A Geek Girl's Castle: Matter of Time Shoot

A convention I attended in Nov. 2014, LIWho 2, fate had me meet Kyle Williamson. He's an independent filmmaker who makes both fan films and original short films (so far no full length ones... yet).

I attended his fan filmmaking panel at LIWho and learned some things. But mostly made a great connection with Kyle. Soon after, in Dec, he asked around Facebook needing help with an original short he was going to enter into a short film festival. I immediately, electronically, raised my hand to volunteer.

He first needed a sound person, which is what I have done with Potent Media films. But I am a very good PA as well. By the time the first shoot came around, he realized he needed a camera person. So I changed hats that week and prepped for that instead. I broke down the script with what type of shots it should probably be, just based on the script directions and dialogue. I went over some of it with Kyle that morning but it wasn't really enough prep work. I got challenged with being an Assistant Director more so then expected. So I had to switch hats or add hats very swiftly. Kyle and I learned a lot on the fly because of that. And we learned from those hardships and mistakes very quickly. But it did mean our shoot was going to need at least one more day to finish filming.

We came back another day in early January to finish filming. This time I had more time to prep. Took the rest of the script and really broke it down this time and made sure Kyle made a shot list for the shoot. We got together the night before and really sat and worked through the rest of the script so we knew how to shoot each scene better, what shots we needed to maybe redo and any pickup and insert shots we missed last time. We decided what type of shot each one would be (close-up's, medium, wide, etc). It was definitely a much more productive and intense production meeting for us.

Being better organized and prepared for the second shoot, it went a lot smoother. There still needed to be a couple pick up shots that Kyle shot later on with the actors but overall we got everything we needed. He had one more shoot day that was for the beginning sequence and outdoor shoot with the actors that was only about a half days worth of filming. (I was unable to attend that shoot).

We actually shot this film in order, which is not normal. But almost seemed easiest in this case, oddly enough... Since we didn't have to worry about different actors for the scenes or different time tables for the actors, and there wasn't a lot of shots that were the same, it worked out ok to shoot in order.

Kyle then had a friend do the special effects in the beginning and Kyle added all the graphics and music and edited the whole thing together. There were a lot of test films sent to me to review and give feedback on what was ok to keep and what needed some work. The full film was about 18 minutes long. For the festival it needed to be about ten minutes. So Kyle worked on chopping it down for that but kept the longer version on his YouTube channel, Sci Fi Geek Productions.

But without further ado, here is the completed film. I hope you enjoy it!