Category: Filmmaking

We wrapped shooting Time Signature on June 22nd. I’ve talked a little bit about it on our Seed&Spark page, but truth be told I needed to take a bit of a break from talking about the film. After talking about it pretty much non-stop through May for the crowdfunding campaign I got a bit tired of even saying the words Time Signature. A couple of weeks now have passed since the shoot. I have a very very rough assembly of the film put together and over the next few weeks I’ll be working towards getting it to the rough cut. So, I guess I can talk a bit about the film again.

Time Signature began back at the beginning of 2014 as a joke. Occasionally on my twitter I will post a bunch of random movie ideas that are not at all intended to be taken seriously. They’re mostly ridiculous. “A pilot crashes her helicopter on a desert island and falls in love with a dinosaur,” or something similarly ridiculous. This one was different. It was something along the lines of “A woman tries to get an autograph from her favorite guitarist, who turns out to be her time-traveling daughter.” It’s a bit difficult to dig back that far on Twitter, especially since I’ve had a pretty hefty volume of tweets since. Anyway, the core of the film: a woman meeting her favorite musician who turns out to be the woman’s time-traveling child, was in there from the beginning. I got a few positive responses from people other than “that’s funny.” A few people really liked the idea and said they’d want to see that. Well, then it started to stick in my brain and after maybe a week or less I banged out the first version of the script.

The script evolved in a few ways during the process. It was always just going to be a short film but it went through iterations of more characters and less and different versions of the reveal and different reasons why the daughter traveled back in time. After several revisions I started talking to a few people who I wanted to work with it on. First, I’d been wanting to put Kitty Ostapowicz and Tara Cioletti in something together for a few months. Kitty and I had been working on a few projects and had more in mind. Tara I unfortunately hadn’t had a chance to really work with since Abel and Cain. I reached out to them. They were both interested. Then, I reached out to director of photography Peter Westervelt, who I had worked with when I crewed Kelsey and I had been talking to about shooting Meme. Everyone was very into the project and I started moving forward with some more revisions. Soon after that I reached out to Hye Yun Park, who I had met back in December, about playing another character in the film. She was in. The team was coming together.

I was excited about the project and the prospect of doing it in the early summer and I talked to a few people about it. They were very into the idea and it made me realize that Time Signature might be an ideal project to try crowdfunding. Not only that but to try a new platform out: Seed&Spark. I plan to talk more about Seed&Spark and why I chose them in another post in the future.

And that’s where we went with it. I won’t go into much detail about crowdfunding other than that we did our best to plan out our outreach for the Time SIgnature campaign and despite many difficulties on the way, the campaign was successful and we had funding to make the film.

Our shoot was scheduled to take place between June 20th and the 23rd for quite awhile. I knew we only needed 3 days to shoot, we were just trying to figure out which 3 days. We settled on the 20th-22nd and work began on finishing up pre-production.

The first day of production, Friday the 20th, came and it was a bit of an adventure. It was our “car day” when we’d be shooting everything we’d be doing outdoors and in cars. We’d selected two locations. One for our interior car driving scenes. Another for our exterior parking lot shots, which had a lovely view of the Hudson river and the Palisades to serve as the backdrop of our scene. We had some minor transportation difficulties but in general we made it through the day and got all of our scenes shot at about the time we expected to finish. The biggest issue we had for the day was a location issue. Our exterior location turned out to be a more popular early Friday evening hang-out spot than we had initially understood and we had some sound issues. We got clean takes and did the best we could, but it was definitely a frustration for everyone that day.

The second day, Saturday the 21st, started not long after the first day ended. I felt a bit bad about a 6:00AM call time after a 9:00PM wrap time but everyone was ready to go bright and early Saturday. Unfortunately, we were unable to actually get into our location until 7:00AM that day. It was a frustration but the crew were very professional and on the ball and made it work and we were out the door with the van packed 10 minutes before the agreed upon time at 3:00PM that afternoon. For being a short day Saturday was also one of our more complex days. There were several scenes to shoot with extras. We had to redress part of the bar location and arrange people to look like they were having a good time at a rocking after party. I think it was ultimately a big success but it was definitely a little crazy at times. Again everyone was on the ball and doing a great job.

The third and final day of shooting, Sunday the 22nd, came after a decent rest. It was the most relaxed day schedule-wise. A couple of short scenes. For me it was even easier because we were shooting at another apartment in my building. So, to get to set all I had to do was put on pants and go downstairs. For me after the first two kind of crazy and very stressful days of the shoot this was the most mellow day. I was a little frazzled just from generally being tired from the previous two days but I also felt more relaxed about the process. It was a little more fun for me. Again, the crew were fantastic at coming in and getting us setup quick and executing changes between scenes quickly and painlessly.

Overall, it was a stressful experience but a good experience. Time Signature is definitely one of the most complicated shoots I have produced/directed with more locations and a bigger crew than I have had before. That was a little overwhelming at times, but in the end it all came together well and it did because of the hard work of that dedicated, talented crew of people.

I look forward to working with them all again and I’m going to thank them all right here. You should hire all of them for your next shoot: Peter Westervelt, Carolyn Maher, Adam Deen, Erin Clayton, Dom Bozzi, Diana Molina, Felix Berrios, Jeff Davis, Zach, Lauren Shaw, Dan Brown, Jesse DeGanis Librera, and Heidi Kikel.

All amazing folks. Also, thanks need to go to my awesome cast of Kitty Ostapowicz, Tara Cioletti, Hye Yun Park, and Matthew Addison who all did a fantastic job realizing my characters for the screen.

