I’m Kasey Price and I am the Producer for a short film entitled “Gamble”.
I learned a lot from this project. At the beginning of the semester my team and I came together to share our ideas and what we could do for our capstone project. I knew I wanted to be the producer for our fictional film whatever it ended up being. I wanted not only to learn more about what it was to be a producer but also to increase my skill set in that area.
After some ideas were tossed around we decided on a rough idea where the main character gambles too much and gets a hitman sent after him to, “deal” with him. (pun intended). Being the producer for this short film I got right to work setting up the pre production materials. I printed off multiple talent release forms, location agreements, and I got started on a schedule for all of us to follow throughout the semester.
PRE PRODUCTION
Being the producer for Gamble, I wanted to make sure everything ran smoothly so I was apart of everything. I went location scouting with our cinematographer. Where we went to multiple locations taking photos and judging the size and spacing. One of the hiccups that we were running into was time. There were places that would work but it either wasn’t available until later into the semester or they were working on renevations that wouldn’t be finished til September. Ultimately the location we ended up using was the apartment of one of our teammates. With a little furniture moving and light manipulation we got it to a way we believed it would work.
Another hiccup we were running into was finding actors. I posted ads on facebook, we sent messages to the communication department, drama department, and I even sent some messages to the local community theater asking for actors to act in our film. One of the ads that we put out got 15 people saying they were available and willing to act. We set a time and date for auditions and 1 person showed up. On top of that, after his audition the director and I both agreed that he would not fit the part that we wanted.
I personally reached out to a few people and actors that I knew and asked if they would be willing to participate. They sent in audition clips or came in person and we ended up choosing one of them to be our “hitman”. Our other actor was someone our director reached out to that fit the part decently and could take direction well.
Correct props can really help move along the story and help the actors visually see what they are working with. I organized a trip to different stores, and online hunting, to find the specific props that were needed. We found a nice doufle bag to hold our “$100 bills”, as well as some good clothing that would fit our actors. Our director was adament on not having any weapons for our “hitman” so we stayed away from those, but we did end up using nice slick black cards for the main poker match.
PRODUCTION
Once production started things started to get interesting. My team wanted to have everything filmed in 2 shooting days. I thought it would take at least 3 due to the small window of filming time we would have. It ended up taking 4 filming days and 1 audio day spread out between 4 weeks. Schedules of college students are hard to work around. To get everyone where they needed to be when they needed to be there was a challenge, and on top of that one of our actors had a hard cut off date where he would be leaving for the summer to be an FSY counselor. Due to this, I stayed on top of my team though making sure reminders were sent out and everyone was working on the things they needed to be because time was not our friend. Even when we had a teammate have some lack of communication, I reached out and discussed with them that we really needed their help and to communicate with us what was going on. That team member agreed to communicate more in the future and things have gone better since.
With each film day completed another section of the shotlist was able to be checked off, but the real challenge was in post production.
POST PRODUCTION
Once we got all the footage off of the camera’s and onto one drive we tried to edit the footage. Unfortunatly we were not able to edit the file type of the footage on the free version of Davinci. Luckily though the school has 4 computers that have the paid version of Davinci and we had teammembers with access to these computers. Even though these small editing bays could only really fit 2-3 people, our main editor, the director, and myself were in one bay putting together the pieces that were filmed.
As our editor looked over the footage he realized quickly due to the speed of the shots taken during production a lot of the slates holding up what shot number was which were not in focus or not present at all. This added a lot of time finding the correct shots we wanted and putting them at the correct spot of the timeline.
After we got a basic outlined assembly cut finished we realized there were some shots that we wanted to redo or add in. The difficulty of this was one of our actors had already left and wouldn’t be back until after the semester was finished. So we worked with what we had and luckily the shots we wanted to pick up didn’t have that actor in them other than some close ups on his cards, easily done with a stand in.
Using the footage we put together for that assembly cut, and some interviews I conducted throughout the production process. I created this behind the scenes trailer that we posted on our social media (https://www.instagram.com/8takeslater/) to raise awareness for the future premire at paramount 5, July 17th at 7 pm.
The Finished Result
Here also is the compendium I put together for the film.