"PAIRED"- A Fifth Click Film

K

KOHR

Well-known member
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BASICINFO:
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PAIRED is Fifth Click Films' actual entry into Twilightfest. We had originally been planning on shooting a film called "Childish," but after a reevaluation, we decided to move in a different direction. I'm going to try to keep the plot details to a minimum as to not ruin the actual film for anyone, but I can say that this one is going to be far more interesting than our previous entry was going to be. And yes, I know that we're getting a late start on this new film... I think we'll be able to make a solid entry in time though. Thanks for checking us out, I'll keep this thread updated as production develops.
PLOT:
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All that I can say until the films are up for viewing is that the entire film hinges on its location: a laundromat.


PAIRED
a 5th click film

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productiondiary:



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|| SEPTEMBER 13 ||- Came up with new better idea than "Childish." Began conceptualization and pre-writing on script called "Laundromat."

|| SEPTEMBER 15 ||- Finished conceptualization and pre-writing on "Laundromat." Began first draft of script.

|| SEPTEMBER 16 ||- Worked furiously on script. Finished first draft around 8 PM. Hit some roadblocks that took a couple hours to resolve. I completely changed the ending at least three times, but I am pretty comfortable with it now. This was hard because I wrote the entire script around the ending, but it just wasn't working.

|| SEPTEMBER 17 ||- Began rewrite of script. Decided on title, "PAIRED." Not much work to do, just got to refine some dialouge. Made temporary poster and banner for PAIRED.

|| SEPTEMBER 19 ||- Received several good responses to our craiglist casting ad. So now we're going to have an actual audition (our first). Really excited! Strange- there are about 4x as many girls interested than there are guys. Still working on the final draft of the script.

|| SEPTEMBER 20 ||- Pretty much consider my script final, but I'm gonna wait on calling it that until I've reviewed it once or twice more. Casting is nearly complete, just solidifying some terms with the leads. Tonight, at 10:45 pm, the producer, dp, and myself go location scouting. I'll post some pics in a little bit. Tomorrow we'll be working on locking the location, but we just want to take a closer look at our options tonight.

|| SEPTEMBER 21 ||- So the location has been narrowed down to 1 of 2 laundromats...with an apartment laundry facility as our backup. Updated the cast/crew list. Casting is essentially complete: its looking like we'll be casting Jason Burghorn as our lead for Alva, and Kristina Plisko as our lead for Louise. Though, nothings set in stone-- they don't even know for sure yet that they've been cast. Things are looking good! Btw... the new cast/crew icons are dryers.

|| SEPTEMBER 22 ||- After completing my 3rd draft of the script-- I can finally say: THE SCRIPT IS LOCKED. I successfully went from a weaker 5 pages, to a verbose 7 pages, and now to a clean, lean, tight full 6 page script. I'm very happy with the script and I think its definitely going to be a blast to shoot. I just found out that a school-related event I'm participating in (sort of a popularity contest for Mr. "Enter your school name here" and Ms. "Enter your school name here") falls directly on the primary weekend of my intended shoot. Considering that I'm not backing out of either event, I may be dropping out of my local 48 hour film competition in order to finish the film on time. The refund from that contest would also bump my budget up $100, so it may be for the best.

|| SEPTEMBER 27 ||- Okay! So, bad news: one of our top 2 location choices has backed out on us. Good news: the other one has given us informal permission to shoot there. So we're pursuing formal confirmation on that permission from the store owner. We'll see what happens.

|| OCTOBER 4 ||- Finished the recasting of the female lead and physically met the male lead for the first time (though we've had many phone and email conversations). She hasn't done any acting before but has been a proffesional model for several years, hoping to now do something a little different. We would have been shooting this weekend but my crew is participating in a local 48 hour film competition, so we're delayed until next weekend. We only have a total of 6 hours (3 hours 2 nights) in our location, so we'll be shooting a page and hour...or a minute of the final film per hour. We're pretty efficient usually so I think it'll happen.

|| OCTOBER 9 ||- So I had a production meeting with the rest of the crew yesterday and we worked out some of the issues-- mainly the color pallet. I also finished the blocking overheads-- the entire film can be covered in 20 set ups. Then the DP and I went to the location where we found out that the employee we talked to did not in fact clear everything with the higher-ups...so we did it personally and she said she saw no problem in our short film being shot there. Phew, that would've been bad. Plus, we got her to agree to letting us get 6 more hours in the laundromat on other nights (12 hours total access to the location now)...because its free advertising for them. Tonight I have another rehearsal with the female lead-- Its gonna be good! First shoot tomorrow! Oi vey...

