COMMITMENT – The trials, tribulations, and all out hell of making an Award Winning Short Film!

COMMITMENT, to most, is a short film done by Two Titans Media. The synopsis for it reads, “When do old commitments end and new ones begin? This is something that Maggie Stein and her beau, Andrew Worthington, must work out”.

But at it’s heart, it was something else entirely.

This was a four year journey of loss, stress, financial woes, hatred, love, and the all out willingness to never give up and never surrender.

It starts, as a lot of stories do, with a simple question: Will you help me make a film?

The film was COMMITMENT. A script written by our friend Sean, for another filmmaker who had to back out of doing it.  Sean needed someone he could trust and depend on to perform the production aspects needed to make his story come to life.

We had been trying to get something off of the ground for awhile now, but as with most dreamers, the stories we wanted to tell required budgets that were not within our reach at that point in time.

So, here comes a short romantic drama, with a cast mostly set and some pre-production already done. It could be done on an extremely low-budget and would look good with the equipment we had.

What could possibly go wrong with this?

A lot, actually.

The first problem we encountered was that the original cast that was brought on (talented people, all) were told originally that this would be shot in two weekends (four days total).  This schedule was set by the previous director and those two weekends were less than a month away from our first initial meeting with everyone.

Is it possible to shoot a short film in that time? Absolutely. But in discussions between ourselves, we came to the conclusion that for the look and feel we wanted for this film, it would have to take a longer shoot schedule; especially considering the only crew at this point were Ryan, Josh, and the DP. And while we got this point across to the cast, a number of them already had taken up other work (and some even making their own films) in the times we tried to get Commitment up and running.

Which wasn’t bad at first, but as we held meetings, Ryan and Josh decided the script needed to be re-written. Originally, the story was about the male character of Andrew, but looking at it from a story perspective, we thought it was really about Maggie. Sean went about re-writing.

Two drafts later, we still hadn’t gotten it to where we wanted it (and behind our own schedule we wanted to be at), thus Ryan took a crack at it.

Because of the extra time we took to do re-writing, as well as some of the cast having booked other work, we fell behind schedule.

We never quite recovered from that, as we would set up schedules, get the okay from all involved that the schedules set would work, but then have to cancel because something else came up for the actors. Compound this with health issues (of both cast and crew) and weather that at times made shooting at chosen locations extremely hazardous, thus forcing cancellation… we were lucky to get anything shot with the original cast at all.

Then came the on-set re-writes. Lord, those re-writes. While it’s generally not advised to re-write all throughout production, when locations/actors and more would fall through… Sean/Ryan would have to get together (sometimes the day before scenes would be shot) to re-write the script to make it work with the people and locations we managed to get.

So, what about the scenes we did shoot in this time-frame?

Well, we were wanting to use our camera at the time, the Canon HV20 with a 35mm adapter lens, but the DP that was on the project wanted to use their camera (a Panasonic DVX 100b, we believe). It didn’t give us the quality or look that we wanted, but ultimately three scenes we shot with it were included in the final product.

The other scenes we shot ended up having some sort of issue (not being framed well, ill-lit or some sort of camera effect being used without our knowledge), and on one particular day where we shot 35% of the film, it turned out as we were filming the last scene that day that everything we had done up to that point was unusable.

It had been shot full-frame and not wide-screen.

I think alternatively between the two of us, we went from crying to punching a wall.

Having dealt with all this, we came up with a plan. We’d do an aggressive month-long weekend shooting schedule, making sure pick-up days were scheduled to get what we needed if (or with our luck, when) things got off-track.

But when we did, the previous problems of scheduling reared their ugly heads again. We had cleared this schedule with the actors, but even with it cleared and set they eventually wanted a change for one reason or another … and since this was now a year after the fact, we wanted to wait no longer. Thus, unfortunately,  half of the cast parted ways because we couldn’t make things work, despite our best efforts to do so.

At the same time, our DP had to leave as well.

So, we did end up putting off the schedule by two weeks, so we could audition a new cast.

Thankfully, the auditions came and went with much success and we had a fully rounded cast again. We also managed to grab a few people for crew, although they ended up leaving halfway through the shoot, leaving it just Josh and Ryan doing pretty much everything.

