Long, Dark Night

'Ello, you lucky people!

Filmmaking is tiring. Especially when you have a single day to shoot 80% of it AND all of it needs to be at night AND most of it needs to be outside. My fault really. It's an example of Kyle the writer not looking out for Kyle the director. For instance, I wrote the opening scene be lit with only the light from a trunk. The car available to me to use (my own car, the wonderful Nova) does not have a trunk light. And that was really the least of what we had to deal with. At one point I even said "God, who wrote this piece of shit?" But, it got finished and actually looks pretty good.

The entire shoot needed to be at night, which has its good and bad points. "Night" can be shot literally anytime between dusk and dawn and it can look like the same time, however getting the proper lighting on your actors' faces is very difficult because at what point does it look like a light is shining on them. Luckily there was a moon out which added a bit of light but not a lot.

The majority of what needed to be shot was a guy digging a grave and burying a body, meaning we needed a location far away from stuff. Clearly, no one would try to bury a body right by a subdivision or a parking lot. Or at least they shouldn't. We had the luck (if it can be called that) of getting to film in the empty farmland belonging to the parents of a friend of a friend. The guy was really gung-ho about it and even began digging a grave for us with the back-hoe. It took us for fucking ever to even find the land in the pitch-blackness of the country and once we finally did, we discovered that the pre-dug grave was somehow full of water. So what did we do? As one has to do quite often in cinema, we cheated. We made it look like there was a hole by building up a pile of dirt. You shoot it right, it looks like a dude is 4 feet underground.

The other major problem with that location was that it was dark as shit and way too far away from an outlet to bring any decent sized light. So, the entire thing was lit with nothing more than the Nova's headlights, a wind-up flashlight, and an Itty Bitty Book Light. And oddly enough, it looked really good. It's creepy actually, which is all I could ask for. Two big thank yous to Steve Giuliano for doing 6 different jobs being my only crew and Andy Lacerte for coming in uber last minute and agreeing to be covered with fake blood and buried in a pile of cold dirt.

I edited the shit out of it today and it's about half finished. The only thing I have to do is cut the scene between Rob Walker and Stephanie Kautz (that I shot in November '06) and put in the music and sound effects. My original goal was to get it all finished by Halloween, now I'm thinking it'll be done by next week. So that's really great. The finished product will probably be between 10 and 15 minutes in length making it the shortest of the short films I have made, but the script is only 5 pages so that's pretty good. I'm excited to let everyone see it as it should be pretty cool. I love making movies.

Talk at ya later and keep circulating the tapes.