Still can't get over playing GOW on a handheld, just doesn't feel right to me.
CowboyBebopper's forum posts
I don't think I've ever been this sleep deprived in my life.
The biggest thing that has been keeping us from breezing through our production days has been continuity. We have a dedicated person on set to watch for continuity. They take pictures and carefully watch where we move objects so that they can reset them after a take has been completed. Needless to say, I wish I didn't write so many scenes with props and such.
Aside from that, the shoot has been nothing less than fun and interesting. From trying to shoot in 90 degree weather while waiting for clouds to pass, to infiltrating a hospital parking lot t
Only one more day until we cross that line from Production to Post-Production and I couldn't be more excited! To everyone following this project, thank you! It means the world to me, and I hope we can deliver on the promise of making a truly fun and exciting musical based on the works of JoCo!
For those of you who are following me on here, thank you. For those of you who are not, I am in the middle of production for a movie I wrote. It is a musical that uses the music and ideas of Jonathan Coulton. I've been keeping a blog on here to track the progress of it all. I'm happy to say that after our first 16-hour day of filming, nobody has died. But who knows, we're still very early on in production. This blog will cover how we're dealing with having a very limited budget.
So making movies is expensive. Who’da thunk it? Going into pre-production we knew we’d be forking over some amount of money to have this project see the light of day but the question was how we could finance it with little to no cash.The answer? Lots and lots of phone calls and favors being called in.
First off, the camera. We’re using a pretty expensive camera, the shell alone without any special features costs around $1,200. When you add on a 35mm lens and all the little doohickies that we wanted, you’re getting to around $2,000. That’s a ton of smackos. Luckily we had friends at the Art Institute in Pittsburgh who were willing to let us use their equipment on one condition: we advertise the $h!t out of them. No problem, I mean we’re getting an awesome camera right?
Secondly, the lights. Normally in a perfect world you’d be looking to spend a few grand on lights to make everything look pretty when viewed through the lens of the camera. Instead we went with a very simple route. When you attach china bulbs around some halogen lightbulbs, you get a very nice lighted-area effect. Cheap, efficient, and they aren’t throwing off an extra 15 degrees of heat on set. We bought about 5 of those and we were good to go.
Third, we are all working for free. Everybody on set is an actor who would normally get paid for their work. Whether they be union, or a union-candidate, nobody on set works for free unless there’s a good reason. Luckily we decided to do this just for the pure love of the source material and the fact that we really wanted to give the fans something out there they could call their own. The world of geekdom doesn’t really have a ton of musicals out there besides Dr. Horrible, although the Street Fighter High School musical looks reeeeeally cool. Instead of taking a paycheck, we’re throwing all of that money into food. If everyone donates 3 dollars a day, we can have lunch and dinner quite easily if we order pizza. Problem solved.
Well those are just three ways we’re saving money on the set of Code Monkey. There’s a few more that deal with our audio problems that I will probably save for another day (recording on set, dubbing, ADR, etc) cause that is a field all its own. Below is our 3 behind the scenes video that will show you how we’re using a wheelchair as our dolly. You know it is going to be a good project when you utilize handicapable transportation as film rigging.
Thanks for reading!
~ Aaron J.
As some of you may know, my production company and I are working on our biggest project yet. A 40-minute movie musical based on the ideas and songs by Jonathan Coulton.
I drove to Pittsburgh last Saturday night to check in with my cast and crew and we sat around making piles of whatever we needed for the next day. A full crate of extension cords, new memory cards for our cameras, every last piece of our costumes and the pre-requisite junk food we'd be chowing down on between takes. After sleeping for a minimal amount of time (see: an hour or two) we loaded up our cars and drove to our location at 4 AM.
Setting up everything you need to film on location can be a pain sometimes, especially because oftentimes you'll need to reset the location back to whatever it looked like beforehand when you're done. By about 6 AM our full cast and crew had arrived and gotten into costumes and we were ready to get our first shot in.
Fast forward to lunch at noon and we had knocked out a good 3 pages of the script and were looking over the dailies. Everything looked fantastic! I was pretty pleased at our progress. For mainly having acted on stage my whole life, repurposing my talent for film was quite the experience but a very fun one at that. One thing I learned was that shooting outside can be a nightmare when you have to contend with hot humid weather and clouds taking away your natural sunlight. Add in the fact that you have to eat multiple PB&J sandwiches so that the editor doesn't have a nightmare cutting scenes together and you've got yourself a fun experience on your hands. Yikes.
The day progressed and spirits remained high throughout. At 10 PM our director "called it" and we began to strike our sets and put everything back in its place. All in all we shot about 8 pages, which isn't bad for 16-hour shoot. We had survived our first day and we have 4 more days on our schedule to finish up. I can't help but feel this is going to turn into something pretty fun when all is said and done and edited. I've included some stills from our dailies so you guys can see everything.
EDIT: Including a link to our first Behind the Scenes video so you guys can see what we worked on before this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5T03H_MCXY
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