Sharing the Cut (Plus: Stills!)

We’ve gone through the rough cut a few times now, and it’s getting more polished. We’re still working out pacing in a few places - we aren’t into the fine cut yet. But each export of the full film has seen serious progress.

In playwriting, there are a lot of development opportunities. You’re specifically supposed to submit a work-in-progress, which can be tough because you know that the play is only going to get better from the time you submit it. A lot of people have angst about when a script is ready to be submitted to a development opportunity.

I have a personal rule for when a script is ready to share: If someone can read the script and tell what it’s trying to do, then it’s ready to share. Even if it’s not actually doing that yet, you share a work in progress as an early vision of what the play will eventually be. Then people can tell whether they want to invest in its development over time.

We’re at this point now with Addict Named Hal. We have a ways to go with the picture edits, not to mention score, sound mix, and color correction. But I do believe that you can watch the film as it stands right now and see what we’re trying to do.

And since we’re at this stage… that also means that we’re sharing the cut. We’ve submitted it to one festival (you’d recognize the name), and we’re sending it out to try to raise finishing funds and start thinking about distribution.

It’s nerve-wracking sending it out before it’s done, when there’s still so much of the vision left to accomplish. But it also feels good; and this is a waypoint where we need outside eyes. My eyes have seen this film too many times in the last few weeks especially, and I’m starting to lose track of what is having an emotional impact. Fresh eyes from trusted sources will help us as we move into this final phase of the picture edit.

Plus… today we are sharing stills from the film! I’ll be adding them to the website as a whole, but here they are in one go.

Temporary Score

I used to hate picking temporary tracks for the score. Obviously I knew that the tracks were important, but I didn’t understand how to find them. This meant that I would often pick a track that was decent but not great to use in the editing process of a short film. Of course, over time, I would grow used to the track, and then when it finally came time to work with the composer, I had trouble envisioning any other kind of music.

I have selected all of the temporary tracks in Addict Named Hal, and I now feel that the rough cut is giving a cohesive vision for what role the score plays in the film, and the type of instrumentation and approach it will have. When I started, I was nervous to choose temp tracks, and didn’t want to trap myself as I had in previous short film projects.

A few things have helped here. One is that we cut the entire assembly with no tracks. That meant that I was very familiar with the footage - not the script, not the story, not what I thought the scene was going to be when I wrote it or shot it, but the actual footage - before I even considered adding music to it. This helped me respond to what the footage itself was offering, rather than trying to use score to force the footage to do something it wasn’t really doing.

Then, Lowell put together several score references for me. These were songs as well as score from other films. Having this smaller sample size helped me enormously, as I could click through specific tracks chosen by someone with deep knowledge of the artistic vision, rather than facing the entire world of music and trying to figure out how to look up what I wanted.

Of course, there have been many scenes that needed something that I couldn’t find in the existing score references. Here I found a new strategy completely. I thought about the mood of the specific scene (feeling isolated from others, overcoming fears at great cost, forcing yourself to do something you can’t bear to do), and then scrolled through my spreadsheet of films I’ve seen to find a film that deals with that theme well. Then, I listened to score tracks from that film. This strategy always helped me find the right track.

And most of all, I raised the bar for myself. Instead of finding a track that will work fine so that I could move on with the picture edit, I have poured hours into the process of finding the right tracks. I have not accepted tracks that aren’t quite right, and we have replaced plenty of tracks that turned out to be strange in the edit. Now that the rough cut is fully assembled, these hours have clearly paid off. While our score is still quite varied (as it’s pulled from several artists, films, and television shows), it has a clear arc throughout the film, and you can get a sense of what the score needs to do from watching this cut.

Full Rough Cut!

This week we saw the full rough cut of the film. For the assembly, Prakshi just worked forward: I kept a running list of notes while she continued to plow through every scene of the film. For the rough cut, we pored over every scene and sequence, reviewing specific moments, discussing reactions and performances, and adding in temporary music tracks. This was a very thoroughly reviewed cut of the film, and it was exciting to see how it was all hanging together.

I sat down and watched the film - not at my desk, as I wanted to see the cuts in a different format. I wish I could have put it on my TV. When I’m writing and I review a script, I always read it on my tablet instead of my computer. Something about the change in dimensions tricks my brain into thinking I’m looking at something I haven’t seen before.

Watching the entire film at once was very illuminating. There’s a definite arc in the temp tracks I’ve pulled, so that’s exciting! And there’s an arc for sure in the performances and the color palette. The film as a whole is holding together very well.

My biggest concerns right now are in Act 1. Once you get to the Act 1 climax, it feels like the movie settles in. In that first chunk of film, though, a lot of characters are being introduced, and we see a lot of the protagonist feeling ill at ease. In our next cut, we’ll dig into shaping that more, so we understand her internal journey rather than kind of watching her be lost, a little confused, a little bored - which loses some of the tension of the film in this current cut.

Since we’re such a small production, we’re doubling jobs. That meant we were spotting this for picture, but also for the temporary score and sound effects that can help tell the story. There were a few times that we thought a track might need to be replaced, but came up with a music editing solution instead. Really, the track worked for part of a scene, but not another part - so we discussed how to bring it in and out to pair the music with the scene better.

