My experience making a short film: POINT AND SHOOT
- Adam Tye
- Feb 26, 2018
- 7 min read
Self-indulgence ahoy
So I think I can only work under pressure. That’s my best excuse as to why I've always finished my essays about three minutes before the deadline and it’s the best excuse as to why, after three years spent umming and ahhing about making a short film, it took me until the last five days of my time at University to actually get around to it. Beyond being immensely proud that I eventually managed to get the thing off the ground in the first place, I’m absolutely thrilled that I got to work with the people I did (the film wouldn’t be half as good without any of them) and the lessons I learned from every single day of trying to put the film together. This write-up is basically as close to a behind the scenes feature as this film's probably going to get. And because I'm the director, you know it's going to be totally unbiased.
Point and Shoot was originally going to have have Nerf guns. Or at least prop guns. It was also going to be about a minute long. Then it was gonna be 30 minutes long. And a western. In the streets of York. At night. Outside the Minster. At some point, someone gently suggested to me that all of that was insane and I went home to think of a way to trim my 30 minute spaghetti western behemoth down to a five minute, straightforward action...thing. Honestly I think most of the cutting down happened just by deciding to get rid of prop guns and dialogue.
Production started with the final scene of the film being the first scene to be shot (well, actually there is a scene that is supposed to come after that one, but it got cut for reasons I’ll come back to later). Aside from just the sheer amount of time it takes to film action (5 hours for a minute and a half scene), it turns out the biggest problem to overcome with finger guns is that it is incredibly tempting to make the 'bang bang' noises on set yourself instead of adding in the noises later, which lead to a really surreal discussion as to whether Roxanne, Carrie and Lucy should yell "pew pew" every time they fired off a shot.
The next scene we shot (the first scene in the movie) brought us the lovely challenge of figuring out how to account for the locations of multiple people in one firefight. Free advice to anyone panicking over how to handle an action scene and don't want to film it with the aim to cut every half a second: you should cut every half a second. Or at least embrace that mentality of just doing what needs to be done to make the scene work. Once I got over that and realised that you can just focus on each assassin one at a time without giving the audience time to wonder where the others have got to, most of the hard planning work kind of sorts itself out. If anything, the hardest part of the scene (beyond how long it took to do) was getting Roxanne to shoot Morgan whilst gliding on a chair that just Would. Not. Move. Dan (crossbow guy/aka a dirty cheat) lay on the floor to push the chair and each time we could barely get it to move about a metre. If I can be proud of one thing from this film, it’s managing to take about 80 gazillion shots of Roxanne’s chair moving incrementally and somehow wrangling it together so that you’d never be able to tell the pain it caused us on set (if there was an award for worst actor in the movie, it would easily go to the chair).
That was also the day where Roxanne came up with the film’s central bounty reward (a guaranteed 2:1), and another friend gave us a crossbow prop which I subsequently turned into the film’s only proper joke (thus qualifying it for the Nasta Comedy category – loophole!).
We did another day of filming for the scene outside Costa where Carrie leaves Lucy to head off and fight Roxanne, as well as a baffling Mexican Standoff scene that died nobly on the cutting room floor. Aside from how bizarrely difficult it was to get the shot where the camera pushes in towards Lucy (the most egregious use of a giant trolley ever in the history of behind the scenes filmmaking), there’s not really a whole lot to say here.
The editing was pretty sporadic (I don't live in York anymore, so it congealed gradually over a period of about six months) so I've just collected my experience in bullet points:
Shooting your film in grey spaces means your colour graders have basically nothing to work with and everyone momentarily panics because nudging the blue levels even slightly makes it look like you’ve used an Instagram filter. Also people who know how to colour grade are wizards to be feared/respected.
Sound does not get enough credit for how much weight it’s pulling in a movie. Case in point: during the second fight, there’s a shot of Carrie dodging Roxanne’s machine gun that looks a little odd on its own. As soon as you add in the sound of bullets ricocheting, though, everything looks fine.
