j.lowe : making and finding stuff

Yes you can. I’ve done it twice now – and the excercise is nothing short of a mental marathon and a race against the sun.

Last Friday night our team (actress/producer Gretchen Treser, writer Elisa Silva, director of photography Chris and his wife Debra Hornbecker, Nike designer Matt Holmes, myself, and filmmaker Briana Bononcini) spent several hours on a conference call brainstorming. It was painful. We had received the genre DRAMA or HORROR as part of the National Film Challenge (you have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a film up to 7 minutes in length).

We all generated several ideas. There was long pauses after each one was said. None of them were great. But they all contained bits of greatness. Matt had suggested we make a film where you are slowly trapped in your own house, the windows would be covered, the doors locked etc. That got us thinking about claustrophobia. Elisa and I had gotten obsessed with the baby monitor that was in the room with us. It kept making odd noises. That led us to a thought about a walkie talkie. There was talk of an older lady who lived next door to Gretchen. What kind of relationship would Gretchen have would a little old lady next door? The ideas jumped back and forth between psychological horror and coming of age drama. Our final idea ended up smack in the middle of those two things.

Sometimes you have to throw a lot of stuff onto the wall, to get to the good stuff. Get all the bad ideas out of your system, and a good idea will emerge.

It was now Saturday morning close to 2am, and we had decided to make a film about an agoraphobic widow who develops a friendship with a 12 year old boy who leaves a walkie talkie on her doorstep.

I was woken up by the phone. DP Chris Hornbecker was downtown, had picked up gear and wanted to pick me up.

We didn’t have a child actor yet. We didn’t have a script yet. I threw on my clothes and got in the car with him.

We began scouting locations. I made some phone calls. By 1pm, we had two kids to choose from, a completed script (Elisa was writing right up to shoot time), and our equipment fired up and ready to shoot.

Jonah Kellam was great. The kind of actor who gets it right on the first take. Our idea centered on us getting the right kid for the part and we were very fortunate to find Jonah. Gretchen had called an acting coach who put us in touch with his mom. Two hours later she was driving him to our set. Everything happened very quick over the weekend. It had to. We had to have our completed film in the mail to the National Film Challenge on Monday. The clock was ticking.

We shot into the evening.

To be safe we had Gretchen and Jonah read the entire script in a quiet room. We would use this audio for any over-dubbing we had to do. 

Because we had not chosen a simple idea, and because our script had many set ups, we had to shoot some of the scenes that took place in the day, at night. Chris did a great job of recreating the sun for a scene where Gretchen opens the front door to grab a package:

It's actually 10pm at night here

We wrapped around 11pm, after transforming the Hornbecker’s house into a set. There was gear everywhere. We had moved the furniture around. 

I decided to get a full night’s sleep, though I was tempted to head into the edit suite and start loading footage.

I slept for 10 hours straight. Woke up – went into the edit suite (around 10:30am). And didn’t come out until the next day at 4am.

A lot of things came together in order for us to complete the film in time. Jeremy Wilkins of Allegra Gellar composed a song for us that helped give the film the proper mood. Chris Hutchinson designed awesome titles. Elisa was a huge help in the edit. Briana got her younger brother Deems to come in and help with some audio effects.

So yes, you can make a movie in one weekend.

If you get lucky.

Check back here in the coming months to see the film.