Ashes of Man: Summer Sets

After six months, filming of Ashes of Man is finally finished!  In whole, we filmed from the northern edges of the Twin Cities, to as far south as Farmington, and as far east as Hastings.  If things had played out differently, we would have pushed into Wisconsin, or even gone as far south as Red Wing!  We were up as early as 5:00am for some sets, and didn’t get home from others until 11:30pm.  We recorded in temperatures as high as 95 with heat indexes over 100; and as cold as 2 degrees, to say nothing of the wind chill.

I can tell you though, filming in the summer is far more preferable to filming in the dead of winter.  Or else we just got better at what we were doing.  Either way, from having watched all the footage and outtakes, I’m happy to know that we got more efficient, yet simultaneously more goofy as time went on.

Filming is such an amazingly complex process.  I learn so much every time I work on any aspect of the movie, be it editing, filming, scheduling, etc.  I’m sure if you ask anyone in the business, I’m going about it all wrong.  Yet, if I had worried about doing it the way it’s suppose to be done, I never would have done it at all.

I'm sure it'll be fine.  No worries.  It's taped down.

Here’s some great tips I picked up on:

- Don’t film at dusk.  Your light is changing constantly, and the sun serves as a fast moving countdown timer.

- If you ever run out of daylight (a problem that may or may not be related to the previous tip), you can always use artificial lighting.  That’s what they do in Hollywood, right?  All you have to do is set up a couple $1500 LED lights…  I don’t have $1500 LED lights.  I do, however, have several friends who own phones with flashlight apps.  They work amazingly well, surprisingly.

- You can mount a camera anywhere with enough gorilla tape - even, for example, the hood of a car!

Rockin' out at the fallout shelter

That all said, I could not have pulled this off without the people who came out of the woodwork to help out.  It still amazes me who wanted to help, and in what ways.  People volunteers their homes for filming, scouted out locations, volunteered their significant others, bought clothes from Good Will solely to have them destroyed on set, etc. 

People like to be a part of something, and by doing so, that something becomes their something as well.  And the more time and effort we put in, the more other people notice that we really have something here to take note of.

Next time, though, we shoot shorter movies.  Ashes of Man is a far cry from the planned 12-15 minutes originally intended.  I have not finished editing yet, but we’re already at over double that time.