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Richard and I are both massive film geeks and we’ve been talking about trying to create something for ages. In August Richard moved to London and I did a short film course. One night we went along to Kino film open mic night, it was a really interesting and fun night. We decided to put something together to showcase there.
The biggest issue in getting this project off the ground was writing a script. The story was born out of our constraints. We had a low budget so we decided to limit ourselves to a single room and as few actors as possible, speed dating was a perfect fit.
I was amazed at how quickly things gained momentum after it was written. All kinds of people started volunteering their time for free. I recruited an actress and an actor from my improv class. And I recruited a director of photography that I met on my film course. He runs a production company and was able to provide us with all the equipment and his vast experience. I also got my friend Tom on board to be the Assistant Director to handle many of the logistical things on shoot day.
I learned that getting people people on board is easy. The difficult thing is location. We called around a whole load of pubs asking to use their space. Most places responded with a flat out “no”, some asked for a large fee. We ended up using The Cavendish Arms. I’ve performed stand up comedy there so I knew the venue, and their rates were very reasonable. We ended up spending about £100 to use the room for five and a half hours.
The rehearsals and shoot day were great fun. Being the director is a very administrative role. You have to keep your eye on the clock and make sure you get through the shot list. There is really very little time to do anything creative, that has to be thought out well in advance.
The editing process took around thirty hours. I learned a hell of a lot here. We used Premiere Pro, which is a fantastic tool. By far the biggest problem we had in the edit was choosing and encoding to the right codec. I was amazed at the complexity of this issue. I was also impressed by how elegantly Apple seems to have solved this, I might have to buy a Mac and switch to using Final Cut.
Short Film: Time for a date
Last night Richard Warburton and I screened our Short film “Time for a Date” at an open-mic film night called Kino London. This project was a learning exercise. And we certainly learned a huge amount. I’m reasonably happy with the final result. As the creator it’s difficult to watch it without focusing on the mistakes or the parts where we compromised due to a lack of usable footage. But we got some great feedback, and had loads of fun doing it.
Richard and I are both massive film geeks and we’ve been talking about trying to create something for ages. In August Richard moved to London and I did a short film course. One night we went along to Kino film open mic night, it was a really interesting and fun night. We decided to put something together to showcase there.
The biggest issue in getting this project off the ground was writing a script. The story was born out of our constraints. We had a low budget so we decided to limit ourselves to a single room and as few actors as possible, speed dating was a perfect fit.
I was amazed at how quickly things gained momentum after it was written. All kinds of people started volunteering their time for free. I recruited an actress and an actor from my improv class. And I recruited a director of photography that I met on my film course. He runs a production company and was able to provide us with all the equipment and his vast experience. I also got my friend Tom on board to be the Assistant Director to handle many of the logistical things on shoot day.
I learned that getting people people on board is easy. The difficult thing is location. We called around a whole load of pubs asking to use their space. Most places responded with a flat out “no”, some asked for a large fee. We ended up using The Cavendish Arms. I’ve performed stand up comedy there so I knew the venue, and their rates were very reasonable. We ended up spending about £100 to use the room for five and a half hours.
The rehearsals and shoot day were great fun. Being the director is a very administrative role. You have to keep your eye on the clock and make sure you get through the shot list. There is really very little time to do anything creative, that has to be thought out well in advance.
The editing process took around thirty hours. I learned a hell of a lot here. We used Premiere Pro, which is a fantastic tool. By far the biggest problem we had in the edit was choosing and encoding to the right codec. I was amazed at the complexity of this issue. I was also impressed by how elegantly Apple seems to have solved this, I might have to buy a Mac and switch to using Final Cut.
Another big problem was colour correction. I downloaded a free version of Magic Bullet that helped a lot, but watching the video back I think the colours look a bit unnatural.
Overall I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not going to win any awards, but I think it’s entertaining and I certainly think it fulfilled the objectives of being a learning exercise.
Overall I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not going to win any awards, but I think it’s entertaining and I certainly think it fulfilled the objectives of being a learning exercise.
This was posted 2 months ago. Notes.
