On Saturday we had our second and final day of production on The Dinner Scene, and as of yesterday we have a rough cut of the whole shebang. I looked back through my notes and believe that I first hit upon this idea on March 12th – and, if all goes according to plan, we will have a finished short by July 12th. Four months and my customary laughably-small budget to create a short bigger and more challenging than anything I’ve directed thus far. Now, we are only ultimately talking about a 9-10 minute short with two locations and three characters, so everything is relative; but for me, that was a giant step. This team is succeeding in the mission to make everything we do incrementally tougher.
This was the first time I was producing by myself. My partner on the previous two couldn’t participate this time for personal reasons, and much as I love having him aboard, there are times when life has to outrank messing around on no-budget short films, so I had to learn how to fly solo. That meant a pretty excruciating few days of anxiety leading up to our second production day. I honestly don’t enjoy producing – if shooting the film is sex, producing to me isn’t even foreplay, it’s stuff like cleaning your bedsheets and vacuuming to keep bedbugs away. But nonetheless it must be done or nothing good is ever going to happen.
Despite that, and despite rolling camera over an hour after we intended because of traffic issues, we still executed our plan. We wrapped at midnight, the crew was basically dispersed by 12:30, but then I stayed up with a couple of colleagues for a toast and a post-mortem review, and I didn’t get to bed until about 3am. I woke up at 7:15 with precious little cognizance or biorhythm. I have hazy memories of taking a bath, eating breakfast, having a nap, then calling a friend from the shoot for a proper celebratory brunch. Here’s a good measuring stick for fatigue – after a cappuccino plus a half-cup of regular coffee, my brain chemicals were finally aligned enough to have a proper nap.
On thing that has been consistent from project to project has been my level of personal terror and sense of difficulty. That is, as they say, a feature and not a bug. I think what is best for me is to make sure I am constantly operating in the space where I am aware that what I am doing is very, very hard, but still possible. Just a few days ago was the 2-year anniversary of shooting Samantha Gets Back Out There, and back then, to do what I am doing now would have been impossible, full stop. But for every step of this cycle, I have been keenly aware that while it would never be easy enough for me to relax, it was always on the right side of feasible. I finally, for example, had to take a whack at plotting camera coverage for a dynamic two-person scene. I have graduated from tripod on short #1 and handheld on short #2 to using dolly shots and timed tilts and racks, and cross-cutting in editing. I know to people immersed in this stuff I’m still describing cinematic storytelling 101, but for a guy who majored in theater I am embracing the strategy of trying to create compelling and entertaining works with a gradually-increasing set of movie tools. It’s rather like learning to play one chord, then learning how to play three chords, then knowing that with three chords and an idea, you can finally write a real song. Perhaps, someday, Prog Rock, even.
It’s a fulfilling sensation; and results have (thus far) borne out the effectiveness of the strategy for me. I have an impulse to say that we won’t know for sure until the festival responses start coming back in, but I don’t believe in completely handing over your power to define success. I think what we’ve got in The Dinner Scene is going to be the most recognizably “Movie”-like product I have yet produced. It excites me, and it excites me for what’s next – which (stay tuned) might be coming along sooner than intended.