Start with a Bang

By Tony Vallone

So as many of you probably know, a good way to start a film is with a bang. Something exciting should happen. Something intriguing that makes us want to keep watching. Our film, until this past weekend, started with a little poot and then follows it up with not much until page 12. This has always been somewhat of an issue but Brad (director) and I have always thought that it was OK to start a little slow because once the stories break apart it gets really interesting. Independent films also play by their own rules.

So when our locations for the first 12 pages of the script started to fall through, we sat down and thought about changing the beginning to help production and help the film. What we ended up doing was cutting the need to film in the top of a bell tower and added a little mystery/intrigue/chase of our own. OverI am pretty happy with it and the film does starts off better now. It is funny how all these changes we’ve been wanting to make never happen until someone tells us we absolutely need to change it.

A Slight Change in Plans

By Tony Vallone

So Friday, June 23rd, I was called and informed that a certain celebrity actor was interested in playing one of our roles. “Great”, I thought, “but why does the tone of this conversation feel so gloomy?”

As it turns out, using this actor requires moving a few days of production to Los Angeles. This means locking all new locations in a matter of days. At this point the reader should know that on Friday June 23rd, I was pretty much the only member of the production team available in LA. So I got to do the most death fun job in the world, location scouting!

After some creative brainstorming, Brad and I managed to minimize the primary locations required of this new actor from three to one. This means we really only need one good location and the other two can kind of be fudged in LA somewhere. Movie magic again.

I ended up covering a lot of miles in the Los Angeles area and finding a lot of cool locations. One of the requirements of the locations was that they had to be located in a business or commercial zoned area. This is because securing permits for anything in a residential area, especially for a night shoot, are insanely difficult because of noise ordinances. Kids need to sleep at 10pm. Of course if we had lots of money I’m sure we could have worked our way around it. Money: a different form of movie magic.

After the Read Through

By Tony Vallone

So the read through went pretty well. All the actors got a chance to meet each other, we got a chance to time the script and see how it plays with our changes, and various people working on the project that hadn’t seen the script for a month got to say “wow, you’ve changed a lot!”

One awkward thing about a table read is that you never know how much of what you’re hearing is distorted by the table. In a standard read through the actors are up on a stage so we can see them all and they are free to act a little more. At a table read they have to stay seated and try to balance the amount of acting they actually do. Since they are not on a stage, the people in the audience can’t really see the actors all the time which makes it hard to put the story together. As a result, the read through was a little disorienting at times - but maybe it was just in our heads. A proper read through requires a stage.

Anyways it was good fun and I think everyone is excited about the project. There are pictures from this even in the gallery.

Before the Read Through

By Tony Vallone

I’m sitting here in a fancy 10th story conference room on Wilshire and Roxbury. Today we have the cast coming in for a full read through of our freshly trimmed script. It seems like everyone is pretty nervous right now. Dan (producer) got us here two hours early so now we have lots of time for the anxiety to slowly build and peak right at 11:30 when everyone else arrives.

So what exactly are we nervous about? Brad (director) and I are a little nervous about hearing the script read for an audience even though it’s been done in the past. I guess it’s because we have some important people coming and our actors are actually famous this time around. Dan is worried that room doesn’t look fancy enough to impress some of the big shots that are going to be here. In fact right at this moment Dan is trying to secure enough chairs to seat everyone.

I am passing the time by writing this entry and looking down at Wilshire. I’ve noticed that a lot of people drive with their sunroofs open. But I guess you can’t really tell that when you’re down there with them. I’m also looking across the street to the other office building trying to start a little Rear Window action but no one is biting.

I suppose I have nothing left to say until the read through is over. So, to be continued…

Lighting Workshop

By Tony Vallone

So today Larry Richardson of Mole/Richardson gave our crew a boot camp lesson in lighting equipment. I was only present for about an hour and I learned a hell of a lot. Even our more experienced crew learned a lot. Larry runs a neat little workshop out of his studio (which is across the street from the retail store). The retail store “Studio Depot” is like heaven for any filmmaker.

Here is an image gallery of the day

Shooting Schedule and Shooting Writers

By Tony Vallone

I just finished school and immediately needed to dive right into pre-production madness. Basically a few weeks earlier I had gone through the latest draft of the script (146 pages) with Dan (Producer) and made a list of every location in the film, each scene it contributed to, all the primary information regarding shooting at that location, correlation to the script, possible fail safes (as in we don’t really need that actor there, someone could stand in), etc. This took an entire day. I call it an entire day because I wasn’t at all productive the rest of the day so I write it off as a using my entire day.

I guess that location list is where it all began because from that Dan needed to create a shooting schedule. Sounds easy right? Right? Maybe if you had all the money in the world. We pretty much needed to meet the needs of a lot of different parties. Some actors were only available during certain weeks, most locations required that we meet certain criteria, equipment wasn’t available all the time, and most everyone working on the film had (believe it or not) real lives. On top of all this there were certain requirements that myself and Brad (Director) had been fighting for. Dan definitely had his hands full.