|| OCTOBER 10 ||- So I got back from the first shoot about an hour and a half ago... wow, it was great but we didn't get as much finished as we hoped. Luckily, the attendants/store owners love the production so they're letting us use their facility for at least 1 more day in the next week. We're taking our time with this film to make sure its really really gonna entertain everyone! The laundromat we're shooting this film in is a real-live-operating laundromat... oi vey! But the attendants and patrons seem to love the production stuff so they just watch and try to talk to us whenever we call cut. :thumbup: Anyway, we've basically got everything done for scene 1 except for some cutaways, and maybe one reversal... but the master was what killed us. Its basically one of the longest dialogue pieces and it took us about an hour just to get that one shot (not including the camera/light set up time). But the film is looking great, and our color pallet/color research is really helping! Plus- did I mention my crew and talent are the best people on earth?

|| OCTOBER 11 ||- So we shot some much needed shots to fix Scene 1, got all of Scene 3 done and now all we have left are Scene 2 and 4... which should take less time overall because there is no dialogue and thats whats been slowing us down most of the time. Overall, production has been going great-- the actors are doing very well. I felt like they were both much more comfortable in their roles today, so they were even more smooth than the day before. I'm very pleased with how this project is turning out. I'll post a screen grab or two up asap.


|| OCTOBER 13 ||- On Wednesday, we go back one last time to finish principal photography. Should be fun, theres no dialogue- two montage-esque bits and a final scene to complete. If we shoot as well as we did during the second shoot, we'll finish no problem. There are a couple shots I would love to go back and get, but we'll see what kind of time we have Wednesday night. I don't want to have to ask my actors to come back for another shoot...primarily because they both live an hour away, and I'm not paying them THAT well. Anyway, since all the dialogue has been shot already and ..now... has been edited, ADR will also be done on Wednesday, before the shoot. However, our sound guy is busy when our actors are available so I'll be doing it solo. If we have time before the shoot... I may also grab the only VFX shot in the entire film while the main actor is still at my house. Tomorrow is prop day- I'm finishing 2 major props for the final day of shooting... I would show them but they'd give too much away.

About editing- the laundromat has a radio blaring in the background so obviously it would be completely out of the question to use the field sound whatsoever...its good because it forces us to ADR. However, the constantly changing song in the background does make my edits more pronounced, so watching through my edited scenes, I felt like I had done a horrible job. However, when I muted them and rewatched, they felt SO much better. I can't wait to see how good it turns out when we've got good audio to help smooth the cuts as well. I'm super excited just to see my own film haha. :)

|| OCTOBER 17 ||- Sorry about the long wait everyone, but I've been crazy busy these past couple days. So, on Wednesday, we had our third, and (supposidly) final shoot. We had the actors stop by a couple hours early to complete ADR for the entire film (the last scene had no dialogue) and to get the couple visual effects shots down. The crew then loaded up and went to the location. We quickly found out that the relaxed, easy going attendant who was supposed to be working had been fired a day earlier, and now we were stuck with a (much) older, grumpy, married couple who were obviously only fill-in employees... i.e.- relatives of the owner/supervisor. Now, this shouldn't have been a problem because we do infact have permission to shoot there after 7 when we need to because the place basically empties out. Anyway, so, we started shooting under the watchful eye of these attendants for about 2 hours. We have a couple shots left till we wrap that are crucial for the film and we're all saying "we're gonna finish, we're gonna finish." Then, out of nowhere, the older lady attendant comes up and says "The owner just called and says we should close up early." Now, immediately, I know this is B.S.- they've been trying to leave since about 8 and they just wanted an excuse to leave once there when there were no customers. But of course, I'm polite and just request 30-45 more minutes, telling them that our actors have to drive about an hour just to be here and that we don't want to have to make them come back for ANOTHER day just for an hour of production. The woman promptly says they can't go against the owner's orders. Then I tell them I will pay them and they can just close shop but still get paid for their time if they stay with us another hour. They repeat the line about the owner's orders. So at this point its pretty obvious-- you aren't leaving because the owner told you to, you're leaving because you don't care about the pay and what to get out of here early. Anyway, I immediately offer my actors a 30% pay raise for a final shoot, which they agree to, and begin to pack up. So, at this point, we've got 75% (more in pure time , but thats in terms of scenes) edited, all the ADR recorded, the color has already been locked, just waiting on the fourth scene, and the visual effects are also nearly completed. All we have to do is finish that last darn scene and edit throughout the week to finish this up. The next time the actors were both free was Tuesday, the 21st, so thats the last shoot. Then I have 6 days to finalize editing, ADR, and sound design.


|| OCTOBER 19 ||- Woohoo! Woke up around 10, worked for about 4 hours on VFX straight... and I'm done! With the fx that is. I had about 6 compositing shots I had to do and they are complete. I worked with AE for a year or so before switching to FCP, so I was quite suprised with how difficult the masks work. I had started the VFX a couple days ago and had been working on them for about an hour or two a day. Now that thats all done, I can focus on ADR and sound design.

