Hitchhiker observations, part 1: Planning and Scheduling
Among my many current projects is helping my friends Emma (Director) and Brandon (Producer) make Emma’s film Hitchhiker. In addition to providing an opportunity to collaborate with a talented, enjoyable group of people to work with, Hitchhiker can also provide some valuable lessons on “no-budget” (ultra low budget, which I set as less than approx. $500/minute of footage) filmmaking. Here are a few:
Preproduction Is Your Friend
Many a no-budget project has failed by simply falling apart due to lack of planning. My ongoing serial project has had problems with preproduction which I’ve been trying to address, but it is difficult to get collaborators excited about that phase of production, so it can be slow going. But it’s worth the time. Every hour spent on preproduction may very well save you two hours in production.
Creating things like script break downs, call sheets, location scouting reports, storyboards, and so on may seem like a luxury, but they are in fact a necessity. Good preproduction involves nailing down all the variables you can think of, so that you’re not completely out of your depths when something comes along that you didn’t think of. And, contrary to what some believe, preproduction doesn’t limit your on-set creativity. Rather, only through proper planning can you truly get creative on-set and make radical changes, because your planning gives you a stable base to fall back on when the new ideas go haywire.
Beat-boards (storyboards with only one key panel per shot) are an excellent and cost-effective preproduction tool that can make not only on-set life so much easier, but many other aspects of preproduction (selecting lenses, lights, and grip gear; spotting for props; making call sheets for cast; location scouting; and in our case, planning the rear-projection shots and acquiring the plates) and postproduction as well. Even simple beat-boards like the ones Emma did for Hitchhiker can give you a lot of bang for very little (or no, if you can draw your own) bucks:
All the “boring” up-front planning is part of the filmmaking process, not something that gets in the way of it. The better (and more complete) job you do in preproduction, the better your results will be.
Keep It Simple
Something I’m particularly bad at is keeping my short films simple. Hitchhiker is quite simple, and it’s going much more smoothly than some of my shoots for it. There are four actors in the whole piece, only two of which have had to appear for more than two shoot days, and there aren’t any set pieces, period clothes, or stunts. The outdoor dialog (outdoor dialog being the bane of no-budget shooting) is less than half the dialog in the film, and more than half of it takes place in a single location (inside a car). To avoid the problems of shooting (and sound recording) in a moving car, those shots will be done with the car in a building and the world outside the car being done via rear projection (which is easy to do if you don’t mind it looking like rear projection).
One way in which Hitchhiker seems less simple is the number of shots. If you count the rear-projection plates, there are over 170 shots from 9 pages of script. Many of these are reversals and same-as shots. This reduces the number of lighting set-ups to something closer to 30 (though that can balloon as lighting is subsequently tweaked on a per-shot basis “just a little bit here and there”).
There are two ways to shoot a sequence that is a series of reversals: shoot long continuous takes and then create the cuts in editing (doing one side of a reversal first, then the other) or call cut at the end of each shot (again, focusing on one side, and therefore one lighting set-up, first). Which one you can get away with depends on your actors, your style, and your own abilities. While you’ll probably get through more footage in a day if you can do continuous takes and then create the necessary shots in editing, doing this requires that the Actors and Director can deliver on this. The natural pacing that stems from this approach can be good, but the Director needs to guide the actors to deliver the scenes in a way that allows the editor to actually cut-away. If the Director and/or Actors can’t nail the right balance of pacing, or the Actors can’t remember the lines for the whole sequence (not all no-budget films manage to score experienced actors), you may be forced to cut at the end of each shot. Some Directors prefer the less naturalistic feel you get from doing discontinuous takes. In a highly stylized film, that may work best. And given time and ability, some Directors will do the continuous takes and then go back and do some or all of the shots discontinuous. Doing both creates more editing options, but can definitely can wear out a cast and crew. Director and Producer must work together to find the right fit given the abilities of their cast and crew and the specific needs of a given project.
On Hitchhiker, since Emma is working with improv actors, there has been more of a skew to let things roll and do continuous takes when camera angles are exactly the same across cuts specified in the boards. We haven’t done the main dialogue sequences (in a car, with rear projection behind) yet, so it remains to be determined if this approach will hold up — but if it does, for this particular project, it seems like the right choice.