Now this brings us to Friday, June 16th, the day I finished school. Or in other words, this last weekend. On my five-hour-turned-seven-hour drive home I was alerted to the fact that the schedule was basically not working out. It was too intense (too many pages per day), lasted too long (well over six weeks), and was costing more money than we had available. Every extra day of production increases the budget by a lot and like most people we like to hang on to our money if we can. Once I heard these words I knew I had a long weekend ahead of me.

For you see in pre-production of a small indie film like ours, once big problems are realized, and big walls are hit, they turn to the writers. In my dual role as writer and associate producer I am kind of responsible for both creative and logistical concerns. This means that Brad and I were given the task to cut the script by as much as we could while keeping production issues in the foreground. Some of the production issues were pretty specific like eliminating the necessity of needing actor A and actor B at the same time or cutting out all the things that would require expensive power and lighting equipment (like night exterior locations). This is where some knowledge of movie magic comes in handy. And Brad and I, we are magicians.

The interesting part to this whole story is that for months various people have been telling us to cut the script down already. 146 is a pretty ugly number in page count world. But Brad and I have been pretty stubborn about cutting things because we felt it would compromise too many elements in the film. We had excuses like “it’s long because of the inherent nature of a four story line script” and “no Dan, we just can’t”. Whenever we did manage to cut a few pages here and there, we’d always end up adding a few pages of new stuff that we thought of that was just so awesome we needed to keep it. We pretty much got nowhere. So now that we had guns to our heads, how were Brad and I going to cut things? In an effort to keep your interest, I’ll reveal the ending to this story first. The script is now a lean 118 pages and we are pretty happy with it. Want to know how we did it? Then keep reading. (What I just did was create a hook. Hooks are good.)

First of all, I’d like to point out that Brad and I are not dumb. It wasn’t the case that we took the “flaming space shuttle re-entry that crashes into Lake Tahoe” scene on page 100 and simplified it into the “cat licking its paw” scene on page 71. When we wrote the script we kept all of our scenes within producing-reason. The trouble is that we felt every scene needed to be in the story when really it didn’t. I think the biggest leap we made was when we realized that we don’t need to strongly reinforce ideas. If a scene does nothing else but restate a theme or emotion in a character then all it really is is redundant. Usually choices like this can be made in film editing but it’s much cheaper to just keep your writers from sleeping for a couple days. We ended up cutting a lot of dialogue that didn’t contribute enough to the story, consolidating multiple locations scenes into single location scenes, and cutting scenes that we decided didn’t bring much to the table. We did this by dividing the script into the four difference stories so we essentially had four 30-40 page scripts. We looked at them individually to see how to edit them on their own. Then I spent an afternoon piecing them back together in a way that kept energy between different stories flowing and consistent.

All in all it has been a pretty stressful weekend. Tomorrow we have an entire read through of the script (which is printing now) with all the actors in some fancy conference room in Hollywood. That should be interesting.

Flagging a Cop Car

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

Last night we were filming at a bus stop when all of a sudden a police chase went right through our set. A guy in a BMW was driving drunk and was stopped by one of our crew members because we were taking and didn’t want anyone driving through. Luckily the BMW stopped but was quickly surrounded by a couple cop cars. We had to cut because the light from the cop cars was falling into our shot. We decided to wait out the commotion.

The thing is, in Palo Alto (in this case Menlo Park) there isn’t much for cops to be excited about. Most calls they get are “suspicious shadow seen” or “lost chapstick reported”. When this drunk driver was stopped just about every on duty cop came for a piece of the action. Before long about ten police cars showed up trying to arrest this guy.

We were behind schedule like usual and decided we absolutely needed to take. Eon (gaffer), brave/idiot that he is, decided he would volunteer his life and try to flag the light from the cop cars. He went into the middle of the street with a giant 4x4 black flag to block the light. He was essentially carrying a shadow with him. So there he was, in the middle of the street, carrying a gigantic shadow. If any car decided to pass through they would not see him at all. Fun stuff.

Can you find Eon?


There he is!

My Visit to SAG

By Tony Vallone

Yesterday at 11:30am Dan (producer) called me on the phone and frantically explained how a check needed to be dropped off at SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and that I was the only one available to do it. That didn’t sound so bad except for the fact that it had to be done by 12:30 and that check was in Culver City. That meant I had to go from Westwood (where I live), to Culver City (where Dan lives), to Hollywood (where SAG lives), in less than an hour. In Los Angeles this trip will take you an entire day.

So this sounds like an introduction to an exciting tale about me driving 100mph through the streets of LA barely missing old women and baby carriers to deliver the check… But sadly, it doesn’t get past the “sounds like” part. The reality of the situation was that it was July 3rd and many people took a four day weekend. That means barely any traffic. I got there with 15 minutes to spare and even went to lunch afterwards. Sorry this story isn’t better.