Dan had concocted a sweet tale about a lab researcher who has a rotten day at work and decides to live out his boyhood fantasy of digging a hole to China. The big question was: How to depict the physical act of shoveling down through the Earth on screen?
The Valerio family had volunteered the use of their farm for any location work it might come in handy for, and it turned out that there was a culvert and stream in the wooded portion, as well as a fairly long, dry creek bed filled with dead branches and leaves nearby. While we shot the early indoor sequences, Clay Reiling spent much of Saturday morning in the woods, clearing out the creek bed, and Jim Valerio used his backhoe to heap up a pile of dirt that would appear in the movie as the mouth to our hero’s epic dig.
We were able to shoot “A Hole Story” in mostly sequential order. The opening sequence in which Kenneth Campbell provides a urine sample was shot Saturday morning in a men’s room at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
“Brian” spilling the sample on himself; at his desk, looking at the map of China and the pictures of a pagoda, the Great Wall, and a dragon; and packing a lunchbox and picking up the shovel, pick, and lamp . . . were all shot Saturday morning and early afternoon in a loft space above West 14th and Burnside, just across the street from the Crystal Ballroom (for you McMenamins brewery and concert fans), where producer and assistant film editor Luke Norby had his workspace.
The only scene in the first 1:18 that was not shot on Saturday was the bus stop (actually, a Portland Streetcar station next to Powell’s Books), which I’ll explain later.
We got to the Valerios’ farm in the late afternoon. I seem to recall futzing around, looking at locations and carrying equipment down a long dirt road into the woods to get to the small field where the next shots take place. The sequence from 1:19 to 1:29 is one continuous shot in which I walk six steps, set down the lunchbox and pick, take three more steps, and take a moment to survey the area. The camera moves with me for the first half, then does an almost full 360-degree circle around me in the sunshine.
The sun was setting, and though Dan probably knew he could shoot many of the “underground” scenes at night, I suspect we were still running a bit behind on the shooting schedule at this point. Since I know we shot it at sunset, it’s impossible for me to see the scene as taking place at sunrise, but I hope the innocent viewer takes it that way.
That near-360 sequence was the work of Dan’s cameraman (aka DP – director of photography), Brian McKee, wearing a Steadicam rig. Brian’s the other primary center of the creative team on this project. Fun-loving yet businesslike, mostly taking Dan’s orders yet sometimes making suggestions with regard to camera work and even what the actors might try doing, Brian is just as responsible for how these films look as Dan is.
After a short break for the title, “A Hole Story” returns to a second Steadicam sequence by Brian, which parallels the two Valerio girls as they run through a field (toward the place where the camera circled me and I started digging, but not to the hole you will see me inside of shortly). At the end of that, at 1:52, the film starts to break up in terms of the order in which things were filmed over the 48-hour weekend shoot, versus their sequence within the story.
Part four: Down in the Dirt
Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project
Read part two: how Daniel Elkayam's Overcast Productions team tackles the 48-Hour Film Project
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Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project
Read part two: how Daniel Elkayam's Overcast Productions team tackles the 48-Hour Film Project
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There are two places on the Web to see the 11-minute director’s cut of "A Hole Story." The best version is on Daniel Elkayam's Web site:
Click on “Short Films” and you’ll see “A Hole Story” on the right. If your computer doesn’t handle streaming video very well (this version gets hung up and jerky on my laptop with wireless Internet access), a second option is the simpler digital copy on YouTube, which should play more smoothly:
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