Midnight Rendezvous
*I apologize for the small size of the video, and the annoying watermark at the bottom. You need Windows Media player to watch it (link is at bottom of the page). It should open as full screen, and when you close it, it goes back to the normal small screen. *Currently, the video is gone. I will try to put it back up ASAP. This short is about a detective that goes on a search for a known criminal. It is shot in a black and white film-noir style. This short is very much like a comic book, such as the Tracer Bullet series from Calvin and Hobbes. This was our final project for our film class, and was voted to play again at our college media festival. It was written and directed by Dan Swierenga. I was the cinematographer, and Chris Kreft was our producer. Lori Steenwyk was our production coordinator. It was shot on the Canon XL1s camera. Gallery of behind the scenes The making of Midnight Rendezvous (...a rambling of events...) It started with Dan's idea of making a film noir short. Chris and I helped tweak the script, and we were constantly changing the script right until production. We started planning for this movie from day 1. We had a quick audition for our actors. We found the perfect church to shoot at, which wasn't in the film. The church was actually shut down, so we thought we'd have a chance at shooting there. But the priest gave us a heck no, so we were forced to find a replacement church asap. I called another church, and they let us use it, so that's what's in the film. I told the church it was a story about a guy meeting a girl, and said nothing about the fact that there was a murder on the church steps. We also had to buy stuff of our own. Our college has a theater company which buys props and costumes for the students to use. Unfortunately, our film department had no such thing. So we bought the desk lamp, and the hat for the actress. We went to several thrift stores at the last minute to get costumes. When we were finished, we had spent 100$ of our own money to make the movie. We shot the interiors first, which conveniently was Dan's bedroom. We did a lot of practice/test shots and spent hours getting the lighting perfect. The only lights in that scene were from a small light outside shining in, and the desk lamp. But the outside light had to be positioned perfectly to get the effect through the blinds. Hours and hours were spent tweaking that single light. Unfortunately, we had to return the equipment each night, so we had to measure everything about that light in order to set in up again. Once we heard one of the neighbors yell, "Are you guys making a porno?" I found that amusing. The dolly that we used was a doorway dolly, and weighed like a mother. It was an ordeal (Dan and Chris will confirm this) to squeeze the dolly into Dan's car (Dan was the only one at the time with a car). But all the problems with the dolly paid off cause our tracking shots look great. It was our first time using a smoke machine, and we didn't really have any problems with that. We shot the phone conversation with just our actor Peter saying his lines by himself, and we added Christine's dialogue in post. On the first day of shooting, we couldn't find our actor. He wasn't in his room, and he didn't have a cell phone. So Dan, Chris and I looked all over campus for him, because we were going to pick him up and drive him to Dan's place. We were like 2 hours behind schedule and we weren't even at the location yet. We had Lori and her friend Luke waiting for us in Dan's room the whole time too. So finally after waiting and waiting, we decided just to go to Dan's place anyways without our actor. We get to Dan's room, and decide that we can't shoot anything that night. We pick up our gear and start carrying it down the stairs. The phone rings, and it's Peter, our actor. His car had died and he was coming over. What a relief! So he came over and we shot all night. It was raining at night too, and our outside light was getting totally soaked. Good thing we didn't have a fire marshal on set! I was surprised all our gear made it through the night. Chris had put a little flowery hat over the light, which didn't stop any rain from coming down. I remember we had bought 2 hats for our actress, so one of the hats ended up only being used as an ineffective raincoat. Then we had to shoot the exteriors. We knew it was going to rain, so we made rain covers for our lights by using cardboard boxes and trash bags. I even made one of the trash bags fit over my camera. You can see what it looks like in the photo gallery. That's me inside the trash bag, with a tiny hole for the lens. We got to the church early and set up everything. The shoot lasted from 6pm to about 4am. Luckily it didn't rain for a long time, so shooting went pretty fast. Our first problem was with our dolly. One of the tires was flat, and our bike pump didn't work at all. Unfortunately, we were shooting right next to the street, which made recording audio a bit interesting. There was a group of cars sitting in the church parking lot watching us work, so that was cool. Lori came by and brought over 2 PAs. Our most difficult shot was the tracking shot when Peter shoots his gun for the first time. It involved the dolly tracking in a U-shape, going pretty fast, and having a gun flash at the right time. The dolly part was fine. I had researched online, and found that a really easy way to make a gun muzzle flash is to use disposable flash cameras. So we had one of our PAs run behind the dolly, run up the stairs at the right moment, flash the camera, and then duck out of the shot. Needless to say it took a lot of takes. But it really does look convincing. I'm surprised we pulled it off. Then it started raining. All our equipment was soaked. The only lights in the outdoor scenes were 2 big lights