When I first decided to make The Climb, it was always meant to be an editing experiment. I just realized that’s a lot of pressure to put on myself as I took over a year and a half to get it done. It should be flawless right? I’m not the person to judge such a thing.
We produced The Climb with about 300 bucks and a lot of help from our talented cast and crew. We made it because it’s fun to be on a film set. It’s fun to make movies.
I’m a professional editor but my experience is almost entirely in a live television environment. Having footage to work with at home has been amazing… But as I exported the final film a few weeks ago, I found myself a little saddened. What footage am I going to work with now?
The obvious answer is to shoot another film but I’m getting married this year! 2012 is also a year I’ve dedicated to screenwriting in between planning the massive event this fall. And so I realized I probably won’t cut another short film for at least a year and half and potentially longer… It’s a little sad.
Having said that, I do plan on shooting some footage when I can in creative ways. I always like to have a couple active projects in After Effects to pick at. It’s addicting.
In the end, I think I cut The Climb using a variety of styles just to experiment and I had a blast. But a film is meant to be completed so I’m happy to have it done. I’m going to miss cutting footage for the next little while but, thankfully, developing new projects is just as fun.
We filmed The Climb over a weekend in May 2010 for about $300. It was the first project we developed after I launched this blog so there was a ton of coverage here.
There are posts about every topic including budgets, screenwriting, stories from the set, post-production, marketing, promotion, trailers, posters and more.
Now that the film is completed I thought it would be useful to gather every post in one place. So check out the entire story of how we produced The Climb.
Today, I finished authoring a DVD and started gearing up for the release of The Climb. The newest short film from 17 West Productions. The drama is just under 14 minutes long and stars Michael Clarke and Alyssa LaPlume as two people struggling with life on the streets and the meaning of hope.
Check out the film’s trailer below and stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!
Giovanni Fumu’s short film 7, Rue de L’Arbalete features a single shot that lasts more than 7 minutes. Any long shot presents interesting challenges but telling an entire film using a single shot is extremely difficult to pull off. It requires careful planning and precision in it’s execution.
Take a look at the film then read on for the director’s take on the project.
As you can understand shooting this short wasn’t easy at all. Since I was writing the script I wanted it to be done with a single shot because I wanted to give the perfect idea of real time passing by. It took two days to shoot it. The first day I directed the actors in a “theatrical way” without the camera. We tried every single scene one by one and once I was satisfied I made them doing the all thing together.
I never stopped the action, I always followed them with a notebook writing down what they had to change in the next rehearsal. In this way they never lost the energy. We blocked every action thanks to my assistant director who was outside the windows giving the right timing to the actors. (He was our traffic light, as I always told him.) I was the camera operator too so it was easier for me since I knew exactly what they were doing and how they moved in the space.
Thanks to all this preparation we could make it! The good take arrived pretty late though, the 13th if I remember well. We had trouble with shadows, mistakes in the dialog, the mic fell down during the sex scene. I fell down with the camera too. In the end, we made it and were confident we did something interesting.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER DEVIN BERKO
Every filmmaker out there can say they have an idea for a short film but you have to be willing to put in the effort to get it made. This is a full time job in itself and filmmaker Devin Berko took some time to explain how his film, Addict, is coming together.
What is Addict and what inspired the film?
Addict is simply a story about two people who have forgotten why they love each other and traded that affection for substance addiction. The screenplay was inspired by my own life, but placed in a different time period and setting. I took something that meant a lot to me: the relationship that I had with my girlfriend. While the story hovers closely around the narrative of methamphetamine use, my story was more about how I had truly forgotten the reason why I fell in love with this girl. We’ve all had these instances where we completely move off course and judgmentally forget why we start doing things in the first place, which makes the project completely relatable. Whether you’re going to college and four years later, you say to yourself, “The reason I’m here now, is not the reason I started on this journey.” I guess you could say that the film was inspired by a lost cause for an event that had great emphasis early on.
Can you give a little history on the development of the story/screenplay?
About a year ago I started developing and writing a feature length screenplay about two people that were desperately trying to figure out why they were still in love. After the first draft of the screenplay was developed, I decided to extract a pivotal moment in the feature film that would work well as a stand-alone short film. My intention for the project was to have audiences question their own psychological makeup. While the feature length version of the film encapsulates more dynamic family issues, I feel that the short thoroughly tells you enough about the world that these characters live in at the same time always encouraging the audience to want more. The short in its most recent draft has been in development for a little over a year now. I wanted to make sure that everything was perfect, down to my score. It’s moving, engaging, and hopefully we’ll turn a couple eyebrows in the process.
Bill Conner – LeadAntagonist
Can you elaborate on your overall vision for the film?
I’ll start off by saying this: my inspirations for the project have been Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Doremus’s Like Crazy, Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Cienfrance’s Blue Valentine.
The film is going to be laced with grunge aesthetic since it’s takes place in the nineties. I really feel like in order for the audience to feel the full affect of the project, the cinematography will feature a lot of perspective shots based on character decisions and dialogue. At this point, we’re planning on using Canon DSLR packages with Zeiss and Canon lenses, which will be able to feature a special color gamut that other camera packages cannot duplicate.I value character and story decisions so much, but my original passion was cinematography. In order for the project to have full effect, the cinematography has to feature a lot of grit and the actors have to fully develop a sense of ownership of their character. It’s difficult to explain over a few paragraphs but once you see it, I hope the audience will find it unique.
What made you decide to try kickstarter to fund your film?
It was never really a question to get microloans to fund the film. With all the research that my producer, J.P. Frydrych, and I have done, it seems as if independent filmmakers from here on out will have to resort to these programs in order to get their projects funded. The only downside is that you face marketing challenges. People are unsure of how the project will turn out and also, when they’ll get their reward packages. Kickstarter also had the highest success rate of any of these sites and No Film School’s Koo successfully funded his project Man-Child through the program. Not only was his campaign the first of its kind (in scale) but also it was inspirational to our team, proving that these sorts of things can be successful.
Whitney Moore – LeadProtagonist
How did you go about getting your pitch together?
When my production team and I had some free time, we found some unique spots around the metropolitan Phoenix area and started shooting. We had been developing the project for so long that we knew exactly what we wanted to say. Then, once we introduced one of our previous Executive Producers on a commercial project we completed, the video flowed together pretty well. I think it tells our audience enough about the project while still giving them a reason to want more. The reward levels were things that we borrowed from other individual kickstarter/indie-go-go pages. We wanted to give people prizes that had been successful in the past. Some ideas came from peer’s programs and others came from prominent programs in the industry.
What challenges have you faced thus far on Addict?
Well, were still in casting for our main protagonist. We’ve got a few people in mind however the choice has to be perfect as perfect can get. Other than that, we’re still waiting for more Kickstarter backers. Hopefully those are the only challenges we face prior to production.
What’s next for Addict?
Our production team is keen on entering the short in as many film festivals as possible. Since the message is universal, we’re hoping that international film festivals are interested in the project. Quite honestly, we just want to reach as large of an audience as we can. I got in this industry to tell stories and to move audiences. As long as we can do that with the project, I’ve succeeded at my job. After the short has made its rounds, I would love to direct the full feature, which encapsulates more of the family drama mantra. Everything seems to be moving forward with that project as well, so hopefully that will happen in mid 2012.
Special thanks to Devin Berko. Visit his sites by clicking the links below:
