Sunday, March 1, 2009

First Read Through

First off before I begin this blog I just wanted to mention how late I was up last night/morning: 4:00 AM! Why? Because we shot our first read through from two camera set ups and I just HAD to edit them together. I had forgotten how long editing kept me up but never once was I annoyed to be staying up, in fact, I was ultra alert! Editing is so much fun and I haven't been able to edit in so long :-D (The picture below shows how long I was editing for).


I would have post this blog yesterday but like I said above I was much to busy editing the read through together along with some storyboard sequences I already had done.

When I woke up Saturday morning the only thing I had on the brain was this read through because the whole main cast would get to see one another and introduce themselves. I was so excited I even cleaned my filthy room (I have odd habits when excited). I had everything organize, everything was charged and ready to go but I HAD NO RIDE!

Early on I thought my dad might have been able to take me but he was going to a basketball game. Then, I called my grandmother and she said that the place I needed to go to was too far. Then, I called my director of photography and asked him if I could hitch a ride and he said it was a maybe. Okay, I can deal with maybes ... But just in case I called my other grandmother and she said she had to go out to a meeting. So my two options were (A) my DP's "maybe" turns into a "yes" or (B) I was going to take the bus with my DVX100B, my little camcorder, my tripod and my laptop aka NOT GOOD!

My grandmother comes home just as I got a text from my DP saying not only can he not give me a ride but he can't go at all because of car issues ... ARGH! I asked my grandmother again and she said that the lady who she was going to have a meeting with never called so she must have canceled. Yay! I had a ride! (By the way ... I really need a car)

So for two hours I waited out until it was an hour before the meeting. When we left the traffic was atrocious! I mean, I usually don't get pissed off at L.A.'s traffic but today I wanted all the people in those cars to just disappear and go away. I could see I was going to be a little late. Phone calls were coming in as quick as they could come, overlapping one another, people were getting there early and I, the director, wasn't even there! Not chill. We would have actually gotten there on time but the directions we got form GoogleMaps said there was an exit on a street which didn't even exist. So we had to make a big U-Turn in large amounts of traffic.

Finally we were making our way down the home stretch to the location when one of the actresses calls to say she's lost! Oh no! So I had to shuffle between getting equipment out and into the house and trying to find where she was all at the same time. On top of all this, most of this craziness could have been prevented if I had just e-mailed the correct address! I had made a typo, forgetting to put a number in the place of another number and a lot of people were confused.

Pretty much, it was chaos until people found there way and we all settled in.


I am so thrilled how well the read through went. Everyone, and I mean everyone, got along with each other and that was exactly what I was hoping for. The younger cast and the young crew really hit it off but Lori Shea, the mother to one of the actresses, was really awesome too! I remember mentioning a lot that FREE was the key word on this shoot because we are working off an extremely small budget. So many people had the ability to call in favors and we even discovered that Rob Watt (who plays Zach) knew how to choreograph! Resa Barton (who plays Carmen) had her own gun we could use! Veronica Aguilar and Spencer Smith (two crew members) could get a lot of equipment from their school! It was just so great! This really feels like it will be a collaborative effort and I'm so glad that so many of us are ALL excited for this ONE project, which has been merely an IDEA in my head for so so long.

Our first shoot is in a week and a half :-D Wish us luck!

The read through ran 22 minutes and 33 seconds. So expect the film to be about that long.

- Antoine Bandele (Director)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

this page is great man!
looks really interesting.
You guys look like you are working hard!