Mind of Migg

That’s right, our web series site is live. Check it out here —> http://www.chutesladderswebseries.com

We also have a Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chutes-and-Ladders-Web-Series/212414365465674

Our first teaser trailer will be going up next week. If you’re a fan of what we’re doing, please like us and be sure to follow those pages for updates about the web series.

I took a week off from my day job to get things going with the web series. The plan was to use most of the week for prep and then start shooting at the end of the week – Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would be our first three days. I thought that would be plenty of time, but it took every spare second to make sure we were ready by Friday morning.

The toughest decision we had with our limited budget was what crew we were going to have. Since my focus hadn’t been on production the last year or two, there weren’t many crew friends I had kept in touch with enough to ask for volunteer work. We also wanted to avoid too big a crew. We were working with clamp lights in one location with a handful of actors. We had a situation where we were fortunate to not need a lot of people to get by. So there had to be some cuts.

We would get to know this room well.

We had a sound guy , Victor David, who will also be creating our score, we had a friend, Andrew, who was on break between reality shows who would be our sole gaffer/grip, we had Violet, our makeup/hair/wardrobe/production design/production manager, Datta, who was a Producer, but also acting, Ritchie, who was our family PA, and I would was DP’ing as well as directing. From there, we made the decision to hire a Script Supervisor rather than a First AD. We could only afford one. Since there wasn’t much crew and I had already done the scheduling, we thought it made more sense to go with the Script Supervisor. I’m editing the thing too, and with everything else going on, we needed good continuity and good notes. We really needed that organization in the madness.

In hindsight, next time we will bite the bullet and hire a few more people. There were times we really missed having an AD. The first day (which I’ll cover in more detail next post), we simply did not have enough people. Datta had to hold a blanket up outside a window on a day he was filming. Producer or not, it’s never good to have to ask an actor to do that kind of work. For the next shooting days, we added a couple more people, but what really made a difference is that our little crew that could really got the hang of working together. By day 3 we were fast and efficient. But it took finding that right mix of talented people to pull that off.

Back to prep. Those days leading up to filming were filled with small errands that added up thanks to LA traffic. Driving out to meet up with potential crew, then driving to the read through, and then back ate up a ton of time. Having a checklist to get through all the tiny things was priceless. Without that list, so many things would have been overlooked. Next time, the one thing I will have for sure is a Production Manager and help for those prep days, so that I’m not making a shot list between runs to Home Depot and putting together the craft services table.

Next: Part V – Production Begins

Casting in Los Angeles instead of Phoenix opened up a whole world of options. As I mentioned before, we needed a specific look for the four roles we were casting – i.e. they were a Latino family. Not only did they have to look like a husband, wife, brother, and sister, they also had to be (or look like) a certain ethnicity. That made it tough. In Phoenix, we would’ve had to settle based on the responses we received. In Los Angeles, we had options.

Family Photo at the read-through

It’s so hard to find that impossible combination – someone who has the right look and delivers a good performance. Sometimes there’s an actor who is amazing, but might not have the right look to fit with the rest of the cast. Or, an actor who looks exactly as I imagined when writing, but might have an accent that’s too strong or not be just the right fit. By the time we started holding auditions in LA, we were in a bit of a time crunch before we started shooting. We weren’t going to settle, but it meant the possibly of auditioning right up until the first day of production. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. We were so lucky in being able to find amazing actors for the roles with plenty of time to spare.

When I’m writing a script, I have a vision of the movie in my head. I imagine a certain look for a role, and that was made easier in this case because we had two roles cast as I was writing, Vikram’s and Olivia’s. Unfortunately one of those people didn’t commit and we had to recast that role. It made casting for Olivia even tougher because I wrote the part with nuances of a certain person in mind, so the first thing I had to do was let that go and make sure I imagined those auditioning as Olivia, not as the original actress.

It’s interesting and terrifying to see words I’ve written performed live for the first time. There were two really cool things that happened. First, I saw a part come to life exactly as I had imagined it while writing. It was a relief to see a scene work when the lines were delivered. Second, I saw lines interpreted in a completely different way than I had imagined…and I kind of liked it. I love seeing how one line can be read so many different ways.

The other thing I learned is that what you see in person can be completely different than what you see on video. I went home after the auditions with certain perpections about each performance and I was blown away by how different some of them looked when I watched them on TV, for better and worse. In one case in particular, we were very torn between two excellent choices and eventually it came down to not just the audition, but also their reel and available content online.

The table read was the icing on the cake. We felt really good about our cast and once we were all in a room together, reading through the entire series, it finally felt like, “yeah, we can do this.” Now all we had to do was make sure everything else was set to go for the first day of production.

Next: Part IV – Prep