David Chiu

Tomorrow afternoon, during our lunch breaks, my friend Jeff and I will start filming our very first comedic piece which I wrote entitled “CRAB-AID”. This will be our first venture together in making a short film and it will be my first production as writer/producer/actor/filmmaker. Tomorrow will kinda be a test since we only have one hour to film anything and I will be setting lights up for the very first time…

Actually, as I was writing the last sentence I had to stop and think. Do I really have the time to setup and light a scene for filming? Even if it’s just filming Jeff in a short scene on the phone?

… I just timed myself setting up the light and softbox from the point of opening the bag to switching on the light. 6 minutes. So that’s 12min just to assemble the lights not accounting the actual time it will take to setup the lights to film the actual scene. Then there’s a fact I forgot: the lights get HOT!!! I just had the light on for about 5min and the casing is already hot to the touch. I can’t strike the lights while they’re hot so that would be another 10-15min of just waiting for the lights to cool down before I can strike them from set…

So I guess what that means is that we’ll just have to schedule a day on the weekend (or two) so that I can take the time to do things right. I don’t have all the props ready anyway so that will be good to have some time.

Tomorrow what I think I’ll do is instead do a rehersal/screen test and actually shoot the piece but without using any lights or anything. I can then edit a rough version of the film to get a feeling of what I’m going for. Doing it this way I should be able to shoot the entire short film in an hour. Now that’s guerilla filmmaking.

That leads me to an idea I’ve been playing with in my head - to shoot an entire full-length feature in one day. Could it be done? What would it look like? I don’t know but I’m curious to try.