FLM235 - We made Pulp Fiction

In my last blog I described the pre production of a little project I was working on. And i'm here to say we did it, we recreated the fun and iconic 'overdose scene' from Pulp Fiction. With some talented actors and a committed crew, we got the whole shoot done within a day and with two hours to spare.

Spoiler Warning

It didn't quite come out as good as Tarantino's but I still think it was a good effort and all round good experience. Considering we only had a few weeks to plan it and get everything sorted.

As Producer I was responsible for making sure everyone knew what they were doing, where they were going and at what time.

I'm happy to say that this is one of the first shoots I've been on where everyone actually turned up relatively early! Which was exciting and inspired hope for the rest of the day. I was also acting as the 1st AD for the day, which meant I was also responsible for all the shoot scheduling, safety protocols and general time-management.

The shooting schedule I made a couple nights before the shoot was set to finish an hour before the set wrap time stated on the call sheet, as I really wanted to make sure we didn't have to come back for any pickups.

So I got a bit worried during the day when my schedule basically stopped being used as a schedule and just as a general shot list. We had a bit of a rocky start at the beginning of the day despite morale running high. Blocking the scene and filming the long one take that covers half the scene first thing in the morning took a bit longer than expected.

We ended up running about 45 - 60 minutes overtime after the first shot. But as I've said a thousand times now, things will never go to plan. And this time, I had expected this, which is why I had allowed so much extra time in my schedule because I knew it was going to get thrown out of whack the second we started.

After the next few shots we had managed to only be 15 - 20 minutes behind schedule and we were back on track. This meant our homemade lunch would be served on time and hot. We were also able to break out the snacks and keep everyone energised and ready to go.

We then started to smash out shot after shot, we went off schedule again as we decided to shoot in a slightly different order. I was able to adjust and we ticked off shots as we meant. One of the benefits of recreating something is that we already have reference images we can look at. I had with me on the day along with a schedule, large screenshots of every shot we had to film with a big fat checkbox sitting next to all of them. This really helped Beth, who had not been a D.O.P previously as she could visually tick off all her shots.

All in all it was a fun day and we smashed it all out. Everyone worked well together and nobody impaled themselves on the needle.

Oh and did I mention I was also a bong girl?

Once all of that was over we handed off everything over to Julian, our editor. He was able to quickly cut together a rough cut to show in the next class. Which meant we were able to get our cut to our previously sourced audio teams faster and gave them more time to breathe. I myself did not have much to do in terms of the post production process since we weren't concentrating on any festival releases. However I did cover for Julian when he unfortunately fell sick and couldn't bring in the cut for our audio guys and for the demonstration for how to export audio etc effectively.

Once that was done we were given a new project to take on, this one much more stressful than Pulp Fiction as crazy as that sounds. We were given the task to create a short film in one week, using only phones, 30 secs - 3 mins long, somehow include the colour 'hot pink', and submit it to MIFF for the Powershorts competition to win $4,000.

Did I mention we only had a week?

This was definitely a challenge, but I think we pulled it off pretty well in the end. We got started by trying to find a story we could tell. Which ultimately led to me sitting in front of a computer for 5 hours trying to come up with an idea and writing a script. We got a script though, a poetic narrative that explores how insignificant things (such as paper) can have a wide variety of meanings and mean the world to different people.

Our little short film is called 1000 pages and i'm happy to say that we were one of the only groups in the class to actually meet the deadline of the competition and submit something. I also managed to sit down with a very talented audio student that I have worked with before, to compose a completely original composition for the film as well as mix the entire film. I sat in with him for a couple hours the night before the due date nutting out all the different sounds in the film and giving notes on how the music should sound.

I then spent the next day completely grading the film, while he finished the mix. I then brought it all together with 5 or so hours left before cut off. Safe to say it was a very productive day. After that whole adrenaline rush I even went and wrote half of another script i'm working on (but that's a whole other blog).

Various things could have been improved and/or simplified all around the place, but so far I have been happy with my team's performance so far and even my own performance, I am juggling many different things at the moment so I'm glad I'm able to do this amount of work with that hanging in the background. Which is a testament to what I've learnt and how I've grown through my studies the last year and a half. Looking forward to whatever we decide to do for scene two.

Written by Aedan Bruitzman