We’re also learning which things need to be shifted by a change in approach; which through some basic tightening; which through a more illuminating track; and which through sound design elements that can shape the environment and provide the context in which the scene is happening. I have had very few chances to work with composers and sound designers, so I feel there will be some experimenting in this next stage as we figure out which element of our post-production tools can do which work. It’s exciting that there are so many methods to create tension, elevate a performance, or up the stakes.

We’re working on high-priority edits first, as there are a few deadlines we’re trying to hit at the beginning of September with a rough cut. Then we’ll really get into the fine cut territory. But the story is holding together, the performances remain strong - it’s all work we’re excited to do, not major problems we’re scared we won’t be able to fix. And that feels good!

Post-Production & Screenwriting

When we first went into quarantine, our Hal team was incredibly grateful that we had already shot the movie. For me personally, I was also relieved that I would have more time to write - with all of the directing, producing, and rewriting I’d been doing, it had been 14 months since I had written a first draft of a play or screenplay. I felt incredibly backed up, and had already been planning to structure my life for the rest of 2020 in the way that would allow me to get the most writing done.

Now, 4.5 months into the quarantine, we’re a lot farther in the editing process for Hal, and I have not run out of steam. I have written first drafts of two brand-new screenplays and one new play, and done major rewrites on a screenplay I wrote in January 2017 that I thought I would never work seriously on. I’ve loved focusing so intensely on my writing, and it feels great to be coming up with new ideas and moving older ideas leaps forward. (I think I’m done churning out first drafts for a while, though - now my focus will be on revising and getting these screenplays into excellent shape.)

Being in post for Hal, and especially in the rough cut stage, has definitely changed the way I write screenplays. I’m writing much more as a director now - which for me means taking Hitchcock’s advice to use a screenplay to “fill the screen.” When we were in pre-production for Hal, I thought of the screenplay as a tool to plan production. Through the conversations with designers, I realized it can also carry more of the visual landscape, and give a production designer and cinematographer something to work with.

Now, as we sculpt performances in specific beats and reaction shots, I am finding how the screenplay can do more to convey the emotional journey of each scene. In the rough cut, I’m giving notes like, “In this cut she’s playing the conflict with so-and-so, but I need to see the fear of such-and-such.” The actions don’t need to sketch out an actor’s entire process of course, but they can provide seeds of inspirations both for the actors and the editor who will ultimately be sculpting their performance.

I’m also getting a lot better at figuring out what can be done with a look, and how to describe that look so that the beat still reads well in the screenplay without dialogue. In the beginning of Hal, there’s a scene where Amy’s mother is driving her to the halfway house. They’re both unhappy, and the scene needs to set up why her mother has chosen this option, why Amy thinks it’s a bad idea, and the fact that they have had a tense relationship for a long time that has only gotten worse since the death of Amy’s father. It’s a pretty dialogue-heavy scene, but we found that their conflict wasn’t being conveyed best by the dialogue; it was being conveyed best by these long silences. We were able to cut a few lines to create space in the scene where one of them jabs at the other, and then the pair just have to sit in that rather than continuing the conversation.

I feel proud of the screenplay for Hal, but it was supplemented by an incredible amount of conversations with my creative team. I’m sure that will always be the case, but I feel now that I am learning how to pour the cinematic vision into the screenplay itself, and that feels extraordinarily valuable.

Problem Scenes

At this writing, we’re within 20 minutes of the end of the film. This is more than a second pass - we’re poring over scenes, doing multiple drafts of them and discussing each moment before moving on. It’s taking shape, it’s telling a story, it’s creating performance arcs. It’s becoming a movie.

Because we’ve covered so much of the film, we’ve hit most of the “types” of scenes there are. We’re starting to learn which scenes are more challenging in the edit.

Generally, the big ensemble scenes in the first half of the film pose a technical challenge. We have a scene with 8 speaking characters, and they’re moving back and forth between the front porch and a car. We didn’t have time to get a close up on everyone; we got creative with the coverage and got people in moving two shots that changed throughout the scene. We got what we needed, and the cut’s looking really nice, but it was definitely a balancing act in the edit.

I wasn’t surprised there - we knew on set that scene would be tricky, and we made sure to start with a wide that encompassed enough action that large portions of the scene could be played in it. The wide was our kind of fail-safe if the close-ups and two-shots didn’t work for technical reasons. In the cut, we haven’t had to lean too much on the wide, but that was our plan on set.

The bigger surprise for me is the challenges in some of the smaller scenes, and I’m learning again how much actor movement changes the situation. In theater, it’s incredibly easy to have an actor cross. A long scene might start stage right, move center, back stage right, suddenly over to stage left, and back center. This is one of the ways we visually convey the changing relationship of the characters, and show what spaces they gravitate to when they feel threatened, tired, excited, etc.

In film, that kind of blocking is a nightmare. But for two long, small-cast scenes, we had important crosses that signify a shift in the relationship. These two scenes have now become fairly tricky in the edit, as we’re dealing with potential line jumps, changing backgrounds, and spatial continuity. I think this is compounded by the fact that they both take place in small(ish) rooms, and our widest lens was a 32mm.

Luckily, these aren’t two random, lengthy scenes - they’re long because they’re packed with emotional information. Because we knew they were crucial to the story and we’d have to nail performances, we allowed plenty of time to shoot them. I believe we allotted 6 hours to one scene, and more to the other. On a big budget set, that might not sound like a lot - but we shot 93 pages in 18 days. When we had six hours to shoot a single scene, it felt like a huge luxury.

