In-World War

In-World War movie update - Winter Solstice 2010

To celebrate the darkest day of the year (and the coming light of longer days), we wanted to share some new stills with you from our recent pick-up shoots over the last few months. These are additional scenes and reshoots to help fill out the story.

Since our main DP Donavan Sell was already booked -- he was the Director of Photography for principal photography and our 2nd unit shoots in Europe  -- we were excited to work with a number of other DPs for these shoots, including Dane Brehm, Jamie Metzger and Frazer Bradshaw (whose Sundance feature Everything Strange and New is a huge critical hit).

Enjoy these stills from these great DPs, giving a glimpse into new scenes and shots for the film.

In the last photo, we include a rare behind-the-scenes shot. Eventually, we'll be showing off more of these glimpses of making In-World War. But we wanted you to get a quick look at one of our location shoots. This specific scene was shot in a Turkish restaurant in New York City.

We have one more day of extensive pick-ups we need to fund in January. Today's a great day to donate, and you get a 2010 tax deduction too. Please donate to support the project today.

 

 

 

Why all the pick-ups, 2nd unit and reshooting?

We're doing a ton of pick-ups and 2nd unit work: three days in NYC, four days in the Bay Area, plus all those random inserts -- not counting the eight or so days of 2nd unit work in Europe right after principal photog in Fall of 2009.

Many people are asking: Why are we doing so much shooting after principal photography?

There are three main reasons for all this additional work:

• The script was too ambitious for our 17 day principal shoot. We got a ton done, but had to pop a number of crucial scenes from the schedule. These were either scenes we couldn't get (due to logistics) or they weren't as crucial to the story (i.e. if we didn't shoot them, we could still tell the story, even if less-powerfully so). Now that we have the time, we want to shoot as many of these as we can.
• Due to our ultra-low budget, we weren't sure during principal photography if we would be able to go on location for the scenes set in NYC, Ireland and France. Thanks to good luck mainly, we were able to make most of these shoots happen (many frequent flyer tickets and "kindness of strangers" moments later). That meant we essentially reshot a bunch of footage we shot during principal. But thank god -- Oakland just doesn't pass as fake NYC or France. You can't beat the production value provided by these authentic locations. Nothing says Dublin. Ireland like Dublin, Ireland.
• Lastly, there's some stuff we just needed to shoot to make the film work. That might be reshooting a scene or single shot (mainly due to poor, hurried directorial choices during principal photog) or adding a shot or even a whole new scene to help tell the story better. Once we had a revised assembly edit, it really gave us the roadmap for what we needed. These fill in the crucial gaps in the overall story and the storytelling of a given scene.

This additional post-principal photography shooting is not cheap. Day for day it's considerably more expensive than principal, despite a much smaller cast and crew. But the footage is looking amazing and really adds layers of depth to the film, both visually and for the story.

(Which is a great opportunity to remind you that donations to the project are still desperately needed and are tax-deductible. Please give something to support our team this holiday season!).

If you're going to sacrifice this much blood, sweat and tears on something, it's worth the extra effort to make it as strong as possible.

A different perspective on NYC

On our New York shoot back in early October, my college pal (and fellow screenwriter) Kevin Brodie came in from Conneticut to work as script supervisor and PA -- basically to see what its like on an indie film set. Despite the frantic pace and often touch-and-go moments, Kev maintained a calmness and professionalism through-out (it probably helps that he's a high school teacher and used to working with maturity-challenged groups).

Kevin wrote up an article about his experiences working on the IWW crew on his blog and described what it was like as a non-Muslim white guy guarding the door of a mostly-immigrant mosque in Manhattan. Read it here.