guerilla

After looking at all of the footage, I'm in that wretched despair/soaring thrill place where the project is more important to me than breathing. Which is a threat to my sleep patterns and my parenting. Mostly it seems solid. But we shot LP and LP, it seems, can be unreliable. Some video gliches and audio dropouts. One forum-supported hypothesis is that this could be a matter of playing back LP footage. Hopefully that's what it is because with another camera or deck, the footage might actually playback without issue (PAL equipment, anyone?). Another, perhaps more plausible explanation, is that the footage is simply flawed because of sketchy equipment and expertise. In which case, we are looking at looping and reshoots drawn out as able over many months.

Trying to disclose the extent of our challenges without coming across as totally amateur and hasty, I'm a little hesitant to share all of the dirty details. We shot everything in ten days. We had a car for four of those days. We lit our night shots with car headlights and energy saver bulbs hooked up to a car battery. There was no props department. No production design. No script supervisor. Grips? Please. No PAs even. We had no control of our locations and had to sneak our scenes into bustling real life (ever been to a Malawian bus depot, bar or outdoor market?). We had no monitor or headphones to check audio, which came from the camera and a shotgun mic. Our transportation department was a bicycle taxi. All this on top of a colossal cross-cultural experiment involving a first time director, first time crew and first time film actors.

In my mind, we nailed our movie in spite of all this and we accomplished what real films do without the very necessary tools of real filmmaking. But actually, no. That's an impossibility. Still, our film will be what it is - which is something very different from any standard of low-budget film - and, with a little luck, that thing will be unique and that thing will be great.