Being the
Further Adventures of an Independent Film Maker
8-12-99
Introduction
Welcome to the first
entry of our Weekly Diary. Every week (or so) we plan
to give you info and updates on the adventures of two actresses/producers/writers
in the crazy independent filmmaking world of Los Angeles.
Dayna and I decided to
make a film quite by chance. We were just two of many frustrated actors
in this town who were fed-up with all the bull. Both of us had just
come out of bad relationships and decided we wanted more in life! So,
after spending many nights writing a feature, we decided to compound our story
into a short and go for it. Family members, friends and doctors were
contacted. We called everyone we could think of and ended up with enough
money for a modest production.
We met our Greek director,
Evangelos Maderakis, at a happening
L.A. bar, and he brought his roommate, Sharon Meir, a fantastic D.P., to our
show. Both Evangelos and Sharon turned out to be a great fit for us.
Talented and dedicated filmmakers, they were determined to help us tell our
story.
We shot with a crew of
12 people. Our Niagara wasn’t working on the first day, our A.D.
threatened the director’s life a few times, we ran out of film, lost
two cans with one day’s worth of footage in them, and our caterer got
sick, but it all turned out okay.
Dayna handled the pressure
much better then I did, and in her quiet yet confident way, managed to have
a good time on the set. I was breaking out with a fever blister, zits,
and just about any other skin condition you can think of. Romance on
the set was prevalent and tumultuous. It was wild.
On the last day of production,
we poppedthe champagne and toasted ourselves. Little did we know
our work was just beginning. WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF POST PRODUCTION,
where no one has any definite answers, where prices can change in a matter
of minutes, and where you will probably need to repeat one or two steps in
the process.
We shot on Super-16, which
made things harder. Being tight on money, we decided on silent dailies
(not recommended), we recovered our cans of missing footage only to find out
that the person who found them had decided tothem, exposing our film
in the process. That meant green and red stripes running at the end
of the frame, on the recovered footage. Aack! After going through
telecine, color corrections, and five long difficult weeks of editing, we
were ready to cut our negative. Unfortunately, Magic Film sliced our footage
wrong! They created deep splice marks along most of the frames in the
film. Somehow, we managed to correct that by changing the viewing ratio
from a 1:66 to a 1:71.
After all of the above,
we thought we could say goodbye to the post world, only to return to it a
year later. Our film got accepted into the IFFM
(Yay!) and it was time to blow up our Super-16 to 35mm.
That’s when we decided
to start this diary. In the next few weeks we will bring you facts and
video interviews from most of the people we dealt with in our production and
post-production processes. We will interview, interrogate and seek the
truth at all cost. All this in the hopes of saving you some of the trials
we had to endure. As we progress, we will also bring you info on our
trips to various festivals, our weekly activity update and many more exciting
things.
Thank you for reading
this far, now go make a movie!
