Dublin, Ireland
Did an eleven hour shoot here -- it really came together.
Since our pal Nora lived here, I was hoping to make this one of the more ambitious shoots. She works for a film production company, dates a filmmaker and was willing to help pull it all together. Fabulous!
We weren't sure of our arrival into Dublin until less than a week before we got here. We were going to go to Amsterdam first, but the whole town was sold out since there was a big int'l broadcasters' convention (damn industry types). So we swapped in Ireland -- moving up the production date in the process.
To get the ball rolling, we set a date to shoot (Saturday Sept. 9) and she recommended we get in touch with a local actors collective. I sent out a casting call via their website and got a small handful of responses.
Of course, the entire sequence was not yet written. I knew I wanted the main character to be much older in this scene and I knew it was in Dublin (duh), but that's about it.
We got to Galway first and unexpectedly (a RyanAir fuck-up -- or Cryin'Air as I call them) -- and it was only on the bus ride to Dublin that I finally figured out the plot for these Irish scenes.
Oliver, who played the main character, was fantastic. We actually hung out with him the night before the shoot, so he and I could bond. He proved invaluable and was a great sport about the whole thing. He secured our pub location (despite a very nervous manager), which was much tougher than I thought (otherwise, it's illegal to film in a pub). He also offered great suggestions about locations, as only a longtime resident can do.
The shoot itself went smoothly, though I was totally spent afterwards. Production is the most intensive time for me, since I wear so many hats (DP, Director, Producer, etc.). There's never a moment to breath really and I always need to be thinking of the final product: "how will this look in sequence?" and "do we have enough coverage and b-roll to cover up stuff in editing."
I've decided to use jump cuts through-out the film, as a stylistic element, which will help move the film forward but also me to use otherwise bad takes (just snip out the bad part via a jump cut). I don't want to be in a situation where the shot is great except for a few frames -- and there's no inserts that could work. Better to build the whole thing to be as fool-proof as possible.
You can call it cheating, or you can call it smart guerrilla filmmaking. We'll see how the final product looks before we decide which it is.
Nora was a champ, really coming through with locations and casting. We even had a second camera on some of the locations, thanks to a friend of hers. His camera looked ten times as expensive as mine, so we'll probably have to dirty up his crisp footage to match the shit that I'm getting with the consumer sony hd cam I'm using, but it's great to have the options to work with.
As I'm going through this, I'm realizing that I'm shooting a tun of footage. Video is horrible for discipline as far as shooting ratio is concerned. Still, I'd rather have too many options than not enough and most of the extra footage isn't extra takes of the same shot, but lots of b-roll and different angles to work with in editing. One thing's for sure, I'll need a ton of hard drive space to edit all this. Luckily it's getting cheaper, but I'll have to buy some soon if I intend to edit any of it on the road.
We're finally getting to Amsterdam tomorrow (after extending the Ireland trip, since we're having such a blast here). I really want to shoot there, even if it's just a quickie scene, just for fun.
Of course, I also want to continue to get footage behind me. There's definitely some momentum right now and I don't want to wait to Barcelona to shoot again (that's the current official plan though). We shot a quick scene in Paris and I'd like to do the same in Amsterdam -- maybe even with me as the main character. We'll see if we can pull it together.
Based on a 12 hour shooting day and the 18 days it took to shoot Quality of Life (19 I guess since the last day was a 24 hour day basically), I figure about I'm 2 full days into the shoot. That means we're about 1/9th the way done. It doesn't sound like much, but it's definitely a start. If we can get halfway done with shooting while in Europe, I'll consider that a huge success.
I'm also thinking of having a worldwide contest for people in random cities to shoot scenes and send them in -- and then include the best couple in the film. After all, there's no reason why I have to be the only one shooting them since the main character changes in each city. It would be a great way to include cities that I'm not getting to (imagine: Moscow, Tokyo, Rio, NYC, etc.).
Big dreams as usual.
