Hope

Shooting Seven Minutes Fast involved several complications from the outset. First of all, the restaurant we were shooting at was in Dubuque, over an hour and a half from Iowa City, where Tod, Laila, and I were going to school. We could only shoot on Sundays because of our schedules and also because it was the only time that the restaurant was closed during the day. We had to have all of the shooting completed by mid-March because I had three weekends worth of gym classes throughout April. Another problem was Kenny, because he was a student at Illinois Wesleyan, several hours from Dubuque. We scheduled the second weekend in March for Ken's scenes; it was to be our last day of shooting. In terms of usable footage it was the first.

Blood

My critical mistake was thinking I could shoot everything myself. There is a reason that there are two or three people on a Betacam crew. All of the footage that I shot on the first weekend was worthless: too dark. I didn't know how to calibrate the monitor and assumed that what I saw would be what I was getting.

After seeing my footage, Franklin suggested I use a waveform monitor on the next shoot. Okay. Except that the equipment room wouldn't let me take out both the standard monitor and the waveform monitor. And after taking the waveform monitor I realized that I didn't know how to use it.

The night before the second shoot I was having a 1:00am breakfast with Chad and a few other friends, notably Brandon Duccini. I jokingly told Chad that I wanted to have a musical number where he and Ken got in a fight and started singing about each other and ultimately resolved their differences by the end of the song. Brandon is a skilled songwriter and musician who would never shy away from such a ridiculous challenge. We went to his apartment and tried to think of song ideas for each character. Three of the four tracks were written that night, the exception being Laila's song. I was so excited that the next day I shot another session of unusable footage. This time, perhaps to overcompensate for my previous failure, all of the footage was blown out.

We realized that if we were really going to incorporate the musical elements, we would have to act fast. Ken was coming back for our only opportunity to shoot with him. We would need scratch tracks for his song with Chad,"Together," as well as Mick's song,"No One Listens," because Ken was supposed to be in the background. This meant that Brandon would have to record the tracks during the week and then have Ken, Chad, and Mick lay down vocal tracks on Friday. It also meant that I would have to learn how to shoot. I recruited a classmate from my EFP classes, Chad Bishop, to finally get it right. We shot from 10:30 Saturday night until 4:00am on Sunday, returned four hours later and shot until 5:00pm.

After getting through that weekend the rest of the shooting went astonishingly well. The following weekend we shot all of the remaining footage with Mick. I continued to enlist help from my classmates, this time a friend named Jeremy Rodman. This was the day that we taped Brandon's cameo as a restaurant patron. We shot this scene ten times because he would give a look that would put everyone in stitches. Even in the take that I actually used, you can see Tod's body shaking.

We took a week off and returned to Dubuque to finally shoot the last two songs, sung by Laila and Tod. Laila can actually sing and reportedly nailed this on her first take, though she did another one for kicks. By contrast it took about five hours to record Tod. (In his defense we did start recording at 2:00am) Tod employed a unique rhythm with his delivery, which made it that much harder for him to lip sync to the next day.

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