BTS - Making Bad Into Good

You know those behind the scenes features on DVDs where you get all that cool insight into the process of making a film and how much work it can be? Consider this our first behind the scenes feature - in written form.

When we were shooting About The Girl, we encountered a challenges and setbacks that could have threatened to derail the entire project. For starters, our first day of shooting was in early September, a time of year where the days are generally warm, and the evenings cool. We were shooting some "summer" footage and planned to hold off a bit to capture some great fall colours for the primary outdoor scenes, but we soon realized that shooting a no-budget film was a rather time consuming endeavor. Any number of factors can affect your production, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. He are a few of the bigger obstacles we had to deal with...

1. Scheduling Life
Favours were called in and a cast and crew formed with everyone generously participating on a voluntary basis. This meant that a wide range of work and familial obligations had to be factored into our shooting schedule. There were many late starts, few rehearsals, and fortunately only one day-long hangover that resulted in a last minute recast of a major speaking role on the day of shooting, and subsequently some last minute "summer" re-shoots in early November.

2. Water Temperatures
In the opening scene, the camera slowly pans across an ominous structure, slowly drifting down to a dramatic final reveal: a pale redhead lying face down in the coppery waters of a slow-flowing river beneath a train trestle. We filmed the shot a dozen times but wound up using the first take, the only one where our corpse wasn't shivering too violently to be convincingly dead. It worked out beautifully, thanks to the stalwart dedication of our "dead girl". She was a trooper through and through.

Rebuilding the audio in studio
Michael Humble and Ed Regan

3. Bad Audio
We spent a cold October afternoon huddled underneath a dripping bridge, struggling to get the words to spill forth from our chattering teeth. It was a fantastic location, but on that particular day, it was like being in a wind tunnel, assailed by a constant barrage of icy rain pellets that were driven in sideways on the gusting winds off the lake. When we got back to the studio to review the footage, we soon realized that the only sounds our boom mic had picked up were the howling winds and the hollow clang of the microphone cord pinging off a metal support beam. Still, not many people realized that the voices, cars, flowing water, wind and cackling crows in that scene were all added in post.

4. Real World Locations
Sometimes a passing car or plane would drown out our shot, or people would walk around a corner and find themselves suddenly on camera. These were fairly easy issues to deal with compared to the evening we decided to shoot our dive bar scene in an actual dive bar with actual dive bar patrons in attendance. While the crew set up the dolly track and equipment, the two principal actors rehearsed their lines, including a scene where a brief skirmish erupts. Despite the congenial approach, the rehearsal was quickly broken up by the owner who didn't want any trouble and who was clearly confused when we explained that we were just practicing our lines. After sorting out the misconception, we started rolling cameras, but were shortly after interrupted when one of the patrons fell down the stairs on her way out and we had to break while the bar was flooded by the flashing red lights of the ambulance that had come to her rescue. Still, despite all the confusion, the background smoke coughers added a lived in feeling to the production, and they were very accommodating of the "movie people from New York". It was worth the extra time we invested in that scene, and just as well we didn't need re-shoots because the bar wound up closing the following day.

5. Inclement Weather
We arrived on set for our the last day of shooting, anxious to have the last scene in the bag, and surprised to find almost three inches of snow had fallen overnight. We were scheduled for a 10am start, and it was 1pm by the time we had shoveled, swept, and flooded the snow from the dock and reestablished our autumn time line. It was more work that we anticipated and by the end of the day, we were racing the setting sun to get our final shots. We did in the end though, and it couldn't have worked out better.

Adapting to change and last minute crises is part of the thrill of film making. We the shooting done, we settled into the editing suite and the hours bled into days, and eventually weeks and months. During that time, About The Girl slowly took form and after a quick pick-up shoot in the spring to smooth out a bumpy scene transition, we were ready to add the permanent soundtrack.

I'll tell you about that next time...

"Re-adjusting" the setting for our "autumn" shoot

Kevin Hoffman and Ed Regan