This summer at SMI, I have been a member of the advanced group. As a group, we decided that for our final project we would make a comedy about a bachelor who gets cold feet and runs away at the alter to go speed dating. Each member of the group was assigned a specific roll in the production of the short film, mine being Production Manager. As Production Manager my job is to organize most aspects of the project. I only somewhat knew what I was in for when I was given this job, but I took the responsibility on whole heartedly.

The first task I faced was finding a location. With the help of our director, Max, I called around to different restaurants in the Central Square area, trying to find one that was willing to let us film for free. The Field on Prospect St. said that we could use their space in the mornings and part of the afternoons. We had planned on holding our wedding scene outdoors, but the week of the shoot we found out that it was going to rain on the day that we were planning to film the outdoor scene. So on short notice we were able to get the the Episcopal Divinity School on Brattle St. as our new location.

Another major task that I faced and organized was casting. We decided that this year we would do something revolutionary for SMI; we would use real actors as opposed to other SMI participants. I posted ads on Craigslist looking for the different characters that we needed, and the response was almost instant. Actors and actresses from all over the state were emailing me looking to be in our movie! We held auditions, which proved a little more difficult than the emails because I had to correspond with each actor and work out a specific fifteen minute time slot that worked for both us and them. Then once we did have that settled, of course not everyone showed up on the day of the auditions. We ended up auditioning for three days, and it was really interesting to see a lot of the people that came in. We found our actors and cast them in the appropriate rolls, But it's never as simple as that. Even though we asked about their personal schedules ahead of time, time conflicts were a big problem. Then the woman that we cast as our Bride couldn't make the day of the shoot we needed her for, and the man we decided to cast as our supporting best man decided he couldn't fit the shoot into his schedule. So I spent our entire first day of shooting emailing other actors, setting up more auditions, and confirming their schedules.

After some deliberation, we had our actors and were ready to do the bulk of our shooting. On the morning that we had planned to do our first shoot at The Field, I got a call from my director saying that the owner of The Field said we could not shoot there that morning, or any morning. We had to call actors, the dolly rental company, and not to mention work out our own personal schedules so that would be able to film on the weekend.

We had everything scheduled, all of the kinks worked out in the script, the perfect actor as our leading man, a great location for our wedding, and everyone was coming in for our next day of shooting on Friday the 8th. We had planned to shoot at 10 that morning, and at 8 I was woken up by a text message from the actor playing our reverend telling me that he wasn't going to be able to make it anymore. I spent the whole morning scrambling find someone else to play the role because our scheduling had been so far pushed back by this time that we had no other choice but to shoot the wedding that day. I called other actors we had auditioned, and CCTV members that we thought could maybe do it on extremely short notice, and finally Mark Basch, who is also playing our Host of the speed dating pulled through for us and came to the church to play our reverend as well. We decided that this wouldn't be a problem for consistency because the parallelism of having the two opposite but somewhat similar characters be played by the same person would only add to the comedy of the film.

So now, after over a week full of a lot of overtime, we have all of our shooting complete. But for a few minor tiffs, the seven of us get along really well and are having a lot of fun with the project. We can't wait to see what the final product looks like! And for me, I would venture to say I've probably been the most stressed out of all of our group, simply because as production manager I have had to make sure everything is planned and everyone is where they need to be when they need to be there. But, I would say that I've learned a lot from the experience. It's not easy, but I've definitely enjoyed it. I think this project, along with all of its complications has taught me and my crew what a real job would be like in film. It's not always going to be simple. Responsibility for this project has been placed on us, and I've taken it on full force and I think we've all learned a lot.