I’m done trying to write these posts like chapters in a manual. I’m going to start putting stuff up as I think of it. If I miss something, or you can’t find it, comment below or message me and we can talk directly. I’m fine with having a chat.

Here is some information I will impart on you if you’re ever interested to make a movie:

Write to the resources you have now. As I’ve stated before I purposely made this movie with the resources I accumulated from years of making shorts. Typically most filmmakers DON’T do this. They lay a rap down about letting their creativity run wild and writing the perfect script and then getting funding. But those big dollars never come in. I don’t know one filmmaker whose made a movie like that. Also, I read a lot of filmmaker biographies, and found all my Hollywood heroes had budgets and parameters set by that budget. They had to figure out how to do with financial constraints, so damn it, you will too. Besides, everything costs way too much. More than you’ll raise your first time out. Trust me, if it ain’t free, don’t include it.

The number one thing to look for in a cast or crew member: Enthusiasm. Everything else will fall into place. Anyone can be excited and eager to help out in the beginning, but most people get burned out and flakey after a while. If you’re not working with enthusiastic people all the talent in the world will be meaningless when they stop showing up.

Also, pay attention to how much you’re working your cast and crew. They’re doing you a favor. Try and do them a solid by not wasting they’re entire weekend or keeping them up late on a work night. I over compensated for this fear by stretching shoot dates sometimes months apart. There’s a happy medium in there somewhere.

Whoever is directing should also edit. Shooting a film is like a football game (note: I don’t watch/like football but I find the concept of sports intriguing. What a wiener kid I am). You will spend so much time carefully planning every detail in pre-production, but come game time you’ll have no idea what will go wrong. You need to be ready to make crucial creative decisions in the moment, multiple times through out the shoot. If you’re also editing, it will be so much easy to make those in the moment decisions because you won’t have to explain it to some one else later.

Speaking of editing: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD edit while you shoot. Even if your production will only be a few weeks (keep dreaming) you will have the colossal task of putting it all together. Edit while you go and you’ll be assembling it while it’s still fresh in your head. If any mistakes are made you can incorporate them into the re-shoots, or change the production accordingly so you won’t have to re-shoot. It takes a giant job and breaks it up into smaller, easy to manage jobs.

Hair: It grows, it gets cut… and the ladies always be changin’ it, amiright fellas?!?!?!? But seriously if you’re shooting over a long period of time (like over 3 years for instance) hair will change. It’s not as obvious in real time but it will be when you edit footage together. Mind the facial hair too.

For my next film I will make something with a more ensemble cast as opposed to one main actor throughout the story. This caused scheduling and availability problems. And why wouldn’t it? I’m not paying the guy. Having an ensemble cast, specifically one who are not all in the same scenes all the time together, will make it much easy to schedule and shoot. Your performer friends have things to do on nights and weekends (like perform for instance) so all of them being in the same place at the same time is hard to orchestrate. Dole out the parts and the scenes evenly amoung a group of actors and you increase your chances of getting it done quicker.

Sound is as big of a nightmare as people say it is. No joke: get your sound game in order up top. People fuss about cameras. Editing software. Computer specs. What mics do you have? How will you be recording sound? Go so far as to incorporate your production process into the early stages of writing your film. If you got shitty mics, write something where bad sound is an asset. Make a silent film if you have too. That might sound excessive but if you have shitty sound: that’s a wrap on your film. Bad sound will ruin, absolutely ruin, your film. Beware!

It still has not sunk in that I’m done.

Some time in the summer of 2010, while at a crappy temp job, I sat down and made a list of all the scenes that still needed to be shot. Shortly after completing that list I almost cried. It was so depressing to think I was about 1.5 years deep and maybe half way done, with the hardest shoots still ahead of me. It felt so hopeless, like this movie would never get done. My only defense from mental breakdown was to ignore that list. I put it in the back of a production folder. I put my head down and kept moving, picking scenes and shooting them when I could, treating each scene like its own short film:

Standard Process
- email the cast
- get the location
- pick a day
- shoot
- upload
- pick the next scene

…and edit in between shoot dates (sometimes there would be months between shoot days. Place gunshot sfx here).

It wasn’t until the fall of last year I revisited that list and realized I was very close to finishing. Once again, I almost cried.

Interviewer: Mr. King, how do you write all those books?
Stephen King: One word at a time.

The whole reason I made Master of Inventions was to get my film career started. No one else was going to start it for me, and after my trip to SXSW in ’09 I realized I could do it my way: Make a film with the resources I had and not spend any money or go deep into debt. The only thing I would spend was my time. It’s all I had.

This movie suffers greatly from time. Whenever I told someone how long I’d been shooting this movie, the same very obvious question would come up, “Won’t your actors look drastically different in the scenes?” the answer: YUUUUUP! #StorageWars

Irritating, yes, but also pretty hilarious. Neil Arsenty miraculously lost 70 pounds during the course of shooting. I should have been mad, but after all that weight loss, he was just too damn handsome.