Sometimes, Weird Stuff Happens
Especially if you’re a no-budget operation, your shoot schedule will almost certainly be blown at some point by weird stuff. On Hitchhiker we lost a shooting evening because a building caught fire across the street from the gas station where we were shooting. There was no plan in place for shooting different sequences should something go wrong with the location, so we all went home. When we lost this night, we were already re-shooting some shots that were previously wrecked by equipment failure. Because no-budget cast and crew members have other jobs, we didn’t have the cast members on-call for alternate options. Add slop time into your no-budget schedule for weird stuff to occur (in other words, book more shooting time than you think you’ll need — but not too much more, because you need to maintain good will with your unpaid cast and crew).
An entire weekend also had to be rescheduled due to an error in location scouting, resulting in at least a one month delay in the shooting schedule (because everyone has other jobs and projects). With no-budget filmmaking, preparation time is the only luxury you really have. Not only should you do careful preproduction (which Emma and Brandon did), you should also come up with plans for how to avoid losing whole days to random events (like fires) or mistakes you made in the original planning (like missing some small details that make a location ultimately unsuitable when the time comes to actually use it). Even in bigger budget filmmaking, it is best to always have contingency plans and fall-backs (for locations, actors, scenes to shoot in a given day, etc.), but in tiny budget filmmaking it can be essential. You need to spend a lot of energy keeping the cast and crew going when you hit speed bumps like this (I know from an ongoing serial project I’m working on, which has had several long spells of stagnant momentum), and it can be draining, especially on the Director and Producer. It’s better to try to avoid it in the first place.
People Eat Food
No-budget filmmaking thrives on volunteer efforts. Without people’s willingness to chip-in to make your project, it’s just not going to happen. Failing to feed people is, according to a couple veteran Indie Producers I’ve talked to, the number one cause of No and Low Budget projects completely falling apart. Considering how important it is, that’s an easy lesson to learn: make sure that you always set-aside time and money to feed your cast and crew. Period. No excuses. Fortunately for the project, Emma and Brandon are all over the food thing (though making your crew have to submit receipts to get repaid for some meals can become quite a pain when the size of the crew gets over 4 – 6 people).
Your Crew Have Other Jobs
Another thing that Hitchhiker production (mostly) got right is to understand that your volunteer crew isn’t earning a living from making your movie for free, and to take that into account. Except for a couple late weekdays, we’ve shot almost entirely on weekends or Friday nights, and generally ended early on Sunday. It is essential to accommodate your all-volunteer cast and crew in terms of their paid jobs, and also to understand that there may be other “resume builder” projects they’re going to work on after yours. If you don’t accommodate their work schedules, you’ll quickly lose cast and crew who need their day jobs to pay rent and buy food. Exhaustion sets in quickly, the people who stick it out despite the excessive demands will inevitably do a worse job than they otherwise would — and your production will suffer. Going past your allotted calendar time will cause people to vanish off into other projects that they’re working on. Hitchhiker has done a good job of avoiding the former, but has stepped on the landmine of the latter. It will be a challenge to schedule the last two shooting days, which have been pushed-back at least a month.
So Give Yourself Enough Time
Take the number of locations, set-ups, and overall shots, and make a shooting plan. Then, if you’re in a no-budget situation, factor in the fact that most of your cast and crew are inexperienced and therefore will inevitably be slow and make mistakes. Add to that a buffer that allows you to let people enjoy themselves, so they’ll want to help you again (and you’ll want to do it again), and then buffer that based on the assumption that you’ll mess up enough to burn at least 20% of your time. Do all that, and you’ve got yourself a no-budget schedule. So long as you can afford to buy food for all those shoot days (and rent any equipment you need, which if you’re a no-budget novice hopefully is basically nothing), and your schedule fits within your budget.
