After some more than a year and a half I’ve got the time, the people, the money and the proper work to do this project… I wrote the script on january 2011, planned to shoot it for more than six months without any chance for school and work problems, so I’ve delayed the project till I got a chance to do it, all because I had to do a live-action movie project for school. The best part is that I had 2 classes involving the same project, so it gave me the time enough to plan everything since day one at start of my school period (called semester in México).
And the journey began… I had the script since last year, and some of my closest classmates knew it and also wanted to participate on it, and now at sixth semester I’m in the best spot to show off at school and get some support for my next projects (I have a couple on mind now)… Everything is perfect… Well, not always… Even with my planning to the minimum detail I had some trouble.
The first problem I had was with one of my classmates… He left school. That didn’t look like much, but contact him became very difficult and to get him and prepare some test scenes was really hard, that’s why I made a change to the script… I changed characters, all before making any important scene that affects the movie plot.
My second problem came when I talked to the school representatives to confirm my location shooting permit for school… I’ve lost it for one of the key locations for my film. The cause? My previous week unauthorized lighting, video and sound testing in the basement parking area of the neighbor’s company was not taken very well for the owner… So, I panicked, I had 2 days to get a new location to shoot almost 2 thirds of the film and maybe rewrite some of the scenes… I had to find a place to fit in the movie. Luckily enough my wife had in mind the perfect place and we used it without problem…
Another problem just one day before filming… The vehicle. I had in mind an old VolksWagen Sedan, a model in between 60’s and 70’s , but no one had one available for the day I needed it, and somebody who had 3 didn’t wanted to give chance to use one, because of the collectible state of the cars. So I had to find a replacement… My mother’s old Nissan Sedan did the work perfectly… Just a thoughtfully wash and… Voila!
After all that I talked to my actors, I had the most crazy idea… To shoot all the scenes in 3 days… That’s 7 days less than expected, but they agreed, so I made plans to shoot exteriors one day, next, to decor and shoot almost all interiors in one full day… So I started early and enden really late that day, but had filmed almost 80% of the film in one single day. And the third day we made the rest of the scenes with just 2 actors and 3 extras. Nice!
So, after many hours of work I started the video edition, something that took me much less than expected, 5 days from the 20 I had scheduled. Now it’s time to work on the special effects and audio mixing, something I hope won’t take more than 20 days to be done.
So far, all is going really well, and after showing the final cut without audio mastering and mixing and special effects to some selected people the critics are good.
May be in a few days I’ll release the teaser trailer and posters, and with some luck and more good critics my first live-action short film will have a nice release… By the way, premiere will be 17 july 2012 in a single cinema in Guadalajara and at the same day on my YouTube channel.
Update: The trailer is here…
[youtube http://youtu.be/JjpD3gXDXx0]And before you ask, yes, the intrusive music is by me too, and some special effects are missing on the trailer… 😛
