Hunting Rabbits from Patricia Hetherington on Vimeo.
This month I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to direct 'Hunting Rabbits', my debut narrative short film together with Action on the Side, a short film making programme that brings together a diverse crew with mixed experience to develop, shoot, edit and screen a short film in one calendar month. Or to be more precise, in three weekends - the final weekend was the screening weekend. Yes, there were also a few evenings thrown in, but since most people involved (myself included) had full time day jobs outside of the project, the bulk of the work was done in less than 10 days.
It was extremely hard work but we had a total blast too and the experience taught me some valuable lessons in filmmaking.
Lesson one: You can make a film with basically no time
I have long believed that there's nothing better than a deadline to focus the mind but this took it to the next level. Yes, we were lucky to already have a finished short script that everybody chose at our first meeting on the first Saturday of the month - which allowed us to get right into pre-production - but we still had to find a location that would be available at short notice for very little money, cast two actors, source costumes and props and plan the actual shoot...in six days, since the shoot was scheduled for the second Saturday of the month.
For the longest time I delayed making my own short film based on a litany of excuses; time, crew, budget, script etc etc. The truth is, if you wait for the perfect conditions you'll be waiting forever but if you absolutely have to get it done now, it will get done.
Lesson two: Something will definitely go wrong
So we cast two brilliant actors, got a farmer in Essex to let us use his barn and sourced all the requisite props, costumes and equipment. The location was near-perfect, isolated, quiet, full of authentic details and the weather was fine with great visibility for November; everything so far was spot on.
...Until the rain started. Followed up by seemingly unending fireworks, then a bit of intermittent thunder to cap it off nicely. I know that the first weekend of November is usually fireworks night but this was the 10th of November, and we were in the middle of nowhere. The ridiculous cacophany continued for almost an hour of our 12 hour shoot, cutting off dialogue and ruining multiple takes; it's nothing short of miraculous that there was any sound worth salvaging and we were lucky to have an experienced sound recordist on the set.
Lesson three: Plan conservatively
We definitely lost time as a result of the unexpected weather/sound issues so we were really in a race against time by the last two hours of the shoot (we had to pack up by 11pm) and had to compromise on a couple of shots. I worked quite a bit on the shot list with the DoP and even storyboarded everything so it was painful to have to miss something out. The lesson? Always be brutally honest with yourself about the 'A' shots and don't waste any time on 'B' shots that are really just nice-to-have but not essential to the story...especially not when you only have 12 hours and can't pick anything up the next day!
Also, it takes about three times longer to light a scene than I initially thought, which was time I hadn't really accounted for.
Lesson four: Being warm, dry and well fed makes everyone happier
It's just a fact of life that being cold and hungry makes us feel sad and therefore less productive. It was great to have plenty of hot tea/coffee, hot food and adequate shelter throughout the day especially when it got dark and the temperature dropped by 5 degrees.
Which brings me on to...waterproof shoes. Not having waterproof shoes was possibly my simplest yet most personally catastrophic error, I now know that having wet feet at the end of a 12hr day is the seventh circle of hell. Crucially, I learned that on a film set being 100% comfortable is a really important way of managing your mood and energy so therefore an absolute essential
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