Behind the Scenes – Revolver

For this project I had three main objectives: experimenting with Point Of View shots, working with a Director of Photography and for the first time - using guns.

Point of View Shots (POV)

I first used a POV shot in my last film where Tessa, who is tied up in the bathroom, has a flashback and regains her memories. It was fun to break the norm and have the actor look deliberately into the lens. With Revolver, I wanted to push the limit. Nearly every shot in this film is a POV.

My subsequent films Shannon Again and Repent also rely on POV but now that I am filming Reup Reload, I am starting to use it less and less. Maybe I just had to get it out of my system. One thing I did notice, is that using POV shots allowed me to compose shots quickly and and get more shots done when there was limited time.

Stepping Away From The Camera

Enter Ian Bloom - Director of Photography (DP), whose involvement with Revolver forced me to step up my game. So much so that I decided to get my storyboards properly illustrated. I had already sketched every shot as line drawings but I enlisted the help of Elim Mak before meeting with Ian. Elim and I knew each other from the ad agency where we both worked. Together we spent a week recreating 120 of my lineart sketches. These drawings then led to the 'animation' version titled Revolver Video Storyboards.

The newly created storyboards conveyed to Ian the mood and feeling I wanted as well as camera movement and framing. I had just shown them to him when disaster struck. The location that the storyboards had been designed around fell through. Luckily I had a backup location but a lot of shots had to be changed. We adapted these shots on the fly and a lot of improv shots from Ian were added for the end scene with Diablo. Ian provided lights as well as his technical know-how and camera work. Casiel, another friend from work, came on board as 1st Assistant Director and Giac manned the mic and boom. Together we spent four days filming Revolver. See more pics from the shoot Revolver On Location.

Using Guns

My third and final objective for this film was to use guns. Fairly early on I decided against using blank firing weapons. This was partly due to safety concerns but more so because I was worried the noise would attract too much unwanted attention. Considering we were filming in an apartment building, this would not bode well. Actors therefore had to fake the recoil and all muzzle flash I added with photoshop.

Notice my nod to The Killer (1989) by chinese director John Woo.

I placed a poster on the wall in
the background during my shoot.
The shot is of Chow Yun Fat
in a scene from The Killer.

Writing and Pre-Production

For most of 2006, I found myself listening to Reggaeton, so for this film I had a strong latin theme in mind. I also thought a Gangsta Rap aesthetic would work well with the John Woo style gun action that I wanted. But this was not enough ... I needed something else to set Revolver apart from other films in the gangsta genre. Then in the middle of the night it came to me. I would include a theme of superstition.

I think I spent the rest of that night writing down ideas as my mind would not stop. Superstition, visions, tarot cards, black cats, a silhouetted cross, dodging bullets... the ideas flew onto the page.
It must have been around this time that I decided to make my project into three films instead of one and over the next two months (Jan/Feb 07) the story outlines for Revolver, Repent and Reup Reload took shape.

The summer of 2006 is also when I started casting. Isn't it strange that I started casting before I started writing? I put up ads on Craigslist for 'latin male actor, 20-30 age, gangsta film - must have own street clothes' and received a deluge of applications - most of whom were not latin. There were lots of rapper wannabe actors and models. Plenty of black dudes claiming to speak fluent spanish, MTV hip hop 'honeys', real thugs offering their insights, chinese, italian, even a white girl from england applied. But very few of them were latin males with an acting resume.

I also had problems with reliability. Over six months I met with many actors and formed a line-up for my characters but I kept encountering unreliable people. I solved this problem by having actors cast for multiple roles so that I could switch them around right up till the last minute. I did not want to show up on location to shoot with Ian and find half my cast missing! Those that had talent and proved reliable were quickly promoted. Pedro in particular started as a minor character and ended up with the lead role.

Other people that I would also like to mention as this point are Casiel Kaplan, Liz Lirakis and Curtis Johnson and Joe DeCunzo from Center Firearms. Casiel helped create props by screen printing all the the little 'RELEASE' stamp drug bags. He also came up with the idea to use singles with a $20 on top so that we had a realistic looking pile of cash. In addition he became my right-hand man and was there for every hour of the shoot as 1st Assistant Director. Liz did all the make-up and bloodwork including the burn mark on an actors arm from a narrowly missed bullet. I created the Tarot Cards in Photoshop and Curtis put them together from laser prints. Joe from Center Firearms on 37th St rented me non-firing guns for the shoot and I beleive it was $215 to rent two Glock 9mm, a Sig Sauer, a Beretta and a .357 Revolver for two consecutive weekends.

Editing and Music

Around the time I was editng Revolver, Google bought YouTube. There were many legal actions against YouTube and many videos were pulled down (out of paranoia?) including one of my short films. Because so much work had gone into Revolver I decided to play it safe and I removed two shots. The closeup of the Stamp Bag (drug bag), and the shot where blood hits the camera lens. I have since uploaded these deleted shots separately. To watch them click on the links below.

DELETED SHOT- Stamp Bag CloseUp

DELETED SHOT- Blood Hits Lens

Once again sound was tough. With a limited budget (Revolver was shot on $700) Giac was forced to work without a portable mixer the mic went directly into the camera and he had to side step around us as we made each shot. Something went wrong and some of the dialog was recorded with the camera front mics instead of the boom mic.

The lines in question were are actually the first lines of the film and I hoped to fix them with voiceovers. Unfortunately the actor Daniel (Rico) was not available and his initial lines had to remain at poor quality. This came as a big disappointment for me (and I am sure for Giac too) however I was able to fix Pedro's (Carlos) lines with a voiceover. Sometimes you have to just make the best of it.

More difficulty arose when it came to the intro song. I had hoped for a reggaeton track similar to 'Gangsta Zone' and I met with several artists but in each case, everything fizzled out after only a few meetings. In the end another work colleague (Hector Reyes) came through for me. His lyrics were perfect and I programmed and mixed the beat myself (yeh - I used to make beats and DJ back in the day). The score for the film proved much less troublesome. Andrew McLean provided excellent keyboard improv which combined well with my beat to provide tension. Then Todd Satterfield created a searing guitar masterpiece for Diablo at the end of the film. A big thank you to Hector, Andrew and Todd!

FX and Rotoscoping

I have already mentioned about all the photoshop muzzleflash when I was talking about guns earlier. Adding muzzleflash is easy and there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube showing you how to do this. I did go an extra step and add highlights to the face and body of the actor as the guns go off .

The vision scenes were also fun to create. The cross on the hill and the cat were completely fabricated with photoshop. To avoid any copyright issues I built the cat out of eight or nine cat photographs. An ear from this one, an eye from that one, you know - frankenstein stylee.

Of more interest is the blood stain on the door. Remember the gangsta in hiding who is shot through the door? When Ian and I shot that I forgot to put a bloodstain on the door. When I realized this many months later, Ian was on another shoot and no longer available. Since I did not own an HD camera and could not shoot it myself I was left with no alternative. I had to rotoscope that bloodstain onto 190 handheld camera frames. Including the door handle as part of my psd file made positioning faster but it still took me two separate five hour sessions to complete.

Shot in Queens, New York City.
May 2007

© 2007 Jhoe Davis