Last week you and I talked about how to prepare as a director.

Today I want to show you what happens when you don’t.

It all started with a golden opportunity - Charlie and the Chocolate factory style.

A $10K ticket to the big leagues

When a short film program for alumni of my film school was announced I knew I was applying.

It was an initiative in cooperation with Hollywood powerhouse Village Roadshow. A chance to get a film funded and work with top executives in the industry. I knew I had to get in.

I developed a fantasy short film called Barrier, and submitted my application.

I got the chance to pitch, and a few weeks later I got the good news: I was in.

That’s when I started messing up.

You’re not in film school anymore

I got assigned an executive to develop the short film with, and we only had a couple of weeks.

My first mistake was not having a script ready.

I’d been waiting to see if we got the grant, and when the time came to execute, I was rushed. The script I presented was not good. The tension and the comedy I’d pitched was not there on the page, which led to my second mistake.

I started treating the film as a school project. I was asking permission, and looking at my executive to fix my film.

Don’t do that.

What I should have done was take extreme ownership of the film and poured my passion into it. It was my film and my responsibility to make it great. As a new filmmaker trying to connect with an executive, I needed to provide the solutions and ideas.

I needed to be in the driver’s seat.

Instead I was locked into the version of the story I’d pitched (afraid of breaking some made up rules). I was limiting my creativity and my vision and in the process I started resenting the film. By the time we got into production the main reason I was making it was because we had $10K.

In a few short weeks I’d turned the opportunity of a lifetime into a burden.

Take my money!

$10K for a short film is quite a lot of money. But it’s not Hollywood money.

To compare, this short branded video I directed for CollegeHumor and Ubisoft had a one day shoot and a budget of about $100K.

On the other hand, we shot an entire feature film for less than $25K with Wild Boys.

Where I went wrong with Barrier was treating the $10K budget as “Hollywood money.” Then quickly realizing it was not. At first I started solving problems with money, rather than using my scrappy indie filmmaker know-how. And when the money ran out, I was left doing a lot of things, and not a whole lot of directing. Like spending days building the main set piece for the film in my garage.

Going into the shoot I was tired, zapped of passion and between you and me, severely underprepared to direct my film.

The shoot that still gives me nightmares

To kick off the show I’d decided we needed to shoot at night.

Night shoots are exponentially harder than day shoots for many reasons. It’s dark, everyone’s tired, and you need more gear to be able to capture the film on camera. Throw into the mix that I wanted to shoot in a forest. The location was an abandoned picnic site with zero facilities about 45 minutes from LA.

Instead of putting my $10K grant on screen I spent money on a porta potty.

We thought it would be simple to get our little short film loaded in to the location. 3 hours later and we were still not shooting.

We were behind from the get-go.

Our first shot was supposed to be a tracking shot alongside our fantasy monster. We’d brought an industry standard dolly, but the ground was too uneven for the tracks. Without the manpower and extra equipment to fix that, we had to pivot.

At least we’d planned for a simple, versatile lighting setup that would help us move fast once we were up and running.

Wrong.

One of our big, rolling light stands, meant to carry a big part of this load, didn’t work. I was lucky to work with smart, resourceful collaborators, and they figured out a different approach. But we paid in a filmmaker’s most precious currency: time.

Do you see the pattern?

• Lazy location scouting
• Bad planning
• A lack of options.

We were so far behind schedule when the sun rose the next morning that me, my producer and cinematographer had to make a game time decision. Did we spend another 3-4 hours packing up, and loading in again to the location in a few hours?

The answer was no.

Which meant someone had to watch the equipment. With no cell phone service, and a tired crew I needed to own the situation. I took the first watch. My cinematographer, Vincent Valentin, generously offered to take the second shift. He even let me drive his car home to shower and nap for an hour in the middle of the day. That might have saved the film.

I’m not someone who functions well without a good night’s sleep, we can talk about the importance of sleep another time. But after a mess of a first day it became clear we weren’t going to finish shooting the whole script.

We had to rewrite on set.

Rushing the third act

We’d shot in story order the first day, except for some running scenes, and the only logical place left to cut was the ending.

We sacrificed our false happy ending, and instead went straight to the twist. It kind of worked, but I always felt the film rushed the ending.

The other place to save time was in our coverage. We shot a minimal amount of angles, and a few takes per setup. This caused limitations in the editing process, but at least we captured everything we needed on set.

Now, I’m not telling you all this to vent (ok, maybe a little), but to illustrate the importance of preparing well.

Bad prep always comes back to haunt you. Good prep saves your butt.

As we prepare we need to think through these scenarios. What are our options if/when things don’t go as planned? Planning is a heck of a lot cheaper than figuring this out on set, and having backups gives you peace of mind to focus on what matters:

Directing.

Conclusion

There are three things I want you to take away from our little story today:

• Expect things to not go as planned
• Preparing is cheap, do lots of it
• You’ll pay for bad prep in your most valuable currency: time

PS: If you’re curious how this shit show turned out, check out the film here:

‍