we needed which is coverage. We set up the set from nothing on the stage to everything including camera, monitors, audio, lighting, props, etc. It really felt like a culmination of our knowledge thus far. Once we got the stage ready it took us 90 minutes to capture all the angles on a 45 second scene. It really is amazing how long it takes to film anything. No wonder feature films take a month to film (on average). Milena, our instructor, took our footage and edited the scene three different ways and played them back for us. This was to show us how much editing can affect the tone of a scene and also what to do and not to do.

In three weeks I will be doing this same thing on my first short... It will be here too quick.