Reunion

Posted: January 15th, 2009 | Author: Adrian Parks | Filed under: Production | Tags: adrian parks, david ivkovic, joseph adam, renée percy |

When this project was still in the organizing stages Simon suggested that we write a little bit about our process as we went from planning to editing.  It went by in a flash, but now that I’m looking at our first rough cut, I thought I would try to put down a few notes about our video.

For those that don’t know me I’ll start off by saying that the cast and I first met while working on the Neutrino Video Project several years ago and have been working (and sometimes drinking) together ever since.

~Pre-production~

I originally planned to set aside half of a day for workshopping some ideas and taking the best of them onto set the next day. The cast quickly realized that I was a foolish, power-hungry egomaniac like most directors and made their own plans to shoot the first day instead.

We tossed around a few different ideas for 20-30 minutes but kept coming back to Renee’s concept of 3 friends reuniting via facebook after being apart for years. We saw a few interesting directions we could take that in, although most of them ended up falling by the wayside when the cast started improvising.

~Shooting~

For you nerds out there, I shot everything on a Sony PD150 (great in low light) and got the best light I could from whatever was lying around. The on-camera omni-directional mic served as our only audio pickup and did an okay job most of the time.

Although I was still kind of hungover from my new years debauchery 2 days before and didn’t want to go outside, the cast decided that we needed to have a simple arrival at one of the characters houses and then see where it went from there.

When that was finished and we moved inside, the characters sat down to catch up and we started to figure out who they were. I did a few wide shots on a tripod to start things off and then about 7 handheld takes just roaming from character to character. I didn’t end up using any of the static tripod takes. When the handheld takes were done we had a pretty clear idea of who everyone was and what direction we were going in. I did 1 take in closeup for Dave, Renee and Joe and then we shot in 2 other rooms, escalating the tension towards our predetermined twist (probably one of the first things we’d thought up).

After about 5 hours we’d shot everything but the final scene. We probably spent the most time setting everything up at the dinner table. We decided to come back the next day for the last scene and work on the song one of the characters would sing.

I won’t give away any top secret plot twists but everyone seemed pleased with what we’d done at wrap time the next day.

~Editing~

Although my coverage would have to be described as irresponsible at best, there were no glaring continuity problems outside of the first dinner table scene.  My first assembly came in around 9 minutes and I realized I would have drown a few of our babies for the sake of the story.

Even with this harsh brutality, the darn thing is still running about 7 1/2 minutes so I’m going to have to leave it for a bit to see if there’s any more chopping I can do. I can’t say I really believe in shorts that are over 5 minutes, but if Buster Keaton can do it, well…I’ll have to think it over.

I hope everyone had as much fun as we did.

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