The second half of the film quiets down and focuses in on our protagonists. There’s a huge tonal shift. Technically, it also means that we have more coverage of each of the performances, and more to choose from in the edit. It’s leading to some really exciting conversations and discoveries.

Shaping: Assembly to Rough

I think of the assembly cut as the shapeless version of the movie. Here’s all the scenes, here are some good shots, we put them in order so you can see what we have to work with. But we’re not really looking at tension, the pace isn’t really there yet, and the moments are generally not built out.

In the rough cut, we get to dig deep into the story of each individual moment. We’re having this real conversations about motivations in the scene, how characters react to each other, what the turning point of the scene is, and how each character feels in their internal life.

I worked in theater before film, and in theater the director works extensively with actors. The assembly cut feels a little bit like when you get the script of the play: everything is there on the page, but it’s just words. The rough cut feels like a first runthrough with actors after weeks of rehearsal: we’re breathing life into the footage.

For the assembly cut, Prakshi and I decided to only work forwards. She’d send me scenes and sequences as she completed them, and I reviewed them and compiled my notes in an ever-growing document. I have to watch every new cut twice: I don’t always respond well to change, so I have one viewing to get my brain used to the changes, and then a second viewing to actually evaluate the scenes.

While I was compiling my assembly notes, Prakshi just moved on to the next scenes. She didn’t go back and incorporate any notes. We knew we just wanted a full cut of the film, so that she had a solid understanding of the major arc and pivotal scenes, and I had a strong understanding of what footage we really got.

With the rough cut, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve continued to go back and forth on scenes until we feel that they’re in good shape before Prakshi moves on to the next sequence. This means that the film is rapidly getting significantly better. Scenes have motion and tension, performances are incredibly nuanced, and we’re able to work the jokes until they land just right.

We got off to a slow start - we had a whole lot of conversations about the best way to open the film, and tried out many creative ideas for the character introductions. But now that we’ve gotten rolling, it’s awesome to see second, third, and even fourth drafts of sequences make up our rough cut. We highlight notes that are so tiny we think they’re just for the fine cut - but everything major is getting worked and reworked as we go.

The cut is becoming a movie.

First Cut: Assembly

Prakshi, our valiant editor, finished the Assembly Cut in mid-May. This was the cut that Lowell said only Prakshi, Lowell, and I would ever see - the very first, baby deer legs version of the movie, with options laid out and each scene getting a first pass at a cut.

But, I did sneak in one extra person to see this cut. For my birthday in April, I invited a few friends to get on Netflix Party, which allows you to sync up Netflix and chat in a chat bar with people in different homes. It’s the perfect quarantine friendship activity! We watched Circus of Books, a queer documentary I had seen at the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival. But Laura Gonzalez (our Hair & Makeup Artist and Assistant Costume Designer on Hal) and I loved it so much, we started watching weekly movies on Netflix party.

So when a new cut of Hal came in, I couldn’t help but ask Laura if she’d like to watch it with me. We didn’t have Netflix Party (because we’re not on Netflix……. yet), so we used an app called Discord to communicate while we watched Prakshi’s Google Drive upload of the very first version of the movie.

I have a very practiced rough cut speech, both for myself and for others who aren’t used to seeing rough drafts of films. I remember the very first time I saw a rough cut. It was for my first short film, “Welcome Baby Anderson.” My friend Paul had shot, lit, and edited the short for me (I have been extremely lucky in my filmmaking friends and mentors).

When Paul showed me the first cut, I couldn’t believe how horrible it was. It was just a bunch of random footage - it wasn’t a movie. I had to hide my obvious despair from Paul, who had worked hard on the cut.

But with each cut Paul turned over, it looked more like a movie. Finally, I figured out that it wasn’t that Paul had put together a singularly horrible rough cut of a film. My despair came about because I had never seen a rough draft of a film before.

I am absolutely used to the fact that my first draft of a script is always complete garbage and should never be shown to anyone. But I hadn’t learned this about rough cuts yet.

I had another lesson to learn the first time I had a film go through sound mixing and color correction. This time it was the short film version of “Addict Named Hal.” These finishing artists, so easy to forget to budget for, really turned our story into a film.

I reminded myself of all of this before viewing the Hal assembly in its entirety. I had seen it all in chunks - I was following along as Prakshi worked and keeping meticulous notes. But sitting down to view it was another story.

I gave a similar speech to Laura. Even though Laura’s worked on plenty of film sets, she rarely sees rough cuts, since her job is all in production and pre-production. I (maybe obsessively, maybe defensively) made sure she knew there would be shots that didn’t match, scenes that weren’t shaped, performances that we would sculpt, and bad sound (including a couple scenes where you can hear me call “action”).

My favorite line in my rough cuts speech is always: “You know how people say ‘we’ll fix it in post’? Well, this isn’t the part of post where we fix it.”

Maybe it was because of all the rough cut speeches, maybe it was because I’ve now seen plenty of rough cuts, or maybe it was because we have lovely camerawork with strong performances and an editor with great instincts. But one way or another, I enjoyed watching the assembly. It had a long way to go, of course - but the movie was there. The story was there. The characters were there.

