“Unlocking the Secrets of Interactive Storytelling: Gavin Michael Booth Reveals How to Captivate Audiences in Episode 533 of SYS Podcast!”
Gavin Michael Booth
We did a super micro budget film. The idea for this film was to self-distribute as much as possible. So, by keeping the budget small allowed us that advantage. But what we did was, uh, I say we, David Wilkins, he’s the lead actor in it. He co-wrote the film with me. He came up with the core idea for the film and, and he’s my producing partner on it. We, uh, we could afford 14 days. So, we had 10 days of rehearsal and four days of actual shooting. The goal being we would start rehearsing, uh, one side and then the other. So sort of all, all morning on day one was one side and it was all about the actor performance. And then we worked in the blocking and then we started full camera rehearsals along with the blocking. Cause there’s a sound person on either side, a camera operator on either side. The camera operators had to be their own focus pullers. So really, really stripped-down crew, no boom operator, only lav mics so that we would never see a boom shadow or boom mic falling into frame. And then by about day four or five, we started splitting off to the two locations and rehearsing. We would just keep an open phone line between the two crews as well as the phone that they were on. And we could just sort of stop, start. And then every night we would take those takes and put them side by side in, in a rough version of the movie. And we could be like, Oh, the blocking’s a little strange here. Because it has to feel like one piece. And sometimes we wanted to feel like almost like they’re looking at each other eye to eye, but they’re not in the same location. So timing up exactly. Okay. Camera’s got to be on the left side of her, the right side of him. Uh, you know, and, and then we want sort of a similar movement sometimes or, or distance where he’s further away in the frame and she’s not. So just filming it every, it’s a little bit like having a sports game tape and then analyzing the plays and adjusting for the players. And then our four days of shooting are, are, we were shooting at night. The whole story takes place at night. So around midnight, 1 AM, we would roll one take, we would take an extended lunch break and then we would go, go broke and try to go again. So we, we’re going to have a maximum of eight takes. And then we had to choose one. We couldn’t intercut, say, you know, side a from day one and side B from, from day four. So we ended up with five full takes of the movie. And then from those five, we had to decide which one was going to live
