Finished Filming my Feature Film… Finally
I finally finished filming the movie. I finished a week ago but just now getting to posting this.
The last scene was the hardest to book, not that hard to film.
Cold Emailing an actress that she’s going to act in a guys house, massaged with her bareback showing, walk past a guy wearing nothing but a towel, and things that get even crazier from there is a hard sell for a no-name filmmaker. Especially in today’s environment.
After getting turned down twice after initially being interested I decided to go another way. Through another actor/comedian friend of mine, I was able to social proof my way to a great casting.
Only hard part of the filming besides one of the actors backing out last second was only having one crew member and he had to film and do audio at the same time for the final scene.
Still need to get some b-roll, not sure how much I can get as my lead actor is fed up with working on the movie and refuses to act anymore. So I may need to be creative.
In the process of editing it all and making a trailer. I’ve got several books on editing I’m going front-end load into my brain to keep the fundamentals in my brain. I feel I’m already good at editing but I can always get better.
I’ll probably cut a 1 and 2-minute version of every 3-minute scene to see if the extra minutes are that necessary.
I got some books on color correcting as well. I’ll need to learn Da Vinci Resolve along the way.
Sound mixing is something I don’t understand yet, but soon will.
Contacting people to get a poster made, so that’ll make me feel official to have that done. I already got the most important part down, the concept.
I don’t have any behind the scenes footage or photos (aside from audio of me directing and some bloopers), as I was barely able to do what I’m doing. I can definitely do some interviews and commentary later.
I need to look up all the people I forgot to sign release forms the first time through, that’ll be fun. I’m sure there’s other legal stuff I need to do as well.
I’ll do a showing and get feedback on what people think.
I need to submit to a bunch of festivals, the ones I want, and the ones I’ll settle for. Then I need to just get it out there through whatever distribution makes sense.
Of course a premiere somewhere, actors have waited long enough.
And start my next project. I’ve got 2 feature scripts ready to go, and a 2 short scripts as well.
Biggest things I’ve taken from this, I now have my business card (this movie), a network (cast and crew I’ve worked with) and most importantly, my newfound confidence (experience).
Let me know if you’ve got any advice or been through similar situations.