Pre-Production: Once More Into the Breach

By Jason Goldstein — Dec. 20, 2009

I've been working on a very cool blog post about Be The Shoe music, but like most of my life, that will have to wait for a while. The cameras start rolling in under 34 hours, and we've spent the last few days wrapping up details.

In the latter half of Salad Daze, we had a whole group of new extras on the set who weren't very familiar with the filmmaking process. They were first discovering that we never shoot anything just once. We shoot over, and over, until we have every angle exactly the way we want it.

I think people are even less aware of how much work we put in before we ever start shooting.

How much work we do before we start shooting

Loss For Words is already six months in the making. While we were in New York over the summer, Randy and I talked about the story nonstop, and he began his longstanding tradition of writing up little bits of dialogue in his notebook.

He started writing when we got back to Columbia. I've always thought screenwriting is harder than writing a novel, because in written fiction, I can spell out things on the page. In cinema, "show don't tell" is not a suggestion; it's a mandate. The dialogue must always be flawless, and it's much harder to get inside a person's head.

As the script came together, we had to make sure our plan was practical. Every character needed an actor who could play the part. Every place featured in the movie needed a location where we could film. Every prop had to be at our disposal.

Some of these are ordeals. Loss For Words is about a writer. Lauren Rubin has spent the last few weeks creating the cover art for his novels. We needed to film in a coffee shop, and most chain stores have a strict policy against people like us.

And then, there are the technical issues. We try to make sweeping improvements every time we make a new movie. Some of these are soft issues, for example, one or our goals was to make Loss For Words have a much more focused plot than our previous films. And some of it involves asking what sort of new equipment or techniques would help us make a higher quality movie.

The photo above is a jib, a big crane that let's us swoosh the camera, and do moving shots that you can't perform handicam. This device puts the little screen on the camera a good 8 feet away from the cameraman, so we need a monitor to watch the shot. That involves more cables, more extension chords, and more shot-planning.

We also have new studio microphone stands, new lighting techniques (replacing all the lightbulbs in a room with brighter, energy-efficient bulbs), and all of this gear needs to be tested.

And then of course, there's scheduling.

In the past, we've spent all summer shooting a feature. We have 24 days to film Loss For Words, so we need to be productive. That means we have the actors' availability in advance, and we're planning to shoot 6-8 scenes per day. Even with such a dedicated cast, scheduling the first week of filming alone took Randy and I two full hours.

Here's my point

Stanley Kubrick liked to say making a movie was like going to war. I disagree. Making a movie requires much more prior planning.

Wish us luck. We start rolling at 10AM Monday morning.

In the meantime, Be The Shoe would like to wish everyone happy assorted holidays, and we'll return to the real world sometime in mid-January.