Making my first short film 2/3 – Production
So it begins…
Hey you came to learn more. If you haven’t already, make sure to start this by reading the Pre-Production process before carrying on with this one.
It was a very exciting feeling to know we had finally reached a point where the cast and crew were travelling to the Airbnb. This was really happening. I’ve actually been able to assemble a team of strangers and got them interested enough to commit to this project. It was an exhilarating feeling.
Brandon Whelan and James Storey were travelling all the way from Manchester, Leon Clements Beall was coming all the way from Southampton, Gemma Wilson was coming all the way from Scarborough, Molly Springs and Tramell Ellis-Rowe were coming London’s outskirts, Nathan Bhamra was coming from Milton Keynes, and then there was Liam Peacock, Lucelia Agostinho and Alex Tuohy coming from different parts of London. I had recently relocated to London as well just the week prior.
Those coming from outside London went to the Airbnb the night before, and Molly sent me this video. I felt so much excitement seeing these strangers come together as a result of my chaotic planning and toxic optimism.
Day 1
On the morning of the shoot, I was so nervous. I looked in the mirror so many times, trying to feel like a movie character preparing to do something epic… Then I got the first bad news… Lucelia might be late for the first shoot. She had an important appointment, and said she would do her best to get there after that.
We had planned to shoot the abandoned footpath scene and two stone circle scenes on this day. If Lucelia didn’t make it, we’ll have a problem.
But we couldn’t dwell on that because there was at least one scene we could shoot at the stone circle without her. And that was when I realised the first miracle – two of our teammates brought their own cars.
Tramell the sound engineer, and Nathan the actor and financial sponsor. That would save us a lot of transportation money and time. I can’t be grateful enough for that. Moreover, the two available cars had sufficient room to fit every single one of us who needed to be there. It was so convenient that if Lucelia had shown up, we wouldn’t have had room for her in the available cars. How lucky right?
Nathan picked me up, and in his car was Brandon, Liam, and Alex. It was great to meet all these online faces in person for the first time. Brandon also told me about what he brought with him: pretty much everything. He brought a boom mic, video camera, lights and more. How very fortunate for us.
So we started our journey to Lewisham. I assumed it was a 30mins journey, but we were still en route an hour after setting off. It sucks when everyone starts looking at you when a location is much farther than we initially thought. Like, come on guys, I didn’t build that place all the way there. Lol. But we got there… At 2ish. Will we have enough time?
Well, we didn’t have enough time… but we didn’t act like it. Tramell’s group arrived first and had started to prepare. Did I tell you I was an insanely shy person? Well, probably not because this article only started… But when I got out of the car, all my introversion came calling. I had a whole speech in mind about how I’ll introduce the team to one another and get the ball rolling. But when i got there, I had nothing to say. Just a shy hello to everyone, and then stood aside to let them prepare.
They were relying on me to take the reins, and direct them on what to do next but I felt so wrong. It was mostly because I didn’t feel like I was doing great. I felt very nervous, anxious nd I didn’t have anyone who could look at everything and tell me that this was great. All I had was my thoughts and feelings of incompetency howling at me with the wind. Not a great place to be as the director and producer.
And in order to not be completely frozen in place, I spent time helping Brandon set up the camera while we went on over shot decisions. I finally got to shake hands with Leon, and I didn’t make it as magical and elaborate as I’d have liked it. He had been a reliable teammate throughout this process so I was expecting to give a bigger Hello. Lol.
When all the makeup and setups were completed, it was time to try for the first time. We tried a number of shots, and looking back, I realise how inexperienced I was. I completely left the storyboard on my phone in my pocket, and worked on completely new shots as discussed on the fly. Brandon hadn’t seen the storyboard much himself so he was throwing ideas around while I kept saying, “Sure, let’s try that.” “Sure, why not?” “Sure, let’s give it a try”. I eventually remembered my storyboard and wanted to reference it so bad. I knew deep within me that I wanted to capture the shots I had planned, but I was constantly getting unasked-for suggestions that I didn’t say No to. A squirrel got your nuts sir?
This ended up wasting so much time with very minimal results. When it got dark and I realised we had barely completed one scene, it hit me that we just might not be able to pull off this short film. We had so many more scenes to complete. Will we be able to tackle all of them? Will all of them be like this? What am I going to do? Should I pull the plugs now and save us the headache? That can’t be an option now that I’m knee-deep in this.