In other news, my sound guy came over yesterday (he's still waiting on Soundtrack for his Mac) and we recorded all the ambient and foley. Went pretty well, and I even figured out that scene 2 and 3 don't need ANY foley. I hadn't even thought of it before. So we put in all the foley and ambient for the scenes that needed it and now we're just waiting on shooting the last shots in Scene 4 so that we can work on that next Saturday. We'll basically be sitting down for half a day and foley-ing scene 4... making the levels precise on all the audio, doing some panning. We're still contemplating the music... whether we want it or not that is.

Anyway, besides all of that, all I need to do is shoot the remaining shots of scene 4 (about 9 shots, none full-length, already got the master down.) Then I've got to quickly edit scene 4 before thursday (its the shortest scene). After that comes the hardest part, trimming down to 6 minutes. Currently, I'm looking at a 7 minute movie (once scene 4 is added in, and thats generous). I have a couple ways of cutting it down, I just have to find the best way without hurting the story-- oi vey! Really starting to feel that deadline. Thanks for all your support everyone!

 || OCTOBER 20 ||- Finished laying down all the audio. ADR, ambient, and foley are all laid down correctly. Tweaking to perfection will happen throughout the week... I'm not sure if I stated it before but the coloring has been finalized and has been applied to all the scenes even though we haven't finished shooting scene 4. We shoot the last 9 shots of scene 4 tomorrow evening, from 7-10 PM. Excited for the wrap.

|| OCTOBER 21 ||- ITS A WRAP! Finished principal photography with only 6 days until the deadline. All I have to do is finish editing the last scene and we're good to go for some audio tweaking on saturday and finalize and export saturday evening/sunday morning. I managed to cut off 50 seconds from my film, its looking like this thing will be ready to compete come monday! Woohoo!

|| OCTOBER 22 ||- ITS A TRAP! I went back for about 4 or 5 hours just now and edited out about 1 minute 45 seconds of the film. WOW, it was difficult! Its hard killing your babies-- there were parts of the dialogue I just knew weren't completely necessary, so I threw them. before I do the final audio tweak on saturday i'm gonna have someone with fresh eyes watch it and make sure it still makes sense in its somewhat butchered form. Anyway, I've got 15 seconds to go, but I know a couple places that'll work, and a couple places where edits can be tweaked still to take off a second here or there.

|| OCTOBER 22 ||- 5 minutes 58 seconds 4 frames. The final cut is complete. Picture LOCKED. Sound design is all layered in, final level/pan to finish on Saturday afternoon. Color LOCKED. Score being contemplated.

|| OCTOBER 25 ||- That's a wrap-- finished!
 
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Behind the Scenes:

||Production||
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THE CAST & CREW OF "PAIRED": (from left to right)
Jason Burghorn (talent), DJ Dodd (producer), Kasey Hettig-Rolfe (Writer/Director), Sebastian Baron (Director of Photography) and in the center, Casey Lynn (talent)
** our sound guy was not there the last night so, unfortunately, he is not pictured **


||Teaser Stills||
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Hey thanks everyone for the kind words! I really hope we can get this in on time... as anyone who read the other thread in the main forum can see... we are probably the most behind (at least out of those who were actively discussing that topic). We haven't cast yet or set the script in stone yet...nor is our location solid. However, we did only decide to actually do something for this fest about 5 days ago...so I'd say we're moving at a decent pace. I'm giving us about 2 weeks for preproduction, 2 weeks for production, 2 weeks for editing.
 
So we've cast our two lead roles-- check out the first post for the details!

Things are looking good for "Paired"!
 
The script isn't locked until after you've wrapped. I was at draft 6 when we shot.. but even then it changed on set.

Actually I take that back... it's locked once the film is cut and done! haha.. I know it's going to change even more in the editing room!
 
Okay so I've got bad news and good news...

Bad news: One of our first choice locations has informed us that they think our filming there will be "too invasive" despite the fact that we were coming during a time when they get little to no business (literally about 1-3 costumers).

Good news: The other prime location choice has offered us their building... sorta... the attendant there on the nights we'd like to shoot has stated that he would be completely fine with our film being shot during his business hours...and that he's let other short films shoot there before. Only problem- thats just an attendant, and when we asked for a store owner's number to legally confirm our ability to film there, the attendant informed us that the ownership just changed hands and he has no idea how to contact the "real" owner now. Oi vey
 
More bad news!

Our lead actress just informed me that she won't be back until late October (she left to California for a shoot a week or two back). So now we've got to go through the casting process again in a week to find a replacement. :(
 
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