Behind the scenes…
DETENTION 101 was created during the pandemic which made it a unique process that I have actually found to be quite enjoyable accept at the points that I was having meltdowns and frustrations with it. (Cue the cursing.)
Yes, there is a lot to be said in the phrase “Necessity is the mother of invention.” I needed to make a film. Absolutely needed to do it for my own mental survival but no one could get together for a shoot for obvious health reasons. Really, no one could really go anywhere. So directing over Zoom began. Many filmmakers started to do this to run readings, to keep their casts together, to keep people employed and just to continue to feel connected to their colleagues. Some tried to record scenes through Zoom meetings alone and put out content. For me, this wasn’t enough.
I set out to make something for under $10K (ended up after two and a half years, spending $18K) and yet I wanted it to be better quality than a Zoom meeting recording even though my initial plan was just to post a few videos online and be done. And so, I began thinking like one of those NASA people who are handed a box of stuff that astronauts have in their spaceship that is stranded millions of miles from home and told to make something that will enable them to keep breathing for another few days while some other crazy plan is worked out.
It really was a matter of mental survival. So, I looked at what I had, what I could get that was affordable and what the actors had. So all of the actors had phones. Great! They could record themselves with that and use an app (suggested by one of the actors) to get a higher quality picture as they didn’t all have the latest and greatest phones with the latest and greatest cameras. I knew I needed to be able to play around with the footage so I asked them all to record one wide angle and we did tests to ensure lighting was even. This would allow me to create push-ins, close-ups, etc. in post along and add lighting effects and stylistic video effects without running into any major issues.
Then there was sound. The phones for most of the actors were going to be far away from them and though obviously the phone could record sound, it wasn’t always going to work well. It all depended on the room, where the actor could place the phone, etc. So I figured out that I could buy each actor a Zoom recorder (This is a piece of hardware and has nothing to do with the software meeting application.) and ship it directly to them from B&H Photo. This would be easy for the actors to run and to hook up to any computer to download their sound. It would be a bit of a nightmare later because it was impossible to slate over zoom and we gave it up pretty early on so matching sound to picture was a lot of, “I need to find the take that begins with Michael has a coughing fit and all of us starting to panic that he has COVID” or “I need to find that take where Kathryn downs another large gulp of water making me wonder how she didn’t have to pee constantly through this whole thing” BUT the sound would be better than what it would have been without these recorders. Not top level pro-sound, but definitely something the viewer would not be distracted or frustrated by. And something a sound designer could work with later on.
Then there was getting the files to me. The actors were living in different cities. WeTransfer worked for getting 20GBs at time but that is pretty low compared to the amount of files that needed to be sent my way…we are talking terabytes. In the end, one actor sent a drive to me via FedEx, a couple used WeTransfer (slowly but surely piece by piece) and another handed me a drive in a park in NYC from six feet away….slid it across a bench in a spy-like manner.
These actors (Caroline Luft, Stacie Capone, Michael Cuomo and Kathryn Danielle) were incredible troopers. Horrible things would happen. Zoom meetings would drop people off, internet connections would be lost…for a good portion of one day, poor Caroline Luft was a black box on the screen, occassionally audible to the rest of us, but she kept recording on her phone and we plowed on. Trust is key.
Many of us had meltdowns off-screen and on, and we had to keep each other going, and frankly our friendships and team spirit is really what made the project a success in the end.
Post was really fun and I have to say I went a lot further than I thought I would. I bought a ton of Adobe stock footage and music, I shot some B-roll myself which included stop motion animation, I learned new software so I could create some quick cartoon like animation and I hired a multi-media artist to create the scenes of Stan’s ghost. And then I hired Quentin Chiappetta to do sound design because by the time I was through with locking picture, I realized, I was already in for a penny and needed to be in for a pound.
So the film got made, despite it all and is a very unique (it’s been called unique in it’s oddness, actually) and I hear time and again that people have never seen a film like this.
My hope is that this opens the indie film world to a new way of creating content. Regardless of assets and cash on hand, a quirky, funny film dense with societal commentary can be made that is engaging and enjoyable to watch.