Making a Film in Two Days

By Giovanni Galindo @giovanniagalindo 

Making a movie in two days. Sounds easy, right? It's only an eleven page script, after all. I'll be honest, it sounded easy to me as well.

    I recently finished my latest short film, Slum Absolution. You might've heard me talking about it, maybe not. Though I've made several short films before this one felt different. Most of my other shorts have been written over a time-frame of a month and I usually start production on it few months later.

    Slum Absolution was different since this was a script that saw its first draft at some point in 2016. Without trying to sound arrogant, I will admit that this felt like an important script. I humbly accepted that if I tried to film it in my beginning days as a filmmaker, it would be an utter failure and I might never bounce back.

    Now, I'm not saying this will be a perfect film whatsoever. In a way, I am still a beginner and I learn new things with every film. I'm sure as I begin the post-production process I will learn some things with this film as well.

    The fact of the matter is that filmmaking sounds easy. You hear crazy stories of directors that make their feature for almost no money and it's still good enough where they excel in festivals and their career takes off like a space rocket.  I've not made a feature yet, so I suppose that is still a possibility for me also.

    But making a short is extremely difficult. Or at least time consuming. Don't get me wrong, I've had tremendous amount of help. I've been lucky to find talented individuals, both on and off the screen, be part of my productions. Couldn't do it without them. However it can be stressful when you are in charge of so many different roles.

    When making my own films I usually have to play the role of director, producer, location scout, costume designer, production designer, editor, composer, production assistant, actor and that's just the few roles that come to my head. 

    The absolute worst part is scheduling. You'd be surprised how hard it can be to get people together and on time. In some scenes of Slum Absolution we have about 15 cast members and 10 crew members all together, and to this day I'm still in awe I was able to get us all there to film. Crazy, right?

I really do have some great friends. I've also met a group of dedicated filmmakers here in the Midwest and that's really exciting. 

    The two days of production were planned ahead about a month out. Before that, it was meetings with the actors, meeting with my director of photography, arranging meals for the days on set, thrift trips to find all the props, and visiting locations.

    I will give a quick shout out to Bryce Docherty and  Nick Daniel, two men that dedicated so much time to this project and made sure to make it the best they can.

    Our first day of shooting felt great. As the indie filmmakers we are, we had some technical difficulties figuring out how to use the follow focus on the camera and that caused some complications. Other than that, the shoot went smoothly.  Our gaffer, Beck Potucek, did his thing and we set up all the scenes fairly quickly. I believe only one extra was hurt during one of the scenes, and that extra was me. It was a 10-hour shoot day which is two hours less than a typical shoot.

    Now the second day, oh the second day. Our call time was 6:30 AM. That's not the worst part of it though. When I woke up  that morning it was unnaturally cloudy and it seemed like it had rained. This had not been on the weather app the day before. I check my phone and there was 90% chance of rain until roughly 3-4 PM. In case you didn't get why this is bad news, we were supposed to be shooting at an outdoor location. 

    We had to flip our whole schedule around and begin with what was originally our second shooting location. The cloudy day still affected us since we were hoping for strong sun coming in through the windows of our indoor location. It caused our lighting set-up to take longer than we would've liked. However, Beck was still on top of it and we were able to make it work. 

    We were lucky enough that the rain did stop and the sun came out so we rushed back to our original outdoor location to get as much as we could before the sun went down. We had roughly about 2.5 Hours to shoot what we had originally blocked out 6 hours for. Though I will admit we were all very tired by the time we got there, everyone did their best to keep their spirits up and we shot as much as we could with what we had. Yes, we still couldn't figure out the follow focus.

    We literally shot until it got too dark to shoot, but surprisingly got enough footage to make it work. In an ideal world I would've like to reshoot the scene, but one of our actors stays in Chicago now and the trip back down to re-shoot seems improbable. Like I said, I learn from every film.

    Our second day ended up being about an almost 15 hour day just due to all the complications. I had to quickly transfer all the footage and return the rental gear that we borrowed for the film that same night. Quick shoutout to Ian Chasteen from Candlelight Digital for allowing us to rent the gear for a great bargain.

And that was it. 

    It was a 48-hour ride that felt like forever and flew by at the same time. I've no doubt this will not be a perfect film. I am glad that I waited until now to make this film, however. I believe with my crew and the great performances from people like Anthony Turner and Nathan Apodaca this story that meant a lot to me will be given justice by the final rendition of the film. 

    I am currently editing Slum Absolution and will enter it into film festivals for the next few months before releasing it publicly. Wish me luck! Next time, I'll definitely have an official day set apart in the schedule for re-shoots just in case. Until then, take care of each other.