Mike Oeming Shoots ‘Six’
Author: Rob Worley
April 28th, 2005
Was anybody hurt on the movie?
Nobody got hurt during the shooting at all, which is pretty incredible considering�
With fight scenes like that, you usually have a couple days with some breaks and stuff. We had two days to shoot it and each day had limited time. One day we had four hours and one day we had five hours.
So it was just constant, non-stop. Both of them were in pain afterwards, just from the general running around and stuff.
Especially the Sifu because he had to do these things�like that one kick where he kicks with both of his feet into Steve’s chest and he goes flying across the room�every time he does that he has to land flat on his body in what’s called a “coffin fall.” So he was in a lot of pain.
But luckily nobody got hurt.
We had to do that in one take with two cameras. I wish we’d had three, so we could have gotten a longer, pullback shot of it.
That’s the fun part of indie filmmaking�or no budget filmmaking�it’s not even indie filmmaking�you have to use what you have.
Any indie filmmaker horror stories?
There’s a scene in the comic�because it’s basically the same story, but some of the scenes aren’t there because they didn’t film as well or they didn’t translate with the editing. There’s a scene where Six goes to a restaurant and he’s confronted by this kind of crazy, rambling guy.
The crazy rambling guy is basically rambling off certain subtext of the film. It was part of the meat of the second act.
But as we realized, the film was getting long and we decided for a short film we should get rid of that.
But what happened was; we went to go shoot it at a diner, at a diner we were going to steal it at. We didn’t have any permission.
Because, usually, you go to a place and you tell them you’re shooting a short film and, in spite of the fact that you tell them you have no money or anything, they want insurance. Getting insurance is a whole fucking nightmare. We couldn’t get any insurance because, even though I had money to pay for insurance, no insurance companies wanted to deal with me because I wasn’t a company. I wasn’t going to create a company just to get the insurance.
So, the idea was to go to this diner, which had these huge windows, set the actors in the windows, set them up with remote mics and shoot the entire thing from the parking lot, so that the camera was in the car, shooting through the windows of the restaurant.
We ended up kind of getting caught, but it worked out.
On the way there we had tested the camera equipment, everything was great, the remote mics all worked fine. There’s a little battery in the microphone itself that hooks into cameras.
Problem one is, someplace between when we tested it and when we shot the scene, which was only about an hour, the batteries died. When we played the scene back, all the sound was muffled and unusable, which really, really sucked.
We ended up looping the whole thing over again, going to a lot of trouble to cut together scenes where we don’t see a lot of the lips, a lot of cuts to people in the diner. We went to all the trouble to loop it.
Then afterwards we decided we didn’t need the scene.
So it was a lot of trouble for, basically, a larger lesson.
In comics you can decide what you use and don’t use, but in film it seems to have a life of it’s own. It’s interesting.
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