Making Short Films With No Money

This is a storyboard:

Real movies have storyboard artists. Short films have well-intentioned writer/director/producers who can barely draw stick figures. Lucky for us, that's all we need to be able to draw. What will be in each shot? Who will be in each shot? Will it be a close-up? A medium shot? A low angle? What's going on in that shot? Is someone talking? Entering? Exiting?

Here's how those shots actually came out:

They're very close to what was called for in the storyboard. Our shooting ratio (ratio of feet shot to feet used) was less than 3:1. This is very low. Storyboards are great.

Transfer to video

We shot on 16mm film because we wanted a "film look" for our video. The traditional way of editing is to process the negative into a "work print" which you cut and splice and paste and glue until you have a working copy of your film. Then a person called a "neg cutter" cuts up the negative to correspond to your work print and a real print is made from that. (There are more steps, but they're not important here.)

We saved money in two ways: First, we decided up front that this project is a video, not a film. We never intend to distribute it on 16mm or 35mm film. It will live out its days on video. This saved us tons of money on film stock and processing.

Second, we took a bit of a risk. The usual way of transferring film onto video is to run a print through a process called "telecine" (TEL-a-SIN-e). However, we didn't want to spend the money on the print, so we ran our actual negative through the telecine machine. This is risky because if anything happens to your negative -- if the machine jams or the neg gets scratched -- there's nothing you can do about it, and no "backup." You're just out of luck on whatever was on that stretch of film.

The telecine operator was able to to set it up so that even though film negative was going through his machine, the video copy he was making was a positive.

This is also the stage where we dropped color out of some scenes. Everything was shot on color film, since Patrick Knisely has a lot of experience in judging how color shoots will turn out when you convert them to black and white.

So, we showed up for the telecine session with our 20-plus minutes of color negative, and left an hour later with some color and some black-and-white video. Cost: $300 for the hour, $120 for the Digital Beta videotape, $10 or something for a VHS copy. (We needed the VHS copy because we don't own a Digital Beta deck -- we own VHS decks. We won't touch the Digital Beta master again until it's time to assemble the final movie in a professional video bay.)

Rewrite!

The telecine session was our first look at our footage, and it was very disappointing in some ways. One of the camera lenses was not working correctly, so some of our footage was out of focus. Our shooting ratio was so tight that losing even two or three shots could have been a problem, and we lost much more than that. A quarter to a third of total footage was unusable. Because we were shooting strictly from a tight storyboard, loss of footage meant chunks of our story simply didn't exist.

This left us with two choices: Rewrite to fit the existing footage, or shoot more footage.

Shooting more footage is called "doing pickups." We did some pickups. However, we weren't able to afford to shoot more film, so we got hold of a Digital Beta videocamera and shot our pickups on video.

We tried for a long time to integrate the resulting footage into our movie, but it just didn't fit. After several months and a couple of different rough cuts, we decided to remove all the pickups from the film and work solely with the footage that was originally shot on film.

This meant serious rewriting. Over the course of about four months, Blake and I twisted more than a few plots around the existing footage. We got very frustrated at times, and very silly at other times ("Hey, we could have Mac and the milkman in a psychic duel..."), and finally built up and honed down to something which is, in many ways, superior to our original script. But in doing so, we had to cut some of our favorite bits. We lost Mac falling over the wall, the stolen drink gag, and the smoking finger gag (for which I mourn), but we gained a stronger story and a better ending.

Although I'm discussing the rewriting process before I discuss the editing process, they actually went concurrently.

Editing

Timecode: Just as videotape has audio tracks (for sounds) and picture tracks (for visuals), it also contains information called "timecode."

In many of the screen captures I've used on this page, a number such as 01:05:43:13 is imprinted upon the image:

This is a timecode number. It means "1 hour, 5 minutes, 43 seconds, 13 frames." However, the number you're seeing there isn't actual timecode; it's what's called "window burn." Somewhere, buried in a track on the videotape, is the timecode value 01:05:43:13. The window burn is just being polite and letting me know that.

When we had timecode numbers for every panel, we wrote them out in an "Edit Decision List" (EDL), like this:

We gave that Edit Decision List to Richard Bugg, who took it to a video bay and assembled a first cut using the Digital Beta master tape.

This worked great in some ways, not so great in others. On the great side: It worked. On the not-so-great side: Editing has a rhythm to it, and it's hard to have rhythm when you're not able to see your scenes and shots together. The first cut was... well, it was okay.

Around this time, I bought a Macintosh 8500/180 for use in audio and graphic design for my business. The day before it arrived, it suddenly hit me that it had videotape inputs. Maybe I could do the editing on my new computer...

(That's me in the upper right, by the way.)

I played all 20-plus minutes of the raw video footage into the computer. The footage all had window burn on it that corresponded to its timecode. (We had them put window burn on it when they did the telecine.)

I chopped the footage up into usable clips and gave each piece a name. Then I started cutting and pasting in the window above.

Many months, nine versions, and a lot of comments later, we have a final cut on the computer. Unfortunately, it's a very low-resolution cut, so it can't be used as the final product. We still have to go back to a video bay and make the final cut.

So, I've gone through the whole miniature movie and written down the IN POINT and the OUT POINT of each clip, based on the window burn that's showing on my screen:

---

We now have a final picture cut. Because all my editing work was on the computer, at a viewing size of about 2 inches square, I had to double-check all my timecode ins and outs against the original footage, just to make sure I wasn't getting eye blinks or camera jiggles or anything else I couldn't see in the low-resolution computer version. Once that was done, we took our EDL and our original Digital Beta master tape to an editing bay, where Steve Melchiorre edited it into a nine-and-a-half minute final cut. New timecode was recorded onto the new tape and a VHS copy (including the timecode) was made for me. I will use the VHS copy for music scoring.

All that remains:

1. Score to picture (this is almost finished)

2. Record final voiceover (scheduled for September 13)

3. A few minor tweaks to the picture cut

4. Final assembly of the film on a computer workstation, resulting in a new master Digital Beta tape, from which our VHS final products will be struck.

We screened it in October for about 150 people at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, which is held this year in Monterey, California. It was a mostly great reception. However, during the second half of the film, people's laughs started getting cut off because we hadn't left enough of a beat after some of our punchlines. Also, one line that worked on paper didn't work on film; no laugh.

Blake and I got together and rewrote stuff. Then we went back to Richards to re-re-re-record voiceover. Instead of recording individual lines, we recorded the entire scene's voiceover from scratch. It's almost impossible to get new lines to sound as though they belong when you're dropping them into half-year-old voiceovers.

Recording the entire scene over again worked very well. If you're listening for the change in vocal quality, you may be able to spot it, but I doubt anyone's noticed.

All that remains now is to put the new soundtrack together with the picture.

Finished!

Any flaws that remain are now officially permanent.

Richard's article, AUDIO FOR THE NO-BUDGET FILM, ran in RECORDING magazine. If you're here because you read about the film in that article, and you have questions or comments, feel free to drop me a line. Also, please stop by my page or the pages for 1 is for Gun, Session 52, or Lady's Man

We're now an official selection of the 1998 Atlantic City Film Festival. They'll be screening "1 is for Gun" on October 26, at 4:00.

Well, you coulda knocked us over without a feather. We won a silver award in Atlantic City.

We almost didn't go to the award ceremony -- after all, we knew all the problems with the film, and there was no way we'd win anything. And it was a long drive, and Blake flew in the same day, so everybody was tired. But we figured, well, that's why he flew in, so I shaved and off we went.

Guess we'll dust off some of the other festival entry forms.