Making of "The Incompatibles"

This post is a discussion of the making of the video The Incompatibles, an AFG project from wdj on Vimeo.

The video "The Incompatibles" is the first project from the Annapolis Filmmaking Group, a meetup.com group founded by James Angiola. We meet once or twice a month in the Factor's Row restaurant, who have been very generous in giving us meeting space.

James decided to run the group in a workshop fashion, to learn filmmaking by doing. We collected some scripts and decided the first project would be a modification of a public domain script written by Horace Holley in 1916 titled "The Incompatibles".

Next, we did a table read and the group decided that the script needed to be updated in language. I volunteered to take first crack at it but also incorporated suggestions from others. After this, we did another table read where more suggestions were made, and we selected actors (2 male, one female) and crew from the AFG members, and set a date for the shoot. Ultimately, the script ended up as 8 pages. Two other (completely different) revisions were submitted by other members and the plan is they will be made in future meetings.

Before the shoot, the female lead dropped out. Instead of canceling the shoot, I took about an hour out of one morning and rewrote the script without the need of that actor, resulting in a 2 page script. It's just a silly comedy, whcih hopefully some of you find a little amusing. We shot that script using AFG and the edited video is slightly over 3 minutes.

Cast:
* Fred - Benjamin Walker
* George - Attral Platte
* Waitress - Erica Chambers

Crew:
* sound, camera assistant - JT Torres
* director/camera/editor/co-writer - David Joyner

Sources:
* Original script:
Horace Holley "The Incompatibles" (1916)
* Sound track:
Pavel Svimba - Teknikal Problems
license: CC by-nc-sa-3.0

There are problems with the finished edit. I'm not very good at color-correction and it shows, focus was in and out on the waitress (I don't know why), and some coverage was missing. Audio was hampered by my lack of skill at syncing h4n audio to on-camera audio, and the AC running full blast. (This was shot on a hot summer night.) None-the-less, the actors were terrific and, as far as I'm concerned, a fun learning experience! Thanks to everyone involved, including my grand-daughter Addie who lent me her favorite doll for the final shot!