It's a droll cliche to observe the 50-year author praised as an "overnight success" when she may have been shelving rejected manuscripts for the preceding 30 years.
One of my personal inspirations is knowing that Ridley Scott who was 41 years-old when he directed Alien in 1979.
But I get a distinctly different buzz when I see kids applying their hand to the craft of storytelling. It's a back-handed compliment to say, "Good work -- for a kid." I know I found comments like that insulting when I was a kid, so we here at Chez Celtx are pleased to offer the following:
Check out the trailer for the new short film Monitor by 64-Bit Films. It's great! No qualifiers, no caveats. It is just fantastic.
Check it out. I'll wait.
[Hold music to the tune of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon"]
And... we're back. How many shades of awesome is that? Nothing embodies the "damn the torpedoes | get it done | barbarian at the gates of Rome" mentality more than seeing people outside the system following their bliss without waiting on permission from self-appointed industry gatekeepers.
Following now is a short Q&A from a conversation I had with director Jared Rosenthal.
* * *
Q: How long did each phase (pre-production, production, post-production) take you?
A: We first had the idea for Monitor in the late summer of 2009, but we knew we would need more than a full year to pull together everything we needed for the shoot. We ended up shooting in August of 2011 for six days, so pre-production was the longest stage of the process by far. We were 14 when we started development on the project, and we were acutely aware of the enormity of the material we were tackling. We also knew that if we ever wanted to see the project to fruition, we needed all of our bases covered, and we needed a powerful script to draw people in. We must have done nearly 10 significant re-writes of the script before we finally had something we were comfortable shooting.
We used Celtx the entire time. Throughout pre-production we would use the sketch tool to illustrate certain setups and ideas, which we would bounce back and forth with each other and make notes on. Production lasted six and a half days, plus a pick-ups day and a rehearsal day. We were really only supposed to shoot for a week, but we got rained out our last day and moved two of the scenes that we needed to shoot to later in the week.
Post-production started pretty much the minute we began shooting. We shot the entire film on two
Canon 60Ds, and we would usually have someone off to the side dumping and batching footage once we filled up a card. The fast turnaround time ended up being something of a life-saver. We had shot a really critical rain scene involving the main character, Karen (Anne DeAcetis), and a pickup truck. I batched all the footage onto our little portable hard drive, and as we were in the car driving back home I cut together the footage on my laptop and realized that we were missing some critical shots. So we were able to catch the mistake incredibly early in the process. It would have been disastrous if we had waited. We just sent out the final cut last week, so post took us about four-and-a-half months.
Q: Did you have financing? Did you have to call in favours and hope for the best?
A: We wanted to finance as much of the film as possible by ourselves, but we ended up having to look for donors. Because we had initially believed we were going to pay out of pocket, we were able to keep the budget extremely low. During our two years of pre-production, we contacted dozens of film equipment companies to see if we could get gear in return for product reviews. We were able to assemble quite a big arsenal of equipment that we fully utilized over the course of the shoot, and that was a major help. One of our biggest challenges was also looking for a police car for one of the final scenes of the film. We contacted dozens of people from the local law enforcement to no avail, but then it turned out that Anne, our lead, knew one of the officers on the force from high school. So we were able to call in a massive favor and get a real police car for the shoot. Ironically, we were able to get help from law enforcement, but we were never able to get permission to shoot at a supermarket. We had to steal some of those shots.
Q: What was the hardest part of the process for you?
A: My first reaction to this question was to talk about how hard it was to get a bunch of professional adult actors (and adult donors) to trust in a bunch of teenagers for a project as big as this was. But truth be told, everyone was exceptionally trusting and dedicated. Our actors gave it their all, and we couldn't be more grateful for that. The most difficult technical challenge (at least for me) was the degree to which we shot out of order. At 34 minutes, this was the longest short film any of us have ever done by far, with a larger cast and a lot more stuff to keep track of. So our shooting schedule was 100 percent out of order. Shooting non-linearly is always something you have to deal with, but this was the first time I'd dealt with anything this out of order. It was a little unsettling. My biggest concern was that there would be absolutely no emotional continuity when everything was cut together, but everything ended up working great.
Q: How big was your crew? Was commitment an issue for anyone?
A: Our crew consisted of me, our cinematographer Luca Repola, our producer Kai Demler, and our assistant director and co-writer Cosmo Scharf. Then we had two fantastic production assistants, Frida Perez and Emma Lov Block, who split the time during the week. Everyone was fantastic. I couldn't have asked for a better team to work with. As far as commitment was concerned, we did have an original team member leave us, and one of our actors dropped out of the project a few months before we shot. But overall, everyone's enthusiasm and dedication was top-notch.
Q: What do you hope happens with Monitor? Do you have a distribution or marketing plan? What's your expectation for the future?
A: We just submitted Monitor to Tribeca Film Festival, so we'll see what happens with that! If we're lucky, we'll have the honor of premiering the film at Tribeca. If not, we'll try and get the film into as many festivals as possible, and then we'll probably put it online and maybe do a DVD sale. We just want to get the film seen by as many people as possible.
* * *
I hope you'll join us here at Team Celtx with wishing Jared & co. luck with Tribeca and their future productions.
Got your own "barbarians at the gates" story? We want to hear 'em. Shout out to Ryan and we'll chat about doing a profile on you too.
(Photos by Jared Rosenthal, used with permission.)
