One Too Many Mornings - a new comedy.

One of the most logistically challenging things to do in an indie film is to shoot in a moving car. It sucks. Cars are hard.

In so many low budget films – if a scene takes place in a car – the camera is almost always handheld in the passenger seat, shooting profile at the driver on the widest lens possible. This shot is always there by necessity – it’s the cleanest shot you can get of the actor driving, while not needing to add a car rig onto the car. It’s a pet peeve of mine – to me, profile shots should mean something. There should be a specific emotional or intellectual reason why you shoot someone in profile instead of straight on, or at an angle – it’s a visual decision, and it’s unfortunate that the confines of a car dictate that you have to shoot cars in this very basic way.

Additionally, cars are loud, roads are loud, and many car scenes, in addition to looking bad, also need to be ADR’ed (re-dub the actors reading their lines).

So, when writing the movie, we were thinking so much about the resources we did have, and thinking about it in a way where we knew we could achieve a specific aesthetic within that limited range. For this very scene, I made cars off limits. One very short, dialogue-less car scene made it into the script, but otherwise – off limits. We couldn’t afford it – we didn’t need it.

Until our reshoots.

When we reconceived how we were going to be introduced to the characters; there was one piece of information that we needed to get across: Peter had driven all night long to get to Fischer’s house. The easiest way on paper that we could achieve this is by showing him that morning, asleep, but seated at the wheel of the moving car. I loved this idea for many reasons. Like the rest of the film, it’s both really funny, but also kind of terrifying. It also serves as a larger metaphor for his character – without giving anything away, you could say that Peter is asleep at the wheel of his life, really. It’s a perfect solution to both setting up his character, but also giving the audience the information they need to get the story moving. But writing a scene is free. Shooting a scene is a whole other story. So how were we going to do it?

The simple answer is: illegally and dangerously.

On a “real” movie that has a budget for such things – we’d simply close down a street and tow the car. But we didn’t have money for closing a street, nor money to even rent a u-haul hitch. It was out of the realm of possibility. So really, we just needed to do it for real.

The first step was finding a road. We needed a stretch of road wide enough so that we could drive alongside the picture car in a second car. It also needed to be off the beaten path so that there would be a lot less other cars on the road. More importantly, it needed to be straight. And ideally –this would be a bonus- it needed to be visually interesting.

So back in June, Anthony and I took a whole day and just drove around. We were delirious. It sounds kind of simple, but all the roads we were finding that were wide enough, they were simply too main of a road. We would have been stopped by the cops in no time. All the roads that were off the beaten path – they were too skinny. We drove all over Camarillo, Oxnard, Simi Valley, and found nothing. Just strip malls.

Finally we somehow found ourselves in Agua Dulce, not too far from the rocks where several episodes of Star Trek were shot. There were definitely houses and small businesses around, but it was otherwise fairly desolate.

Next up, we had to figure out where to put the camera. I mean, we’re doing this for real, we’re putting Anthony’s life in danger – so let’s flaunt it. We did this in two ways. The first was we got this specialty car mount that Elisha borrowed from a friend (for free!) that was a series of industrial strength suction cups. So we could mount the camera almost anywhere on the car.

Additionally, we borrowed a van from another friend (for free!) so that we could drive parallel to the moving car, and shoot from the side of it. We could see the entire car and clearly depict that in no way was this an illusion.

The day of the shoot we woke up at 4:30am. That way we could not only start shooting right as the sun came up, there’d also be even less of a chance of people catching us.

We didn’t realize this – but at the end of this stretch of road – the one house we would meet in front of, a fireman lived there. At one point he got out, saw us, got in his firetruck and left. At another point his wife came out to check out what we were doing. We called that meeting point “the fireman’s wife’s house.” We were kind of scared of them.

The one expense we incurred – we rented walkie-talkies. It cost $40. But that way we could communicate with everyone all at the same time. For most shots we had one car driving in front of the picture car, and one car driving behind it. Meg was up ahead at the end of the road on lookout. If a car was coming up ahead – Meg would call out “car coming!” and we would stop.

Like everything– I think a hefty amount of naivety is important to success. Otherwise you may psych yourself out of doing it, knowing what the difficulties are going to be. So that, mixed with a large dose of luck has lifted us and our ability to craft what I think might end up being one of the most visually compelling scenes in the film.

Our fingers are crossed for many reasons, but the current one is that this is hopefully the last set of pickup shots we need. Onward and upward.

mike

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.