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Emma Walker wrote:
“I hope to be able to complete for the new year, but this is less of a bloody horror and more of a psychological thriller.”
If that’s not what they’re looking for, drop me a line: I’m looking for a good ‘psychological horror’-type script for a short to shoot in the summer.Have you tried exporting the document as a .PDF file? They’ll probably be able to print that.
Of course that won’t help if you have Final Draft 5.0 or earlier.“Pro video editing is likely to cost £600 + VAT per day in London for offline”
I can only wonder why, when for a couple of thousand you can set up an Avid Xpress DV system, edit from a DV copy of your rushes, and produce an EDL for your online edit. I honestly don’t understand why anyone who’s doing more than a one-off project would pay that much for offline editing anymore: even if you have to hire an editor to run the system for you I’m sure you can find plenty willing to work for a lot less than 600 a day.We’ve only shot in a graveyard once, and from what the director said the only proviso was that we picked shots so we didn’t see any of the names on the graves: other than that I believe it was free and there were no restrictions. Just had to let the caretaker know when we arrived.
Schools I’m not sure about, we did shoot in a playground at the weekend and had to pay for the caretaker to come in to lock and unlock the gate to let us in and out: I think it may have been where the director went to school, which would have helped, I’m sure. Shooting inside would probably be more difficult.
Since we were doing it on the cheap we also had to live with the school football team playing a match on the football pitch and some singing group practicing in one of the school rooms: good for a playground atmos track, but it sure complicated sound recording for the shots.
My experence with parks has been that it doesn’t seem to be too hard to sweet-talk the council into letting you shoot there free as a low-budget, but pretty much every time we’ve shot in a park we’ve had officials come around checking we had permission. Other people have told me, though, that their councils wanted to charge extortionate fees to shoot in parks as it’s apparently one of the few places where they can legitimately charge and they’re used to the BBC and other people who can afford to pay good money.
In any of those cases you’ll probably need at least a million or two in liability insurance to satisfy them: however, you should obviously have that anyway just in case the worst happens despite being careful about safety. Also, it almost certainly helps if you live in the area or get someone on the crew who lives in the area to talk to them, the council are less likely to want to offend a local tax-payer than to worry about someone who lives miles away.Having worked with both, IMHO 16mm still looks better than Digibeta, even on tape… a lot better if you actually pay to get a print made for theatrical screenings. Plus you get some experience of working with film, which is still going to be considered the ‘professional’ medium for movies for a few years to come, and it’s probably a lot easier to blag a decent 16mm camera than for free than Digibeta.
That said, I made a five minute short on 16mm a few years ago and by the time I had a finished print it had cost me several thousand pounds: so unless you’re shooting with short ends in a wind-up Bolex and finishing it on video, 500 pounds won’t go too far for a 15 minute short.“if I had been paying them I could have sacked them in mid-production”
To me that sounds like half the problem: there’s nothing to stop you from ‘sacking’ someone just because you’re not paying them. On a number of the shoots I’ve worked on there have been people who were, shall we say, not asked to come back for the next shoot day: though obviously that’s harder if you’re doing a continuous shoot on location as you were. A one-day test shoot beforehand would probably be a good idea in those situations.
IMHO what matters is less whether you’re paying someone (and I’d pay everyone I work with a million pounds a day if I had the money, but I don’t) than whether they have a professional attitude, which is why I’ve often worked with the same people on different projects: it soon becomes clear even on an unpaid low-budget set who has that kind of attitude and who’s just there to mess around (or just there for the money, if you are paying).
Any sane person who works on a shoot for no money is there for a showreel or experience and they want the movie to be a success even if just so they can say they were the runner on it, and will do what they’re told provided the director or producer isn’t taking the mickey (e.g. turn up at 8am, start shooting at 3pm, or work sixteen hour days for a week, as some people I’ve worked for have expected us to do). Sounds like you unfortunately got some of the mad ones!