A mistake most inexperienced no-budget filmmakers make in scheduling (and in using their time) is to forget that set-up will be slow with an inexperienced crew (especially as they get tired — nobody but a triathlete or soldier comes into the business prepared for late night shoots and early next day calls). This leads to slow set-ups and rushed shots. That leads to getting into the editing room with only bad takes. Give yourself the time to do safety takes, and maybe even an alt here and there. Rehearse, learn your actors’ styles, and plan your schedule to allow your particular actors run the scene as many times as is comfortable to them. Don’t overdo it and shoot 40 takes of each shot (time is cheap as a no-budget filmmaker, but it’s not free — especially with borrowed locations), but generally moving on after 2 or 3 takes isn’t recommended until you’ve really gotten a feel for what is and isn’t a truly good take. It’s emotionally difficult to let actors do a safety take (and many will always want “just one more” — and feel unsatisfied if you never let them have it) when slow set-ups are dragging down your schedule, so make sure your schedule is realistic given your (and your crew’s) skill level.
Hitchhiker, a nine page script, will have shot over at least six full days, with at least five additional partial days. One day’s footage had to be re-shot due to camera problems. Three days had to be rescheduled due to problems on location. The original schedule was eight shooting days — a reasonable amount for a nine page script, even with a pretty small crew. Problems arose which caused the schedule to become scattered, but because of the good preproduction that was done (boards about what was to be shot, breakdowns and call sheets per sequence, etc.), it was relatively easy to flex the schedule based on the issues that arose.
Project Crew: Emma, Brandon, Dani, Austin, Danielle, Erick, Victor, Susan, Jesus, Jason, Jose, Sarah, Rebecca
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
It’s Always A Hard Time To Be Indie
A recent post on John August’s blog, titled “A hard time to be an indie,” inspired me to inaugurate this blog with a post about the idea that it’s a particularly difficult time to be an Indie filmmaker (John quotes a speech by James D. Stern, which is also worth reading). It was a particularly synchronous post by John since I recently just attended the first annual Produced-By Conference, where a number of Producers were singing a somewhat different tune (or, perhaps a similar tune, but in a different key).
One point that several Producers made at the conference is that it’s always “a hard time” to be an Indie filmmaker, and that it’s an unusually bad time merely because it’s a hard time for the whole industry, and the whole economy. Their perspective, as working Indie Producers, was that if your passion is for Independent Cinema then you have to make a go of it when the time is right for you as an individual filmmaker — because the time is never “right” for entrepreneurial filmmaking.
A perspective I found especially compelling was that the demise of Warner Independent and similar big studio “Indies” is not a death knell for Independent filmmaking, but rather a resurgence. The speaker’s point was this: your competitors with the deepest pockets just got out of the market, leaving the entire playing field to the real Independents.
Right now the big studios only want to make huge budget tentpole films, and as many of the veterans at the conference pointed out — this sort of thing has happened before. Every ten years or so, the big studios focus on tentpoles and only are dragged back into smaller films when a few Indies are both sufficiently critically and commercially successful to draw the attention of the big studios back to making “cinema rather than flicks.”
However, the prevailing attitude among both speakers and attendees who work as Indie filmmakers was that Independent filmmaking is suffering from overblown expectations stemming from too much money being spent on making small films during the recent Sundance–fed Indie film spec-market bubble.
In other words, they felt too many $1-5million films were having $8-16million (and similarly on up the scale) spent on their production. Furthermore, in a crowded media marketplace an advertising arms race is on, which makes competing for audience attention so expensive that films like $7.5million Juno rose to box office numbers upwards of $100million only atop marketing budgets upwards of $50million.
This has set Indie filmmakers’ expectations very high. “A Sundance Film” has become a trope, an anti-commercial approach as cliché as the Hollywood formula. As John states:
Yet the fact that we can say a script “feels like a Sundance movie” belies this intent. It’s shorthand for challenging, quirky, maddening and (if we’re being honest) non-commercial. We want these movies to exist. But we need to be honest about their prospects.
We do need to be honest about this. The financial expectation a filmmaker sets for his or her self when describing their story as “A Sundance Film” is Juno (approx. $140m off $7.5m) or Little Miss Sunshine (approx. $96m off $8m), not the equally excellent but quite different La Mission or Death In Love (both approx $2m budget, and both still seeking distribution). Only Indie spec market hype has taught us to assume our projects are the next Juno (and budget accordingly), not the next La Mission.
