First Film

Ki-Ki

Ki-Ki

Veteran
Seems there was a thread that I cant find on this. Though Its slightly different so what the hell. Does anyone remember creating there first SERIOUS film? What was it like? First time Directing, shooting and so on. Organising everything. Directing people older or with more experiance than yourself. Quite interested to find out..
 
My first "serious" effort was a 40 minute short. I learned a few lessons, but most of what I would do differently now, was still appropriate at the time, given what I had to work with.

We didn't really have a DP, so I spent at least as much time fiddling with the lighting and composition as working with the actors. I would not do it that way again, but at the time I didn't have much of a choice.

I had rehearsals and sought actor feedback in pre-pro (As what Zak mentioned, a bit more of that is usually a good idea), which helped on set (especially considering my aforementioned neglect of the actors on set)

I fed the cast and crew well, making sure there was always stuff to snack on.

I intentionally overestimated the time I would need each day by about 90 minutes (which wasn't always enough, but helped a lot)

I walked away for a breather when I needed to. There were some moments when I felt like I had no right to be there, and I didn't have a clue what to do next. Taking five minutes to gather my thoughts saved me time when I got back.

There was one time when I called a day early, even though we had about 3 hours, and a scene to go. But i knew that what we had gotten was crap, and that I would probably want to re-shoot the whole thing. So I explained my reasons, and called the day. A tough choice at the time, but the right one in the long run.

I had a GREAT time.

As far as directing older actors, it wasn't an issue for me. First of all I wa about 38. I was working with actors in their 20's up to their 60's. Rehearsals may have helped with that because it gave us time to get to know each other, so we didn't thnk of each other in terms of age. But in the end, if you treat people with respect, communicate well, and all work towards the same goal, they probably care less about the age difference then you do.
 
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Thank you, its nice to hear about peoples experiance with creating films and things that went wrong and some that went extremely good.
 
My first serious effort was my sci-fest short, A Price Too High. Then I worked on Smuggler's Ransom following that.

I should some day document the process creatively and practically that went into A Price Too High. It was quite simple, and we worked similarly on Smuggler's, and I believe we'll always work in a similar fashion, as we now know what we can do, even with a bigger scale and more crew.

Some basics about the film though:

We wrote it to our resources. We knew we wanted to cast certain people in the film, who we had instant accesablilty to. I also wanted to write a piece for my sister to have a big role in, since she's an aspiring actress, or at least was... We also wrote it to locations we knew we'd have. We filmed it in about 12 hours total. We had 5, or 6 locations, we shot it on two nights and one day. We had a crew of three. (me, Noa, and our sound guy)
 
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