Community Project

NickClapper

NickClapper

My greatest regret, during my time on IndieTalk, has been my failure to get a community project off the ground. We came pretty close with the organ lottery project, but it never quite worked out. The past few days has seen a new member trying to get another community project off the ground, but is, I suspect, going to fall into a number of inevitable traps.

I am currently studying for the final exams of my academic career (*sob*) so am just sitting in libraries all day, every day. I'd like something to break it up a little bit (in addition to the couple of projects I am, slowly, working on). So I've come up with a new way to do a community project.

If you would like to participate in this project as a director (or in a shooting capacity), I need the following information out of you:

What actors are at your disposal? [i.e. two men and a woman]
What locations are at your disposal? [i.e. a house, a bar, an abandoned quarry]
Can you record decent quality sound? [i.e. yes]
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Please be conservative with your responses. In order for this project to be realistic and work, I need to be sure that people can (and will) shoot their scenes in the allocated manner.

Once I have a bunch of participants, I will go away and write a short script that incorporates these various shooting units into a single coherent story. I will ensure that no member has more than a maximum of two days shooting (though generally will try and keep it to what can be done in a single day). If you cannot record decent quality sound, I will give you no dialogue to shoot. Everything will be kept as simple as possible (within the constraints of a very tricky project!) so that we have the maximum chance of success.

Additionally, if you are not willing to direct (or arrange the production of) a shooting unit, there are loads of other roles that are required:

Composer
Editor - individual units should edit their scenes but a central editor will put it all together and try and ensure that the editing matches throughout.
Post-sound
VFX - will not be VFX heavy, but we can incorporate some if there's someone who can supply the talent.
Marketing - with so many cooks, would be great to have someone responsible for pushing the film.
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In order to make this attempt as successful as possible, I will only accept forum regulars into the scheme. New members (and I'm talking people who've only been around a few weeks) are welcome to input and help out, but it is of paramount importance that I know people will stick around and see their unit through to completion.

The deadline for signing up is 18th April 2014, giving people two weeks, after which we will allocate two months (and a bit) to complete production of your scenes, meaning a shooting deadline of 30th June 2014. As I have said, should be no more than a day of filming over the course of two months, so if you can't commit to that then please don't!

I really hope this works, and I think it can. Let me know if you have any thoughts and get signing up!

Current units:
David.rhsc (San Francisco, USA)
cheeseandachallenge (Wellington, New Zealand)
Cracker Funk (Richmond, USA)
wheatgrinder
Flicker Pictures (Boston, USA)
mad_hatter (Birmingham, England)
Dreadylocks (Omaha, USA)
Lucky Hardwood (New Orleans, USA)
ChimpPhobiaFilms (Ohio, USA)

Fence-sitting-maybe-merchants:
WalterB
Dreadylocks
sfoster
mad_hatter
ChimpPhobiaFilms
ItDonnedOnMe
jax_rox
Flicker Pictures

Music team
JoshL
mike mcguill

Sound team
mike mcguill

Sound maybes
AudioPostExpert
Alcove Audio

Marketing maybes
RayW

And remember to fill in this form if you want to have a shooting unit in the film!

(Of course, if you're local to an existing unit, why not team up?)
 
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Um well I'll be going away the day after my retakes (less than a week from now), and my DOP goes away for two weeks when I get back. Our schedule is already a bit tight to add a new scene for tomorrow (we are probably shooting till 1am anyway), and it's possibly a bit late to spring that on my crew. I don't know my crews availability a few weeks from now (and myself, my psm and my actress will be back at Uni, so we'll be a bit busy too).

However, if nick/other people want this scene, I can probably grab it in a few weeks time with myself, the actress, my DOP, and my psm (using mic stands). I already have a few shots (mostly establishing shots) to fill in with my DOP when we're both back.

I just wouldn't be able to do it this weekend.
 
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My opinion is that we should, at this point, stick to the basic schedule and try and get the scenes, as they're planned, shot.

Then we can address the opening scene but I do think we should keep it simple. I quite like the idea of just creating an audio landscape of mingling radio broadcasts about the UFO sighting over a black background, before we burst into sunlight on the beach in San Francisco...
 
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Agreed. As I said, I can potentially whip something up down the line if necessary/it's decided Walter's intro (or something similar) is preferred, provided it's pretty lowkey - I don't want to have to suddenly call back my whole crew. I'm friends with the actress and DOP, so minor stuff is pretty easy to grab (which makes any minor fix ups easy to get as well, if needed).

Personally not a huuge fan of the radio broadcasts. It's fine, it serves, but it doesn't do anything to excite me particularly. However, it does do well immediately establishing the international nature of the project, and I have no better ideas.
 
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a couple of thoughts on the script..

No native Californian, or anyone I know in USA uses the term "spotty" when referring to teenage facial blemishes. Its "pimples" or "pimply"

Nobody knows where "Vernonia" is... its a tiny place, with no name value, you could just say some "back water hick town"or some similar NZ style vernacular to refer to small towns in the middle of nowhere... Alternatively, 100 - 150 kilometers north west of Portland Oregon would be a natural reference. Finally, if you do use Vernonia, then make sure to mispronounce it, or at lest struggle over it, or reference small town\village etc..
 
