I'm not a seasoned Director by any means. I'm working on my second short film, and researching how to be better at directing.
That said, any of us out there who have good/bad/ugly stories to share about directing their own films? Be it short or feature length? I'd love to chat about experiences and lessons learned.
For my first director story, I'd say my lesson learned was trust your people more than yourself.
The first scheduled day of shooting our short film "Kushtaka", we had an earthquake in Alaska. It was the first major earthquake in a long while, and being on Kodiak island, we were warned that a large Tsunami was headed our way. Everyone evacuated to high ground, and we were worried for our son who was in school at the time.
Luckily, his school was evacuated safely, and all that was left was to wait for the wave to hit. 30 minutes later, no wave. Everyone was safe, save the people at the site of the earthquake in Anchorage. They were rocked pretty hard.
Come to find out there are different types of quakes, and we lucked out with a side/slip quake that doesn't cause any tsunamis.
After everyone stood down from the alarm, my first thought was that the filming day was done. I thought, no one would want to film after such an event. Much to my surprise though, everyone showed up, excited and happy to work. We built the set, and prepped for the nighttime shots. It was a beautiful thing to see everyone together and working on this, even with such a stressful event.
That showed me, even if you think something might not work out or people might quit on you, there are always times and people that wont. That moment, I knew we could complete the film, no matter what life threw our way.
That said, any of us out there who have good/bad/ugly stories to share about directing their own films? Be it short or feature length? I'd love to chat about experiences and lessons learned.
For my first director story, I'd say my lesson learned was trust your people more than yourself.
The first scheduled day of shooting our short film "Kushtaka", we had an earthquake in Alaska. It was the first major earthquake in a long while, and being on Kodiak island, we were warned that a large Tsunami was headed our way. Everyone evacuated to high ground, and we were worried for our son who was in school at the time.
Luckily, his school was evacuated safely, and all that was left was to wait for the wave to hit. 30 minutes later, no wave. Everyone was safe, save the people at the site of the earthquake in Anchorage. They were rocked pretty hard.
Come to find out there are different types of quakes, and we lucked out with a side/slip quake that doesn't cause any tsunamis.
After everyone stood down from the alarm, my first thought was that the filming day was done. I thought, no one would want to film after such an event. Much to my surprise though, everyone showed up, excited and happy to work. We built the set, and prepped for the nighttime shots. It was a beautiful thing to see everyone together and working on this, even with such a stressful event.
That showed me, even if you think something might not work out or people might quit on you, there are always times and people that wont. That moment, I knew we could complete the film, no matter what life threw our way.