February 8, 2012

The Key to Midnight Movie’s Most Striking Images

A Director’s Storyboard Comparison

by Jack Messitt | Published September 21, 2009

When you are deep into editing a movie, you start to see all the shots you didn’t have time to get on set, as well as all the great ideas you now wish you had written into the script. Midnight Movie, my directorial debut, was no exception.

Midnight Movie follows the terror that emerges (literally) from the screen as The Dark Beneath, a fictitious film from the late ‘60s, is played at a midnight showing. Unknown to the audience, the film’s director, Ted Radford, has embedded his soul into the film—allowing the killer from the movie, armed with his signature spiral knife, to emerge from the screen and slay those in the audience.

The original Midnight Movie shooting schedule was for 20 days in May and June of 2007. With all the action sequences and effects we had planned, 20 days was not a lot of time. We really had to make the very most out of every day. And when we lost an actor halfway through production, we had to spend a day re-shooting scenes. So an already tight schedule was made even tighter. But we managed to get it done.

When we finally wrapped principal photography, I headed to the Philippines to start editing and, within a month, we had a pretty good cut of the movie.

In August, we had a test screening in Los Angeles to help gauge how the movie was playing to an audience. It was full of temp effects, score and sound. After the screening, we passed out questionnaires and asked for opinions about the movie. Even in its rough state, it went over pretty well, but the screening pointed out a few areas where we could have done better.

So I went home and watched the movie about a thousand more times, really nitpicking every last frame. It was during this Midnight Movie marathon that the genesis for additional shooting began. I started to watch the movie in a different way. Not only living with the footage we had, but dreaming of footage we had yet to shoot. It was liberating and I saw the possibility of smoothing some rough edges and amping up the tension level of the movie as a whole. But this feeling was short lived as our original budget was so slim and we had yet to get into the heaviest expense of post: The visual effects. My producers brought me back down to earth and said that it just wasn’t possible.

Not wanting to take “no” for an answer, I went back to the movie and devised a shot list that we could shoot in one day—and that would make a huge impact on the areas of the movie that were bothering me.

I storyboarded these new shots and, as a test, I roughly edited them into the movie to make sure they worked. Armed with this test and a will to get it done, I went back to the producers and begged them to find the money for one more day of shooting. Even though the test was severely handicapped by my bad drawings, it had just the impact I was hoping for.

WATCH VIDEO HERE

As you can see, I am a terrible artist and should probably apologize to Rebekah Brandes for her portrayal in these storyboards (really, she is so much better looking in real life!).

Much to their credit, the producers saw the benefits to what I wanted and they found the money—where, I don’t really know, but I wasn’t going to start asking.

While I wrote one completely new scene, the main portion of the additional day of shooting involved shots specifically designed to be seamlessly edited into already existing scenes.

1 - Bobby Walks To The House: This scene from The Dark Beneath (our movie within the movie) needed something more. It was the introduction to the mystery house and was falling a little flat. It needed a little something weird or creepy that we just didn’t have.

One of the producers suggested that I add Bobby finding a dead animal. I wasn’t buying the idea until I took that idea a level further and added a cow that had been gutted by Radford’s signature knife. I storyboarded a sequence that we could shoot without revisiting the actual house location and it worked pretty well.

We shot this sequence in a parking lot, dropping a load of dirt to mimic the dusty house in the middle of nowhere. And while the rotting cow remains, the signature knife wound proved to be too expensive and was dropped (much to my disappointment as that was the reason I ran with the idea in the first place). But the giant maggots (especially a suicidal one) made these shots pretty cool and added just that bit of weirdness we were missing.