This past week I directed a short film which will be the last short-form project I complete before my upcoming feature later this year. The film is called “Starlet” and is based around a young actress in Hollywood on a quest for fame.

The film itself will be edited and released online in the next few weeks (stay tuned for that!), and will later be submitted to festivals that don’t require a premiere status. In the past, I’ve often waited to release my films online until after they have premiered at a festival, but due to the nature of this project, I felt it was best to get it done and push it out into the world as soon as possible.

Often times, readers of this blog ask me to post behind the scenes photos and videos from my shoots, and for the first time I am actually able to do that. Thanks to fellow LA filmmaker Christian Hubbard who shot the BTS material, I was able to cut together a behind the scenes piece, consisting entirely of the raw camera takes.

The video is not overly produced or edited, but rather a realistic look at what the behind the scenes of my smallest shoots are often like. As you can tell in the video, our entire cast and crew was tiny –  comprised of only 8 people. Two of which were our actors and one of which was my wife Jen, who produced this with me. I almost always prefer working with as small of a crew as possible, even if it means we all need to wear multiple hats. It helps the day to move more quickly and leaves us room to improvise on the spot, and stay nimble.

Working with the excellent Varicam LT – which was generously loaned to us by Panasonic – also allowed the day to move quickly as the camera is very well suited for run and gun style shooting.

In the coming weeks I will do a more detailed writeup on the project and my thoughts on working with the Varicam LT when the film is ready to be released.

For now though, you can check out our raw behind the scenes clips below:

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