Today I’m releasing to the public for free viewing my third short film “Laid Off.” One thing about this short film ended up being it’s timeliness. We broke the story in early September 2008. I handed in my first draft of the story literally the morning the sub-prime mortgage crash started started kicking up. I don’t think we were trying to predict anything about the financial world at the the time, (at least not consciously) but it definitely ended up being a relevant story, especially in Michigan where we were filming.
More of my thoughts (with spoilers) after the jump:
“Laid Off” was my most difficult film personally to make. We had a big group of people who all wanted to make a short film that would kind of be the epitome of what we had been working towards over the last few years. My goal at that point was to make something that would have a lot of appeal to film festivals and look good as a cohesive story.
I didn’t know Jon (the co-director) at all. We had never really had a conversation much less been on set together. In fact, I don’t think that Jon had worked on set with anyone in the group before. But Jon seemed energetic and excited about the project. Eric Buist was hired as the DP and Gerard Van Halsema was hired to be in charge of sound. I was excited about working with Eric as we were good friends and were already developing a shorthand for working together. I was a fan of what Gerard had done with the sound on a film called Snowstorm.
Cinematographer Eric Buist’s Thoughts
Laid off was a great first take on a short film. We had this beautiful idea and as DP it was my job to put the idea on screen. I wanted the camera to move in every shot, at the time it was a great call so we had the camera on the dolly for every shot.
We had two directors on this film. This has been my only experience working this way and I know why this is not a common practice. The directors split up their tasks, Jon focused on the story and Charles took the visuals. This meant I would work a lot with Charles. One day, while I was working at the equipment checkout room, we spent a few hours laying down overheads for each move and each shot. We created extensive diagrams which were extremely helpful once we got on set. The film was completely created before we even had all of our locations. After that I realized the importance of pre-production and now I try to do similar things on every project.
The Gaffer for the film was Steve. The good thing about it being Steve was that he was my roommate at the time. The best part was that we lived together, worked together, shot together and, well… did everything together. By this point I knew I could tell him that the lighting was shit and he would not take offense to it. It allowed for a very interesting on-set dynamic, but it helped the film look a lot better than it would have if I did not have the trust that we had. For me to be able to tell him exactly what the lighting should look like and then for him to do it perfectly was great… even though I told him to make a lot of “small” changes.
Casting was an interesting process. We had several folks lined up at various points in time but they dropped out for one reason or another. Mainly we didn’t have any money (story of my film life), so as a result when something better came along for an actor we got bumped to the curb. We ended up locking Peter less than 24 hours before production. He really came through for us.
We shot for two consecutive weekends. The first weekend was all the stuff in the office. We had Steve Childerston in the roll of the boss. He was in first with Peter. We ended up shooting basically in reverse chronological order. It was starting to snow as we were doing the stuff on the roof which was a happy coincidence. It ended up looking really good. Steve had been a professional actor for years and was great to have on set. He was laid back and quite funny but he never distracted anyone from doing their work. It was great to have a real pro around.
For the last shot in the office, I turned to the assistant producer, Michael Bulthuis and asked for the gun that was Steve was supposed to have. He looked at me with a blank look. We both knew what had happened instantly. In rehearsals we had this huge revolver that looked it was on loan from Travis Bickle, which needless to say was going to get across the wrong idea. We had forgotten to get something else. Michael came up with the idea for the pills bottle but that’s the solution we went with, and I actually think it worked quite well.
We ended up shooting really fast. Mainly because the AD Brandon DeWyn had scheduled us really tight. I always thought we were way behind when we were like 2 shots ahead. I think on the whole we ended up wrapping 2 hours early almost everyday.
I definitely took a lot of risks on the project especially the sequence in the office. And I think most of them paid off. We did some really interesting things with visual and sound mixing. And Gerard and Eric had to be in sync understanding how the final product was going to turn out. The audio montage of office sounds was one of our biggest shots just because we wanted to give enough time for the audio without dragging it out. I also was really excited about this idea where the character leaves the frame and we don’t follow him visually but rather just sonically. They don’t seem like such huge risks to me now but to me at that time we were really putting it all out there.
