When each day is a new adventure of craziness and ain’t no time or $ for much pre-production, you’re gonna go a little off script... not necessarily a bad thing.
In the indie movie making world TIME is always a major issue. There is NEVER enough of it. So on those days(like, every day) when you is running behind, ya gotta make some modifications. This usually means cutting what ever possible out of a scene, still move the story, and save on set ups. Yes, this can and does usually come back to bite you in the ass so need to be very careful about what does go, but when you can’t get said location back... You’ve got to. For example, all that extra banter in the band rehearing scenes... in a room which took too WAY long to light, didn’t lend itself to master shots, and contained multiple characters... GONE
SOME STUFF PLAYS OUT NOT QUITE AS PLANNED Yes, there are times(on a movie no matter how big or small) where the initial vision of the flick is not necessarily what you end up getting. So gotta make the most of what you DID get. In our case, we actually ended up getting a more streamlined work... For example, the apparent tragedy of one of our actors almost dying, seriously HE ALMOST DIED, forced the production to take some time off during his recovery. Thus providing a bit ‘o unexpected extra time for the script to get tweaked, plugging plot holes, and smoothing out all that didn’t quite play out as ‘planned’.
ACTORS LIKE AD LIBBING the script was pretty much kept to, but a couple of those crazy thespians also just happen to be EXCELLENT improvisers.. so just let ‘em roll, getting in and out of scenes. Some of the funniest stuff in the movie came from this. Feeling out scenes also got better as the actors got to know each other. We shot the second part of the movie first and the first part last, which ended up working wonderfully. In the second half of the movie our heros(Fran and the Lord of Evil and Darkness) are in some rather weird and bizarre situations... tentative and ‘by the book’, good. In the first part of the flick our heros are just having a fun, drug induced, good ‘ol road trip.... actors being comfortable with each other, freely messing around, good too!
photos by Suzan Jones
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