And then thanks should go to Valerie Opielski, and E’s Bar for generously allowing us to use their properties as locations for the film.

Also, the extras who showed up early in the morning on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for no pay (sorry, guys) and stuck around through our craziness.

And also my wife, Jessica, deserves thanks for putting up with me. I’m a neurotic mess.

Everyone is amazing and I couldn’t have made this film without any of them.

Now, here’s some behind-the-scenes photos by Heidi Kikel to enjoy. More can be seen at Heidi Kikel Photography on Facebook.

I was going to write about my Channel 101 NY commercials that followed a long drought of shooting, but instead I want to talk about our shoot on Monday, March 31st. I’ll get the to the Channel 101 commercials next week.

On Monday, March 31st, we shot four scenes at 1 Knickerbocker, a great restaurant in Bushwick. Two were for the final in my series of Ione shorts, Ione’s Date, and two were for actress and co-producer Kitty Ostapowicz’s first screenplay, 600 Steps.

The Ione shorts, if you haven’t watched them yet, are about Ione a punk rocker who is trying to get into law school and the conflict between her lifestyle and her dream. Ione comes from a feature screenplay of mine, White Wedding, she comes into the film seeming like a manic pixie dream girl but soon we find that she has her own dreams (practicing law). We started shooting the Ione shorts because Kitty Ostapowicz and I had worked a little bit together and we wanted to shoot again. First, she joined my, currently being re-developed, feature film Meme and then worked on my horror short Metatron. I needed to shoot more after Meme’s Kickstarter was unsuccessful and so I took some time to consider what we could shoot together. After skimming through old ideas and screenplays I looked at White Wedding again, which has been sitting in a folder because I need to work towards being able to secure a budget for it, and I thought Kitty would be perfect for Ione. Still, I didn’t want to shoot just a scene or two from the film. That would mean recruiting people for the other roles and I’m not quite ready for that, yet. So, I wrote Ione’s Wedding Problem both to see how Kitty would do in the role and to also challenge myself to do a little animation. I loved her performance and so a few months later we shot Ione’s Last Hand, which fleshed her out a little bit more. Then, after some discussion, I decided that I wanted to do one more and only one more Ione short. I thought a date would be a fun way to do it. I wrote a funny date scene but it just didn’t fit with the rest of the shorts. It was about a funny date and I realized that it needed to be about the conflict between her lifestyle and dream of being a lawyer and more than the previous two that conflict had to be foregrounded. So, I wrote Ione’s Date, which starts with a date and will end with Ione arguing with herself about the reality of her choice while hesitating to open a letter of either acceptance or rejection from a school.

600 Steps was written by Kitty a few months ago and is about relationships and loss. I don’t want to get into too many details about it, but I think it’s going to be a very visually powerful piece. I love what she’s written and that she wanted to work with me to make it. I think people are really going to connect with it.

We had these two short films lined up and started talking about where to shoot them. One is at a bar and the other at a restaurant. Kitty had connections to a bar in the East Village and got them to agree to let us shoot there for free. After taking into consideration exactly what we were going to shoot we decided to shoot both in one day. All the scenes were short and it would be easier to coordinate the location and the extras we needed for one day rather than two. Kitty busted her ass for this shoot. She put on a Producer hat for the first time and did a fantastic job. She organized the location and contacted dozens of people to be our extras. I think at one point we had 25 confirmed people. I secured the help of a bunch of friends and past collaborators to crew. I also contacted just about everyone I knew with a piece of equipment that would raise our overall production value and they all came through and loaned us their gear.

Everything was coming together. Then, on Thursday the 27th, when I had a string of meetings and work that made me unavailable, our location fell through. The man who was our contact texted Kitty to tell her we couldn’t use the place because he no longer owned it and couldn’t give us permission. I was useless, because of those meetings, so Kitty got on the line with everyone she could and secured us 1 Knickerbocker, which ultimately, I think, was an amazing get. It’s a beautiful restaurant and it’s very large. It was perfect for shooting in. We both went over there Thursday night and met with them and got the paperwork signed.

Monday came and it went fantastic. We lost some of our extras due to the location change and just that that’s sometimes how it goes, but we ended up with a great batch of people who did show up. The shoot went smoothly. We got started a little late and ended a little later than we had hoped, our ideal was to wrap shooting at midnight and be out the door by 12:30 and I think in the end we wrapped at 12:45 and were out the door right around 1:00. I’ve been reviewing the footage we shot and I love how it all came out. I think we got a great start to both films.

I’d like to extend a thanks to 1 Knickerbocker and Aimee Arciuolo in particular for letting us have the run of their restaurant on Monday night while they were closed. I also want to thank the great crew we had, who everyone should go out and hire for all of the things: Jeanette Sears, Christina Raia, Erin Clayton, Lauren Shaw, and Jesse Librera. Our two male leads: Vance Clemente and Drew Bruck who also should be hired by everyone for all of the things. And then all of our extras: Oksana Shestakova, Kristina Masters, Cameron Ketcham, Gregory Kong, Scarlett Costas, Kyle Bentley, Aimee Arciuolo, Stacy Mize, Brett Vanderbrook, Lydia Schmidt, Kathleen O’Leary, Benjamin Stonesifer, Denise Robinson, Lauren Shaw, and Naomi Steinhagen.

And Kitty deserves another mention for doing a great job producing for the first time on her first screenplay. Amazing work.

More on both of these projects coming soon.

Here’s some behind the scenes photos from our shoot.