Memento Recreation - Production Review - Wheres the chalk?

Production Review - Memento Recreation

The conception, pre-production and filming of this project all had good points and bad points, unfortuently it was mainly the latter things from Actors to Locations and repeatedly losing the piece of chalk that I was writing on my Slate with.

I started watching all of Christopher Nolan's work I could such as The Batman Trilogy, Memento, The Prestige and Insomnia. I decided to film a scene from Memento.                                   

               A man juggles searching for his wife's murderer and keeping his short-term memory loss from being an obstacle.

Starting off I went through several ideas of the scene I would like to do, I chose a sequence of scenes from Memento following the story of Sammy Jenkis, I felt this would be a good choice as it was essentially a mini story told in flash backs, my idea was to make them one entire concise scene.

This would allow me to work at telling a story rather than several small parts of one, however I was dissuaded from doing so as the scene contained a lot of dialogue. I then went through several other ideas before deciding.

I would film a scene in which the main character Leonard faces Dodd a man who has just been chasing him. Leonard having been given a note telling him where Dodd lives breaks into his apartment and lies in wait in the bathroom, however he soon forgets why he is there and concludes he must be there to take a shower.

Dodd then returns and find Leonard in the shower, they fight Leonard coming out on top by knocking Dodd out with a bottle.

The second scene I wished to do was the scene in which we find out Natalie is manipulating Leonard, this is a pivotal scene in the film and turns the film around. In this scene Natalie hides all the pens and then goads Leonard into hitting her, she then tells him she will use him, she leaves and returns a few minutes later after Leonard had forgotten what she had done, she has a split lip from where Leonard hit her and tells him Dodd did it and threatened to kill her, Leonard decides to help her by scaring off Dodd.

Preproduction

Actors

The first thing I did was put up a casting call for actors, I needed three, Natalie, Leonard and Dodd, I had 7 applicants for Natalie within the first few days, however I only had one person apply for both the Leonard and Dodd role.

This was frustrating as the actors who applied did not seem suitable for the role, during this time I met a part time actor who showed a great deal of interest in playing one of the roles, I took down his contact details and emailed him the information.

He wanted to play the role of Dodd and did look the part, I asked the applicants for Natalie's role if they could send a short clip of them saying a few of her lines, only a few responded and I decided to cast Freya Storch as the part of Natalie. I then decided to bite the bullet and use the only applicant for Leonard.

We sent a few emails back and forth, however a few days before the shoot he sent me an email apologising and withdrawing from the project, this disheartened me a bit and I spent the evening making a back up plan.

I decided to scrap the scene with Dodd and recast Dodd as Leonard, he seemed interested at first but then asked what the date of the shoot was, I responded with the 13th and 14th of February and he replied that he thought the shoot was in April.

I sent him a reply highlighting the previous email and the information I provided and he did apologise profusely for his mistake, I was upset but I didn't burn any bridges as he was a nice guy when I met him and seemed generally sorry.

This left me in a difficult situation as I had both my actors cancel a few days before my shoot, Luckily I had been talking to an actor who had worked on Callum's shoot and he was free to film on the 13th but not the 14th.

To stop this from happening again I will try to put out a casting call earlier, I will also try to use actors that I have worked with before or have worked with other students and are known to be dependable, I will also try and make my emails clearer to prevent any further misunderstandings.

Location

Whilst I was struggling to find actors I was also struggling to find locations, I knew I could film at my house if needed but I did not want to inconvenience my parents as they were willing but uncomfortable with me filming the scene.

I contacted many places, houses and hotels to see if I could film in one of their rooms, I also searched on Kent Film Office but the majority of places required a location fee, I found a location to film the bathroom scene at the University Halls, but when that scene fell through due to Actors withdrawing from the project I called them to cancel.

Meanwhile I was still searching for a house to film at, I contacted several more individual houses before coming up with the idea to ask local real estate agencies as they may have empty house up for sale and with the owners permission we may be able to film there.

In hindsight it is probable that people were unwilling to have people potentially damage the homes they were trying to sell, which I expect is one of the reasons why I didn't get any responses, however I thought it would be a good idea at the time as I was not making any progress.

I spoke to Plamen about locations when he asked me to help with his project and he offered to let me film at his house, this was a very kind gesture and one I had to take up when I couldn't get anywhere. 

However after the shoot I found out that other people who lived there were actually unwilling for me to film, I did not know this and felt bad that I had inconvenienced them that much.

