Author: Brian Tolle

Our first look at ALL THE OTHERS WERE PRACTICE.

Between April 25 and June 15 we had twenty-one 8-hour filming days. We were busy – averaging over an hour of footage every day. With over 27 hours of footage for our 90 minute film, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

During July and August, we will be editing, adding music and fixing the sound and picture.
As the summer draws to a close, we’ll start festival submissions and our search for a distributor. The film should be available to audiences as early as the end of the year.

On Saturday June 15, we wrapped photography on All the Others Were Practice. We filmed the office cafeteria scenes, and it proved to be one of the more challenging days of the entire schedule. There were lots of food props and wardrobe changes, and we had more actors on set than any other day.

We got a lot of great, funny performances. We went a little long with our first ten hour day, but considering we had originally scheduled it as two days we did very well. It was a great way to finish filming.

Now on to post production!

Our last day of filming is Saturday, 6/15. We will be filming the cafeteria scenes. I can not wait to see these scenes, they are some of the purest comedy in the film.

When the cafeteria scenes play in the film they’re little bits that perk up the pace. We are filming them all at once, and I hope the actors have a fun day playing around with it.

In order to give the actors as much flexibility as possible on set, I have to know what I’m doing before I show up. Before every filming day I draw rough boards. Surprisingly these little bubble head sketches have gotten us through 21 days of filming.

We will post some comparrisons of boards to final shots as we get deeper into the editing process.

We couldn’t find a suitable office location. We looked at what we needed, and realized that all we needed was some walls. It needed to be claustrophobic.

So on Sunday 6/9, Joe, Kerry and Eric helped me assemble and paint a small set on the rehearsal stage of Boxcar Theater. It is the only set in the entire film, and it seems like it worked fairly well, it definately has a distinct feel from the rest of the film. We have a little clean-up in post, but it looks fairly convinving.

On May 25, we completed 18 days of filming. We have a lot of amazing footage and performances, but there is still about 1/4 of the script left to film.

On June 10 & 11, we resume filming with all of the office scenes. This will be the only sequence where we will be filming on a set. We will be on a small stage in San Francisco and we hope that the control over the set will allow us the build the claustrophobic environment that we need for the cubicle. Having walls that we can move, and place a camera ‘behind’ will let us get shots that would not be possible if we were filming on a location.

Our last bit will be on June 15th, when we film the cafeteria scenes.

As we wrap up production we look towards post production, and getting this little film onto your screens.

These are the boards that we used to help keep track of what angles needed to be filmed while we were filming each scene. The drawings seem simple, but they contain just enough information for me to remember what the various camera angles are that I need to tell the story.

For scene 91 – we rehearsed the scene, then we headded down to the intersection of Van Ness and Grove St.

There were just five of us, two actors and three crew, and we were able to get four camera setups in less than an hour. The footage looks pretty good and the performances come through, even with all of the traffic noise.

While we were filming scene 151 at Terra Mia, the actors painted their props during the scene.

We went ahead and had the pieces fired and they are really cute.
I hope to use them in the closing credits somehow.

Today we had a long and grueling day as we filmed the final scenes of the film. It was day 13 of 22, and I had a bit of trouble getting into the spirit of the scenes.

The actors helped me rally and we pulled off a tremendous day – with great performances and one hour, thirteen minutes forty-two seconds and eighteen frames of footage. When it’s edited, the final scenes should end up being about three minutes. That’s a lot of coverage.