It wasn’t just the production that suffered. It was easy to be exited when things were going good and invigorated when a challenge had to be met, but mostly the lengthy production wore on me in the form of boredom and loneliness. I can’t count the number of weekends I’d spend Friday night to Sunday night editing, writing, shooting or what ever. A lot of my friends are performers, and the one thing performers love to do (almost as much as performing) is post on facebook how much fun they’re having. The Saturday and Sunday mornings I had to endure photo after status update about the epic parties I totally missed while chained to this desk was really tough.

You can believe there were dozens of times I wanted to quit. Broken equipment, bad hair cuts, poorly shot scenes, bad tape stock, shitty microphones, busy schedules, horrible weather, hangovers… You name it, we had to deal with it. I developed a mantra to get me through the excruciating defeats, stalls and weekends of editing boredom:

“This is where everyone else would quit.”

I knew anyone else would’ve given up at these moments, and with good reason. If you’re struggling right now with your movie or project, I get it. It makes total sense to cut your losses and walk away, and most people would. But please remember: it’s very hard on purpose and almost everyone quits.

“But it’s hopeless! And if I keep going I’m positive it’s going to be horrible and not turnout right!” 

It’s your job to save it, and if you eliminate quitting as an option, you’ll only have the path of finishing ahead of you. Personally, I feel a finished ‘shitty’ movie will always be a million times better than an unfinished ‘great idea that still needs more funding or rewrites or is currently being developed into a blah blah blah’ movie.

I want to make movies. Plain and simple. My hope is this $2,000 film will help me eventually raise $35,000 for the next one. Then that one will  help me raise $100K for the one after that, and so on. This is an absolute guess / wishful thinking, but if it takes me 10 movies to get to a 35K budget then so be it.

One of my hopes when I started making this film was that making a movie would be an amazingly fun and rewarding experience. I was right.

I’m very lucky / grateful to have had such a talented cast and crew who were willing to put in the hours with me. I probably didn’t express my gratitude then, but to all that helped: thank you so very much, especially Jeff Murdoch, Tim Heurlin, Katie O’Brien, Chris Othic and Ed Boe, who went out of their way and sacrificed so much of their time and energy to this project. If you know them, be sure to shake their hands. They’re some of the best people around.

Ug, I think I’m going to cry.

Joe Avella
1/18/12

My fellow designer friends made some kick ass logos for the products in Master of Inventions:

by Matt Taets


By Phil Schriver


By Ryan Halvorsen


By David Kadavy


By Adam Holt

Below are the credits for the film. Putting this out there now, to give thanks, and also to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Written & Directed by
Joe Avella

Produced by
Joe Avella

Executive Production
Adam Holt
Diane Murdoch
Ryan Halvorsen
The Rhythm Method
Matthew Lang
Casey Wills
Philip Schriver
Christopher Martin
Sabah Al-Sabah
Evanuel Meatnormous, Esq.
HSP at Law
Dan Craig
Joey Ostrander
Katie Roycroft
Paul Heskin
Wood Sugars
Amelia LaRoche
Linus Lee
Paul Straw
Paul Lopes
Joseph Danielson
Steve Gadlin
Peter Heskin
Neil and Kathy Heskin
Jim King
Sara Schueler
Ben Cannon
Bob Miller
Thomas Lucido
James Chase
Rishi Shah
Erica Moore
Sean McMenemy
Linda Mcmillan
Jayme Joyce
Spencer Ham
Byron Roussin
James Sorrels
Nathan Wade
Molly Johnson
Joey Paul Gowdy
LaTisha Judeout
Jeff Phillips
Eric Schinzer
Kathryn Babb

CAST

Director of Photography
Joe Avella
Ed Boe

Cinematography and Sound
Joe Avella
Ed Boe
Joe Dejulius
Gregg Jaffe
Eliaz Rodriguez
Tyler Smith
Ben Bowman

Editing Joe Avella

Except ‘singing GPS’ segment edited by Ben Bowman

Stunt Driver Ben Johnson

‘Singing GPS’ Commercial Segment
Directed by Ben Bowman
Original Score by Eric Bowman
Narration by Ben Bowman

Sound FX Provided by Free Sound Project
Music Provided by Free Play Music

Art Department
Product Logo Design
David Kadavy
Matt Taets
Ryan Halvorsen
Phil Schriver
Adam Holt

Poster and Packaging     Joe Avella

Sound Department         Joe Avella
Visual Effects                  Garrett Kucinski

Camera & Equipment Department
Ed Boe
Chris Quinn
Joe Dejulis and Zacuto
Wood Sugars
Tyler Smith

SPECIAL THANKS
Ed Boe
Kickstarter.com
Matt Kelley and Joe Dejulius at Zacuto
Matt Kubinski and Reno at Rush and Division
Big Teeth Productions
Free Sound Project
Free Play Music
Chris Othic and Helen Carroll at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP
SolidLine Media
Kevin Trudeau
Chris Barker
Matt Barbara & Aaron Caponigro at the Playground Theater
Steve Archer & Ed Debevics
Chris Quinn
The Staben Family GPS
Mark Colomb and The Poor Choices Podcast
Wood Sugars
Ry the Movie Guy & the Cinemajaw Podcast
Sean McMenemy and Midwest Media Now

New scene from Master of Inventions!