Spending $58million plus on a $4million film (or even one that’s legitimately an $8millon film) hoping to turn it into a $10omillion blockbuster by sheer force of marketing is a luxury only a huge corporation has (well, had).
You can’t afford to compete with that. Sure, it’d be nice to get picked-up by Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics, but it’s a lot easier to do so if you’ve understood your audience and convey that fact through your story, your pitch, and your budget. Even if you don’t win the Indie filmmaker lottery and score $8-16million in up-front financing for your first feature and a subsequent negative pick-up by one of the majors’ boutique shops, you can still make a great movie — maybe even one that makes enough money to let you do it a second time. Making a $2million film, or even a $250k film — or even a $50k film — isn’t a failure, it’s a huge success, even if other people are getting to make $10million films. Selling it is even better, and that’s going to much more possible if you’ve chosen your scope and budget based on an understanding of an actual audience.
Which gets to part of what John (and James Stern) are saying that ties into a point about Indie filmmaking that was also made repeatedly at Produced-By. John puts it this way:
Every filmmaker would like her movie to break out of its niche and gain wider exposure and acceptance. But Stern’s point is apt: figure out your base, and develop a marketing plan that succeeds even if it never goes beyond that. If this sounds more like planning a small business than planning a movie, that’s sort of the point.
At the Produced-By conference there was an Indie Distro panel where the panelists recommended, in light of the current attitudes of the corporations that run the big studios and exhibitors, that Producers start thinking about the business of Distribution — even becoming microdistributors themselves. John’s post briefly touches on alternate distribution (V.O.D. in particular) as a potential savior of Indie filmmaking (a topic that was much discussed at Produced-By), but in suggesting that you consider budgets, distribution and marketing during script development, John is basically suggesting that filmmakers (his audience is primarily aspiring Writers and Directors) think more like Producers.
Why should you think about parts of the process that “aren’t your job”? Because Independent filmmaking is entrepreneurship, and in any small business everyone involved needs to think about the bottom line when doing their jobs because there’s no huge corporation providing a cushion in case of failure. Most investors in truly Independent films are not in a position to throw their money away, and they want to see both a tenable budget and realistic expectations of return.
It’s pretty easy to understand the basic principle at play here: you want to spend less money on making your film than you reasonably believe, based on analysis not dreams, that you can make off of it. That’s the surest path to being able to make a second film, and a third, and a three hundred eighty seventh. Should you then get lucky and make $150million domestic gross off your $7.5million dollar film, that’s fantastic. But your $7.5 million dollar budget should be based on an audience analysis that gives good odds for $10million gross, not a reliance on winning a $150million box office lottery (in other words, don’t create unrealistic expectations in your backers).
And while Writers and Directors need to consider these things much more than perhaps they have in the past, Producers should ultimately still be responsible for thinking and acting like Producers. A good producer is responsible to both the creative team they’re a part of, and the financial team that is hoping for a return on their investment so they can work with you again. And if you don’t have the skills and drive necessary to Produce your own films, you really need to find someone to work with who is dedicated to the Producing craft.
Non-Producers still need to do what John and the others are suggesting and “keep their audience in mind from a project’s initial conception — even if that audience isn’t a typical mainstream audience.” Filmmakers need to aspire to making films that are personal, yet universal — not personal through smug inscrutability. And if your vision requires making a film with an extremely narrow appeal — budget accordingly.
And to be a good Producer you not only need to keep that audience in mind when working with the rest of the creative team to develop the voice, style, and scope of your film, but you’re also obligated to determine the realistic size of the target audience, and create budgets and marketing plans based on that.
Thinking about your audience is not anathema to great storytelling and filmmaking — or even art. By choosing to be a filmmaker and/or artist, you’ve chosen to communicate your ideas and stories to others rather than keeping them in your head, so you’ve already decided to care about speaking to an audience in terms of structure, theme, tone, visual style, and so on. It’s all about reaching an audience. And understanding the business dimensions of your audience, or developing a relationship with a Producer you trust who does, will enable you to craft projects that are designed to be successful both artistically and financially.
So to paraphrase several folks at the Produced-By conference: It’s always a hard time to be an Independent filmmaker. Are you going to do something about it, or just sit around complaining waiting for some big studio to give you a handout?
About The Indie Auteur
