FULL SERVICE

Full Service was a spur of the moment production, inspired by a couple of free spools of film and a free bolex rental. Shot in 4 hours on 2-100ft. loads (that's 6 minutes worth of film). Each shot got at the most two takes, but the actors were up to the task.

We burned through some extra for the kid's shots. The kids were great. You could read every emotion on their faces, which only was a problem at the beginning, they were so excited to be in a film - and I wanted them to be bored and irritated. Not letting them know when I was shooting helped.

We were shooting with a non-synch camera, so I had the actors loop their lines right there at the station after we were done shooting. The kids, I had do their lines once for sound and once for camera. That was nice because in the end their lines overlap, but I recorded the lines seperately to make synching them up easier. You couldn't do this on a super talky picture, but it worked fine for this.

Shooting with such a low ratio (6 minutes of shot film to a 2 1/2 minute movie) made the edit very simple. Just cut it together. I had a rough cut in a day. The sound edit took a little bit longer, synching up the shots without a slate, but another day or two and I had the cut.