Jeff tries to lay some game down on Susie. Marcus keeps interrupting. Zaniness ahoy!

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New scene from Master of Inventions! We’re in the home stretch.

Jeff is getting acting notes from the director of his latest infomercial. Art imitates life!

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Most times I shoot in noisy locations or ones I need to leave quickly because I’m there illegally. Time is always of the essence and I don’t like getting bogged down with more equipment. What almost always suffers in my production process is the audio.

Thanks to the library of sound FX in programs like Garageband and free sound sites like Free Sound Project, you can easily recreate any location specific sounds, but not dialogue.

Here’s a quick and easy dubbing (also known as ADR, which stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement) method that’s worked well for me. Quick, simple, and can be done with your iPhone headphones. Helpful for when you couldn’t get clean audio the first time.

What I use:
- Apple iPhone headphones with mic (Any smart phone headphones with a mic will work)
- Adobe Premiere (Final Cut will work too)
- Garageband (Audacity is also fine)

First, shoot your scene

I shot with no external mic, just the one on my camera. It’s a decent mic, but as you can see from the 1^st video below, the location was super noisy. (Per a previous blog post: Some filmmakers re-record the lines while still on location. That method rarely works for me because the location is usually too noisy, hence the problem in the first place, and it’s hard to get a good match.) Get 60 seconds of the location’s ambient noise to be added in later!

Cut the scene together with the bad audio

Programs like Soundbooth and Audacity can remove hums and hisses, but this audio is too bad to be saved.

Invite the actors back to your home or office

Hopefully you weren’t a tyrant while filming and they’re still talking to you. Also, hopefully you have a quiet room to record audio in.

Open your project in Premiere and a start new file in Garageband. Plug in the iPhone headphones.

In Premiere, you can isolate any line and loop it.

Have them talk clearly into the iPhone headphone mic. Hold it close, but not too close or your audio will peak!

When you pick your actor’s first line it will sound like this:

In Garageband hit record, then play the loop in Premiere

Have your actor repeat his line over and over with the loop, Garageband will only pick up what’s coming through the headphone’s mic and you will get something like this:

Start and stop recording in the Garageband file as you go
line-by-line in Premiere

What you will have at the end is a track with your actor’s clean voice saying each line several times.

Once you have all the lines, send your Garageband
track to iTunes:

It will open and play in your iTunes. Right click the track and show in Finder:

Drag the mp3 into your Premiere project

Open it, scroll across, and pick your favorite line. Pull your favorite onto a new audio track. The shape of the waves should be similar so you can match them up visually. If no, move it back and forth until it matches up.

Once you have your clean lines in place, mute the tracks with the bad audio

Here the scene with just the clean dialogue:

Too clean sounding. To make indoor audio sound outdoor reduce the bass and maybe add more treble. Adjust by ear.

Add your sound FX

I get mine (gun shots, ricochets, etc.) from Garageband and/or Free Sound Project.
The dramatic music is from the Team America soundtrack (Hopefully I won’t get sued).
Add your layer of uncut location ambient noise! It should be low enough to be just barely heard. Its continuous drone in between cuts will further enforce the audio illusion. Fancy!

Here’s the scene with the FX and music mixed in:

PERFECT!!!!!!!!!!!!

No it’s not. I’m no master at this technique, but I’ve used it a lot, with varying degrees of success. There are may variables you can adjust (actor’s line readings, a better mic, perhaps recording the ADR on your laptop and go back to the shoot location if at all possible?)

If you don’t have great audio equipment, are pressed for time on a location, or end up getting bad sound, this ADR method can be a great way to keep your production moving and save poorly recorded dialogue.

I’m shooting scenes for my film in June and I could use extras. If you’re available and would like to come out, please shoot me an email at joeavella@gmail.com

Sunday June 5^th
11am
Playground Theater

I need 5-10 extras to be an audience at a performance. You’ll be sitting for most of the shoot, with a little bit of standing around to create an after show environment. Causal dress. Should last about 1 hour

Saturday June 11^th
We’d only need you for an hour some time between 11-3pm
Office building
191 N. Wacker (near Merchandise Mart EL stop)

It’s an office scene and I need extras to play various office personalities. We need about 8 and every one will get either a line or a good close up.

Thanks, hope to hear from you soon!

New scene from Master of Inventions!
The Hypercolor dinner jacket shouldn’t be worn if you have a peanut allergy, or if you don’t have one.

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