Next time I will make sure all people relevant to the location give their consent, I will also try doing what Seth Worely recommend in his Q&A on Film Riot, which was to go to places in person to ask. This allows for a more personal and trustworthy exchange.

Props and Costume  

For the props I needed Poloroid Images, Pens, A Suit, A Handbag and Fake Blood.

For the Polaroid images I created them in photoshop with the correct dimensions and printed them off with photo paper, then I cut the individual polaroids out and used them, I found this worked well and was convincing.

The pens I simply collected a bunch from my home and put them in a holder, The suit was more difficult as I had only a few days to find one, Luckily the Actor had a suit he could use himself.

The handbag I borrowed from my mother and the fake blood was lent to me by Plamen who had a large tube of it spare which was very handy as I didn't need to make it myself.

Next time however I will assign a budget and look more into what I want in the scene, this didn't happen primarily because I hadn't a location sorted, I collected what I thought was most important.

Production

During the production many things didn't go how I would have liked, whilst I had seen the location before via pictures sent to me by Plamen,  I hadn't realised how small the room was, this caused a lot of problems, the main one was it was very difficult for me to get behind the cameraman and see the shot.

Because of this some of the shots are not what I would have framed personally and sometimes do not follow the right actor, this could have been solved by using an external monitor or reviewing each clip after we had filmed, however after a few shots I would only watch the clips sped up as we were behind schedule.

I also realised after the shoot when I was editing that I had missed a shot, since this was quite an important shot it really affects the scene, This was really frustrating as I had believed that we got the shot in the first place, however watching back the footage I discovered that the cameraman had followed the same actor.

This is my fault as I should have been rewatching and checking all the shots filmed and it was probably a breakdown in communication which caused the shot to be missed, In the future I will make a more detailed Shot List, perhaps using a program like Shot Lister Pro or something similar to help keep my shoot organised.

One of the shots also breaks the 180 Degree rule, however I was able to fix it by letting the scene change from inside to outside and back, this seemed to fix the problem and the slip up wasn't noticed. To stop this from happening again I will do a proper location Recce rather than just pictures and draw up a location layout along with camera and actor positions, I would have done this if I had longer with the location.

Another issue was that I had a 8 page script this made me think that the shoot would take longer than I wanted and I would have to cut things out to make the final video 6-7 minutes long, however I was shocked when we finished the shoot on time, with all the shots I had on my shotlist (apart from the missing one).

When I got home from dropping off the Actors and the equipment I began making a rough cut and was frustrated when the total time came to around 4 and a half minutes. This was a lot shorter than what was required, I managed to get the fine cut up to around 5 minutes but it was still a lot shorter than what I needed.

Next time I will do a read through of the script and time how long it takes to complete, then I will also work on pacing my actors so they do not say the lines too fast or too slow. The problem arose from where I had to remove a scene from my project do to casting difficulties.

On location I decided to film a shot of the water dropping in a sink, I wanted to have something that caused Leonard to get distracted and causes him to forget, when shooting the scene I also decided to do another shot of the tap head with the drips coming out, I thought it would be a good touch to have a pen in the background, since the character Leonard is desperately trying to find a pen before he forgets what Natalie has done.

Post Production

In post production I needed to do several things, such as record the Foley noises for a Slap, Punch and door slamming primarily. I also wanted to get some extra atmosphere noise as when Natalie waits outside you hear birds chirping and it sounds too cheerful for the scene.

Foley

With the Foley I found a quite spot in my house and recorded several different sounds, I wanted them to be quite realistic and not over dramatised like in movies, I simply slapped my palms together a few times, hitting the fleshy part with a hand to get a skin on skin smacking noise.

To get the punch I folded a piece of paper in some clothing and hit that a few times, it sounded quite good but I tried several other ways such as hitting my hand into my palm and clapping my palms together.

Editing

I found it very difficult to edit this video as I was not happy with my footage, If I had the time and money I would likely have called for a reshoot, unfortunately I had to use what I had, finding the motivation to edit was very difficult in the beginning because nothing that I was doing seemed to be making it look any better.

In conclusion, the main things that went wrong in my project when wrong because of inadequate planning, I focused primarily on locations and actors, because of this single mindedness my preproduction suffered, even though I had shot listed and storyboarded I could have been much better prepared but suffering setback after setback I became very disheartened with the project and lost a lot of my initial motivation.