5 things that went wrong during production. Please share.

[Ask_the_dusk]

tipota. - I love the way you put it. that sure will stay with me. Thanks for advise. By the way, I highly respect and admire directors who work in intuitive and raw fashion, like Wong Kar Wai as one of many, but I believe ( as you pointed ) that even WKW has a plan for ' not having a plan'.

 

[Rolf Silber]

The situation is: We have three cops, two guys one gal we call over here "snatchers". Special squad. They observe a restaurant. They have information that an oldish guy, driving a Jag, may appear soon who is the boss of the Russian mafia specialised in stealing luxury cars and smuggling them to the east. They need to get him. He is "the ghost" everybody is after. From their stakeout the see an oldish guy parking a Jag in front of the restaurant. Our male hero recognises the face of the driver somehow! But is he "The Ghost"? They decide to encircle the old guy. Carefully. If he is not what they expect, the work of a month long stakeout is blown. The girl speaks a bit Russian. She will approach him and fake she stumbles, curse in Russian. If he reacts they will take the risk and arrest him. They do that. He reacts. They arrest him. The guys in the Restaurant see that. Our heroes are triumphant - until they find a conductors baton in the briefcase when they have expected a gun, sheets with musical scores where they have expected falsified documents for stolen cars - and then they realize why hero no. 1 has known the face of the man: Posters around in the town. Russian conductor. Our three heroes are f**d big time.

What do we plan? We need movement because before, in the stake out, we had some time laying out the basics of the story: hero no. 1 - nice super-macho womaniser - was kicked out by his girl friend and has to live for some days with a friend (who is very, very gay) and he does not want his co-cops to realize that. hero no. 2, the hunk, the tough guy, is actually a closet gay guy without even his best friend (hero no. 1) realizing that. The gal is new in the team and is reluctantly falling in love either with hero no. 1 or no. 2. and needs to show the others that she is job wise a real toughy. We make storyboards. We plan long fast travel shots. We want, after the more static stakeout scenes, that the movie starts really moving and swirling like a roundabout until our heroes realize they have blown their cover and arrested a prominent artist.

We have about 40 meters of tracks with us. We have a tight schedule. We don't have a big budget. We need to shoot this today. The scene is crucial for the movie. We come to the set. Where we wanted to be the end point for both rail tracks, a big truck is parked. Driver is gone. Will not come back. Half of our storyboard makes it crucial that the camera moves where the truck is or looks at the resturant windows, where we see the truck with it's big beer ad-signs in the reflections. And, above that, the city authorities have just decided that they revoke our allowance to stop the traffic and lay our tracks over the small street. We are f**d big time.

After one hour of shouting, my DoP and I make a decision: We will shoot. Something. A lot. From all angles. We go over the axis. We follow the actors. We will shoot, shoot and shoot and hope the editing room saves our behinds. When the evening comes, we will have a finished scene. Somehow. So we burn our storyboard and decide to shoot what was planned as a scene with wonderful fast, complicated and arcanely choreographed travel shots extremely doc-style now: Long lenses, power pans, lot's of close-ups and details, hand held. The result is not exactly a magical moment of cinematography as planned. I wanted to be a bonsai-Bertolucci here, my DoP dreamed of being a midget-Storaro. Instead we have a more tv-like action scene with less than half the shots we wanted to get. But: It works. For the flow of the story it works perfectly. The audience did not know that this was planned differently. They did not see the storyboard. They did not know the plan.

But our planning had given us a concept about what is crucial to be told in the scene and a pace - and this we could transpose.

 

[RockmanX3]

Problems:

1) Didn't rehearse the lines... that I wrote
2) Assumed I can film in a dark area without a lighting kit
3) Stalled on getting a larger storage card
4) Tried to rush
5) Tons of cars and airplanes passed by

--------------------------

How I fixed them:

1) Turned off my radio to and from work and rehearsed my lines. I even made up better ones without writing them down
2) Decided to film in the early evening, despite my script saying it was night
3) Immediately bought a larger storage card since the old one wasn't big enough
4) Took more time
5) Didn't solve this problem, but can be worked on in Post Prod.

 

[Angelshare1]

I get nervous before every shoot but I find that when everything is starting that there is some sort of magic on the set and everything turns out fine.

I'd say though what helped me a lot:
1. Frame shots in case no extras show up.
2. If guerilla shooting, make sure all your actors know this before they go up to the front desk of a hotel room and say "I'm here for the movie that's being shot here today."
3. When in doubt with lighting, over light.
4. Bars are very loud when they are quiet. There are usually 10 refrigerators under them that are humming away and restaurant managers have an inability to recognize this.
5. Don't discuss money around people who are not being paid.
6. Get every ounce of productivity out of your locations. If you have a restaurant, cafe and bar scene in your film, film all three at the same place with different angles and lighting.

