Where to start
Monday/July/2009 09:42 AM
Let me start by saying that this is presented by BOB but it is a collection of production advice gathered from a fifty-person production crew that shot two feature films back-to-back in about a month. Our crew didn’t miss a single day of production goals. We never cut a scene or pushed back shooting because we were unprepared for it. There are flaws with this method, just like any creative collaboration, but it is the best we can present and we can back it up with real on-set examples.
Double Shot Script Model:
Start with your choice of film. Make it local. Find a story that takes place in your backyard and invest in the idea that it will be shot completely within walking distance of the primary location (this rule can and will be bent, but some production schedules budget as much as 50 percent of the time for “production moves.” and with a limited budget and local talent with jobs, this is unacceptable). If you like thrillers, create a thriller that would occur in your town. If you live outside of the major cities, plan on using exteriors. They are the strength and the novelty of your setting. Nobody has seen Billings, MT the way you have. Use that. Police charge 125 dollars an hour to sit outside your set in LA, but in some places, they’ll shut down traffic just to let a hometown filmmaker practice his craft. This is especially true in small-town America. We shot in the desert after shooting interiors in LA and the entire community rallied around the production. People shut down their businesses just to be an extra in the film. THAT is the kind of help that you need when shooting a low-budget film.
Keep the page count to 90. This might sound arbitrary, and it is, but you don’t have the luxury of being long-winded. Think of each five pages as an extra day or two of production. Think that you’ve been shooting for thirty days already. Adding anything to the story that will be cut in editing is a real shame. Stay away from car crashes, laser battles and historic recreations of any kind. These just look silly in low-budget land. Once you’ve finished the script, decide if you want to commit to the Double Shot Model. It will give you and your actors a chance to show versatility and range, but it is not an easy road (neither is producing just one however, so think about it).
Count the characters and model your second script with crossover in mind.
Make the leads in the first film the supporting cast in the second.
Change the genre of film. If you have a drama, write the outline for a comedy and make sure you are interested in it before you jump in.
Keep the primary location the same. If the primary location is a diner in your sci-fi, make it the same in your second script. This isn’t as hard as it seems. If you wrote the first film around a diner, you must have an idea of diner culture. Flipping the script and looking at it in a different way is actually not that hard. We chose a coffee shop for our first double shot. We are using a diner for the next production.
Don’t worry if you have a gender gap. You can bring in a few new people for each film, but it is the goal to have everyone in the first play some role in the second and of course vice versa.
Age is important. A teenage lead cannot turn into a weathered farmer for the second film. Don’t force people into roles. You’re doing no one a favor by showing them in this way. We had a role for a deaf videographer in our first film and we decided to go with a hearing-impaired actress even though the part she was paired with was already cast. We split the parts when the need arose, but we kept to the plan everywhere we could. This modification provided us with one of the most memorable characters in our films, and the actress who played the hearing-impaired role was simply put astonishingly good in the role.
If you want to change the voice of the scripts (a great way to work with your own material and others) sit down and outline the second project with a writer. He or she will then work on the script independently and it will still feel like it fits in the DS concept. Directing a project written by another writer can be a liberating experience. You’ll be less likely to take things personally when they aren’t working and maybe more free to interpret a scene. Some of the best work in our first project was done by the actors when they were given the chance to re-invent their lines themselves. Some writer directors have a hard time allowing that. YOUR EGO HAS TO BE BIG TO START A PROJECT LIKE THIS, but you don’t have to let it show in production.
You’ve chosen your scripts, now it is time for pre-production. This is make or break.
Bob
Double Shot Script Model:
Start with your choice of film. Make it local. Find a story that takes place in your backyard and invest in the idea that it will be shot completely within walking distance of the primary location (this rule can and will be bent, but some production schedules budget as much as 50 percent of the time for “production moves.” and with a limited budget and local talent with jobs, this is unacceptable). If you like thrillers, create a thriller that would occur in your town. If you live outside of the major cities, plan on using exteriors. They are the strength and the novelty of your setting. Nobody has seen Billings, MT the way you have. Use that. Police charge 125 dollars an hour to sit outside your set in LA, but in some places, they’ll shut down traffic just to let a hometown filmmaker practice his craft. This is especially true in small-town America. We shot in the desert after shooting interiors in LA and the entire community rallied around the production. People shut down their businesses just to be an extra in the film. THAT is the kind of help that you need when shooting a low-budget film.
Keep the page count to 90. This might sound arbitrary, and it is, but you don’t have the luxury of being long-winded. Think of each five pages as an extra day or two of production. Think that you’ve been shooting for thirty days already. Adding anything to the story that will be cut in editing is a real shame. Stay away from car crashes, laser battles and historic recreations of any kind. These just look silly in low-budget land. Once you’ve finished the script, decide if you want to commit to the Double Shot Model. It will give you and your actors a chance to show versatility and range, but it is not an easy road (neither is producing just one however, so think about it).
Count the characters and model your second script with crossover in mind.
Make the leads in the first film the supporting cast in the second.
Change the genre of film. If you have a drama, write the outline for a comedy and make sure you are interested in it before you jump in.
Keep the primary location the same. If the primary location is a diner in your sci-fi, make it the same in your second script. This isn’t as hard as it seems. If you wrote the first film around a diner, you must have an idea of diner culture. Flipping the script and looking at it in a different way is actually not that hard. We chose a coffee shop for our first double shot. We are using a diner for the next production.
Don’t worry if you have a gender gap. You can bring in a few new people for each film, but it is the goal to have everyone in the first play some role in the second and of course vice versa.
Age is important. A teenage lead cannot turn into a weathered farmer for the second film. Don’t force people into roles. You’re doing no one a favor by showing them in this way. We had a role for a deaf videographer in our first film and we decided to go with a hearing-impaired actress even though the part she was paired with was already cast. We split the parts when the need arose, but we kept to the plan everywhere we could. This modification provided us with one of the most memorable characters in our films, and the actress who played the hearing-impaired role was simply put astonishingly good in the role.
If you want to change the voice of the scripts (a great way to work with your own material and others) sit down and outline the second project with a writer. He or she will then work on the script independently and it will still feel like it fits in the DS concept. Directing a project written by another writer can be a liberating experience. You’ll be less likely to take things personally when they aren’t working and maybe more free to interpret a scene. Some of the best work in our first project was done by the actors when they were given the chance to re-invent their lines themselves. Some writer directors have a hard time allowing that. YOUR EGO HAS TO BE BIG TO START A PROJECT LIKE THIS, but you don’t have to let it show in production.
You’ve chosen your scripts, now it is time for pre-production. This is make or break.
Bob