A lot of people have asked us why it takes so long to produce an episode, so I thought I'd take the time to talk about the process for our web series and explain a little bit about why it does take so long to make something that only ends up being around 10 minutes long. Like I said above, making these episodes is hard (but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy every second of it). It's like rolling 10 different dice and hoping that they all land on a 3. There are so many elements that need to come together in order for the cameras to start rolling that if you think about them all at once, it can be overwhelming. Things like: actor availability, location availability, availability of the crew, of the equipment, the weather, this actor is available from 10-12 but this actor is available from 2-5 only, etc. While these issues in themselves present a problem, it's exacerbated by the fact that we've all got day jobs or full course loads that we're trying to work around. My co-writer, Nicky Stevens, lives in Florida so we have Skype sessions when we can. Two of our main actors, Brock and Rookie, drive three hours from Auburn to come to the shoots in Tuscaloosa, so we have to be mindful and considerate of that as well. Fortunately, we've got some dedicated producers and crew members who are willing to play as much schedule Tetris as they need to to make it all come together and work.
Episode 3 took three days to film. On the first day, Saturday, June 8, we filmed all of the interiors of Jennifer's house that involved Brock, Bo, Rookie, Jennifer's mom, and the cops. Considerations we had to make were: Drew (Jennifer's mom) had to be wrapped by 6 and Bo could only be there Saturday because he had to work the next day, so we needed to get all of his scenes done on Saturday. We started the day with crew call at 7am (after I did some pre-lighting the night before with Alex Beatty, the Director of Photography) so we could set up our first shot and be ready to go by the time cast was called at 8am. Let me go back for a second and remind you that the crew: college students, during the summer, were called at 7am on a Saturday. And they showed up on time, enthusiastic, and ready to work (see, I told you it was a blessing). And we got to work on the whopping 36 camera setups that we had planned for the day (which is, for all intensive purposes, insane). In class, I tell my students to plan on each setup taking at least 30 minutes, from setting up the camera, lighting it the way you want it, rehearsing the blocking with the camera, to rolling a few takes to make sure you get it right. By that math, it should have taken us 18 hours to get everything. I know, that seems pretty ridiculous because it really only ends up being about 5-6 minutes of the finished video. But anyone who was on the set that day will tell you that we flew. So much so, that I didn't even really have time to think about if what we were getting was right. It was a long day - some shots were cut, some consolidated with others, but we managed to finish the day right at 12 hours. We celebrated by eating at Wintzell's. Those fish tacos really hit the spot.
The next morning (7am crew call, 8am cast), we finished what we weren't able to get on Saturday: the scenes with Rookie in the bedroom. We managed to finish those scenes by around noon so that was a pretty short day. So all we had left to film were the exterior scenes for the cops - the dialogue scenes in the car and the exterior scene with the cops standing around the Ghostbusters' car. Again, scheduling became an issue. For various reasons, including actor availability, we were unable to schedule those scenes during the same weekend that we shot everything else. In fact, we weren't able to schedule those scenes until a whole three weeks later - we shot them on Friday, June 28th (in less-than-ideal weather, no less, but I didn't want to have to postpone that shoot any longer, so we rolled through it). Crew members went out of town, actors were involved in other film projects, so we had to wait three weeks to shoot. So, in the meantime, I set out to cut the scenes we shot together, and I had a rough cut of those scenes pretty quickly afterwards. As the director and the editor, I find it's necessary to give it a day or two after you shoot just because I don't want to be influenced by all of the hard work and issues and considerations we dealt with on set. Walter Murch, Academy Award-winning editor and sound designer, calls it "seeing outside of the frame," and recommends avoiding that so you can focus solely on what you have in front of you: the footage (and who am I to argue with the great Murch). But then, there wasn't much I could do until we had the rest of the episode shot.
So finally, after over 20 hours of shooting over three weeks, we had the whole episode in the can and I could start putting the whole thing together, and again, I had a rough cut of the episode 3 footage pretty quickly afterward. But a rough cut is the first step in a long line of post production tasks. There's sound mixing/design, color correction, visual effects, in addition to polishing up and tightening the cut as much as possible. At this time, I also had several other projects going on: shooting interviews for a documentary project, writing a pilot script for a different series, prepping classes for the Fall semester, etc. so I had to work on episode 3 whenever I could, which was sometimes not often. In order to really begin working on the sound design and color correction/vfx, you have to achieve "picture lock," which means all of the video is cut and trimmed and exactly the way you want it so you can lock it down and not make any more changes. So I'd do a cut and send it out to trusted folks for feedback. I'd make changes, and the process would repeat. Then, after picture lock, it was time to start working on the sound design, color correction, and visual effects. Because I'm colorblind, it's impossible for me to accurately do color correction, so that job went to my awesome Director of Photography, Alex Beatty. Alex has also had quite a busy summer traveling around and taking classes. In addition, he fell ill for a time so that put him out of commission. So I worked on the sound while he found some time to work on finishing the picture.
Sound design is probably one of the most overlooked processes in film production. It's mixing dialogue levels, cleaning up audio, removing hiss, smoothing transitions between clips...and all of this is before you get to adding sound effects and music! So needless to say, I spent a lot of time on that, because having good sound is one of the most important things when making films. Finding the perfect sound effects and music takes a lot of time, especially when you don't have a composer. You have to find pre-made tracks and make them fit, not only with the tone, but the timing. Making sure a song ends when you want it to not just by having it fade out when you're done with it, but ending on a finishing phrase so that it feels complete, which often requires cutting and stitching pieces of the track together. If you didn't notice any of that happening (and it happened a lot), then I guess I did something right :). So, Alex finally had some time to do color correction and visual effects (the sparks from the lights were added in post-production), and those were finished on Tuesday, July 16. So then, all of the assets were combined and the final cut was again sent to trusted people for feedback. We felt confident that we could go ahead and release the episode soon, so we set a relatively safe date of the following Monday, July 22, and started promoting it on social media. In the meantime, final tweaks were made (actually making final tweaks on Sunday the 21st), cast and crew approved it, and we were ready to go. The rest, they say, is history. And now, we're planning to do that all over again for episode 4 and beyond :).
So that's what went into making episode 3 in a nutshell. It's unfortunate that it does take so long for us to produce a 10-minute episode. I wish it weren't the case, and, honestly, it won't always be exactly like this. Some will go faster while, inevitably, some will go slower. I wish we could release an episode every two weeks. One day, maybe we will have the opportunity to film multiple episodes at once but it's hard to say, considering we only have weekends available and we don't want to make Brock and Rookie travel back and forth from Auburn to Tuscaloosa all the time. Gas is expensive! We're doing the best we can with what we've got to work with. I also want to stress again that none of us are making a cent from this project (we can't, legally, even if we wanted to). It's truly a passion project for everyone involved. Something we love doing. Something we believe in. And we're so fortunate and grateful that we've received so much support and love from the community. So much so, that we're definitely going to keep doing it, even if it does take longer than we'd like to crank these out. We're committed to providing you with the best quality production possible, even if it takes a little more time to do so. Stay updated on episode progress by liking us on Facebook! We'll keep you abreast on every phase of production. We hope you stick around for the ride. It's going to be a fun one.
