or how to make movies in your basement.
______________________________________________________________________
Pre-production
Equipment:
Panasonic DVX 100A
Letus35 Adapter
Used Canon SLR lenses (bought on ebay)
Lowel DV Creator 1 Light Kit (bought at bhphoto.com )
150 watt fluorescent light bulbs (bought at Walmart)
PC (AMD 3500, 3 gigs ram, 1 Terabyte storage)
Adobe Photoshop CS2
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5
Adobe After Effects 6.5
The whole bloody affair of putting the script into production began when Joseph Arnone told Wes Tarca he was extremely interested in playing the character of Julian Shay. But a problem quickly arose: money. Only able to cover half of the cost of the film himself, Wes asked his father if he was interested in investing in the film. Having read the script and believing in Wes' talent he agreed. Wes’ extremely supportive boss Elizabeth also provided financial as well as physical help to the film. The money was now secured and the production moved full speed ahead.
Wes and Joe turned their attention to casting the three remaining roles. An ad was placed in Backstage Magazine, Craigslist.com, NY Casting, and Now Casting. In addition, Wes posted character sides on his website for the actors to practice before coming to the audition. After receiving over one thousand submissions to the ad, Wes cut the list down to about ten selected individuals for each of the three roles. He gave each of them an auditioning time slot and rented out a small room for the day. Thus began the auditions.
Though several actors performed well, it was Lynn Mancinelli, Torrance Downes, and Paula Riley that stood out in their respective roles.
Lyman Chen, a friend of Joe's, was introduced to Wes prior to the auditions and was given the role of Rich Hampton after a private reading.
Wes wrote the script with several of the locations already in mind, namely Julian's apartment (Joe's apartment), the bamboo forest (behind Elizabeth's house), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first two locations were easily obtained but the third Wes wasn't so sure about. He placed a call to the museum and got into contact with Hilda Rodriguez, when told A Certain Darkness was a small production and would only take ten minutes to shoot, she was more than happy to allow filming on a day the museum would be closed
The final two major locations (the school and interrogation room)came about by simple coincidence. Elizabeth's husband Clinton owns a school for medical and dental assistants in NYC and agreed to let the crew use the school on a Saturday afternoon, when the school was closed. Wes' father had access to a storage warehouse with plenty of spare barren rooms, which matched his stark vision of the interrogation room. The rest of the locations Wes decided he would just shoot guerilla style without getting permission. With a small crew and fast movements everything went off with no trouble. And with that, the locations were filled and not a dime was spent.
In order to get the look of the film right Wes performed many tests over the course of several weeks before filming. Using anyone he could find as stand ins, Wes tested every lighting situation possible as well as numerous camera movements. Everything being digital in today's world he was then able to import the footage into After Effects and apply color correction and filters until he found the seventies film stock look he wanted. Wes also took daily trips to every location and tested all of the lighting scenarios and how they would affect the look and mood of the scene. During all of the tests he kept a journal and made drawings to ensure he would be one hundred percent prepared when shooting began.
Concurrently, Wes and the actors held rehearsals. It was imperative that the lines be memorized because Wes wanted to shoot long takes and not have the actors be thinking about what they were saying instead of how they should be feeling. Time was also spent experimenting with the characters and scenes. No scene was allowed to be rehearsed more than three times as to keep spontaneity when the actual shoot came.
______________________________________________________________________
Production
Equipment:
Panasonic DVX 100A
Letus35 Adapter
Used Canon SLR lenses (bought on ebay.com)
Lowel DV Creator 1 Light Kit (bought at bhphoto.com)
150 watt fluorescent light bulbs (bought at Walmart)
Sennhieiser ME66 Shotgun Microphone Basic Kit (bought at bhphoto.com)
Wardrobe (Salvation Army)
Tapes (bought in bulk at bhphoto.com)
Blood (corn syrup, raspberry cool aid, and cocoa power)
The shooting schedule was split up by location and spread out over fifteen days. The film was shot out of sequence so that the cast and crew would never have to go back to a location more than once. This helped immensely in keeping the production moving smooth and quick.
According to Wes the single most important part of each day was the shot list. Each day was broken up by scene and each scene was broken up by shots. By having this list Wes was able to focus on the performances and not so much on how he would shoot the scene since it was all prepared before hand. Though this list was sometimes deviated from it was always there to fall back on and helped to keep the panic level to a minimum.
The shooting moved so quickly that before it even started it seemed to be over.
______________________________________________________________________
Post-Production
Equipment:
PC (AMD 3500, 3 gigs ram, 1 Terabyte storage)
Adobe Photoshop CS2
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5
Adobe After Effects 6.5
Adobe Audition 2
Reason 4.0
Ableton Live 6
Pro Tools LE 6
Eighty percent of the film was put together by the time shooting officially wrapped. This was made possible by the digital age and Wes' inability to sit still.
The first official cut of A Certain Darkness came in at just under three hours. This was completely unacceptable for a script of one hundred and nineteen pages. By cutting back the beginning and ending of scenes, Wes was able to get the film down to a brisk two and a half hours. A tough decision had to be made; Wes had to kill some babies. And that he did. Any scene that was not completely essential to the main storyline was shown the door. As a result, a cut that topped out at just under two hours (one hundred and fourteen minutes to be exact) was achieved.
In a few scenes the actors lines were muffled or couldn't be heard at all as a result of background noise. A session of ADR was needed. Over the course of two days the lines were fed into film through Adobe Audition and mixed into the soundtrack.
A rough cut of the film featuring temporary music and no color correction was shown to friends and family of the crew. With a few pages of feedback in hand, Wes went back in and made the final adjustments to the edit.
Next was color correction. A Plug-in for Adobe Premiere called Synthetic Aperture was used for this process. With most of the work already done in pre-production this process was used more to make sure that all of the color temperatures matched up and exposures were proper. All of the sound was mixed using a combination of Premiere Pro 1.5 and Adobe Audition.
Finally the temp track needed to be taken out and the original music needed to be created. Wes' brother Michael was in charge of the original soundtrack. Using a combination of Pro Tools, Reason, Ableton Live, and Adobe Audition, Michael crafted the themes and textures of the film. Mixing Midi instruments with live guitars he was able to achieve a unique sound that had the same feel as the temp tracks but a sound all its own.
______________________________________________________________________
Beyond The Production
A combination of withoutabox.com, Indie Slate magazine, Chris Gore's Ultimate Film Festival Guide, and a shit load of research the film will be sent out to the masses and taken for what it is.
______________________________________________________________________
