So, you’re a student of film, or like me, you’re a story enthusiast who is doing your own unaccredited version of film school, and the big elephant in the room is telling you that you actually need to start making a film.

Now, you might be super ambitious and think about making a full movie, however, if you think about how much experience and practical knowledge you actually have, along with how much money you can spend, you’ll quickly realize that a short film is the way to start.

But where to start?

In this article, I’m going to break down my short film: “Why Of Why Didn’t I Take The Blue Pill”.

Lets see if you can learn from my experience, and get you ready for your own project.

Why Of Why Didn’t I Take The Blue Pill

When you’re first starting out, you can read all the books in the world. Check out some of my other articles, and I’ll share with you some of the books that I recommend reading. But at a certain point, you need to put your book smarts into practice.

That’s what I did with my Matrix Spoof, Why Oh Why Didn’t I Take The Blue Pill. When I decided to start this project, I did so with a specific goal in mind: to make it look as much like the Matrix as I possibly could.

For me at the time, that meant I had a few goals

1. Get the lighting to match.
2. Don’t ruin it with bad audio.
3. Transport the audience into your world
4. Give them something they haven’t seen before.
5. Learn how to greenscreen.

Naturally, I didn’t have a big budget. So like all aspiring filmmakers, I had to get scrappy. 

How To Do Pre-Production

For this short, I storyboarded everything myself. I studied clips from the movie that I wanted to emulate and printed off several pictures so that my crew would be able to understand my vision and how I wanted to light this. 

I didn’t have any fancy software, other than Final Draft and the adobe creative suite to help with everything. The storyboards were drawn by me, by hand. Then I had to create a budget.

For a budget, I know I went over it a little, but I budgeted about $1000. That might sound like a lot to you as a beginning filmmaker, and for me, it was.

Luckily I already had splurged several months before and bought a Dracast lighting kit, and a GH5s camera with a few lenses, a Senheiser boom mic, and a Zoom recorder. I’m not going to include those in my budget, but I think I ended up spending close to $5000 on those at the time. Some were second hand. Those have honestly been the staples of my gear for the last few years, and probably will continue to be, though I do add to that when I can afford to.

Anyhow, for my shoot, since I couldn’t get too spendy, I needed to tally my resources. At the time, I was working full time as a general contractor, and I had access to a vacant house with a fireplace and a garage. Location—set.

Next, I needed props. I could use the garage, but it was so bare, that I walked around my jobsite and was able to collect several wooden pallets that I turned into tables, and leaned against walls to add some variety.

After that, I needed some furnishings for inside the house. In the Matix, they had these two rich red couches. My dad’s office had 2 similar couches, so I borrowed those and an end table my wife had, and wallah, I had my interior set decorated.

There were other places I needed, like a pool, a forested tea party, and a worn-out commercial district. My parents had a pool, so that was easy enough. Their yard was also ideal for setting up my tea party scene. The run-down commercial district was a stumper. I decided to do that all with greenscreen, so that became one of my goals to learn how to do.

Up until this point, everything has been free, but now I need a greenscreen, which was actually pretty cheap on Ebay (cheap both in price and quality, though I still use it today). Then I needed some tea sets and computer parts. I went to Deseret Industries, our local 2^nd hand thrift store, and found pretty much everything I could possibly want. I think I bought most all my props for about $50. Then I just had to scour my house, grabbing things like potatoes, an old science fair project from elementary school, a bunch of wires that we all have filling up one of our junk drawers, and things like that. I did have to buy some china balls, but I ordered those in from, China, for a really cheap price, I can’t remember, maybe $75 or so.

For costumes, I shopped the 2^nd hand thrift store, ebay, and the Halloween store till I had what I needed. I think I spent about $100 on all of it put together.

I also needed to make a few props. I wanted breaking concrete, because that was one of the coolest things about the Matrix. So I used scrap 2×4’s, 2×2’s and ¼” sheetrock to build some breakable pillars and floors that I could film and edit into the movie. These didn’t cost a lot, because I had access to a bunch of waste from my construction sites, however the time it took to build was days.

In the end, I was ready to set up my scenes. All I needed now was crew and actors.

