As of October 6th I have finished all the filming for my short film Take Care Your Own. Rushing into shooting helped me learn about the stresses of being a Director and having creative control.
I had to deal with a bunch of set backs, for example, budgets not covering actor fees, crew members bailing last minute, a cat in heat meowing it’s ass off on location, and rented equipment malfunctions (just to name a few). But I felt like I handled each nightmare with grace (except for the cat problem, which I solved by chasing it down the street before every take like a madman). Waking up on the first day of shooting I can honestly say I was the most stressed out I have ever been while working on a Newhouse project. A little voice in the back of my head kept saying “Don’t screw this up. This is your last chance.” but that stress just got my creative juices flowing. Every small victory took a little bit of the stress away and by the end of the first day I felt like I was on fire (in a good way).
The one thing I wanted to make sure I didn’t do was waste the actors time. I had two actors, Kevin Sweeney and Marcy Savastano, driving all the way from the Greater Rochester Area with only a limited time set out to help me. Even with all the hiccups we wrapped both actors ahead of schedule. This gave me time to sit down with them and get feedback on how the experience went compared to other shoots they’ve been involved with which was astronomically helpful and a great self esteem boost. They told me about shoots from hell that were unorganized and had no artistic direction and actually thanked me for having everything so well planned out (sounds like I made this up I know, but it’s true!)
The feeling I got after the first day was wrapped and I had the whole crew and 1/3 of the cast at Beer Belly Deli (don’t worry the drinks were on me not Newhouse) is the reason I love filmmaking. That euphoria and felling of self accomplishment was like crack and I can’t wait to get another go. I can’t imagine how intense this feeling must be after a feature film is wrapped.
After the 6th and with the motivation that I could potentially show Nick Cassavetes my work in two days, I locked myself in my room and edited for a solid 7.5 hours straight with only a few bathroom and leftover Beer Belly Deli breaks. At 7am on October 8th I decided I should probably get a few hours sleep before class at 12:45pm.
At class I found out Nick Cassavetes got food poisoning (if I ever find out which restaurant he went to I’ll burn the place down [ jk ]) which was a little upsetting but what can you do? Luckily my classmates had awesome notes on my first rough cut and I got a lot of good feedback from Professor Tula Goenka.
Right now my biggest task is to find a firewire cable so I can back-up my footage onto my hard drive. I’ve kinda avoided using FCP just in case the application decides to crash my computer. So I may not have a re-edit this week but definitely by next week!
Thats everything I can think of right now!
