Lessons Learned From My First Short Film
Hello creatives,
Today I’m gonna talk about some lessons I’ve learned from adapting my novel into a short film. It’s been a long several months with this process that has been incredibly fulfilling and it’s a bucket list item that I have once again checked off, and it’s something that I want to do more of in the future. There’s several things that I learned throughout the process that really has changed my perspective on the independent filmmaking side of things. Now, I have worked with a lot of filmmakers, and I have friends and colleagues who are filmmakers. Being around a thing is not the same as doing the thing, though, so I want to take a moment for those who are just starting out with their own film journey and provide some perspective on things that I would’ve probably done differently.
Write the Short Film Script With Logistics in Mind
Let me start from the beginning and just walk you through the whole process. I had already adapted the first act of Vicious Circle into a one hour TV pilot and I had submitted that to the Final Draft script writing contest where I got good feedback from the coverage team. I had paid for the feedback, which is a common aspect of scriptwriting contests. So, it was pretty easy from there to take pieces of that script and pair it down into a six page short film. I’ll go over my approach to adapting a novel into a script in a later post, but for now we’re gonna stick to the process of creating the short film.
In January and February, I selected the scenes from the one hour pilot script, which was about 60 pages, that would be the most easy for me to find locations for and to cast for on a short timeline with a small budget. That’s easier said than done, of course, but the goal for the short film was:
one to show that I can do it, and
to give a glimpse into my directorial chops and
to leverage for future partnerships and future funding
So as with everything else I do, the short film is just one aspect of a broader plan to build out the world of Vicious Circle in a tangible way across multiple mediums. This is a lifelong project of mine and I’m building it as strategically as I can with the resources available to me.
Expect Things to Go Wrong When Filming No Matter How Well You Plan
I started casting in March. I sent out a couple of casting calls and I posted them onto a film network that I’m involved in. I looked through a couple of different submissions and I found my people pretty quickly. Riley Jo Payne plays Elizabeth Reid. Michelle Concha plays Director Bravo. Pamela Adegun plays Miss Sarah Ezumah. They’re a lovely group to work with and we had a fun two day shoot in April In terms of location scouting, I lucked out because my office allowed me to use some of our office space for the scenes. On the day of the shoot, I had Reilly meet me a little bit earlier for us to do a couple of shots around the area as sort of the “stitching” scenes and for the end montage where it’s kind of hinting at what will happen later on should the short film become a broader project and foreshadows the next installation should there be one.
Now before the two day shoot, I had to figure out the tech stack. I’ll be honest this is where I think my biggest lesson comes in. I really strongly advise you to seriously test out and plan out what kind of tech you’re gonna use I have an Olympus Mark IV camera and I thought that was going to be fine. However, it is an older camera that was meant mostly as a photography camera and not a film camera, although, it does film in 4K, which is pretty good considering it’s like a 10-year-old camera. It doesn’t have external audio input, which is a problem because audio is like a major, major, major component of any film project. You can have the most beautiful, stunning cinematography, immaculate acting, and whatever but it will be completely ruined if no one can hear the dialogue. So I had to create a makeshift a plan to leverage some external audio capabilities on my iPhone 13 mini and ended up routing the lav mics being to a laptop, where I recorded everything in an Adobe Audition file. It’s was a whole mess. Honestly, I don’t even know how any of it worked, but it did somehow –sort of– and even though I had a few different means to capture audio.
I had a lav mic that was attached to Riley and Michelle, but I only had two. Unfortunately this meant that Pamela‘s voice wasn’t always picked up very well. I was hoping it would be okay because she’s sitting so close to Reilly and she has a very resonant voice vocal texture. This of course, was not was not the case which made for a lot of pain in post production so my number one lesson here is double check your text and make sure that 100% you will have solid audio.
Get Yourself Organized For the Post-Production Process
Now on the day of the shoot, I had a shot list which I highly recommend anyone to have because it makes it so easy to gather the pieces that you need. I went through the script and I marked it up with all the different shots that I was envisioning for the script and then I put it into a spreadsheet with a checklist. The only thing that I wished I had done was get a few more takes of every shot across both cameras that I was using. I used my Olympus and I used an app on my iPhone called Blackmagic Camera. For those who are familiar, Blackmagic owns the DaVinci Resolve, which is one of the top editing softwares in the industry and they have a free version. I edited everything on the free version.
There were plenty of times in the post-production process, as I was creating a rough draft of everything, where a shot would be perfect but just a little too short. Or I didn’t like a specific composition. Or the dialogue wasn’t quite there. It felt like it was a whole mess. On top of having to manually sync the audio, I had to deal with how to cover some mistakes that were made during shooting even though everything else was great. I made it work, but boy oh boy, do I wish I had a few extra takes of several of the shots.
Now because I’m a one woman show in all this I also had to teach myself how to color correct because I was using a camera that didn’t have LOG which is a type of video capture that makes it easier to color correct later. This meant that I had to manually correct a lot of things and the thing about color correcting is that you need to do that first before you can add anything stylistically. So, I had to figure out how to match the temperature and tone of two different types of cameras to make it look like it came from the same camera, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be and that’s mostly my fault for not doing enough research to have the proper tech. Again, I made it work. I’m still pretty proud of myself with how it turned out, but I could’ve saved myself a lot of headache had I use different equipment that worked better together.
It’s Okay If You Can’t Do Everything
Sometimes you just have to accept when you need a little help. I wasted multiple months trying to figure out how to do special effects myself to no avail and so I ended up hiring someone on Fivver to do a couple of clips with special effects for me. The guy did in one week what I had been trying to do all summer, so there’s that. Was it extra money that I wasn’t planning on spending? Sure. But it moved the project along.
I have learned in all this that it’s okay to miss your internal deadline because my original goal was to have everything finished by September 2024 so that I could start applying to film festivals but of course that didn’t happen. Now, it’s looking more like I may not be done until the end of January and start applying to festivals in the spring. At the end of the day, the project is better for it. It’s better to take your time than to rush anything because if I rushed then I would’ve tried to put out a project that I did not love and I was not proud of. So do yourself a service and give yourself some breathing room when trying to work on these projects.
All in all I spent about $1000 maybe a little more on getting the cast together, getting equipment together, and a couple of post-production things. I think that’s pretty good for a short film.
There’s still a lot I want to say on the subject, but I think for now that’s good enough. In a later post, I’ll talk about distribution strategy as an independent filmmaker and because I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I’ve submitted to film festivals I’m sure I’ll do a follow up post about my experience with that. Until then, let me know if anything resonated with you and what your experiences have been like as an independent filmmaker.
Until next time,
Rochele Rosa