And back into the editing room we went.

New Promo & Recovery In Quarantine

We are now in the midst (in the beginning? in the middle? impossible to say) of shelter in place due to the spread of the Coronavirus. From a production standpoint, we’re very grateful that we shot the film before all of this began. Our hearts are going out to everyone affected and struggling through this time - we’re still right in the editing room where we should be.

Recovery in 12-step programs is very rooted in community and fellowship. We attend meetings not just for the actual meetings themselves, but for the conversations we have with other sober people before and after the meeting. We form friendships that carry us through our sobriety; stepwork and fellowship are the core principles.

It’s hard to stay sober in isolation, and isolating is a common sign of relapse. A lot of folks in the recovery community have been frightened by these new measures, and struggling with desires to drink while they’re alone. But through all this fear, leaders in 12-step programs are stepping up to connect online and by phone, and to be of service in different ways. It’s beautiful to watch, and I personally have been very grateful for people who have invited me to online meetings, and called and texted to check up.

And in the middle of all of this madness - we have a new promotional video! I am so excited by the performances, the cinematography, and the balancing of tones that we’ve got in this little 2-minute piece that showcases the amazing work of so much of our team. I hope you’ll check it out - it has footage from the feature, behind the scenes video, and interviews. Click here to watch it now.

More soon. Stay safe!

Lane

Options on the Table

Prakshi (our Editor) and I had our first meeting last week to show each other what we’ve been working on. I’ve assembled 10 pages of scenes, and the assembly has come in at about 10 minutes. Meaning: I have made WAY too many decisions, and not left enough options on the table for the point that we’re at.

Every cut I’ve ever done has moved way too fast in early stages. I am so focused on character/dialogue and establishing important moments/beats, and so in the edit I often think “great, we get it” and move on. My constant flaw in first draft cuts is not letting the scene breathe, letting us really take in those images.

The script is 90 pages; our goal for the first assembly cut is 2-2.5 hours. I think I am going to give myself seemingly arbitrary length requirements for scenes, just to force myself into leaving more on the table. There were plenty more moments that I liked that I did not put in the assembly - and I am not supposed to be cutting those out yet!

I think this is also an interesting perspective on writing/storytelling overall. When I am writing a script, I am always generating way more information about the characters, story, and context than will ever end up in the actual play or screenplay. In editing, our material is video footage, not words. In our first cut, we have to find every moment in the footage that tells exciting story - and then, we’ll narrow down to the absolute best choices to be made.

Early Early Post-Production

We got the Avid project with synced audio from the assistant editor last week, and Prakshi and I have officially started assembling the film.

After watching the dailies in log, just seeing the footage with a LUT on it feels amazing. Plus, seeing our actual movie up in Avid is just exciting!

Prakshi is assembling the first half of the movie, and I am assembling the second half. I think more will fall on Prakshi later down the road, but for now it makes sense for each of us to tackle half the film. It’s an overwhelming amount of work for one person. I assembled six minutes of cut footage this past week - it’s not an amazing six minutes of cinema, but you can now sit down and watch six minutes of a first draft of the movie, and that’s something.

It’s a bit bizarre to watch myself direct. I don’t mean that literally - I very rarely hear myself say anything other than “action” and “cut.” But I’ll be watching the footage, and feeling that a certain actor’s performance is strange in one beat, or that a line isn’t working. And then in the next take, poof! The performance or line has changed. On-set Lane saw the same thing that at-home Lane sees, and fixed it!

Of course, sometimes I remember the note I gave, and it’s frustrating to watch my past self work towards it. The last scene I edited was when Amy has a panic attack in Hal’s room. Hal’s response in the screenplay was weird - he just asks what is happening several times. Ray reacted clearly to the text, and played the confusion. The scene felt super weird. Watching through the footage was a little painful - because I can remember standing in that room, talking with Ray about how either of us would actually react in that situation, and how we had seen Hal react to crisis in previously shot scenes of the film.

We did eventually solve the problem of the scene - but I see now that the solution is only in Hal’s coverage. We don’t have Amy reacting to it specifically in her coverage (though I believe we will get away with this, because she is very isolated in her panic attack), and we don’t have it in the wide going into their flight from the room. I’ve cut together a solution for now, borrowing audio of the better lines from Hal’s coverage and putting them into Amy’s coverage, then only using the wide for them both running from the room. But to sit there through all the bad takes of the end of the scene, knowing now what the answer is!

Shooting Week 3: Location, Location

This is part of a series where I break down shooting week-by-week.

Once we were out of the house, we started rolling through our other locations. Our shoot was meticulously scheduled by our producer, Lowell Blank. Lowell is able to see groups of locations that will make sense together, so even if we are shooting multiple locations within a day, we are able to have a home base for production, equipment, design, and cast.

From the house, we went to the convenience store. We arranged with a store near the UT campus to shoot in their space during the day while they were open, and we only had full control of the space from 10 PM-midnight. This actually went far more smoothly than I anticipated. The store owners were very supportive of our work and excited to have their store on film. They gave us great control over the space, including moving and rearranging shelves.

Customers were pretty manageable. There were definitely a few who took pictures of the shoot and half-jokingly asked to be extras. But they had no problem waiting until a take completed.