Editing pre-made royalty-free music to fit your existing footage is horrible and feels like being punished for a crime you didn’t commit.
If you think part of the editing is only going to take an hour to do, it’ll probably end up taking a week.
The biggest decision that got made in editing was the excision of the final Mexican Standoff scene. Basically, this scene was the ultimate remnant of my original spaghetti western idea that would close the film by having Roxanne and Carrie kill each other in the middle of a field. Combined with music, it would have taken about a decade to edit together and there is literally not a single joke or action beat or anything that actually happens in it. Roughly an hour of footage of Roxanne and Carrie dramatically staring at each other now lies forever at the bottom of the YSTV editing ocean.
That deleted scene kind of stands as a battle scar that reminds me how I’d do things differently next time. Firstly and obviously: a plan. Have more of one. Because whilst I look back at the shoot and am a little impressed (and baffled) as to how we pulled off a short action film with no script or choreography, it is not a method of production I'm itching to repeat again. I didn’t really lean into the comedy angle of the film until day 2, which means the two halves don't quite slot together as seamlessly as they perhaps could have done.
But if I can point to one defining lesson from the whole experience, it would be how stunningly wrong it is to think of film as the creative product of one person. I’m sure this is a revelation that comes to every film/TV student when they first start collaborating on work together, but it really is true. Most of my favourite parts of the film – the bounty, the crossbow, the flying hat – all came from other people throwing ideas into the pool and it was strange to feel like I was only just realising this for the first time when it should have been ingrained into me years ago. Part of this I blame on how people talk about movies (I took a Philosophy in Film course that heavily emphasised the creative vision of the Director) but then you only hear what you want to hear so I’m probably just as much to blame.
I’ll end on that note because I literally cannot understate the importance of everyone else’s work enough, both in making the final film what it is, as well as just making the whole experience so enjoyable. I'm really proud and happy to have Point and Shoot as my first short film. I'm not sure I could have asked for much more.
Other stuff about Point and Shoot I want to say that's a bit more random:
I still have the plans for the original 30 minute version of Point and Shoot somewhere in a notebook alongside a weird idea for a sequel to Checkmate. Both plans are too rubbish to recount here.
The essay that Roxanne is writing at the beginning of the film is a surrealist essay on the nature of bloopers in The Lion King and it is so weird I’ve preserved it for eternity on the YSTV wiki.
Logan (first guy to die) pulls in admirable duty as the only person in the whole movie who doesn’t get to do any action (sorry your death is off-screen too – we couldn’t get the timing to work properly in the edit :S)
Shout out to Gareth Young who hung around for hours of filming only to fire off a couple of shots before being immediately shot in the head.
Also to Morgan who I think ended up doing more running for ten seconds of screen time than everyone else did combined.
Kenric as the archer is the best ten seconds in the whole film and I’m gutted I didn’t use him more.
Dan’s comedy timing with the crossbow is the other best ten seconds in the whole film.
I managed to time the bass in the soundtrack with Carrie looking up from her phone. You didn’t notice or probably care, but I did.
The hat flying after being hit with an imaginary shotgun makes no sense, but neither does the rest of the film and it doesn’t matter because you can’t even see the piano wire we used for that shot and that makes me happy.
The click of Carrie’s shotgun jamming. I don’t know why but I just find it really satisfying.
Roxanne as the target is awesome. Some facts are just that straightforward.
I think the stabbing sound effect is a bit OTT too, but it was the best I could find.
The final shot of Carrie putting on her sunglasses is slow-mo’d partly for dramatic effect, but also to artificially increase the length of the shot because none of us could film it without laughing. What you see in the film is the longest take we have.
My friend Rob wanted to call the film ‘John Mick’ (because it’s taking the mick out of John Wick) and not a day goes by where I don’t regret calling it that.
I’ll probably never make it, but if there were a sequel, it’d involve invisible guitars and copious amounts of inexplicable blood squibs. Also maybe a predator missile. And a musical number.
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