As we initially thought, Lucelia wouldn’t make it on time to shoot her scene at the park… We would have to leave the park with two scenes instead of three. And as we prepared to leave, we brought both cars onto the field to pack our equipment. And we took our precious time.
This bothered the locals at the park, which led someone to call the police on us. I was helping pack up Brandon’s camera when I saw the police car pull up – no sirens and no blue and reds. They appeared to just be watching us at first. And we still weren’t moving fast.
So both policemen approached us. I remember thinking to myself, “OMG, we don’t have a permit to shoot. What am I gonna do? Am I gonna get arrested?” They asked what we were up to, and I went with the best answer I could think of. “We’re making a YouTube video.” which was technically not a lie. They doubted and said there were too many of us for a YouTube video. They explained that if there are this many of us with a big camera, boom mic and stuff, it’s considered a film, and we need a permit for that kind of thing.
“Oh do we? We usually just take out our camera and goof around. We’re sorry about that. We were just about leaving”. This led them to address our parking situation as well. “You’re not allowed to park on the grass”. We apologised for that as well, and within minutes, were on our way out of Lewisham.
The group dropped me off at my place, and continued on their way to the Airbnb at the stable. Thus ended Day 1 of our three-day shoot. Overall, I hated it so much. I was so angry at myself for not been better prepared for interacting with the rest of the team. Everything would’ve been so much better if I had spoken out and asserted myself some more. We wasted so much time for so few results, and worst of all, we didn’t get one of the important scenes. Hopefully things get better on…
Day 2
We were to meet at the trailer on the farm for Day 2. That’s where everyone was staying as well. All 10 of us were present at the location today, and we hoped to cover as much as possible because we don’t have much time after today.
But first, I made sure to have a conversation with Leon and Brandon to get their opinion on a very sensitive issue. One of our actors has had a minor limp when he walks that’s unfortunately noticeable. The problem is that this actor did not open up to me about this during the entire pre-production process. Inasmuch as it’s very sensitive, it would’ve been very useful to know that because it would’ve informed how I wrote this actor’s character. So on Day 1, when I noticed the actor’s slight limp, I realised that it ruined the scene and didn’t match the vision for the film.
I asked what Leon and Brandon thought, and they didn’t have solid enough opinions to give regarding it. So I called the actor in question ask spoke to him about it as well. The actor insisted that it wasn’t an issue that he needed to disclose to me, and I disagree because that makes all the difference in how we portray his character. So ultimately, I had to let the actor know that we can’t use him for that scene because of the visible limp. It was a hard thing to do discuss since this was my first film and he was a volunteer. I still think about it till today and wonder if I was wrong about bringing it up with him.
We then had to wait for Molly to prepare the hair and makeup of Lucelia for some hours. When she was ready, we were ready to film our first scene of the day. But before that, Molly approached me privately. She had brought something she wanted to show me. An entire portfolio of her hand-drawn art. This was going to make a significant difference in how we decorated the set and gave the artist stuff to do. I was so grateful to have this addition to the project.
Now, let’s call “Action”. Here, my directorial inexperience came to play once again. We wasted so much time trying to perfect that first scene. By the time we went on to the next one, so much time had passed. Dude! Seriously!?
But we cracked on. We actually shot several scenes on this day till it got dark…
Then we realised that there were still some indoor scenes that we hadn’t covered. At this point, Leon was also worried. He came up to me and suggested, “Would it be worth shooting all night?” Brandon supported the idea.
I was so worried when I heard this. Won’t I be overworking the cast and especially crew members? But Tramell said he was fine, and Brandon was good to go. The actors as well agreed to keep it going all night. So it was unanimous. We will pull an all-nighter. The only person I couldn’t trust to pull it off was myself because I hadn’t slept at all the previous night. I had stayed up in frustration and anxiety due to the events of that day.
But we kept going – night rangers – an epic unstoppable team – nothing can stop… oh look the director dozed off at midnight. My body was not having it. At that time, I hadn’t started down my caffeine addiction path so when it was time to sleep, my body didn’t want any excuses. I felt so bad to be dozing off as a director when everyone else was still working. I tried to hold firm… but I couldn’t help it.
I took an hour power nap, and woke up to find that everyone was still going. I made this embarrassing video when I woke up.
Leon and Brandon had picked up to cover the scenes that I had already discussed extensively with him over the months leading to filming.
