A FILM PROJECT UNDERTAKEN IN 2003 - LESSONS LEARNED
In 2003 - when I was employed by the City of Alexandria as an engineer - I decided to continue a project I had started when I was living in California - where I was also employed as an engineer.
I guess at that point in life I considered my engineer positions to be "day time jobs" - in that I felt my true calling was to be a filmmaker.
But at the time - 16mm film as a media of choice was slowly waning with the advent of relatively new digital media tools. For example - the 24P Canon XL1 mini DV camera was used to shoot Steven Soderbergh's feature film Full Frontal around that same time.
Using soon to be obsolete technology was perhaps the most foolish choice I had ever made in my life. I had purchased at a considerable cost an Eclair ACL 16 mm film camera from Birns & Sawyer in Hollywood while I resided near LA - and I decided to use this camera to use in the film I would shoot in Alexandria, Virginia - a year after my return 'Back East' from California.
We shot around 3 or 4 reels - the process, in comparison to shooting with digital media, was excruciating painful and slow - requiring reloading the film magazine after almost every take. Being an old camera even then - the gears in the magazine and registration mechanics were old and often jammed.
Needless to say - our crew, our camera person Leah Anova - who went onto an AFI Fellowship in Cinematography -and cast - all whom we sourced from the local SAG - Screen Actor's Guild - disbanded very disappointed - and very angry at me for the decision to halt production simply because the production was not moving at a speed I could afford from a financial perspective.
Like my working title for the project - it became a "Moment in the Time Space Continuum" !
The older blonde actress - an English woman - kept on insisting I complete the shoot using "DVD" - I guess she meant using a digital camera.
I was using a Panasonic 24P mini DV camera to record the audio - which had I used from the beginning of the shoot as my primary means of lensing this project - I may have been able to actually complete the shoot from beginning to conclusion.
FYI : each 16 mm film roll ("film stock") of Kodak 7247 cost a fortune - and I managed to miscalculate the amount of this precious film stock I would need to complete the entire shoot - not taking into consideration what is the ratio between the total film shot and the film shot that could be finally used (this varies and depends on how many takes per scene).
The younger actress Abby Sugrue portraying the daughter in my project - did in fact move onto bigger projects :
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1403595/
I guess at that point in life I considered my engineer positions to be "day time jobs" - in that I felt my true calling was to be a filmmaker.
But at the time - 16mm film as a media of choice was slowly waning with the advent of relatively new digital media tools. For example - the 24P Canon XL1 mini DV camera was used to shoot Steven Soderbergh's feature film Full Frontal around that same time.
Using soon to be obsolete technology was perhaps the most foolish choice I had ever made in my life. I had purchased at a considerable cost an Eclair ACL 16 mm film camera from Birns & Sawyer in Hollywood while I resided near LA - and I decided to use this camera to use in the film I would shoot in Alexandria, Virginia - a year after my return 'Back East' from California.
We shot around 3 or 4 reels - the process, in comparison to shooting with digital media, was excruciating painful and slow - requiring reloading the film magazine after almost every take. Being an old camera even then - the gears in the magazine and registration mechanics were old and often jammed.
Needless to say - our crew, our camera person Leah Anova - who went onto an AFI Fellowship in Cinematography -and cast - all whom we sourced from the local SAG - Screen Actor's Guild - disbanded very disappointed - and very angry at me for the decision to halt production simply because the production was not moving at a speed I could afford from a financial perspective.
Like my working title for the project - it became a "Moment in the Time Space Continuum" !
The older blonde actress - an English woman - kept on insisting I complete the shoot using "DVD" - I guess she meant using a digital camera.
I was using a Panasonic 24P mini DV camera to record the audio - which had I used from the beginning of the shoot as my primary means of lensing this project - I may have been able to actually complete the shoot from beginning to conclusion.
FYI : each 16 mm film roll ("film stock") of Kodak 7247 cost a fortune - and I managed to miscalculate the amount of this precious film stock I would need to complete the entire shoot - not taking into consideration what is the ratio between the total film shot and the film shot that could be finally used (this varies and depends on how many takes per scene).
The younger actress Abby Sugrue portraying the daughter in my project - did in fact move onto bigger projects :
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1403595/