Filmmaking Stories

[temerson]

I figure this is the Filmmaker Cafe, so why don't we share some of our favorite stories from our experiences in filmmaking? I'll start with the question, has anybody ever seen the Green Flash of Death? For people who don't know what it is, when you turn on a light in one of the Mole Basic kits, you HAVE to be sure that you are grounded and that the switch does NOT tough the light stand. One day, on a shoot for a television show that we are producing, my friend, the DP is moving one of the lights when he does exactly what he is NOT supposed to do. He FLIES about three feet back onto his butt, scared and paranoid. We went through the day, made our day, and went home.

That night, we had a meeting where we screened a student film on electricity and electricity safety. Everybody goaded my friend, and it was funny.

So, this story may not be the funniest or best, but it's a start. Let's hear everybody's!

-T

 

[MarkG]

I've seen DoPs give themselves electric shocks too, but not quite that bad .

My first short was shot in a village out in the middle of nowhere. All the pre-production went OK, we got to the location, staying a cheap 'hotel' outside the village. Got up in the morning to find that the vans had been trashed. Called the police 'oh, I expect this is one of those crimes that will never be solved, it was probably just some gypsies'... shot the first day, went out to dinner afterwards, and as we were coming out of the restaurant some of the locals decided to pick a fight with one of the actors, who was about six and a half feet tall and pretty well built, so they came off worse .

The first sex scene in any movie I worked on I never actually saw, since I was recording sound and the movie was never finished (though I remember one comment about certain parts of the lead actress 'looking like two melons boucing in a sack'). Afterwards the two actors went home together... though I hate to think of what they got up to, as the guy was playing a necrophiliac serial killer .

There was also a feature I worked on which took so long to shoot that by the time we were shooting the final scenes (which were actually the start of the movie), the lead actress was pregnant and we had to be careful what angles we shot .

That was also the movie where if the director set a crew call at 8am you knew not to turn up until noon, because odds are he wouldn't start shooting until 3pm (low-budget and no pay, so he didn't lose anything from wasting our time). There's probably a reason why only myself and the DoP made it all the way from the first day of shooting to the last day of first-unit shooting .

There was a film school short I worked on, where the director kept the production design people up all night painting the walls of the set precisely the way the director wanted. The DoP came in at 8am while they were finishing it off, said basically 'what are you doing? The lights will reflect right off that gloss paint', and then I had to go and get a load of new paint and wallpaper so they could decorate the set a second time.

Which, unfortunately, used up all the catering budget! So rather than feed us decent food, they went to the local sandwich shop every night, go all the expired food from there, and we had to eat that for a week. I've never been able to stomach a sandwich from that chain since...

 

[wburke]

i was involved in a zombie short (shot on DV) and it was a messy job in a forest where it rained non stop (this is in Ireland) and halfway during the shoot we watched the footage and discovered there were no "shots" but the cameraman just recorded Everything!! his excuse was that he was a documentry filmmaker and he was making a documantry on the side. This is after complaining that he had been running out of batteries. That was the end of that "Horror story"

will

 

[safarion2003]

Here my story

Here my story

First of all I am not a pro filmmaker. I am just an Amateur. Once I was working on my second Doc about the homelessness. So I had to interview a sociologist, the Guy is a PHD holder, he has more than three Jobs, in brief he is awfully busy. I had hard time setting an appointment with him. Finally he agreed and I went to his office with my camera and the Lavaliere mic etc. the Dr. was in a big hurry, and I was obligated to rash… I tried to interview him but he had difficulties understanding because of my terrible thick accent LOL. So I decided to write down the questions for him to answer. As I’ve already mentioned the Dr was busy, the phone is ringing constantly; some visitors are waiting outside his office etc. I didn’t waste a minute to set up the equipment and started shooting… I really got relieved after finishing the shooting. But here is the problem when I got home all excited etc I found out the Lavaliere Mic wasn’t on, so there was no sound, oh Lord!!! I was about to bite my butt LOL.

 

[mirv]

Well this past weekend was out first shot at short. We had the location nailed down, script written, actors cast, craft services at the ready, and director was pumped. About midnight before the first day of shooting, the writers wife calls and states that we can use here building instead of the one we have picked out. We speak to the writer, because he has seen it, and agrees that for this short it would be better. Well it was more centrally located to everyone, so we go for it. I contact everyone and make it happen. Now the first 2 people on site were supposed to be the writer and craft services at 8 AM. Everyone else shows up at 09:30, and we are immediately told that craft services could not set up hot plates to cook food because there were hosting servers there. I am thinking that if the break room breaker and the hosting room breaker are on the same circuit that they have bigger issues, but anyway...it starts going down hill from there as we are coralled like children all day by the Location Nazi. She also startes telling the director and myself, the producer, what to do! We about packed up and got the hell out of there, but stayed and it motivated everyone to finish in about 7 hours.

 

[Manuel Marino]

Hello, I'm not a filmmaker, I own a recording studio, but I worked with many filmmakers.

Usually, I am called for companies/individual spots, intros, logos, advertisement and so on.

A cool shot we've done in the past was for a guy who tried to enter in the models world.

So a kind of intro of himself to show to people around and marketing himself.

The cool thing is that this guy was totally unable as model, well, lots of muscles, but rigid as a tree. And his voice was very bright. So totally ineffective because with those muscles you expect a kind of big deep voice.

A girl who helps us as consultant suggested to voice over him... well, after this he was so upset that we feared he would have broken something. He went away :shock:

At evening, we laughed all the time thinking about the event. We didn't accept models anymore (except female models, OF COURSE!) lol

8)