XVII. The Shoot (Part 3)

Welcome to the weekly production log of my first feature film, The Big Pay Off. My budget is $15,000 and I am producing and releasing it completely independently from the current Hollywood regime. If you are a new reader and are curious why I’m doing this, you can read my manifesto here. Thanks for stopping by!

“It should just work”, the gentleman on the technical support hotline quipped. It was day two of our attempt to get a gimbal to calibrate correctly that was rigged to a car mount. When we tried to shoot, it wouldn’t stabilize and focus correctly. No one could figure out why. My director of photography Kate and her team had done everything and contacted everyone to make it work. We even sent someone to pick up a different gimbal from the rental house. Still, it gave us the same problems. All I needed was a two-shot of my actors driving in a car. It wasn’t even a complicated shot!

The day before, we had gotten all the car interior shots we needed. The two-shot was supposed to bookend the scene. It might seem trivial but it was important for its emotional resonance and we had shot the rest of the scene with the assumption that the two-shot preceded it. We had gone for a take once the hood mount was installed but I could immediately see on the monitor that something was wrong: the camera focused on reflections on the windshield instead of the actors, and the image wasn’t stabilized correctly.

I am technically illiterate so I can’t tell you details of what exactly was wrong with the equipment. Suffice to say that after a couple hours of trouble shooting, Kate took me aside and broke the news to me that we wouldn’t have a solution any time soon.

We had three scenes planned that day. The car scene in question, a short scene in a park without dialogue but with a bunch of extras, and another dialogue scene in a car at night. Thank God the car would be stationary for that one. It was an ambitious plan but we had been on schedule until the gimbal refused cooperation. Now, the sun was beginning to set. The park scene was supposed to take place during dusk. Four extras had found their way to set who had all braved various lengths of LA rush hour traffic to be there. We needed to move on.

I decided we would scrap an entire scene we had planned for the next day, come back and finish with a gimbal that, by then, would surely work. For the rest of the day, a good time was had by all. The shoot proceeded without incident and my stress levels evened out.

“It should just work”, came the tinny voice out of the phone’s loud speaker.

It didn’t work. The next day, we had the exact same problem with the gimbal. That morning, we had shot another scene that went great. Now we were back trying to get a simple two-shot with a car mount and the equipment was failing us again. Actors were getting restless, Kate hung up on the unhelpful technical support guy in frustration, and now came the question: do we really need this shot for this scene? Could I think of something else so we wouldn’t waste an entire afternoon not shooting anything?

On a production this small, there is a constant push and pull between what is creatively desirable and what is technically feasible. We don’t have a camera crew. Kate is DP and camera operator. Our budget for equipment is tiny. I quickly learned to operate within the confines of our capabilities and yet I like to push the boundaries. The question Kate hears from me the most is “would we be able to do this?” I am always surprised how often the answer is “yes, but…” Quite often, Kate and I find new creative avenues in negotiating the “but”.

I could write an entire essay about how restrictions are actually good for creativity. In the case of The Big Pay Off, our technical limitations define the visual grammar: a mostly static camera, simple frames, a visual progression within a scene that, through montage, achieves emotional resonance if I do my job correctly. In a way, it’s a return to basics, an old school style of filmmaking that forces me to always think of what the best frame is for every moment in a scene, instead of plotting unnecessarily elaborate camera movements.

Working this way has the additional benefit, crucial at our budget level, that we can get through a lot of pages fast. Because I always know in advance exactly which shots I need, we don’t even have to shoot coverage. It’s nice to have, but if we fall behind (and when don’t we, really?) we can always resort to only shoot specific parts of a scene or specific lines in a particular set-up and then move on. It is a bit risky for the edit and it weirds out actors who are not used to it but so far it has always worked out.

In the case of this accursed two-shot, though, all of this had put me in a bind. We had already shot singles for the whole scene. We even had inserts. It was inconceivable to me to not have the two-shot at the beginning of the scene. Could we frame it up differently so we wouldn’t need the hood mount? Could we rethink the entire scene and come up with new set-ups we could achieve that afternoon and would carry the same emotional resonance? If my answer to these questions was “no”, was I just being stubborn or was I fighting a righteous fight for my creative vision?

My answer was “no”.

I sent the actors home. As I copied the day’s footage onto my hard drive, Kate and I discussed solutions to our problem. A different type of hood mount. A different type of gimbal. Bringing on someone who owned their own rig but would have to be paid a day rate. Other fixes that would mean more money. For here is another dance we’re engaged in constantly: is it worth throwing money at a problem when we don’t have any money? Or is it better to rethink the whole issue?

There are several scenes in the script in which characters are driving and talking. There is an entire scene where one character follows someone else in a car. We had discussed car rigs with Kate from the beginning. I am willing to compromise on a lot but a car rig, I decided, is not one of them. It’s part of our visual grammar. There’s a difference between being stubborn on a single issue, or fighting for the integrity of a larger creative whole. If it’ll take us a bit longer to figure out how to make it work technically without a whole camera crew on hand, so be it. In this case, it’s worth it.

We can shoot other stuff in the meantime. Ultimately, I know this: it will just work.