that we used to shine on the church. The lights were protected by our cardboard boxes, but everything electrical was exposed. So we put more trash bags over everything. The trash bag that covered my camera didn't work out so well. It was so hot and sticky under there, that I eventually threw that out. It got really cold during the night, especially with the rain. Our two PAs started shaking from the cold, so we let them go. They were real troopers though. I heard that the one guy, Kyle, was impressed with our shoot so much that he transferred to our college to be a film major there! When it rained really hard, we had to stop shooting. Dan, Chris and I got into Dan's car, and we watched our "dailies" on my tv inside his car. When it cleared up, we finished the rest of our shots. Our actors never complained, cause they're the coolest people in the world. We finished at 4 in the morning. The next day we did pick up shots in a deserted part of town. That took us an easy 2 hours, and we were done with production. Since I had all the tapes, I decided to edit this beast asap. As soon as I got back from shooting the pick up shots, I went straight to editing. I spent about 50 hours editing. People who haven't edited before don't know how long a 6 minute short will take to edit. Dan and Chris helped edit as well. I remember Dan adding in footsteps in post. Some of our outdoor shots didn't have sound, cause it was too much hassle to shoot in the rain, especially with our tracking shots. So Dan used the sound of a left foot and a right foot stepping on pavement, and matched up each footstep in our movie with the sound effect. Talk about dedication. That itself took over an hour. When we had a near-final cut, we brought in our actors to do ADR. Then we had to get our actress Christine's dialogue for the telephone conversation. I sat in an upstairs office, with a camera pointing at a speaker phone. Downstairs, Christine would watch the footage and say her lines. I recorded the sound from the speaker phone (much better to get it clean, as opposed to recording her voice normally and adding telephone distortion later). We had 16 audio tracks going. We had the sounds of rain, city traffic, cars going by, thunder, music, sound effects, room tone, all playing at once. I brought in Joe Kawano to be our SFX editor. He used after effects and created the gun muzzle flash. It was awesome cause he knew what he was doing, and gave us our 2 gunshot flashes really quickly. They really make the gun shots come alive. Great job Joe. A few titles and tweaks later, we were done. We had worked on this project for 4 months straight, and I think it paid off. Then it was time for some r&r.
*I apologize for the small size of the video, and the annoying watermark at the bottom. You need Windows Media player to watch it (link is at bottom of the page). It should open as full screen, and when you close it, it goes back to the normal small screen.
*Currently, the video is gone. I will try to put it back up ASAP.
This short is about a detective that goes on a search for a known criminal. It is shot in a black and white film-noir style. This short is very much like a comic book, such as the Tracer Bullet series from Calvin and Hobbes. This was our final project for our film class, and was voted to play again at our college media festival. It was written and directed by Dan Swierenga. I was the cinematographer, and Chris Kreft was our producer. Lori Steenwyk was our production coordinator. It was shot on the Canon XL1s camera.
Gallery of behind the scenes
The making of Midnight Rendezvous (...a rambling of events...)
It started with Dan's idea of making a film noir short. Chris and I helped tweak the script, and we were constantly changing the script right until production. We started planning for this movie from day 1. We had a quick audition for our actors. We found the perfect church to shoot at, which wasn't in the film. The church was actually shut down, so we thought we'd have a chance at shooting there. But the priest gave us a heck no, so we were forced to find a replacement church asap. I called another church, and they let us use it, so that's what's in the film. I told the church it was a story about a guy meeting a girl, and said nothing about the fact that there was a murder on the church steps. We also had to buy stuff of our own. Our college has a theater company which buys props and costumes for the students to use. Unfortunately, our film department had no such thing. So we bought the desk lamp, and the hat for the actress. We went to several thrift stores at the last minute to get costumes. When we were finished, we had spent 100$ of our own money to make the movie. We shot the interiors first, which conveniently was Dan's bedroom. We did a lot of practice/test shots and spent hours getting the lighting perfect. The only lights in that scene were from a small light outside shining in, and the desk lamp. But the outside light had to be positioned perfectly to get the effect through the blinds. Hours and hours were spent tweaking that single light. Unfortunately, we had to return the equipment each night, so we had to measure everything about that light in order to set in up again. Once we heard one of the neighbors yell, "Are you guys making a porno?" I found that amusing.
The dolly that we used was a doorway dolly, and weighed like a mother. It was an ordeal (Dan and Chris will confirm this) to squeeze the dolly into Dan's car (Dan was the only one at the time with a car). But all the problems with the dolly paid off cause our tracking shots look great. It was our first time using a smoke machine, and we didn't really have any problems with that. We shot the phone conversation with just our actor Peter saying his lines by himself, and we added Christine's dialogue in post.
