One of the most stressful film experiences of my freaking life! And that said, it was a great experience. I had just purchased my own sound and video equipment so I was finally in a position to do high quality productions and I signed up for a DMC 265 course, advanced digital filmmaking. Much like the course I produced The Way We Are in, the objective of the class was to break up into crews within the class and produce our own films. It was a bizarre first day. First off, I had no idea that we needed a script ready to go on that first day (because I had taken the 264 class in the summer, not in the winter only a couple weeks before when it was offered again, and obviously everyone in that class got the memo - have script ready!). When we split up a bunch of people had obviously decided what crews to be in and I got jammed in with the four or five other people that had no idea who to group up with. We lost someone, gained someone, one of our crew members went to jail the night before we started shooting (and we never saw him again), it was an interesting experience.
So there we were, complete strangers, and we were throwing around ideas and I suddenly knew I had to come up with something. I had to have something in my arsenal. Out of nowhere a short comedic piece I had written about three years before popped into my head, a short piece I had tried to shot a few times but could never really get anything going on it. The film, once tilted The Day After Last Night, was called The Morning After. Initially others presumed the film revolved around a morning after pill type concept. But the script itself follows a young, uptight character named Max who finds his world turned upside down when he wakes up after a drunken party and finds that he brought a girl home with whom he may or may not have had sex with. The main problem: he’s already in a relationship.
Now I had been looking forward to this 265 course for a while, but did not know what that course necessarily entailed. I didn’t know if we were working as crews in the class or if we were all striking it out on our own. And when all is said and done I really did wish I had a stronger script at that time to throw at everyone. I had a script for a piece titled The Runner, which I had been working on during the winter and hoped to shoot at the 265 project, but I knew it would be too much to do in a course such as that. The script had its funny moments to be sure, but it had its shortcomings as well and even now it still annoys me that this film was one of the first things that I was involved in that was shown to a large audience because it did not remotely represent my best work. The script all takes place in one place, so it functions more like a one-act play than a film, thus it was a little stagnant. The fact that the dialogue got a little redundant did not help matters there. To put it bluntly, the script was old and thus represented a much more minor dialogical effort on my part.
But all of that said, what started out as a collection of people thrown together, forced to produce a film together, blossomed into a strong friendship. Being one of the fastest crews to get started on our production in the whole class we were also the group that was having the most fun, going out to dinners and bowling together in addition to filmmaking. So it was a fun experience overall, but as far as getting to work I found myself taking practically the whole project under my shoulders. It wasn’t that my fellow crew members weren’t doing their job or didn’t know how and it wasn’t that I was a possessive jerk, but it was just that at that time I had stronger experience in so many of the key areas we were working in. I had more directing, cinematography, sound and editing experience. For those three months in that course I put about as much work into this film as anyone could. After shooting the whole piece I found that our sound guy hadn’t quite been up to par and in this film with one leading lady and one leading man, the male’s voice came out much stronger and we found it was obvious that his voice was overpowering hers. This forced us to completely ADR all of her dialogue to bring her up to his level because if we had just brought up her audio levels the background hiss difference would have been obvious. However, after engaging in a four-hour ADR session with her we had a new problem: now her dialogue was more crisp than our leading man. His audio had become inferior. I ended up doing a three and a half hour ADR session with him. And to round everything out, I had to also do an hour and a half ADR session with the girl who played the lead’s girlfriend, who appears late in the film.
That was just one of the many headaches I took on because I knew I would get the job done the way it needed to be. By the time all was said and done about 99% of all the sound in the film was ADR’ed and it sadly shows. Even though practically all the voiceovers matched with the character’s mouths it is clear that something is not quite right with their voices. They sound like they’re reading off the script, as they were, but they are obviously not seeing doing so on camera.
The editing process was ongoing. I practically cut the whole film together and found myself running through the piece several times as there was a slight yellow tint created throughout the house we shot in from the lighting. But when all was said and done we had a viable piece of work, which included me pulling an all-nighter to get a rough cut done for previewing by the class. It was a sold 20+ hours of work and by the time I made it into school at noon the following day for class I was literally shaking and was planning on just turning in the rough cut and going home. But Mr. Professor stopped me right there, telling me I needed to be there to take notes when the class viewed the film. On the verge of passing out all I could think at the time was, “You dick!” But I later realized that he had noticed how much of the grunt work I was doing and I think he was concerned that no one else in my group would have taken down notes so I needed to be there to do that. Now I know my fellow group members would have taken down notes, but at least our teacher’s reasoning for keeping me there was a good one. We viewed it and one of my crew members gave my corpse a ride home.
