Making the Webisode

This long weekend I spent most of my waking hours working on a friend's web series pilot. It was a fun and exhausting experience, and I'm secretly glad I have to work and can't do the whole shoot.

Sound Man for a Day
The first day, by virtue of no one else being willing to do it, I got to be the sound man. (I also got to play the sound man, when the documentary-style camera intentionally accidentally catches me in frame.) I had to get myself up to speed on the equipment pretty fast in the morning. I dialed through the menus of the recorder, a Sound Designs 744T hard disk recording unit, trying to figure out how to split the boom between two channels and mix one hotter than the other. Turns out, the 744T can't do that, or I couldn't figure out how. I could put the boom on two tracks, but I couldn't set different gains.¹

The location was a fraternity, and we used a real frat house on the UCLA campus. There had been a raucous party there the night before, by all evidence, and the place was quiet until the late afternoon, as the brothers slept off what must've been outstanding hangovers.

Most of the day was spent getting one amazing shot, where a character moves from spying in the bushes across the street up the stairs to the house and all around the ground floor. We did probably six or seven takes, and everyone who has seen me run with my AC vest full of expendables and my hands full of gear knows what a comical sight it is. Whatever I can do, I say, to bring mirth to a film set.

Gaffin' and Grippin'
While I thought I was going to be doing AC work on this project, I ended up doing very little. I set up one tape and clapped about twenty slates. The rest of the time I was schlepping equipment, driving the U-Haul around (mostly looking for parking) and setting up lights and stands.²

I'll say this for grips: they earn their keep. Raising one small HMI up and down on a roller stand to test position and filters a few times -- the set-up called for the light to be aimed from outside a second-story window -- gave me the best upper-body workout I've ever had outside a gym. Oh, and two other people were helping me with it.

SAG is Expensive
Even with the Ultra Low Budget Agreement, the producers didn't count on all they would have to spend for their excellent talent. I know now to budget an additional 40-50% on top of the actors' salaries to pay for fees, taxes and the SAG payroll company. Yikes!

The project is now thousands of dollars over budget and it's only a few days in. I hope some angel alights to gap fund. In the meantime, let me just say that I'm coming to believe more and more that film making is pre-production, pre-production and more pre-production. The budget is a big part of that. If you plan far enough ahead, you can cut corners and save money. But at the end of the day, you have to be realistic. And you have to set aside contingencies for things unforeseen. Because there is no project that doesn't encounter the expensive unexpected.

1. Yes, I suspicion an XLR splitter would've let me use Input 1 and 2 with the boom - since Inputs 1 & 2 can be mixed separately - but I needed that second XLR input for the wireless lav anyway. At it turned out, when we used a second lav, we had to plug in directly to the camera, a DVX100. The 744T, by the way, is an excellent piece of equipment. The fault was in the sound package not having enough adapters to make full use of it.
2. The main lights were a 650W HMI and two KENO 4-banks. I liked the KENOs a lot, although the DP was frustrated by how little they did against direct sunlight. (What can you do? DV is contrasty by nature.) I feel pretty confident I now know how to change out daylight-balanced bulbs for tungsten in a under two minutes.