Creating Bran & Park

Bran & Park

During the production process of our group's Master Shot Sequence, we learned a lot of things about working as a team and time management. Firstly, getting the entire group together in the first place was a struggle. None of our schedules matched up and we couldn't have just two crew members on the shoot. Once we all found a day, it was a Monday night and we weren't all together on location until 9pm. I arrived at 7:30pm and started setting up all of the equipment. Our director, Victoria, was picking up the DP and our actors so she arrived somewhere around 8pm. Once they got there, the DP and I started setting up the first shot while Victoria worked on rehearsing the blocking with the actors, and then she helped get them into hair and makeup. Our first road block was the first shot. For some unknown, psychological reason, our DP was having difficulty taking the initiative to frame the first shot. As he hesitated, Victoria stepped in to help. Once we established our first shot, we learned out shotgun mic was out of batteries, and we didn't have headphones. And so began the search! We were already twenty minutes behind schedule... and when it's this late into the evening, every minute counts!
By the time we found batteries, were satisfied with the lighting, and the actors were ready, we were already an hour behind schedule. Our sound guy, Alex, had shown up by now and we were using his house. We were all exhausted from our already long days and had low blood sugar. I ordered a pizza, but that proved to be an insufficient effort at satisfying my crew, so Alex made a frozen pizza and pizza rolls, along with coffee. So this endeavor for food proved to not only consume our appetites, but our time. The shoot ended up going all the way until 4am...
We had originally planned 13 shots, finishing them all by 12am, but that was merely a fantasy. The reality is that people get tired, and the later it gets, the more delusional everyone becomes. And with mixed personalities, it's hard to keep order and maintain the assigned shooting roles. Alex was on sound, but often found himself doing the DP's job. One problem we ran into with this was that our camera's mic box was plugged into the on-board mic and we didn't realize this until our sixth shot. So, for our first six scenes, we have no on-board sound! Alex knew he could synchronize everything from our shotgun in post, but he also knew this would be a time consuming and tedious process. Another problem was that our director was tired, so I found myself stepping in a lot doing the director's job. I think a lot of our impatience with each other had to do with the fact that it was so late and we all just wanted to finish the shoot fast! Not every member in the room had the same concept of time as I did--which they really shouldn't because it was my job to keep the time, not theirs--so I was the most frustrated with the way we managed time.

Our Production Shotlist

Our Production schedule that we
so obviously did not follow...

Overall, this was a great learning experience. As our first real project in creating narrative films, we got a lot out of the adventure. I know now how important pre-planning a shoot is and I liked the role as producer. If I did it again I would definitely do some things differently--like try to schedule the shoot on the weekend. There were a lot of factors in my personal life I let get in the way of this, like my work and an episode of depression, along with family relationships. Next time, I will do my best to work around all of this in order to create a more successful outcome in our group project.