The Debate: What went wrong, what went right?

Last year seven friends and I turned-around a short film project in about 14 hours (from conception to delivery), with nobody other than Anu and I working more than 6 hours on it (that’s how long the shoot was, including rehearsals and dinner). It was literally no-budget filmmaking. The entire project was made on volunteer time, borrowed gear, and $50 pocket money for food and tape. There was no dedicated editor involved, and I’d burned myself out by the time I went to edit it myself, so I decided to use one of the single continuous takes that we’d shot. Thus, it became a filmed skit, in the style of an old variety show. I still think I should have edited it, because the action isn’t very expressive and camera movement / shot dynamics would have helped mask that, but alas, that ship sailed long ago.

The genesis of the project was this:
Around Super Tuesday 2008 my wife Anu and I observed that the tenor of the Democratic Presidential Primary race was an awful lot like the Best Animated Feature Oscar Nomination race: a plucky underdog whose supporters believed to represent the new face of contemporary society and a departure from the entrenched interests (Obama/Persepolis), and a popular establishment candidate whose supporters believed to represent a balance between something new and an overdue vindication of long-standing efforts to make the world a better place (Ratatouille/Clinton). To us, in both cases both choices were quite good, and we found the vitriol expressed by supporters on both sides was ridiculous. So we decided to write a skit in which debate about one (Animated Films) stood-in for the other (Presidential Candidates). To us (and as small group of others), this was utterly hilarious.

Here is the video:

It was fun to make, and the participants all found it amusing to watch, but it certainly has its problems. There are some lessons that can be drawn from the production, some specific to the type of project it is, some more general.

What went right?

We got the thing finished, and released, by the morning of Super Tuesday.
The actors did an amazing job of memorizing six pages of often fairly complicated dialog — in about two hours.
We had fun doing it.
If you’re into animation, politics, and dry sketch comedy, it’s reasonably funny.

Honestly, that was more than we expected to get right given the time constraints. The lesson there: set your expectations accordingly, and you can be satisfied with a project being what it is for its budget, time constraints, and time in history and be drawn into overworking a project into something it can’t be, or find yourself disappointed because it doesn’t reach standards that are unrealistic given what it is.

The thing that we got the most right was to keep it enjoyable. Anu really helped with that, because I was tired and stressed, which can lead me to get temperamental (which is something you never want to do as a Director — regardless of what some people seem to believe). She did a good job of the people management aspects of being Producer, which is the most critical aspect of managing a production. Good people management gets the best work out of your crew, builds trust, enables them to solve more problems on their own, and reduces overall stress for the Producer and Director. By helping me not take out my frustration on the crew, who were valiantly trying to make due with no time and no money to shoot six pages, Anu really “earned her stripes” as Producer.

What went wrong?

It’s clearly a rush job.
The dialog was too ambitious given the time constraints.
The action was too boring to support the dialog.
The space we shot in was too small — it was very hard to light, and we couldn’t move the camera or actors much.
Equipment broke down. Without backup gear, we lost shooting time.
I involved myself too directly in solving the equipment issues, wasting time better spent rehearsing the actors.
I should have edited it rather than using one long take.
I wore myself out by rushing through everything (which led to several of the mistakes above).

The cast and crew did a great job. Everything that went wrong was my fault as instigator of the project and Writer/Director/Co-Producer. I was so in love with my own clever writing that I didn’t consider what a mouthful I was asking my actors to memorize in basically no time at all, and I also thought that the dialog would carry the project with no substantial supporting action. Wrong. Filmmaking is a visual medium, and even in fast turn-around, guerilla sketch comedy some compelling visual element is critical. And without that visual interest in the staging, the lack of camera movement is glaring. We didn’t have any room in the space we shot in to physically move the camera (or the actors, really), so if I wasn’t going to move my actors more (already a mistake), I shouldn’t have worn myself out and left time and mental space for editing. Variety in the camera angles would have added at least some visual interest.

As for involving myself too directly in the equipment issues, I got in the way of my crew and neglected my own job (supporting the actors). Even with a very small project, one where you wear a lot of hats, you still shouldn’t take someone else’s hat off and try to wear it — even if they’re having problems (unless they’re so incompetent they can’t solve the problem in a timely manner and you must step-in — which was not the case with this project). Not only does this erode the trust relationship between Director and crew, but it distracts you from the most important business at hand: keeping the creative development of the film on-track. The crew is their to do their jobs specifically so you don’t have to.

Tiny projects like this are rarely objectively great, but you can learn a lot from them and have a good time while doing it. Making mistakes is part of the learning process, it’s far easier to learn from mistakes made on $50 mini-DV projects shot in a mailroom than on a $50million project.

Project Crew: Anu, Mach, Austin, Michael, Erick, Luigi, Fabio

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