Son of a Ditch Goes Up the Creek; 48-Hour Film part 4 - David Loftus

[Here again is a link to "A Hole Story," the short film I'm describing in this account:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4 ]

The mound of dirt you see at 1:52 was heaped up in the Valerios' “front yard” (actually, a plot of ground between a barn and their driveway which is closer to the passing road than their home) by Jim and his backhoe. We hollowed out a “hole” in the middle of it to shoot into and out of as the mouth of the hero’s hole to China. The girls look down into it a little later, and both I and the Chinese girl shout and drop things into it -- supposedly at opposite ends of the earth -- near the end of the story.

The naturally-lit scene of the mound of dirt at 1:52 was probably shot on Sunday morning, as was the next scene at 1:57 -- where I’m in a fairly dark area supposedly down the hole. But that was shot in a creek bed below a road and culvert several miles away from the mound of dirt and deep in the woods. (You can see the bottom edge of the culvert near the upper left corner of the screen when I’m talking to the girls at 2:07-2:25.)

Each side of the conversation with the girls was shot out of sequence: me at the creek earlier in the morning Sunday, them at the dirt mound much later that morning. Similarly, the little girls weren’t anywhere near the culvert to drop the bucket on the rope to me at 2:45; someone else did that.

Also, the sequence between 3:13 and 3:20, when I first hear and discover the buried miner, was shot Sunday morning at 8 or 9, many hours after we did the miner’s end of the conversation, which was done between 10 p.m. and midnight the night before. That had been in the ditch that Clay had cleared out, somewhere in the woods between the culvert/creek and the Valerio homestead with the dirt mound “at the surface” of the hole. (The distance from culvert site to the mound was, I would estimate, something like two miles.)

Tony Green, the actor who plays the miner, lay on his back in the bed of the ditch, and we buried him in dirt all around and over him from his waist to the crown of his head while keeping only his face uncovered. The camera was hung directly above him, “upside-down” from his perspective, and I crawled into the shot from the other direction for a few scenes where the back of my hatted head appears with Tony.

The interspersed scenes when I’m facing the camera right-side up were shot the next morning, in the culvert creek, with no Tony around and someone else reading his lines for me to respond to. (I notice the background in those shots starts pretty dark and gets lighter as the scene plays out, because the morning sun was coming up and increasingly piercing through the tree cover.) Obviously, at least two different half-eaten apples were used, too.

One of the challenges of doing the scenes with the miner was getting enough lighting out there in the deep woods in the middle of the night. We had a few artificial standing lights, but we also pointed the headlights from two different cars, I believe, down on the scene from the road above. It was a cold night in the ditch, and the dirt was cold too, so Tony asked for blankets on his legs, and by the time we finished and he could go home, shower, and get to bed, he was shivering. When he wrapped, we all applauded his brave work.

(That's Tony emerging from the dirt at the completion of his scene. In the background you'll note a silver "bounce" disk to reflect some of the artificial lighting, probably from the car lights, down onto him when he was lying on the floor of the ditch and covered in dirt.

I continued shooting in the ditch for another hour, to get the scenes of “Brian” deep in the earth and getting closer to China: first lying on my side and pretending to dig downward, toward my feet while the camera shot me mostly from above; next, a side shot of me digging the pick into a wall of the ditch; and finally, another shot of me on my side in the ditch, appearing to pick at the wall above me while the camera moves in and gets a shot of me pulling out the all-important prop of the picture frame for continued inspiration. I remember Dan asked me to wipe my brow in almost every one of these shots, but I thought that was a little too repetitive, so I pretended to be out of breath from the labor and trying to catch my breath.

At 7:03 the film moves to a dramatic new location, both within the story and during the shoot. Obviously, the camera shoots the field in “China” upside down as a piece of visual wit. This field was a different location from everything else: the dirt mound next to the driveway was a little west of the Valerios’ home; the forest, ditch, culvert (even the hill and pond where Juno is seen dumping the dirt) were all pretty much north and east, I think; while this pasture land was several hundred yards down a hill to the south.

We moved back to the original dirt mound for the shot of the shovel and me “breaking through” (which I think you can tell from the treeline in the background), and to get that, I had to scrunch myself down into the hole in the mound, let myself be covered with dirt and grass -- partly held in place by cardboard flaps -- and deal with spiders and potato bugs that dropped out of that mess on me while the camera was being set up for the shot.

Then we hustled back down to the alternate pasture for the rest of those scenes (including Maggie the Horse and Juno at the very end), for which Jim Valerio had dumped another, smaller mound of dirt with his backhoe. As the Chinese girl, Sabra Choi also clambered out of the original dirt mound, shot from a different angle. That mound is also the mouth down which both of us yell, supposedly at opposite ends of the earth.

I’m proud of my leap into the earth-long hole from the China end, which was really just a jump behind a small mound of dirt in the “Chinese” field. I had to crouch down instantly behind it to make it look like I was plummeting all the way to the other end of the planet, and I think it works.

I believe I had finished shooting all my scenes by the time Sabra arrived to shoot hers close to noon on Sunday. Dan wasn’t sure Sabra was going to make it; all through the weekend, he was hunting for alternative girls, possibly making them Australian (which might have made more sense, geographically; through the center of the earth, and all), but a Chinese girl made more emotional sense, so Dan was pleased that Sabra could make the shoot.

Part five: Trying to Go Viral

[It was announced last night by the Portland chapter for the 48-Hour Film Project that our entry for this year, “Hit Count,” had made the finals and will screen with the other best films of the 2010 Portland competition on Thursday -- hardly a surprise, since our film won the audience favorite award in its group in the first round of screenings two weeks ago. There are one or two more things to relate about “A Hole Story” and then I’ll move on to my account of this year’s shoot.]


Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: Daniel Elkayam and Overcast Productions' approach


Read part three: Digging a hole to China