The shooting

After a creative process is finished I always feel kind of empty. Understandable, really, seeing as I’ve basically just invested a huge amount of time (and above all thought) into it, to ignore such immeasurable like passion and soul.

Sometimes it’s a bad empty, but this time around it is a good empty. It’s the kind of empty that I can now fill in with the good things from life around me, knowing that I did my utmost in the last stage to create something good. Will the end product actually be good? I don’t know. It was my first time out as a director and I’m sure I made a bunch of mistakes that experience would have eliminated.

The shoot itself was a grueling affair. We started at seven in the morning (though we were supposed to start at six, go figure) and were officially supposed to end by six in the evening. We didn’t. In fact we didn’t by a long shot. We ended at 1:30 the next morning.

This was for a ten minute short film!

As the director of the short film I had a whole bunch of people looking to me for final decisions and directions. Somehow I made them all, without thinking too long or waffling too much. It was really mind boggling that I was pretty much the youngest on the set, yet everybody was looking to me for guidance.

Not once did anybody question me either. They would offer alternative suggestions, but this was always in the spirit of aiding the creative process, rather than undermining me. (I believe I am now a good enough reader of character that I can figure out when somebody means something positively and when they mean it with malice in their heart). Hell, some people were even trying their hardest to impress me.

I too tried to impress everybody else, of course. Mainly by working twice as hard and being twice as positive. I don’t know if I succeeded in either, but I know that my feet hurt like hell, by the end of it. I ran around giving directions, looking at different angles and making sure that the effect I wanted was the effect I got. I think by working as hard as I did I motivated everybody else to continue working, without complaining, for 17 hours. I’m sure that in the movie industry even that isn’t that regular of an occurrence. It could also just be that I had an amazing crew, put together by an amazing producer (who worked three times as hard and was three times as positive as everybody else).

All in all it was an exhausting but inspiring day. I just hope it shows in the final product.