Since I wasn’t in an actual film school, I couldn’t just grab my buddies in class and go to work. Come to think of it, I don’t really have any buddies anymore, just my family. Oh well, I did find a guy at church who does corporate videos and some creative work for BYU. I told him about my project, and he volunteered to help me out. Sweet!

Next, I enlisted his son and some of the teenage boys from my church and I had a cheap film crew.

For actors, I found a Facebook group for filmmakers, and I put out a casting call. I had a lot of feedback from some students and freelancers who were hoping to build their portfolio. I wanted to pay them, so I offered about $200/day, if I remember right. I had them sign some legal documents that I drafted up. No, I didn’t use a lawyer, but I’ve read so many legal documents in my career, I might as well be a fake lawyer. So now I could have them sign a document to legitimize my rights to their work and in the end, I had 4 actors, 4 would show up on one day, and two the next day. That put me over budget, since I think I might have paid them a collective sum of $1200 on actors. 

I went in to the home on my construction site and set up my set the day before,  and we were good to get filming.

Day 1: Production

I did not sleep at all the night before. I left bright and early to arrive before anyone else. I think I stopped at McDonalds to grab a breakfast to try and calm my nerves, though I felt nauseous from the anxiety of doing this production.

As soon as everyone showed up, I had them sign their legal rights away then had them start getting dressed and in makeup. I did have to hire a single hair and makeup artist, since I’d be going pretty crazy with some of their hair. She brought her daughter along, and in the end, I was glad I had 2 of them. I made sure I paid them both, another $600 down the drain.

Filming that first day went very well. We checked off all the shots on my shot list, and we worked from 1^st light to late into the night. I brought lunch for everyone, but my wife packed it, and it was very healthy, nobody wanted to eat it, so my church volunteer took everyone who wanted, out for hamburgers. I never told my wife that.

Day 2: Production Continued

Yikes, one of our actors called in sick. Time to get creative. I didn’t want to reschedule when both actors and my cheap crew were available, because that just might never happen, so I filmed all of our Morpheus character that day, and just had him reacting to our prompts. I used my hand a little to fill in for our absent actor’s hand, and in the end, we got all his parts done.

After that, I got my daughter to my parent’s pool, and we filmed her scene. After that, I excused all my volunteer crew to go home and not come back again. I also enlisted the help of my brother who loves to scuba dive. Me and him went to the bottom of the pool and used one of his underwater cameras to film a few clips there.

A week or two later, I brought my other actor back, no longer sick, and we did the whole second day’s shoot over again. We filmed him in the room, reacting to my prompts. I was a one-man crew this day, and after that, we went back to my parent’s pool, and I got my scene with him done there also.

And then I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. I had all the footage I would need, in the can… I thought.

Post Production

How long do you imagine it should take to edit that video together? A week? A month? Try 6-8 months.

I worked every night till one or two in the morning, and every Saturday, all day and night. I had no idea how much work went into cutting a movie together. 

Add to that, the fact that I just owned a simple consumer grade computer. I already had the adobe editing suite, so I had access to all the cool things it could do, though I didn’t know how to do any of it.

I also knew I’d need to do a 3d element for when my Neo character touches the mirror and the liquid mirror climbs up his body like mercury. Luckily I found Blender, and I started learning how to use that. Boy was that a big learning curve.

All the while, my computer kept crashing every hour or less because of the computing power I needed but didn’t have.

The sheer amount of masking was daunting. Not only that, but once I thought I had something masked out, I had to render it so my cheap computer could play it at realtime speed, and I learned how badly a mask can jitter if not done perfectly. 

Great, back to masking everything all over again. I couldn’t work in layers, because my computer was too weak, so I rendered every layer with its transparent alpha, and overlaid it on the backgrounds, and in the end, everything I did had to be in a destructive workflow.

Some things ended up looking great, some looked terrible, and by month 6 I was burned out. I think like many film projects, I eventually finished this one by giving up, rather than redoing work for the umpteenth time.

I calculated my time to edit this, and arrived at the conclusion that I spent about 4 hours per every 1 second of finished film produced. Figure that and give me a dollar value for your time. Yikes.

What We Learn

Well it was done. I was proud of it, mostly. Still I knew the production quality wasn’t at all near film festival quality. So I posted it on Youtube for all to enjoy.