I was the most stressed about shooting the armed robbery while the store was open. We had a large crew, a camera, and film lighting, but people still make assumptions. We did not shoot anything with the gun until after the store was closed, but we were still doing takes with the full heightened language and fear of an armed robbery. Everything went fine, with no concerned citizens stepping in or calling police.

From the house, we moved to the church location to shoot the 12-step meetings, and a few other scenes in cars, including a scene of dropping Amy off at the emergency room. The meeting scenes were fantastic. My sponsor agreed to be our extras coordinator, and almost all of our meeting attendees and speakers were people who are actually in recovery in Austin, including several of my sponsee sisters and their husbands. We had 20 extras with over 250 years of sobriety. They tapped right into the community energy of 12-step meetings, and the joy and fun that people often have together there.

We went from the church to Tony’s garage, which was at the home of our Hair & Makeup Designer, Laura Gonzalez. We spent three days shooting intense scenes at the garage, and this was where most of our special effects (vomit and makeup) came in. It also meant a whole lot of night exteriors with limited lighting equipment, but our camera and G&E teams worked wonders.

We ended the shoot at McKinney Falls State Park. There were two major scenes to be shot: one around the mid-point of the film, when it’s still Amy’s first day at the house; and one in the last 20 minutes of the film. It was nice having these two very different tonal scenes for our final day.

JD (the cinematographer) and I had previously scouted McKinney Falls, and chosen spots on the shore to film both scenes. When we arrived on the shooting day, there had been a big rain the day before, and it was very difficult to cross the actual falls to get to the shore. Normally, it is a tiny stream of water; this day, it was more like a river. Even though individuals could and did cross this space, we did not feel good about requiring people to cross, transporting equipment across this stretch, and our need to go back and forth countless time over the course of the day for things like food and restroom.

There was no option left to us at the space, because the end-of-movie scene included a jogger, and there was nowhere to jog on the accessible side of the falls. JD and I went to investigate a different part of the park, which we knew had far less spectacular views than the one we had chosen. As we drove there, we realized we could just switch the jogger to a hiker and use our original space, just a different section of it. Thank goodness we had that realization - the jogger vs. hiker issue was a far lower priority than the beautiful views, which give Amy a sense that she can take a breath and be okay in the moment.

All in all, the shoot was a dream. We had a few late nights, but mostly ran on schedule and kept spirits high. I’ll post next week about key takeaways and lessons learned from set.

Lane

Shooting Week 2: Tone Shifts

This is part of a series where I break down shooting week-by-week.

We had a great week 1 of shooting: the scenes were fun, we made all of our days on time, and cast and crew were getting along wonderfully. Our first day back into week 2 was the first time we did not finish our shooting schedule for the day, and we ended up with many scenes getting rescheduled, re-rescheduled, and eventually re-shot in Week 2.

Week 2 gave us the big tonal shift in the film, which happens around a major relapse. I like to joke that the unofficial tagline for this movie (and for recovery houses generally) is, “It’s all fun and games until someone dies of an overdose.” We shot everything in the halfway house in our first eleven days, so that meant that we shot most of the first two acts, and the final conclusion, and then left the house for the bulk of act 3.

This tonal shift required some reenvisioning in how we were approaching the camera work, gave us new makeup looks to deal with, and also meant that we were getting really specific with time of day. There are two major story days of the film, and the second one happens in dusk and sunset.

When we initially shot the big turning point scene, we did not budget nearly enough time. The scene itself was less than one page, and I cut all of the dialogue in it on set. We had budgeted 90 minutes for this scene, which sounds okay on paper, but in thinking about the emotional story, was completely ridiculous. We also had new makeup and wardrobe to contend with, as it was our first scene on the second big story day. Any choice made in this scene would affect the entire rest of the movie, so it took us our 60-90 minutes just to get wardrobe set.

Then, we took far more takes for this scene than we had for previous scenes. We had not yet shot the scene leading up to the relapse - so it was difficult for our actors to jump into, even though they were both incredible. It’s hard to start a take in the middle of a panic attack that you haven’t yet shot the buildup for. We found that if I shouted and clapped before calling action, that helped get the actors in a more heightened state. Then, there were some performance issues that I wasn’t sure how to fix in the moment - I was still clarifying the story of Hal’s performance in my own mind.

In the midst of all of these elements of the film taking more time than anticipated, the sun set. As it will. This meant that while the shots we did first were workable, our lighting continuity went completely out the window (literally) for later shots, and the fake daylight ended up spreading far more light on the walls than on the actor. We had to reshoot the scene.

Luckily, this was the perfect scene to reshoot. Before set one morning, I pulled the old footage into Premiere and cut two versions of it, one favoring Amy and one favoring Hal. This told us which shots worked, which didn’t, and why. We planned to reshoot on a longer lens, and I gave Hal more specific story beats for the decision he was making internally, even though none of it was said with dialogue.

Ultimately, I am very happy with the performances, camera work, and lighting we got through this scene. This proved to be the most trial-and-error and workshopping that we did of any scene. It paid off, but I don’t know how I would have accounted for that time in initially making the schedule.