 

[ToTheBack]

A lot of good advice in this thread, but the quote above has a point. I wouldn't say "thinking on your feet" is better per se, but simply it's *required*. You should still plan, extensively - as advised here; no doubt, 100%. But.

The reality of filmmaking is that there is room for experience and talent, because so much cannot be anticipated. Let me describe to you a situation that happens all the time and WILL happen to you. You storyboarded and drew the exact shot breakdown. You do your setup. You film it. And you review your shot - and the scene is dead... for some reason, it just lies there like a dead fish, and you don't know why. I'm not talking about the script or actors - those are the first line of examination, of course, even before you start shooting. I'm talking about a scene that works on paper, the actors are doing what they are supposed to be doing... but for some reason, the scene is dead.

Now let me say something tough. The idiots will tell you it can't happen, that if your script works and the actors do their job, the scene will never feel dead. But they are idiots - they simply lack judgment and an aesthetic sense. Nothing can help them, so let's ignore those people. IF you have an eye, you will perceive when a scene or setup is dead. And that's what marks 99% of failed amateur productions - when people either don't perceive when something isn't working (idiots or hacks), and those who perceive but don't know what to do. Here sometimes experience comes in, or natural talent. This is what will happen to you - you will be confronted with this, and how you deal with it will determine if your film will succeed or not.

When that happens, often the answer is purely technical, and you have to search for it. For example, one time I was involved in shooting a feature and the scene was not working at all - it felt dead and flat. The director finally hit upon a very simple little thing - he just moved the camera slightly at the beginning of the shot. All of a sudden, the scene came alive! It's such small things that can make your scene come alive or lie there dead. It can be just an issue of re-framing, or changing the tempo, or slight change to the staging. That's where your "thinking on your feet" comes in - you are confronted with a dead scene, and you must quickly experiment with ways to make the thing come alive. So you see, merely having your script and actors solid and storyboarding is not enough. People's films fail, when they either (a) don't recognize when something is not working or (b) don't know what to do about it, and they simply stick to the pre-arranged storyboarding solutions.

The lesson for you here is: use your eyes and ears. When something is not working - and hopefully you recognize that - be willing to abandon the previous preparation and storyboarding. But there is a natural resistance to abandoning the comfort of the preparation - because you've invested so much time and effort in the preparation, that it now acts like a giant gravitational field, and you are unwilling to be brutally honest with yourself and say "IT IS NOT WORKING" and "I need to abandon my comfort zone and 'waste' all the preparatory work". Be willing to always change your design, and experiment. Your first and most important obligation is to make a good film. For that, you need to abandon your preconceptions and be willing and able to keep re-evaluating the work as it progresses. Always keep your eyes open and be ready to jump.

This is a great piece of advice, especially in light of the preparation-heavy posts that came before it. Plan for what you want and what the material requires to make it work so that when the **** hits the fan, you'll know what you have to do to fix it and continue on.

For instance, I directed a music video recently and unlike some of my recent projects, a lot of things went wrong. The 2 actors I was to use in my opening shots didn't show up and claimed they didn't know they were still needed (major communication screwup as we learned). The grip w/ the light kit was two hours late for the first time ever. Extras who would show up and mysteriously disappear between takes. Props that mysteriously went missing. The usual no-shows.

But you have to make sure that even if things go wrong or aren't working, you remain calm and don't lose your cool in front of crew. You can retreat to the bathroom to regain your composure but if the cast and crew know you're cracking, their faith in you's gonna be hurt and the problems will continue. Learn to improvise and do what you can.

I got lucky and was able to move two other extras to being the two missing people (very tricky because it requires a full makeout and that's not easy to thrust upon two nonactors last minute). We ended up shooting a ton of performance footage, cut out the shots that would've been cool but weren't crucial, reworked our shooting schedule a little bit, and managed to get a ton of really good footage. The result? It's uploading to youtube as we speak.

