Full Disclosure was yet another project made for the 48hr Film Project. This time it took place in Indianapolis. My cousin/Executive Producer, Jason Breitwieser, invited a few of us from Atlanta to travel up for the weekend and participate. One of the bigger benefits with this is that Jason had some pull for a few interesting locations. I really wanted to use some of them but our required character profession was real estate agent and it’s better to shoot in a house for that. Luckily Jason’s place was near empty on one floor. Coming up from Atlanta was myself, Sean Davis, Alex Ayres, and Kaitlin King. Kaitlin wasn’t apart of the Enchantress crew and this is her first time on the Cygnus Films team. The remainder of the cast and crew were native to Indiana. Stephen H. Pattison and Jaime Casida were our talent in front of the camera. Jaime being the required character Darlene Giordano. Behind the camera was our editor, Nick Heighway, PA who was promoted to Sound Mixer, Aidan Sturgeon, a key PA, Rita Cripe, and another PA who helped set up our super editing machines, Derek Keller. It was a significantly smaller crew this time around. One PA got called into work a couple days before the event and one didn’t even show up AT ALL! But the beauty of the 48hr film project is that it pushes you to your limits to make a film and there are going to be problems that pop up. It's best to learn about them and learn how to adapt.
I will be honest, this project doesn’t feel as special to me as Enchantress did. Enchantress did have it’s issues but it did feel like a lot of hard work paid off into a full short film. Full Disclosure, to me felt rushed in a sense. I had a couple of months to prepare for one shoot, but only a few weeks to prepare for another. The writing could've been better too. In atlanta, we left the kickoff event and almost immediately landed on a good idea and ran with it. It took us a lot longer to settle on an idea for Full Disclosure. When I asked our editor, Nick, what the runtime was on the rough cut, it barely eclipsed the minimum 4-minute requirement. The final runtime ended up being 5:10 with credits and title cards. fortunately, we didn’t have to cut anything from the film but we also didn’t have anything to add either. To me, it felt like Enchantress had more issues but Full Disclosure had bigger issues. In hindsight, I wonder if burnout was a factor? Alex, Sean, Jason, and I all worked on Enchantress and Full Disclosure within a few weeks and it may have affected our workflow a bit. We did feel like we were ready for it but maybe we weren't quite at 100% yet.
On the plus side, we ran into no equipment hiccups during shooting. We were able to seamlessly shoot everything, our shots looked great, and our sound sounded great. The key equipment difference between Enchantress and Full Disclosure is clear as day: Invest in better sound equipment and don't ever buy Boya microphones. Just don't.