There was another scene between Amy and Rich toward the end of the film that I fully rewrote on set. I took an hour with the actors just to workshop the dialogue, and fully overhauled the scene. This hour felt like an enormous luxury when we were shooting 6 pages per day, but it saved the scene. I had written other, silly scenes to happen with Marcia, Bradley, and Andrea eavesdropping in the hallway, because I had lost faith in the Rich/Amy scene. We were able to take extra time on shooting Rich/Amy because the rewrites (and exceptional performances) saved the scene, and I cut the Marcia/Bradley/Andrea scenes that we were scheduled to shoot the next day.

At the house, we were able to have some flexibility because the location never had a hard out, and because we would be at the same location the next day, and the day after, etc. We also got very comfortable: we had our production office, our crafts setup, and a nice table for our production meetings. At the end of Week 2, that stopped being true, and we had a series of locations back to back for the rest of the film. But more on that next week!

Lane

Shooting Week 1: Welcome To The House

For the next few entries, I am going to break down production week by week. This is the first entry, detailing week 1 (our first six days of shooting.)

Week 1 of production was basically a dream. Our very first day, we started with Beth and Amy driving to the recovery house. We hopped through several scenes on our first day, from the car, to Amy’s old room at her mother’s house, and then Rich’s Mom’s kitchen. We were able to use one location as home base; the walls in the kitchen and bedroom were distinct enough to look like different houses, so we consolidated several locations in the screenplay into one for our first day.

For a long time, we were planning to have Beth pick Amy up from the hospital. In our final weeks of preproduction, we changed this to be Amy waking up back in her childhood bedroom. We were more interested in showing Amy’s fully furnished room, which could differentiate from the bare rooms at the halfway house. How does a space lived in over years feel different from transitional housing, where you may be moved any day for logistical reasons even if you stay clean?

This also gave us an extra day after New Year’s to prep our halfway house location. This was a big task: we rented a nice home in Pflugerville, and our art department did a decent amount of dressing down, especially in the kitchen. I lived in two recovery houses in Baltimore, and both of them were large, older houses that used every square inch available for bedroom or storage space. There were several things that broke and went long stretches without getting fixed - the porch in one of the other houses caught on fire once from a burning ashtray, and there was just a blackened hole on one side for a few weeks. We wanted to preserve this sense in the art direction of the main halfway house space.

We had a full day at the halfway house before Amy and Hal joined us, filming Rich’s introductory scenes and the initial piss test before they arrive at the house.

Daylight became precious quickly in the house. Our usable daylight ended between 5:15 and 5:30 PM, and with our daily call at 7 AM and shooting beginning at 8 AM, that did not leave us a lot of time. Most of the scenes at the recovery house take place at daytime - the nighttime scenes happen more after they’ve relapsed, and they leave the house fairly quickly at that point. Our nightly meetings became a question of which scenes we absolutely needed real daylight for, whether we could move around some of our nighttime scenes so we ended with those each day, and which scenes/locations we might be able to fake daylight for.

There was one scene in the first week where faking daylight turned out to bring an incredible beauty. The scene takes place after the Act 1 climax, when Amy has seen some of the chaos of the house but chosen to stay thanks to encouraging words from Hal. She sets her stuff up in her room, but is interrupted by Marcia, her roommate who has to get dressed for court. The scene in question was just Amy leaving her room, passing into another room where Todd is packings his things after being kicked out, and then overhearing Rich on the phone with his sponsor before going outside.

When planning the scene, I almost wondered how it had made it through so many drafts of the screenplay - not much is happening here. It was also scheduled at the end of our day, and while we could shoot it in an hour with real sunlight, it would take at least that long to set up fake daylight for a tracking shot through so many hallways and a staircase.

We chose to push ahead with the scene and fake daylight, since there was no time to be found in the next day’s schedule. The lighting was absolutely beautiful. Faking daylight created an emotional, closed in feeling that was delicate, vulnerable, and a bit sad while still truly feeling like early afternoon. This brought a whole new meaning to the scene: it was Amy experiencing the house and its residents in a quiet moment, which was absolutely crucial sandwiched between two high-chaos ensemble scenes.

Shooting that scene was one of many joyful surprises on set. Week 1 we didn’t go more than 10 minutes over on any day. I felt a shift in the crew becoming more invested in the material and more in sync with each other by Day 3. We were filming a lighter part of the movie - one that had always felt like exposition in readings. I know now that the tone of the screenplay was always opaque to a reader - but the tone of the movie was clear to me, the designers, the actors, and the cinematographer, so the tone of this part of the movie is anything but opaque. It was an exciting start to a huge process.

Next week I’ll talk about week 2 of shooting - which includes the big tonal shift of the movie, and new locations!

That's A Wrap!

We wrapped principal photography on Addict Named Hal a week ago, and it has taken me about that time to get my feet under me and figure out what’s going on in my life. I missed the first week of my final semester of grad school (and rehearsal for my last play at UT) to finish on set - the transition has been a bit rocky, but I’m figuring it out.

Being on set for a feature was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done artistically, and also definitely my most favorite thing I’ve ever done. I had so many days where I would walk on set and think to myself: “This is my dream. We are all here, literally doing my dream.” I thought this was the dream least likely to come true, but here we all were, making it happen.

It was fucking awesome.

And, obviously, it was also really hard. We shot for 18 days, with three off days (6 days on / 1 day off / 6 days on / 1 day off / 3 days on / 1 day off / 3 days on). That second six-day week got a little brutal for us, especially because we moved into splits and are schedule changed from 7 AM-7 PM to noon-midnight. That also coincided with us moving into the darker part of the film.