 

[Ted Spencer]

Missed this previously. Good stuff : )

The situation is: We have three cops, two guys one gal we call over here "snatchers". Special squad. They observe a restaurant. They have information that an oldish guy, driving a Jag, may appear soon who is the boss of the Russian mafia specialised in stealing luxury cars and smuggling them to the east. They need to get him. He is "the ghost" everybody is after. From their stakeout the see an oldish guy parking a Jag in front of the restaurant. Our male hero recognises the face of the driver somehow! But is he "The Ghost"? They decide to encircle the old guy. Carefully. If he is not what they expect, the work of a month long stakeout is blown. The girl speaks a bit Russian. She will approach him and fake she stumbles, curse in Russian. If he reacts they will take the risk and arrest him. They do that. He reacts. They arrest him. The guys in the Restaurant see that. Our heroes are triumphant - until they find a conductors baton in the briefcase when they have expected a gun, sheets with musical scores where they have expected falsified documents for stolen cars - and then they realize why hero no. 1 has known the face of the man: Posters around in the town. Russian conductor. Our three heroes are f**d big time.

What do we plan? We need movement because before, in the stake out, we had some time laying out the basics of the story: hero no. 1 - nice super-macho womaniser - was kicked out by his girl friend and has to live for some days with a friend (who is very, very gay) and he does not want his co-cops to realize that. hero no. 2, the hunk, the tough guy, is actually a closet gay guy without even his best friend (hero no. 1) realizing that. The gal is new in the team and is reluctantly falling in love either with hero no. 1 or no. 2. and needs to show the others that she is job wise a real toughy. We make storyboards. We plan long fast travel shots. We want, after the more static stakeout scenes, that the movie starts really moving and swirling like a roundabout until our heroes realize they have blown their cover and arrested a prominent artist.

We have about 40 meters of tracks with us. We have a tight schedule. We don't have a big budget. We need to shoot this today. The scene is crucial for the movie. We come to the set. Where we wanted to be the end point for both rail tracks, a big truck is parked. Driver is gone. Will not come back. Half of our storyboard makes it crucial that the camera moves where the truck is or looks at the resturant windows, where we see the truck with it's big beer ad-signs in the reflections. And, above that, the city authorities have just decided that they revoke our allowance to stop the traffic and lay our tracks over the small street. We are f**d big time.

After one hour of shouting, my DoP and I make a decision: We will shoot. Something. A lot. From all angles. We go over the axis. We follow the actors. We will shoot, shoot and shoot and hope the editing room saves our behinds. When the evening comes, we will have a finished scene. Somehow. So we burn our storyboard and decide to shoot what was planned as a scene with wonderful fast, complicated and arcanely choreographed travel shots extremely doc-style now: Long lenses, power pans, lot's of close-ups and details, hand held. The result is not exactly a magical moment of cinematography as planned. I wanted to be a bonsai-Bertolucci here, my DoP dreamed of being a midget-Storaro. Instead we have a more tv-like action scene with less than half the shots we wanted to get. But: It works. For the flow of the story it works perfectly. The audience did not know that this was planned differently. They did not see the storyboard. They did not know the plan.

But our planning had given us a concept about what is crucial to be told in the scene and a pace - and this we could transpose.

 

[thisisapocalypse]

3. When in doubt with lighting, over light.

+1 Just don't clip the highlights.

4. Bars are very loud when they are quiet. There are usually 10 refrigerators under them that are humming away and restaurant managers have an inability to recognize this.

This is true, but especially when someone is letting you borrow the location, you just have to work within those parameters. Restaurants and bars are places of business, they may not be able to turn off their equipment for any number of reasons so you need to have a plan for this sound-wise, it's not really fair to criticize the management for something like this. If you're paying for the location, see if you can work something out, but I certainly wouldn't expect it if they are allowing you to shoot for free.

5. Don't discuss money around people who are not being paid.

True.

6. Get every ounce of productivity out of your locations. If you have a restaurant, cafe and bar scene in your film, film all three at the same place with different angles and lighting.

Agreed.

 

[maranfilms]

1. Make sure your contracts are in place. It's very easy to say, " I will get to that later" later meaning never.
2. Make sure you have contacted the proper authorities if you plan to shoot in public where it can be a distraction to others. people love to call the cops for any little reason. get permits to shoot if need be.
3. Make sure you have extra needed gear, (lamps, cables, stands, whatever. just make sure you have extras in case something breaks, which always seems to happen at the worst possible time.
4. Make sure you have decent craft services, people slow down and get cranky when hungry nd running on fumes. these seem simple, but they are important.

It's the little things that fall between the cracks and come back to haunt you. Like everyone else stated, PLAN, PLAN PLAN!!!

 

[Allan Black]

1. Let the writer come on the set.

2. Let the writers girlfriend come on the set.

3. Let the client come on the set.

4. Let the clients wife come on the set.

5. Let them all go for lunch.

Cheers.