The Collective

A friend of mine (and eventual co-producer of this film) posted a video of what looked like some sort of production meeting. I asked him about it, and he said he was starting a film collective with Kiaro Pictures and invited me to the next meeting.

The collective held meetings twice a week. Anyone could pitch an idea, be it a web series, commercial, or short, and everyone would vote on the ideas. 2 or 3 projects would be selected, and teams would be formed around them. In that first pitch session, I pitched an idea I had for a short film I called “The Sleep Machine”. It was a one actor, one location shoot, an “easy win”, something we could knock out quickly to start the collective off with a bang.

Here’s the director’s treatment I made to help pitch it:

After a couple rounds of pitching and Q&A, Sleep Machine was voted in.

Here’s the 2 page script in all its glory.

Blocking with blocks

The first step to planning this shoot was obvious to me.

Playing with Legos.

Setting up scenes using Legos is incredibly quick, satisfying, and fun. It’s also a huge net positive to your creative process. You can experiment and adjust things at the speed of thought. I walked the camera and actor through the story, wrestling with what the story required and how to best tell it. I’m obsessed with film grammar, and this workflow allows you to quickly experiment with different setups on how to convey ideas with the camera.

The overhead diagrams

To show my shots to the crew in a visual manner, I drew a rough outline of the set and did the work of placing the camera and actor in the shot, showing the blocking, the camera movements, and setup numbers. This is a huge time saving unlock, and helps get everyone on the same page quickly. We were working overnight with a large voulenteer crew, I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.

Plans to shoot things

I made the shot list on Google Sheets. The Shot Size, Movement, and Location columns are all actually drop down cells. That means that instead of typing “mid shot”, I could just click the cell and select it from a drop-down menu. This was a cool luxury for Sleep Machine, but it can be a huge time saver for a feature-length film.

Drawing with friends

The storyboards were drawn up by producer Jeff Malo in about an hour while we were arguing the merits of curly fries vs “traditional” fries. 

Shooting with friends

 Production spanned 14 hours on set, but it was the quickest time of my life. We had a hard stop because our incredibly talented and gracious camera operator (and lender of 99% of the equipment used), Chris Kennedy, had another gig the next morning. 

The awesome behind the scenes footage below was shot by Abdul Muhsin. Most of the footage includes me, which was pretty intentional. He gave me all the footage and I cut this together to use as a sort of memento from this experience, but then realized that there was no reason why I shouldn’t share it. So, there’s lots of me in it. I think it’s interesting because there aren’t so many BTS videos that show the actual work of directing.

Faking it

The awesome VFX were done by Silvia Sayas. There was no original plan for VFX, but in editing, I realized that the ending shot we got was not sufficient. There’s a saying about filmmaking: You make the film three times, once when you write it, once when you shoot it, and once when you edit it.

Sounds good!

The sound was a pretty cool situation, as it was done almost entirely in post. The only sounds we recorded on set that made it into the final film were the bed squeaks. This was planned from the get-go, for two reasons:

1. We had to move quickly on set, and I didn’t want bad audio to ruin good takes

2. The sounds I could add in post would be much higher quality that what we could record in that room. 

I used the sync audio we recorded audio on set as a reference track and recreated everything from scratch. I also did the score for the film. 

Post no bills

One thing I didn’t account for on set was the poster. Since we didn’t take any photos on set, I just used some 2k screen grabs from the film itself. I had to enlarge them up a bit which caused some softening in the images, but by overlaying sharp textures, I increased the perceived clarity of the poster. All in all, I’m really happy with how it came out. 

The film premiered at D’Vision Screen Fest. Andres Andres, the organizer, was Sleep Machine’s DP. The event was a lot of fun! The other films were all really great, and it was great to meet so many people in the local scene.

Here’s me giving a quick introduction to the film.

And here it is! The full film.

Hey, if you made it this far hit me up on the contact page and tell me what you think! 

Director
Ben Ferster

Actress
Gleydis Viera

Director of Photography
Andres Sarmiento

1st Assistant Director
Michael Morello

Camera Operator and Executive Producer
Chris Kennedy

Camera Operator
Brandon Lozano

BTS Photographer
Abdul Muhsin

Makeup Artist
Anna Alameda

Gaffer
Rosa Vasquez

AC
Brandon Vecino

Executive Producer
AK Kiaroscuro

Grip
Andy Lizarraga

Producer
Jeff Malo

Producer
Christine Vorsteg

Script Supervisor
Kevin Gandolfo

Actor
Chris Milan

Editor
Stephanie Zinnes

Visual effects
Silvia Sayas

Boom Operator
Francisco Rodriguez