ON LOCATION- Feature Production Tips from John Akre
Like many people who pick up a movie or video camera, I have long had a subtle but persistent case of "feature fever." I wanted to test myself against the ninety minute mark; I wanted to pit my skills against the movie's version of long-form story-telling. This summer I was finally able to battle the fever by acting it out, and spent two weeks in Montana shooting a feature project.

I had been bandying around a feature film story idea for a few years with my friend Rob, who lives in Seattle. The story is about a woman whose life has broken down. She has lost both her parents and her boyfriend, but she finds a box of family photographs in her mother's closet. The photographs take her to Butte, Montana, the place where her great-grandmother lived. She goes there to find out about her family and, perhaps, herself.

Originally Rob and I had planned to shoot the project on 16mm film, so we started saving up money a few years ago for that. But seeing movies like "The Blair Witch Project," "The Celebration," and "The Cruise," films shot on video for far less than they could have been made with film, convinced us that digital video was the way to go. Digital video allowed us to go ahead and shoot the project now; if we were to do it on film we'd probably still be trying to save up money.

We spent a week in Montana lining up locations and talent and another week shooting. We started shooting early in the morning each day and finished at night. We shot over three hundred camera setups in less than a week, and it was only through a great deal of pre-planning that we were able to do that. I'll share with you some of the techniques I used to plan this whirlwind shooting schedule.

Firstly, I had a script, something that I, dyed-in-the-wool public access producer that I am, rarely use. But for a long-form project like this it seemed absolutely necessary. But a script is more like an architect's sketch than it is like a blueprint. To get the script into blueprint form I went through my own version of the process that professionals call "breaking down the script."

I literally did "break" the script down. I first numbered each camera setup and then I cut each numbered setup out of the script. I glued each numbered section of the script on a 3X5 card. I shuffled the cards and arranged them in piles according to location and actors needed. On each card I wrote the location, the actors needed for it, as well as costume, prop, and screen direction requirements.

With a complex video project, it just makes more sense to shoot things in the order that is easiest, rather than in continuity: the first scene first, the second second and so on. Because we had scenes that took place in some of our main locations, a house, a restaurant, a library, at different times in the story, I arranged the notecards so that we could shoot all the scenes that happened at one location at the same time.

I also wanted to make the most of our small cast, and so I arranged notecards so actors would not have to spend much downtime. Two of our actors were needed for three of the days, so I arranged cards so all the scenes that they were in would be shot in three consecutive days.

Once I had the notecards in their piles I pasted them into the pages of a sketchbook. I set a standard that each page of the sketchbook would represent an hour of shooting and arranged my cards in the pages to reflect how long I expected each camera setup to take. Once the book was filled I moved the location, actor and time information into my calendar and our shooting schedule was completed.

We budgeted some extra hours into the schedule, and that ended up necessary, because we had rainstorms on two of the afternoons in which we had scheduled exterior work. The shoot went smoothly, and knowing the detailed schedule in advance allowed our actors time to mentally prepare for each day's scenes. I carried the sketch book around with me throughout the shoot, making notes in it and drawing slashes through each setup once we had shot it (which was also a very satisfying way to move on to the next scene!)

Our shooting week was fun but exhausting - but it went far more smoothly than it could have gone because of all the work we did to prepare for it. Since then, I have chopped our fifteen hours of tape down to 98 minutes. To find out more, including when and where to see the movie, check out the film's home page at http://home.earthlink.net/~jakre/butte or www.buttemagic.com

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In this Issue:
Page One: MTN At the Millenium
Page Two: On Location
Page Three: MTN Profile
Page Four: Programing Notes
Page Five: Cyber - BYTES
Page Six: MTN Features
Page Seven: MTN Members Forum Survey