PART EIGHT - "Remembering AMNESIA": Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker Shot an Apacolyptic Thiller for $6,000 and Gained the Attention of Media Outlets."

PART EIGHT

Racing Ahead

(picture to left is before and after skyreplacement from post-production of the House-with-the-Windmill)

After getting the first two days of shooting out of the way I had Wens-Sat to try to get as many scenes "in the can" with the three main characters as much as possible.  The original plan, as I explained in the prior posts, was to get the biggest cast scenes (except for scene 34) shot in the first 4 days to get the largest scenes possible out of the way.  Mike and Jon's music performance schedule force us to do Monday/Tuesday on week one then Monday/Tuesday of the second week.  Ironically this was going to work to my advantage because of our lighting situation.

I still couldn't find lighting for the night scenes.  I was going to be shooting night-for-night. I wouldn't recommend it.  I researched it and I knew the lights I needed.  The original budget I came up with to purchase for this time around with the film was an additional $15,000.  A large portion of that was for lights.  Then I had to trim the new additional funding budget down to $7,000 which allowed me some extra money to buy this special "broadlight" that I would use for the moonlight.  I would then just have to make sure the camera was framed up a way to maximize this one light (simulating the moon).  This budget was not going to happen and I ended up with the money to buy the camera and microphone (we made the boom pole to put the mic on.)  I was searching for lights.  I called anyone I thought I could borrow the lights from.  Nothing worked out.

I continued to shoot.  I had a certain amount of scenes originally scheduled for each day, but I tried to see if I could cram another one in per day.  I had this sneaky suspicion that something was going to go wrong that would either end the production or would temporarily shut it down.  I felt that if I got as much "in the can" as possible in the first couple weeks then I had a better chance to finish it.

One of the scenes we shot in the days after the first two days was a scene called, "Put The Gun Down!".  In the scene Allan had acquired a hand gun in a prior scene.  She tries to convince him to put the gun down, she's trying to live up to her ideals of being a pacifist.   But he is angry, really angry. I had storyboarded certain shots that would both create a sense of personal connection with the audience plus cut down on shooting time.  We found that the sound isssues we delt with caused the second reason to not happen according to plan. Below are two scene excerpts, the first one is the "Put the Gun Down" scene:

Not having the proper shock mount the microphone would pick up "clicks" and other sounds created by movement.  Andrew ran camera for this scene.  He had to wrap around Allan and Sandra after Allan turns around. Andrew also ran the sound at the same time so he had to try to keep us in camera while trying to keep the mic from creating the extra, annoying sounds.  We did take, after take, after take.  Finally Andrew couldn't take the stress of trying to keep the sound from sounding awful.  He suddenly burst out in a tantrum of yells (I don't completely recall what exactly he said).  Jenny, playing Sandra, stood there in shock. Andrew scared her with his burst of anger... and ironically it helped her play her character better.  She was seriously scared for the part where Allan is having his own tantrum

I called "action" for a final time.  We ran the shot, I walked up to the camera, Sandra spoke her line, I turned around and start into my tantrum and she started to back away with her face.  I became so involved in "the moment" that I actually screwed up the line and it sounded even more natural then the original line.  We wrapped up the shot and everyone felt that we had really brought out the best that was possible for the scene.

One of the scenes we shot was at an abandoned stone house that was burned down.  It sat at the top of a blueberry covered hill.  The only thing that remained was the stone part of the structure.  We attempted to shoot the scene at dusk.  We found out very quickly on that we showed up too late and it was too dark to shoot.  The other concern I had was that the scene was shot handheld with the sky completely open to the view of the camera.  The sky in the film is cloud, all the time.  The sky when we showed up was bright blue.

The next day we decided to go back up to the burned down stone house, but several hours earlier.  Since we had to drive off road to get to the stone house I wanted to get several scenes shot at once.  I shot the morning scene which was only 3 shots of Sandra and AJ talking.  It went very quickly. 

We had brought a guy named Sergio up with us.  We convinced him to run the camera for one of the shots in the main scene at the burned down stone house.  He had never run a camera before, but we convinced him that we could show him how to do it.  The shot was suppose to look like someone spying in on a conversation between Allan, Sandra and AJ from on top of the stone house.  Sergio had alot of guts, so we convinced him to climb up on a ladder and sit on top of the stone house.  Once again, the cameraman had to run camera and the mic at the same time.  This time we put the mic in his hand, hoping it would cut down on shake.  It did, but we also were fighting against the wind, being on top of a hill.

I was inspired by our shot inspiration "Citizen Kane", so after the first shot was finished, and Andrew had the camera I improvised on the shots I wanted.  I had him go outside the building and shoot through the window to see the back of my head with Sandra in the far background.  Then I had him reverse the shot and shoot through the opposite window, seeing her head in the foreground and Allan in the far background.  I then grabbed the camera and shot Sandra from the point-of-view from the fire pit (no fire).  I gave the camera back to Andrew and he shot my closeup as Allan. 

The greatest part of the reshoot of the scene was the fact that in the entire shooting of the film it was the one scene that showed an entire landscape full of cloudy skies and that was exactly what we got in-camera the day of the shoot.  It would have been a nightmare to do the post-production skyreplacement for the scene if I had to do.

The cave was entirely demolished by a rain storm a day after we had shot the main cave scenes.  Before doing the reshoot of the burned-down-stone house, we had created a cave tunnel full of rocks and candles.  Emmeditaly, after the reshoot of burned-down-stonehouse, we shot the cave tunnel scene.

At the end of the week we shot the House-With-The-Windmill.  The house that was just up the street from where we were living.  It was one Route 1.  Anyone who has travelled down Route 1 in Maine, especially on the coast, knows that the traffic is almost non-stop.  How could I give the impression of a house in an area completely unoccupied by any humans?

I set up the camera on a tripod, in my car, across the stree, in a gas station and shot the wides shot of the scene.  We ran over and over again, hoping the one of the shots we would have enough screen time without a car driving by.  Then I brought the camera across the street and shot the other shots.  All of them were on a tripod (we borrowed from a friend).  I knew that locking the camera down on a tripod for the shots would achieve two purposes:  enhances the suspense of the scene and also making motion-tracking easier for skyreplacement.  We ran each shot over and over again.  Luckily for me I had written the scene with very few lines and they were spaced out.  This made it easier for us with the issue of the traffic.  One of the things I really like was that I set up every camera shot in the scene. 

We continued to push through as many scenes as possible.  I still needed lights for the night scenes coming up on Monday and I still didn't have a blank firing gun for one of the important scenes coming up.  Things were becoming increasingly more stressful