Behind the scenes of “Family Man”

In film school we were tasked with completing a project outside of class that was either volunteering hours on a real production or make your own short film. Click Here if you haven’t seen the film, Family Man Short Film.

I decided to go the route of making a DCBS Short film over doing the volunteer hours. I talked with a previous teacher about it and he thought it was a good decision for me.

I have volunteered on a film set before, both editing and on-set help.

I have also worked a video production job for the last 4 years, so I didn’t think I would gain much from finding volunteer work and I am really passionate about making my own narrative films, so that’s what I did.

Once I came up with my script I broke it down into an organized way so I could use a slate. I normally make films by myself so I really tried to get more hands onset for this.

I used my older brother as the actor, my fiancee was keeping track of the shots and operating the slate, and one of my friends took BTS photos.

I scheduled out a weekend to shoot the initial production then used another weekend to do re-shoots.

The biggest thing I learned from making this film was that I need to do it more. When I showed up with my equipment to shoot, I didn’t feel very confident.

The crew were my friends and family so I didn’t really tell people what to do as much as I should have as a director.

I felt like there was a lot of time just standing around and not staying on schedule, even though I had done pre-production and was prepared.

I also learned that the shots I chose to shoot while making a spreadsheet weren’t as efficient or as good as I thought once I got there, so there were a lot of shots I changed to make a better film.

If you ever have the chance to shoot more than one day do it.

It was so nice getting a rough edit together after the first day of filming and seeing what worked and what didn’t and then planning to go get more shots or different angles.

Another thing I learned was that I didn’t really like the film until I started adding sound effects and music (especially adding music)

I was pretty bummed out the whole time editing it thinking this was terrible but adding the right sounds changed everything.

Also the Full Sail Instagram posted my BTS photo on their profile so that was pretty awesome!

Behind The Scenes photos