It was the Monday before the grand unveiling of our projects at our college’s film festival, which was scheduled for two days later. Monday was “turn the final project in”. I had spent all weekend getting everything finalized and copied off a final as an H.264 file, which we were required to save the final as. Then, Monday morning, I realized suddenly some of the film’s dialogue was a frame off from the film, a small and yet clearly noticeable problem. We had three hours in class on that Monday and I had made all the fixes right before class. The H.264 file I had published the night before only took fifteen minutes to publish. I had never had any problems with publishing in that format. But then, of course, in class publishing in this format once more to turn the absolute final version of the film in the software decided to lag. Every one percent of the film that was published it added another ten minutes to the publishing time. I ended up having to try and download it as an MP4, knowing that format is often crap at best. But it was recommended by Mr. Professor, so I went with it. I then found out later that the MP4 downloaded didn’t work. The audio was completely off.
Fortunately, we were given an extension. We had to have an H.264 copy to the teacher before 6 p.m. Wednesday night, the time that the film festival began. It was so frustrating because everyone in the class took till the last minute to turn their films in and that’s a regular thing, but I don’t want to be that “regular thing”. If I am going to have to mix in with a crowd being late with a final is not the way in which I want to be blending in. So I had two days. It should’ve been easy. I just started publishing again as an H.264 and let it take it’s several hours to finish and I would have been fine. But, upon arriving at home, I found that midway through this publishing would lock up. Not only as an H.264 file but also trying to download it as an NTSC file, and then a PAL file. This film had just decided to be a total curse. That Tuesday and Wednesday was one of the most stressful times of my life. After all this work, if we didn’t have a viable project to show at the festival we were going to likely fail the class. I then looked back at how much I had taken on and knew inside that this was not going to happen. I literally tried over twenty different ways to try and download the film and all encountered a problem. I literally, out of desperation, dumped the whole project onto my old PC and tried to burn a copy through Microsoft Movie Maker and DVD maker, but in being files from a Mac nothing matched.
The greatest problem was we were required to turn in the final on a DVD, and I couldn’t because my Mac was nearly brand new and I had just assumed there was DVD burning software on there since I had a DVD drive on it. To that point I hadn’t had a reason to check. So once I finally got my Mac to cooperate and publish an H.264 file this new problem simply negated that old one. It got to be 4 p.m., two hours before the festival, and I had no way to get this thing to burn. I thought we were screwed when I suddenly got through to my buddy Josh, who was going to the festival with me, and he just happened to have purchased a refurbished Mac himself. Because it was refurbished it was an older model from back in the day when they put DVD burner software on there. Like a bat out of hell I made him rush over to pick me up, we booked it to his place and I burned a copy, freaking out every second that the film was burning, just presuming something was going to go wrong here too. But it went through and burned a copy, I checked it and everything was working. I nearly collapsed just from the transition of two days of stress to a suddenly moment of relief and relaxation.
My friend dropped me off at 5 p.m., we got the disc to our professor and somehow, someway the film got done was shown at the festival. It’s somewhat annoying that I put so much effort into a film that I just really did not care for that much. Just in general, it was one of my weaker efforts both in terms of being a writer and also in the way it was shot. But at the same time it was one of those projects where everything that could go wrong did. And I was astounded that, of the five films that were made in that class ours was easily the second best one. One of the best parts was that our film was packed with sexual innuendo and commentary, as would make sense, and there were so many extremely conservative-looking elderly folks there (I presume to be grandparents of some of the students there). We got laughs where I expected and everything went over pretty well. I’ve found others like the film a lot more than me so maybe I’m just being a jerk to myself. When the festival was over, and each group had the chance to go up on stage and take questions from the audience, we got the most... I presume because of all the sexual content. If nothing more, which the film is not one of my favorites, it proved, at least for me, that I could stick it out a work myself to the core to get the project done when it was due. And any critiques I have about it only helped me on future projects. After having so much ambivalence about the cinematography of The Morning After, I found my next collection of works were much improved and much more back on track. Lessons always learned.
Can be seen on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXy_OuuuCN0
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