So, what does the title of this post indicates? It was all about the amount of screenplay that we have (2), the time that we were given to shoot at the location (3), and the amount of days before the deadline of the movie or video (3). Alas, we made it. It’s IMPOSSIBLE!
How the Project Came to be
PKKMB was very near, it is short for Pengenalan Kehidupan Kampus bagi Mahasiswa Baru. A pre-college event to introduce new students to the university. This is a golden opportunity for all of the organizations in the university, to promotes their organizations and scout some member. I had not been in an organization at all in all my life before college, but then I decided to try one - best decision of my life. Like my first love, this organization is also a perfect fit for me, and it is called Lambung Mangkurat Debate Society (LMDS). This organization focuses on personal improvement through debating, which in the case of being in a college, this skill is a necessity to survive.
A member was tasked to create a video to be shown at PKKMB, the result? It was… Okay. I mean, I was expecting something so much more than just slides, wasn’t it clear about making it “Cinematic”? I think we ended up using his work on our Instagram. Keep in mind, I hadn’t seen the result of the video before I was put into this random group. In WhatsApp the group was called something like: This is someone’s crazy idea but im up for it. I didn’t think about it that much, but then there was an announcement by one of the member of the group, it was the president of our organization and it was something about an underground project.Is it what I think it is?
If it was not apparent from the first page of my website: I do video editing & graphic design. I’ve always been excited to work on something along the line of that, especially on making a video, or movie as I would like to call it. My relationships with movie has been clear enough, and I’ve talked about it in my previous posts 👉here. Basically, cinema is a medium that helped me built my ability to become exposed to so much creative minds, and the English language. So then, it was and still is pretty exciting when I’ve got to be involved in a movie production.
Naturally, when the underground project was about making a movie, I was excited, really excited! I’ve dreamed about this moment for a long time, working together with people once again on a movie. I couldn’t be content with myself, and as soon as it was declared, I started working on a script and testing out some shot for it. I wasn’t the director, I was supposed to be the DOP and editor. The director was someone else, and he had made the script, which was pretty good in my opinion. The setting was supposed to be at this big stage, the location was supposed to be at one of the building in the campus.
Great idea! It’s perfect, so perfect that I could not see it goes wrong, until I had noticed something. If we want to use the place, we need to have premission for the place - through university’s bureaucracy. I knew that It will be shit, and it will be disastrous. Our shoot was delayed with great amount of times, just in time for me to write a new script for other locations, just in case - my house.
Days gone and we still had not been given any response towards our letter. So it is set, to shoot the scene at my house, or so I thought. When the day came for us to shoot the script, my mother got sick and need to be injected with syringe. Well, what choice do we have? There’s still 5 days left… A miracle comes, the director told us that he had got permission to shot at the initial place, but we have to do it in 3 hours. We were happy, I mean, the original plan was finally going to be realized, but we have to be there at exactly 8am.
The Day of the Shoot
I woke up very early, 2 hours before the shoot. After doing morning stuff (breakfast, shower, etc.), I pack my stuff and ride to college. Arriving at the location outside, I saw a lot of old people doing morning exercises and tons of motorcycle at the parking spot. I went inside the building into the room, and there I saw two girls sitting on blue chairs, they were the people that was going to help shoot the movie. This is the unfortunate part, very very deeply unfortunate. I pull my tripod, next my phone; it slipped and I went to picked it up, and the screen actually cracked - unuseable. Shit! I thought to myself. Now I can’t test some shot, I’ll have to wait for the director so I could borrow his phone.
We were stalling for 15-20 minutes as I recalled. After everyone’s here, we set the scene right away. I was helped by my girlfriend, she was to assists me when shooting, and she had been a great help!
So how did we do 2 screenplay with 3 hours of time? Well… We cut some scenes out from the script and somehow reworked both script so it could relates to each other. Initially it was two seperate story, but then my girlfriend noticed something, one script could be used for the main story, and my script could be used as a flashback scene. Brilliant! And so we shoot, shoot and shoot the first script. It took 1+ hours to finished shooting the first script, and even that’s not enough! With much little time left, we had to start with the second script - my script. My script is a little bit tedious for how much time we had, we had to move furnitures a lot. Compared to the uncut one, it could be more tedious, because there was tons of dialogue and scenes. Alas, you know how it goes: It’s a wrap!
To the Editing Room we Go!
Most people hate editing, not me, I fucking LOVE editing. I’m not talking about editing in term of cutting and stiching the footage together! I am talking about color correction, color grading, sounds, and then of course, cutting and stiching the footage. I had to do all of these within 3 days.
Why would I go to that extend just for a movie? Well, I could’ve use a pre-made color from the camera, but I will lose something - control. I don’t want anything ruining the aesthetic and flow of the movie, I want full control of these things. When you have a raw (log) footage, you could manipulates color and contrast in many different ways. If I had to give percentages of how much I spent my time doing, it’ll be like this:
- 🎥 Cutting & stiching → 40%
- 🎨 Color correction & grading → 50%
- 🔊 Sounds → 10%
The editing process took place on my laptop of course, mainly using the Davinci Resolve 18 software, and some footage like the slideshows had to be done in a different software, one that I’ve been using for a long time called Vegas Pro 19. My laptop is not built for heavy workload like these, I could barely preview my video when editing! But when you have to make due, you’ll push through it… I’m not one to look at boundaries, and I don’t even try thinking about going past it, maybe I did it, but not conciously.
Our movie is not perfect, and it could be more if we were given so much time. But it just goes to show, that shooting a movie with limited resources could lead to a movie, but it will not be perfect, there are no perfect movies; only movies. Go out there and shoot something, it’ll be a movie, and I’m sure of it…
The Thank you List
I would like to dedicate this section for the people who have helped this project, directly:
- Gita for assisting me throughout the shoot.
- Kak Bhisma for initially proposed this idea and script.
- Kak Tasya for approving Bhisma’s adhd and buying wadai.
- Tiara for being MC.
- Fier for supporting role.
- Afif for supporting role and newspaper design.
- Wildy for supporting role.
- Elma for assisting some shot.
- Meila for supporting role and microphone.
Everyone else in the group who’s given their time, just in case we need something:
- Kak Vieri
- April
- Naida
- & Hafiz
There in place or not, your will and participation still helped the project a lot! Let’s make more of this shit!
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