Creative notes by Mark Vetanen, the Portland test film director:
My purpose for this article is to explain the challenges in making a test film and give fellow participants insights into our process.
After reading about Amazon Studios and believing a unique opportunity was being created for independent filmmakers such as myself, I became active on the site and read many screenplays.
My first step was to select a screenplay that contained drama, action, and yet could be made on a modest budget. Not a small task. Writer John Carr’s script, AMERICAN ANTHEM, fit the needs of our project and some exciting speed skating footage made our team decide this was the script to tackle.
Technical breakdown
The Test film for American Anthem commenced in January 2011 till the first week of March , shooting mostly on weekend and a few weekday nights. Casting was done by Karen LaVoie mainly using her Acting School students, except for two local talents.
Our challenge was motivating a cast without being able to offer pay. This also made crewing the shoot difficult. It was rough growing. For our first shoot we had two no shows. Last minute paying gigs took them out. This remained a constant worry. However, given the circumstances we got the best cast we could and I’m very happy with the performers and efforts given.
Let’s assume you wanted to replicate our ANTHEM shoot using a standard pay scale. The numbers would, conservatively speaking, look something like this:
Total days shooting: 16 (5 hour days) or 80 Hours. ($120,000 estimated value for an average of 5 actors per day at $300/day rate)
Crew: One experienced Videographer, one director, and one assistant ($17,600)
Camera: Panasonic HPX300 shooting DVCPROHD-100 1080x1920 on P2 cardsSound: Sennheiser ME-66 on a boomLights: Arri D4 Light kit, Lowell DV creator Light kit and an assorted reflectorsEstimated cost of Production gear used: $22,000. You may save money renting everything and that cost would be: $8240.
Post-Production
Editing System: Sony Vegas 10 ($850 value)Editing Time: 90 hours estimated. ($8550 value)Additional Cost: $25 for istockPhoto video purchases. Music rights: $20 (real value is hard to determine though I can estimate about $15,000 for Low/indie film)
Total value of the test film: $184,525
Challenges faced by our team:
We started the production with no storyboards, no pre-production other than to just schedule the scenes to shoot at the locations we had at the time. We simply did not have the time or the budget to go through a normal three month pre-production and scheduling process that you see with a typical film, and would be with a full time staff.
All of the cast and crew had day-jobs or school that we had to work around and worked with Karen during her acting school class hours to rehearse them with the scenes
Karen LaVoie took it upon herself to re-write the script where she combined a lot of scenes to one scene, alter locations to fit what we had available, and deleted bunches of scene that would have been difficult to secure any realistic location to shoot them. Her re-write really helped to schedule the film and shoot it in a way that was reasonable for a zero budget film on a time crunch.
I should publicly note that the original script’s author, John Carr, was and is highly invested in his screenplay. He was not pleased with modifications being made (no writer ever is, regardless of budget) and we only hope the short track sport will gain more popularity and will make up for the stress our project has caused. We wish him the best in all endeavors. He still holds the rights to American Anthem as I was only its director.
As I stated, on the very first day of shooting we had two no-shows and casted crew to fill the roles (happens when you cannot pay actors). With no time to learn the lines or prepare we threw two crew persons then in the mix to take on supporting actor roles for Seth and Mr. Briggs.
Given the time crunch that we faced, also that many of our actors would be leaving for vacations and had other acting gigs lined up, we had to move fast to get the film done and we had to move fast on set to get the scenes shot before actors had to leave for work or for family commitments. Often we had only time for 2 or 3 takes at the most before we had to move on and could only get about 5 hours per shoot day to get the scenes shot.
Only a few of our actors knew how to ice skate, and shooting on the ice itself would have cost $160/hour to rent the ice. We were lucky that the Valley Ice Arena in Beaverton let us use the location for the non-ice arena shots for free. The only on-ice shots we got was during a holiday when everyone had the day off and during public skating hours (and I had to pay rental and entry fees for everyone too!)
John Carr really did a lot of work to contact the Speed skaters and was able to get promo material sent to us to use for Eric’s room scene. He also secured the rights to the music we used, The Rose of Jerico, Perfect Hero, The Martichoria, and Carrie Soloman. The music really made a huge difference in the feel of the film. Big thanks again to John Carr and all the musicians that contributed to the project.
Editing this film was also on a time crunch as well, to make the deadline for the June submission. This is my busy time of the year businesswise with videography so the film had to be done before the end of June.
Overall, this is the best film I possibly could have shot given four months with zero budget and no crew to speak of. It worked out rather well for a test film and we all hope that it is well received. Special thanks to Karen and all my team. Bright future ahead for everyone. Thanks again to Mr. Carr for his passion and vision. Finally, thanks to Amazon Studios for providing us with this opportunity.
Watch film at:
studios.amazon.com/movies/show/7839