Being on my feet, rewriting the script, making decisions about shots, giving performance notes, for 12 hours per day for that many days in a row definitely drained me. I’m reprogramming my brain to care about things other than this movie (like groceries, coursework, and rehearsal). But I absolutely loved it, and I have major directing takeaways.

One, I got a lot better at giving notes quickly. Sometimes, in the name of caring for our collaborators, directors give really mushy notes, or ask leading questions. If camera’s ready to roll again, I need to spit out the note as quickly as possible. I learned to be more direct and clear.

The actors also learned my “note face” very quickly. Ray (playing Hal) could tell whether I had a note within two seconds of me calling cut. That forced directness, too! When you’re spending that amount of time with someone, they start to learn your ticks (and I am particularly bad at hiding my feelings). Ray didn’t always know if the note was for him, or for camera or design, though!

Over the next few weeks, I am going to post reviews of each week of our production, and maybe by location. I’m interested in capturing more of the challenges we faced on set and how we solved them (or didn’t) for my own review, and also in case it’s helpful to anyone in the future. Be on the lookout for more about production as we get into post!

Lane

We Start Tomorrow!

It’s the day before we start principal photography, and I feel a bit like a kid on Christmas Eve.

A ton has happened since my last blog post - we’ve rounded out the cast, solidified locations, finalized our equipment list (after many long but fun conversations about focal lengths), made a shooting schedule, re-made the shooting schedule, re-re-made the shooting schedule, broken down color palettes for primary locations and color arcs for characters…

Oh, and we had a reading with Austin Film Festival, and I did a big round of rewrites. (Which definitely contributed to how many times we had to make the schedule.)

It’s been awesome. I can’t believe I get to do this.

Part of me wishes I had done these rewrites much sooner; they’re clarifying the arcs of the main characters, and giving more story arcs to the rest of the ensemble (who were previously seen in more episodic flashes than their own subplots). A core value of this film is to show addicts in community, which means we need to see them save each other, and we need to feel the moments when they build each other up.

But I also don’t think I could have done these rewrites sooner - the process of preproduction, my collaborations with the cinematographer, art department, and the actors, have completely evolved the way I think about the screenplay and the way we’re telling this story. These eleventh-hour rewrites are fully informed by the work my incredible colleagues are doing.

We shoot for 18 days. We’ll have 80 people or so on set at a dozen-ish primary locations. Two actors will be wrapped 36 hours from now.

I am so, so ready.

Lane

Kickstarter Success & Our First Festival!

It’s been a big week for Addict Named Hal.

On October 10, we closed our all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign to fund principal photography. After an enormous amount of outreach and incredible community support, I am so proud to say that we met our goal, raising $22,205 from 263 backers. The support from our friends, families, colleagues, and audiences has meant the world to us! THANK YOU!

The day after closing this campaign, I hopped on a plane to Los Angeles for world premiere of the “Addict Named Hal” short at the REEL Recovery Film Festival. It was fantastic watching the film with an audience for the first time, and feeling their response through the major turn of the film. We got to connect with other filmmakers and audiences in LA, and it was pretty awesome.

Now, we just get to focus on making this movie! Locations and scheduling are the primary focus right now, and they are occupying a lot of our team’s bandwith. But, tonight I get to watch Sean Baker’s Tangerine with our Director of Photography (John David de Virgiliis) and our Editor (Prakshi Malik), since that’s one of our major comps for Hal. Taking artistic, cinema-based time with collaborators after all of this fundraising and networking will be really nice.

I’m about to be out for a week - I’m getting top surgery on October 22, and it’s about a week-long recovery period. I’m incredibly excited, and also spending this week getting ahead on my class projects for the semester, and making sure that all of our area heads are prepared to continue working in my absence. It’s a big delegating and preparation week for me.

More soon. Thanks for following our adventure.

Lane

We're Halfway Funded

We launched our Kickstarter campaign for $22,000 on Thursday, September 12.

Today is Wednesday, September 18, and we’re at $10,860.

Which rounds pretty neatly to halfway there. I think we’ll be halfway by the end of the day today. Maaaybe tomorrow.

That’s pretty incredible.

It’s been stressful launching and running this campaign. My dream of the last 3 years is at stake. And it still feels stressful, obviously - we have to raise another $11,140 for any of the donations we’ve received thus far to become real.

But, the progress we’ve made in such a short time is pretty incredible.

I think people want to see us make this film.

We’re building a community of people who are literally invested in this film and its success.

One of my friends from rehab donated to the campaign. That felt pretty awesome.

If you haven’t checked the campaign out yet, I hope you will. We have a promotional video with scenes from the film and our lead actors, the full mission and vision of the film, and all our perks. Click here.

The Kickstarter and casting are enough to keep me busy on this film for sure. It’s a balancing act right now. We have a fundraising event on September 28 as well at Austin School of Film. I’m pretty excited to connect with folks in person. If you’re in Austin, come to the event!

Two Shoots

We had a promotional shoot for the Kickstarter on Saturday, with our lead actors, cinematographer, production designers, and some sound. It was like a sneak preview of what our set will be like.

