My name is Amy and I’m the producer of the film titled “The Bridge” by Marlon Torres. Here you’ll find the documentation of our film shoots as well as any other films or animations I might be working on at the time. I hope you enjoy reading this and can appreciate how grueling and tough it can be to create a film, short or feature.
It first started off with Marlon and an idea. He bounced that idea back and forth with a few people and started writing. Many revisions later and small tweaking, he had a script. Though that script may change slightly over the course of the film, the main idea still stays. Marlon always thinks big. He has big ideas and he’ll be damned if he lets anyone ruin it. Since the movie started, about $10k has gone to costumes, equipment and various other things. When writing the script, he knew who he were to cast for a few roles. Upon reading the script myself, I had a few ideas who could play the other actors. In the end, I believe we picked the perfect cast between us.
A few weeks ago, Marlon wanted to do a photo shoot with every cast member, which you can see in the pictures below. He did a scene with Leah and another one with Pablo on their off time. Not everyone is available for every shot, considering work, scheduling and life. It’s pretty tough to be able to work with everybody, but it’s great that things seem to be going smoothly, though Marlon might say otherwise. We also had another shoot a few weeks ago for rehearsals, to see what the soldiers were made of. That went all right, but we didn’t get any sound recorded from that shoot, so we had to reshoot everything. That’s okay, because it gave the guys a chance to warm up.
Yesterday’s was a mess and a half, but we made it through alive! And with great actors and wonderful scenes. We started off with Pablo not realizing that we were shooting today, so when Marlon got to his house, he wasn’t answering his phone. I had failed to get the most current email address from Pablo and assumed he was receiving them. Anyway, long story short, I was able to pick up the costumes from Marlon and get the rest of the crew suited up before Marlon arrived on site. Worked out just fine.
As we started trekking through the woods to the cleared area, we realized that the site was extremely mosquito-heavy! Due to the heavy rain that has hit San Francisco for the past few weeks, those little buggers must have been breeding like mad. Boy were they happy to have fresh blood for their bodies. Not only was the site riddled with skeeters, the whole place smelled like rotting foliage. There were mushrooms a-plenty and mushy trees for the little mites. At that moment, I was really happy that I was not an actor that had to slide, skid, fall and run in that skeeter-filled muck. Unfortunately for me, however, I was probably wearing the most penetrable of all clothing. While the actors had heavy duty canvas covering mostly all of their bodies, I merely had a few cotton layers, leaving my skin the most vulnerable to the creatures. Needless to say, I’m pretty itchy right now.
We ran through all the lines and as the story got more intense, it was pretty frightening how convincing these actors got. I mean, you’d think they were really getting ready to shoot somebody. I was a little worried that some nearby park rangers or joggers would hear the delivery of lines and come to investigate, then realize that we had some very realistic props and call the cops on us, throwing all of us in jail! Okay, maybe not so extreme, but you can visualize the intensity. Also, Mike and Pablo were getting so into fighting that in one scene, Pablo’s helmet falls right on Mike’s brow bone, leaving a gigantic welt on it. Talk about really getting into it! Those helmets are real helmets and it’s like dropping a 2 lb metal brick on your forehead from 2 feet away. I had to hold back my automatic ouch! for fear of accidentally recording the sound, resulting in a re-shoot of the footage.
Somewhere in the middle of the shoot, we started getting really bad sound problems. Either planes seemed to fly too close, hawks were squawking or children were running into our scene, screaming into the mic when lines were delivered. In the end, we ended up with really good shots, acting and a few more minutes to the movie. All in all, it was a great film shoot. You can check out the images and a few shots of the scene below.
The Bridge – Everything’s Fine from Marlon Torres on Vimeo.
And if you love our work and would like your name in the credits, feel free to donate! If you donate at least $25, you’ll get a copy of the dvd as well!
