James Fair On The 72-Hour Movie Project – Production (Pt. 4 of 5)

This entry was originally published at Hope For Film

By James Fair

Unsurprisingly, most of the fascination around the 72 Hour Movie project ‘The Ballad of Des & Mo’ surrounds the process of filming and editing it so quickly, especially in relation to the projects that can take months. In this post, I’m going to focus on how we turned it around in such a short time. I wrote a post for Ted a while back titled ‘The Shape of Things’ that explored the organisational structure of the 72, so I won’t repeat that here. Instead I’ll concentrate upon the necessary elements that must be present in order for the process to work alongside the organisational structure.

The simple target is to maximise effectiveness from the effort. People assume that you would have to work hard to make a film in 72 hours, but that is not as valuable as being productive and efficient. In fact, it is the opposite! To be productive and efficient is to achieve a significant amount with a small amount of work. Efficiency is the ratio of the useful work performed by a process to the total energy expended. If it is hard work, something has gone wrong. Quite a few films have been shot in such a short timeframe and even less. Corman’s version of ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’, in which Jack Nicholson made an early appearance, was shot in two and a half days I believe. Shooting rapidly isn’t that hard or complex. It just requires thoughtful consideration to the effective organisation of a good cast and crew, good location management, good scheduling and good direction.

Good casting is critical. They must not only cope with pressure but also thrive upon it. They must be consistent with performance. They must have patience and calm. They need to be rehearsed but not so much to be inflexible. They must know their lines and be capable of nailing the performance in approximately three takes. Any more than three and we are losing too much time on set and sending too much data to the editors. I was incredibly fortunate that all of the actors in ‘The Ballad of Des & Mo’ were extremely competent and unflappable, despite the huge pressure. This sounds like a staple requirement of an actor, but in reality not all are happy to be put under such stress.

The crew must have similar characteristics, buoyed by an enthusiasm and energy for the project. As a director I believe I encouraged this through leading by example. It was more ‘do as I do, not do as I say’ – the opposite of traditional direction. If a tripod needs carrying, I can do it. People criticise this approach by saying that ‘if you are carrying the tripod you are not directing the film’. This is rubbish. Carrying the tripod is directing the film. It is moving it where you want it to be. If you are still making creative decisions on the set of your movie, to the extent that you can’t carry a tripod, you are an ass. Something has gone horribly wrong.

I believe that good direction is good planning. Know where you want to put the camera. Know how scenes will cut together. Know the pace of the action and make sure you are getting it on set, regardless of how fast you are filming. The temptation with video is to shoot lots of coverage, but I believe this is lazy ‘dump-truck’ directing. Shoot what you need and move on, otherwise there are ramifications throughout the process. Shooting too much means time transferring it, cost to store it, time sifting through and editing it.

Good scheduling is essential. For every hour that we filmed, approximately two minutes would have to be used in the final cut of the movie. Our first day of filming remained in one location and we shot through just over a third of the movie, accounting for the slow start as we gelled as a team. The second day we had many more location changes but split into two units for a couple of hours and filmed sections of the script where the protagonists weren’t on screen together. The third day we fell behind early on, but the adrenaline and momentum of being so close to the finish line carried us forward.

All the way through this we were transferring files on location from the 16GB RED cards in regular data dumps, not dissimilar to the process of changing the film magazine. Occasionally we’d resort to using the RED drives instead, but we were wary of bottlenecking the data to the edit and paranoid about dropping frames. These were then couriered as quickly as possible to our edit team, who were located centrally in Melbourne. They would transcode the footage and send low-resolution versions for the editors to picture cut. They would communicate back to location that the footage had been ingested and in circulation that meant we could start to recycle the cards on set. Once the editors were done, they’d send the sequence back and it would be conformed at full resolution, along with a stereo sound mix that was being cut independently. This convoluted process requires a blog in itself, but that would have to be authored by Mike Fisher, our genius workflow manager courtesy of Sequence Post in London.

Ironically, the biggest problem throughout the process was dumping the film back to tape in order to be screened in the Australian Centre for Moving Image. The whole 72 Hour Movie project hinges upon the benefits of tapeless workflow, it simply couldn’t work if we had to digitise in real-time. Yet in order to screen the film in a traditional setting we had to go back to the conventional safety of tape! A classic example of how the possibilities of digital filmmaking production don’t always marry nicely with the traditional processes of distribution or exhibition.

I have never advocated making features in 72 hours to be the way forward for filmmaking. I believe that our project serves as an example that we can think differently about the process of filmmaking instead of unquestionably adopting the same roles and protocols each time. We all have different motivators for making films, perhaps storytelling, art, business or fame. We should formally acknowledge the different approaches to filmmaking so that alternative processes can be legitimately recognised as valid and viable for production. Perhaps it is the current inability to recognise and reward innovative filmmaking that is leading audiences to believe that cinema is running out of ideas?

James Fair is a lecturer in Film Technology at Staffordshire University, UK. He has directed two features in 72 hours. The first film, ‘Watching & Waiting’, was shot in Galway, Ireland, as part of the 20^th Film Fleadh in July 2008. The second film, ‘The Ballad of Des & Mo’, was shot in Melbourne, Australia, as part of the 59^th International Film Festival in 2010.