In fact, it was the fact that we ended up having to do most of the crew side that lead us to create the name of Two Titans, because unlike the Titans of Myth, we weren’t going to let problems hold us down, we were going to triumph.

But, as you can imagine, some of the set-backs that befell us initially struck again here: Inclement weather, hasty re-writes due to locations/extras falling through, equipment breakdowns…

Yet, we stuck to the schedule and with shiny new equipment we bought specifically for the shoot and using the HV20 as we planned, got some striking footage.

So, that’s the end of the troubles, right?

What are you, crazy? No… now it was onto editing and that was a trial and a half. Ryan edited the rough cut on Adobe Premiere Pro, before Josh took it to do some tightening and color correction.

Except that he was now using a Mac, so he only had Final Cut Pro. Thus, started the long and laborious process of getting the ‘Ryan Edit’ off of Adobe and onto Final Cut Pro.

Also, a note to potential editors: Only start color correction when you have a final edit. We screwed the pooch royally on that one.

It was during this time that the now 2-year journey of getting this film done was starting to take its toll on both of us. With problems in editing (from cuts disappearing in the edit or ‘jumping’  cuts after renders), the botched initial color correction, the notion of doing foley work and having to ADR the entire movie, we reached a point where we needed a break.

And every so often, Ryan would nudge Josh that we needed to work on it. We would, get depressed, set it aside. Then Josh would mention to Ryan that we’d need to finish it. We would, get depressed, set it aside yet again.

Finally, we put the hammer down and said we needed to get this done, hell or high water, before we hit the four or five year mark. So we did: We created a brutal schedule like we did before, got the foley done and then got everyone we could into the ORU Foley and ADR Room (which was much appreciated) and got the sound mix done.

It was a rush to get it done in time for the 2012 Barebones Film Festival and we even burned a disc that worked and looked great, but after sending it in, was told that it wouldn’t play!

So yes, our problems continued even after supposedly getting it done! We burned a new copy (triple-checked it this time, because turns out the process we did use originally was making messed-up discs) and sent it off.

Yay! You got the DVD finished and sent off to a Festival. Then What?

What else? Going to the Festival!

While we didn’t have a lot of people at our premiere, those who did come to see all the movies (and those who came out to support ours) really seemed to enjoy the film.

It was always our hope to win an award… and as much as you want to win, you oftentimes see other films that you feel are better than yours and deserve to win. And there were a few that, we felt, were overall better looking than ours. So it was a surprise and an honor to win Best Oklahoma Soil. And considering that Barebones is listed as one of the 25 Film Festivals Worth The Entry Fee, it means a lot to us.

Well, it’s after the festival. Now What?

Now, we premiere it online for all of you to see. So, here’s Commitment.

There were two audio issues we wanted to fix  but upon opening our Final Cut Pro file… nothing loaded. Pretty much, the final edit was gone… so, what you see up above is the final version, for good or ill.

Now, we just hope that people will watch it online and we’ll continue to submit it to film festivals, as we think despite what issues are in the final cut, there’s an entertaining film to be watched.

So, what has Two Titans learned from all of this?

First: Expect the unexpected. Naturally you can’t do that… but don’t be naive and expect things to go perfectly smooth. Just on this film, we pretty much had everything short of death happen! It’s just like in the poem, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” and if it can, it will.  Be flexible and patient.

Second: Film-Making is a stressful endeavor and it can cost you friends. During the making of “Commitment”, we were under enormous amounts of pressure (on-set and off) and lost a few friends because of what was going on. It takes a powerful personality to make a film and sometimes, personalities clash… and sometimes you can find a happy medium and sometimes you can’t.

Third: Be passionate about the project. Too many people start up films (regardless if they’re shorts or features) because they think it’s a quick path to fame and success. It isn’t. As noted in the last two notes, it’s full of unexpected events and stressors… and if you’re not passionate about the script/idea, then these things will beat down on you and you will quit either during the filming or in the Post-Production phase.

It can honestly be said that “Commitment” only got finished because Ryan and Josh had a passion for the story. If it didn’t mean something to the both of them, it would have died during production because of all the problems.

So in other words: Making a film is tough work, but if you stay passionate and make a commitment about seeing it through to the end, the final product can be extremely rewarding.

That’s the story of “Commitment”. The short one, at least 😉

IMDB