So here are my key take-aways on my goals and things I learned, and hopefully you can learn too:

1. On Lighting:
   1. Having examples of what you want for lighting on set really helped me get the look I was going for. I had disagreements with my helpers on how to light something, but when I showed them the picture of my vision, it clicked, and we got the lighting we needed.
   2. LED Christmas lights might flicker on your set. Mine did, because the frequency of the electricity lighting them, was out of sync with my shutter speed. I had florescent light bulbs in my china balls, and those retained their light better, because the plasma didn’t die fast enough for the electrical frequency to be an issue.
   3. If you need a film light in a specific spot, but can’t get it out of frame in camera, pretend it’s a practical.
   4. The Sun is terrible at lighting a greenscreen outdoors, especially if you don’t have any lights to overpower the Sun.
2. On Audio:
   1. Go through the motions of calling out audio and camera before calling action. It’s so easy to remember to push record on one but not the other.
   2. Get backup audio if possible, just in case. I wish I could have had another microphone to catch some of the secondary actor’s audio that just wasn’t possible on the scene. It made me have to use ambient audio and it was very obvious.
   3. Whatever you think you need to reduce reverb in your scene, do more. It’s near impossible to cut out the echoes in a room with a lot of tight smooth surfaces.
3. On Transporting the audience:
   1. Some things I had to do in post and with greenscreens. This is possible, but difficult and much more time consuming. I had fake sconces that I added to the walls in post, and fake backgrounds that weren’t all that convincing. If you film something practically, then do it. Even if it costs a little extra, it will give you a much better production value in the end.
4. On giving the audience something they haven’t seen:
   1. I think as an entertainer, it’s our job to create a sense of wonder in our audience. I guess, in the end, I’m too close to this project to know if I succeeded in this. I’ll have to look at audience reaction to know that.
5. On learning Greenscreen:
   1. Chroma keying is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Even with a decently lit greenscreen, there was a lot of issues I ran into. Reflections that I never knew were there kept giving me grief. Even on shots that I had a decent greenscreen lit, I found that I still had to do a surprising amount of masking to cut it out.
6. Other key take aways:
   1. Be flexible. When my actor called in sick, I had to completely change my whole shooting plan.
   2. Get a current picture of your actors before they show up. When I hired my Neo character on Facebook, his picture showed him clean shaven. When he showed up on set, he had a full beard and mustache. Yikes, that wasn’t in the plan. Not only did it not fit with my vision of a Neo character, but I didn’t know how I was to make my 3d model of his face for the mercury to climb with facial hair. Luckily I got through it, but it was still unexpected.
   3. People are the most expensive part of a film project. I felt that I was pretty scrappy with my scenes and props, but people, despite my volunteer crew, was where I went over budget.
   4. Don’t forget B-roll. While I got all my storyboard shots, I didn’t get nearly enough b-roll. In the end, I had to film some of this during my edit so I’d have enough to cut in when nothing else would fit.
   5. Get coverage. Another problem with filming nothing but storyboard shots, is that sometimes it doesn’t cut together very well. I sure could have used some additional shots to make everything flow better in the edit.
   6. Know your backgrounds before you shoot your actors. In my composite at the end, with the tea party, I shot my actors walking along, but I filmed them from the wrong angle, and so they don’t match my tea party scene that I built later. If you’ll notice, they tend to glide sideways as they walk. Not very good looking.
   7. The more special/visual effects you do, the longer the edit will take. Especially if you have a bad computer.
   8. Invest in a good computer. I built my own after this because there was no way I was going to fight another short film on my family’s consumer grade computer. Never, never, never again.

In the end, I went over budget by close to $800. Not ideal, but I had no idea before this how much this was likely to cost. My next short I think I’ll be a little more prepared on what things are likely to cost.

I’m sure as you watch, you might think of a couple other things I could have done better. If you haven’t seen the video, then check it out. Also, check out my breakdown online and leave any comments you thought about as you watched it.

I hope this helps you get a better jump on your future project.

To watch the actual short film, you can view it here: https://youtu.be/JcToyRGe7v0

For my making of video, check it out here: https://youtu.be/jRDd24lIbmE