On the first day of shooting, we couldn't find our actor. He wasn't in his room, and he didn't have a cell phone. So Dan, Chris and I looked all over campus for him, because we were going to pick him up and drive him to Dan's place. We were like 2 hours behind schedule and we weren't even at the location yet. We had Lori and her friend Luke waiting for us in Dan's room the whole time too. So finally after waiting and waiting, we decided just to go to Dan's place anyways without our actor. We get to Dan's room, and decide that we can't shoot anything that night. We pick up our gear and start carrying it down the stairs. The phone rings, and it's Peter, our actor. His car had died and he was coming over. What a relief! So he came over and we shot all night. It was raining at night too, and our outside light was getting totally soaked. Good thing we didn't have a fire marshal on set! I was surprised all our gear made it through the night. Chris had put a little flowery hat over the light, which didn't stop any rain from coming down. I remember we had bought 2 hats for our actress, so one of the hats ended up only being used as an ineffective raincoat.
Then we had to shoot the exteriors. We knew it was going to rain, so we made rain covers for our lights by using cardboard boxes and trash bags. I even made one of the trash bags fit over my camera. You can see what it looks like in the photo gallery. That's me inside the trash bag, with a tiny hole for the lens. We got to the church early and set up everything. The shoot lasted from 6pm to about 4am. Luckily it didn't rain for a long time, so shooting went pretty fast. Our first problem was with our dolly. One of the tires was flat, and our bike pump didn't work at all. Unfortunately, we were shooting right next to the street, which made recording audio a bit interesting. There was a group of cars sitting in the church parking lot watching us work, so that was cool. Lori came by and brought over 2 PAs.
Our most difficult shot was the tracking shot when Peter shoots his gun for the first time. It involved the dolly tracking in a U-shape, going pretty fast, and having a gun flash at the right time. The dolly part was fine. I had researched online, and found that a really easy way to make a gun muzzle flash is to use disposable flash cameras. So we had one of our PAs run behind the dolly, run up the stairs at the right moment, flash the camera, and then duck out of the shot. Needless to say it took a lot of takes. But it really does look convincing. I'm surprised we pulled it off.
Then it started raining. All our equipment was soaked. The only lights in the outdoor scenes were 2 big lights that we used to shine on the church. The lights were protected by our cardboard boxes, but everything electrical was exposed. So we put more trash bags over everything. The trash bag that covered my camera didn't work out so well. It was so hot and sticky under there, that I eventually threw that out. It got really cold during the night, especially with the rain. Our two PAs started shaking from the cold, so we let them go. They were real troopers though. I heard that the one guy, Kyle, was impressed with our shoot so much that he transferred to our college to be a film major there!
When it rained really hard, we had to stop shooting. Dan, Chris and I got into Dan's car, and we watched our "dailies" on my tv inside his car. When it cleared up, we finished the rest of our shots. Our actors never complained, cause they're the coolest people in the world. We finished at 4 in the morning. The next day we did pick up shots in a deserted part of town. That took us an easy 2 hours, and we were done with production.
Since I had all the tapes, I decided to edit this beast asap. As soon as I got back from shooting the pick up shots, I went straight to editing. I spent about 50 hours editing. People who haven't edited before don't know how long a 6 minute short will take to edit. Dan and Chris helped edit as well. I remember Dan adding in footsteps in post. Some of our outdoor shots didn't have sound, cause it was too much hassle to shoot in the rain, especially with our tracking shots. So Dan used the sound of a left foot and a right foot stepping on pavement, and matched up each footstep in our movie with the sound effect. Talk about dedication. That itself took over an hour. When we had a near-final cut, we brought in our actors to do ADR. Then we had to get our actress Christine's dialogue for the telephone conversation. I sat in an upstairs office, with a camera pointing at a speaker phone. Downstairs, Christine would watch the footage and say her lines. I recorded the sound from the speaker phone (much better to get it clean, as opposed to recording her voice normally and adding telephone distortion later). We had 16 audio tracks going. We had the sounds of rain, city traffic, cars going by, thunder, music, sound effects, room tone, all playing at once.
I brought in Joe Kawano to be our SFX editor. He used after effects and created the gun muzzle flash. It was awesome cause he knew what he was doing, and gave us our 2 gunshot flashes really quickly. They really make the gun shots come alive. Great job Joe.
A few titles and tweaks later, we were done. We had worked on this project for 4 months straight, and I think it paid off. Then it was time for some r&r.