It’s been a good point of reflection for me about how far I’ve come as a filmmaker since we shot the short film of Hal in May 2018. I think my pre-production chops were roughly the same - a lot of my background producing and directing theater directly relates to the coordination and direction of actors and design in pre-production.

But, where in the short I didn’t have a strong sense of my aesthetic, I now know that my stories do best with handheld camera and naturalistic lighting. That won’t be 100% of my films forever, but that is the visual aesthetic that often lifts up the character-based films I’m writing and directing.

The difference in post-production is huge. There’s just no equivalent to post-production in theater; it is an art wholly unique to filmmaking. We shot the promo on Saturday, and I finished it last night (Tuesday). Lowell pointed out that I’ve come a long way as an editor in the time we’ve been working together - literally from not being able to edit at all, to doing at least a decent job on this video. I’ve also been able to assemble a team for color, sound, and score for the video on a tight turnaround, and I feel much more comfortable giving them direction than I did when we made the short.

This promo video has me really excited for the film. We’ve got a great team and just the footage we shot in a half-day on Saturday is really exciting. I can’t wait for people to see it.

8 days to launch of the Kickstarter. We got this.

Yours,

Lane Michael Stanley | September 4, 2019

Reflections on aGLIFF

I spent this past weekend at the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival, Austin’s queer festival. I was a volunteer and audience member and it was my first time at a queer fest. I saw a lot of incredible films and it was pretty amazing to spend a weekend watching movies with all queer protagonists in queer stories.

I joked when I went into recovery that it was the most straight people I’d ever been around. Being in a liberal part of the country (Maryland) and primarily in arts spaces, I was used to having at least a few queer friends. When I started doing trans work in Baltimore, that became primarily queer friends and collaborators.

It’s not that there weren’t other queer people in the recovery house - there were, but they were few and far between. My status as a bisexual was also very confusing for people. Everyone assumed from my shaved head and more butch clothes that I was a lesbian, and there was an obvious confusion when I said I was interested in men, too, and in fact had primarily dated men. It was clear that people could not quite compute someone who was attracted to men but didn’t dress for them in the way we expect women to.

The particular intersection of Narcotics Anonymous in Baltimore was a very straight crowd that valued gender performance. It took me a few months of sobriety to confide in any of my recovery friends that I was non-binary transgender, but eventually I did start trusting people with that information. In my first 90 days, I was having such a difficult time staying sober and getting through each day that being in the closet barely registered as something I was going through.

In Austin, there’s a much bigger queer recovery scene. There’s even a queer recovery center. The intersection here is primarily gay men recovering from meth, but the recovery center has all kinds of people, and even has a weekly AA meeting for sex workers.

aGLIFF made me think about what makes a queer film. There are tropes and stereotypes for sure - coming out films, struggles with families, desire for acceptance, self-discovery, transition films, etc. But I think a queer film is any with queer people.

Addict Named Hal centers Hal and Amy, a man and woman who enter a romantic relationship. But Amy is bi (known only from one flirty glance, but she is), Tony is a lesbian, and I can work to cast visibly queer and trans people throughout the film. It’s an addiction film first - but our aim is to look at addiction as it intersects with class, race, sexuality, and gender, and that means it can and should be a queer film, too.

Who's Here?

We’re through callbacks now, and I am really excited about a lot of the actors we saw.

Callbacks were a little bit of a manic process - we staggered calls, but since I was most interested in seeing people in different combinations, I had to think on my feet to respond intuitively to which actors might work best together. It kept my brain going a few steps ahead, and I dreamt I was scheduling callbacks after each night.

(This happens to me on set, too - I haven’t directed a film yet where I didn’t have set dreams the night before and after. I wonder if that will change over the 18-day shoot for Hal.)

Creating different groups makes me think a lot about the makeup of my halfway houses. Mine were all co-ed, though obviously there are sober houses that are separated by gender. My trans brain wouldn’t have liked one of those, but the co-ed arrangement definitely didn’t keep me out of trouble, either. I think I would have found trouble regardless.

Rehab and halfway houses both had a wide age range, but most of the other alcoholics were quite a bit older than me. I think alcohol takes a little longer to destroy your health/life than hard drugs do. And I think heroin addicts rarely keep using after 35 or so - they get clean or die. So most of the people I hung out with in the halfway house were my age and were heroin addicts, and the other alcoholics were generally quite a bit older.

In the Big Book, Bill says that people in AA make more money than the average person. That book was written in 1939, and it shows. My sponsor and I were just talking about how that was probably a self-selecting group. Bill was reaching out to alcoholics in hospitals as they went through withdrawal, and those hospitals often had to be paid for personally. So the AA’s Bill knew were those who could afford to dry out in a hospital instead of a jail cell, at home, on the street, etc.

A halfway house is the opposite. It’s often people who don’t have anywhere else to go. Of course that means different things for different people. I felt like I had no good options - I could stay with family, but there would be alcohol in the house; I could go back to the empty house where I found my fiance dead, but that didn’t sound fun. My options were bad, but they still existed. There were definitely people whose only other options were prison or the street.

The roles have been written to reflect the different experiences of people living in a halfway house, and our callbacks process was a matter of finding people who form a cohesive but diverse group at a glance. I think we’ll tailor some of the roles a bit for the folks we found - but first, we have to get those offers out!

Casting, fundraising, locations. Repeat. :)

Lane