Re-energised, I picked up when I woke up. We shot Nathan’s scenes where he interacts with the Artist’s character played by Alex. This was actually my favourite scene because I had framed it so well in my head, and the location was ideal. Brandon also had some ideas about portraying Nathan’s character that really impressed me.
We kept shooting till daybreak of…
Day 3
Since we couldn’t use the scenes we shot at the stone circle on Day 1, we had to go back to Lewisham to film the Day 1 scenes all over again. Brandon was happy to cover the scene that the previous actor couldn’t play properly. Looking back, this was a silly idea to redo this whole sequence because we could’ve just used the shots we already had and then used Day 3 to cover the missing scenes at the different location. Rookie!!
Anyways, we started Day 3 by stressing out Tramell. Out of everyone, it was he and Brandon who had had exerted themselves the most and had the least rest. But Tramell had to drive half the group in his car to Lewisham while Nathan carried the rest of us.
When we got to Lewisham, we waited some time for Tramell to get a power nap. When we went back to inspect the stone circle, we found that it had rained previously so the ground was not the best. But we didn’t travel this whole way for nothing.
We decided to film some of the scenes without Tramell at first. We managed to capture some scenes, to that effect. We also captured some close-up scenes, and I’m sure we tried to do some action sequences.
By the time Tramell was up, we had another issue. Today was a Sunday, and unlike a Friday afternoon, today would have lots of people using the park. In no time, the park was flooded with different people doing their own thing, and we could no longer film there. See why we shouldn’t have made this journey? Complete Rookie mistake! We then travelled back to the trailer on the farm.
We spend some hours here going over what we have accomplished so far and what to do next. At this point, my self-doubt came calling. “Look what you’ve done to these poor people. Look at how tired they all look, and that’s all your fault.” I began to feel like I had let everyone down. And we still had a couple more scenes to film.
Leon switched into solution mode. He suggested we use teleportation to bridge the gap in the story. I explained that I don’t like to introduce teleportation into my universe because it breaks the universe and is too convenient. Brandon doubled down on the teleportation thought, insisting that it’ll solve the plot hole that was now showing up as a result of not finishing the scene at the stone circle. I just couldn’t allow teleportation into my story, and I could tell that this frustrated Brandon quite a bit.
After enough time waiting around, we decided to ask people around the stable if they knew of a forest-y area which we can shoot our final scene. The neighbour of the stable was able to suggest one and how to get to it. So once again, we hopped into Tramell and Nathan’s cars and rode to find an open field bordered by a thick area full of trees. This was perfect.
We filmed the scene of the Artist meeting the Painted Goddess. We then went on to start filming the final fight. We went as fast as we could. But there was still a lot of issues with Brandon suggesting how he thought we should film the scenes as opposed to my direction. This further delayed the process because I kept saying, “Sure”, “Fine”, and “Let’s try that”. Grow some balls Mr. Director.
Anyway, when it got dark, Brandon brought out his lights and we kept going… But there was only so much we could do. We couldn’t finish filming the final scene to wrap the story.
We needed one final encounter between Gemma’s character Morgan and The Painted Goddess, as well as the resolution between the Artist and his sister and we were unable to film those scenes. Worst of all, we all had to return to our various homes the following day. I failed. I felt so crushed. I couldn’t think about what to do next.
Leon switched into consolation mode. He suggested various ways we could fill in the gap of what we didn’t shoot. He told me this was great, and I should be happy with what we accomplished. But I knew what we had captured, and it was not enough to make this story that I had written down. This film was a passion project that cost all the money in my bank account so I can’t just organise this shoot again on a whim.
Back at the trailer at the stable, we ordered pizza and laughed about random stuff. Tramell had come up with this funny catchphrase that escapes me now. He made everyone laugh their guts out, which was pleasant to experience. In that moment, I didn’t need to think about this recent filmmaking experience.
When the pizza delivery man arrived, I took it as my cue to leave. The others asked me to stay… And I really wish I had stayed… It would’ve been a great opportunity to connect with Leon and the rest of the team on a personal level, but I didn’t. Rookie level 3000.
That was how I concluded the last shooting day. Aw man. If you were hoping for a happy ending, I’m sorry to disappoint. My production had flopped. What now? Well, now we wrap up.
In our next article, I’ll tell you about the three-year post-production process that came after this, and hopefully, I’ll share the final results at that point.