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Wheaty, we shot our dialogue last night using Veronia :(
Pronounced "ver-own-iah" - not sure if that's even correct, but we didn't think to even try mispronouncing it intentionally. Apologies.

---

As said, we shot last night. Fun shoot, but we got a bit behind schedule (mix of experience levels, new team working together) and then to make matters worse our 650w light blew. We only had a handful of shots with it (but they were also my favourite shots). We had to get it up quite high, so we hired a hi-boy for the weekend. Unfortunately, our pickups day is tuesday, and the cost of hiring it till then will be triple (the shop is closed on weekends - they only charge one night for weekend use). Plus we're meant to be getting a storm on Tuesday, and it's already a sketchy enough rig that I don't want my team to be dealing with rain. Plus I'm going away on Wednesday and I cn only get my team together again on Tuesday. So, I'll be shooting the few shots we needed with it tonight, provided I can get a replacement bulb (may be difficult, it's a sunday here) tonight. I'm competent, but I'm not a real DoP, so the shots may be somewhat worse than if I could actually get my DoP in... to compensate, I'll create a few alternate shots we can do without needing the light outside for Tuesday, so then we have some more editing choices.

However, looking through the footage quickly, it does look pretty good :) Here's a handful of screenshots - most of it is still copying to my computer.
http://imgur.com/ZiiJ63F,qz9gHHF,25qbtK9,Fr63FDQ,L5ZOUVv,aJgd8LD,bJhXwW2,ZF3c0dX

EDIT: did we decide on a file naming system for the edit?
 
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cheeseandachallenge said:
I would push this forward a little to about 6am - which would address the issue raised of whether or not it is likely that the San Fran douchebags would be at the beach so early...
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Asked and answered many pages ago. :) Regular surfing, Kite boarding, Abalone Diving, leaving from an overnight stay ... there are a million reasons to be at the beach that early in the morning. We're going to pick the one most appropriate to our location and talent.

Bear in mind that this will put the sun on the land side of the beach, not over the ocean. I'm sure everyone's already come to that conclusion, but no one has said it out loud. So if your expecting beautiful dawn sun over the ocean horizon, I'm on the wrong coast for that at 6am, lol.

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

Ray, sorry for the delays, I'll explain via PM when I answer your survey thing. Working on that from my friend's laptop in Colorado this morning.
 
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Great job, C&C – congrats on your shoot! This is really happening :)

Ray: I'll get on it now. (EDIT: Have filled out the first section now, will do another soon!)
 
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We also got some BTS photos, but I ran out of time to get someone organised for a BTS videographer. We can potentially do some interviews, though. My DoP also did a quick walkthrough with his camera when we were eating, if it's of any use :P

David.rhsc said:
Asked and answered many pages ago. :) Regular surfing, Kite boarding, Abalone Diving, leaving from an overnight stay ... there are a million reasons to be at the beach that early in the morning. We're going to pick the one most appropriate to our location and talent.
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Right. Well we're playing it a wee bit loosely for time, so should be all good.
 
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I feel like there used to be a schedule thread, but, if there was, I can't find it anymore.

When is everyone else shooting? And are there things we can all do/information we can provide, in order to make the shooting process easier for whoever's going next?

I definitely think it'd be worth each of the unit directors having a look at a clip or two of the footage that C&C shot over the weekend, just so we're all on a similar page. But, other than that, are the ways that we can help facilitate the upcoming shoots (I feel like we inadvertently left C&C to fend for themselves...)?
 
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I'll be shooting tomorrow.
The wheather for the weekend will be crap again, so I looked if is was possible to shoot tomorrow, because it promised to be a dry day.
Now it looks like it will be even a sunny day.

The downside: no big Dutch name anymore: he has to shoot for a real TV show, instead the fictional one in the script ;)

So if there is something I need to see I need to see it now :P
 
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Walter I'm not at home now, so i havent updated my super rough edit with my pickups from last night, but I'll send you the test edit I sent Nick and CF from a few days ago.

Nick: not too stressed about fending for myself. I was just second guessing a lot of decisions I wouldn't normally because I didn't want to make any decisions that would effect others.

I'm away for about a week. When I get back I'll sort and upload my footage (how are we doing this btw? All free hosting services that i know of don't give enough space). Do we have a system for naming and tagging footage? I'll send CF my logs as well.
 
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cheeseandachallenge said:
I think my full project is about 60gb (excluding audio, which I'd guess is about 10gb). But I haven't sorted through and removed some test shots and rehearsals, so it's probably closer to 50gb.
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I apparently have 'unlimited disk space and bandwidth' though reading through the ToS it does prohibit using the shared server space as 'storage.' Not sure if this really qualifies as that, but I think we all should be good as long as CF can download the media in a timely manner.
 
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60gb, wtf?! Did you shoot on an Alexa? :lol: No worries, we'll figure it out. Congrats on the shoot, C&C! Good job, it looks nice. :)

So, are we gonna do this thing without the actual "sighting" footage? That's not an outlandish idea, but it's a little bit of a cock-tease. I'm open to the idea, but I do need to know, before I shoot my scene. I can't shoot with a green-screen, I either need the actual footage, or I need to not show it at all (I think it's better with the footage).
 
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