Case Study: The making of Daniel J. Brant’s ‘Dead Meet’

Francesca Louise White as ‘Cleo’ in Dead Meet (2016)

Date: 07 JUly. 2018
Case Study: The Making of Dead Meet
Filmmaker: Daniel J. Brant

indieactivity: What is your film about?
Daniel J Brant: “Dead Meet” is a short action-comedy about a lonely assassin, Cleo, going on a date with a man who knows nothing about what she does for a living. And to complicate her evening even further, she has a target to kill in the same pub. So Cleo has to try and keep the two parts of her life separate and make sure she doesn’t mix business with pleasure. The film’s got a bit of black comedy, some pathos, a dash of suspense and Hong Kong inspired action sequences.

indieactivity: Tell us about the festival run, marketing and sales?
Daniel J. Brant: So far, the film’s been shown at the Birmingham Film Festival, Starburst Media City Festival and Artemis Film Festival in Los Angeles. It’s also playing at Austin Action Festival this month. Reception’s been largely very positive- particularly the characters and the action sequences- and it’s actually won a couple of awards! Our leading lady, Francesca L White, won the Best Performance award at Starburst and Best Actress (Short Film) award at Artemis, which are much deserved.

Watch Dead Meet n 4K on YouTube (Free)

indieactivity: Dramatic Feature?
– Director: Daniel J Brant
– Producers: Daniel J Brant and Francesca L White (Associate Producer)
– Budget: £1100
– Financing: Personally financed
– Production: Enborne River (production company)
– Shooting Format: AVCHD (4K, Cine-like D)
– Screening Format: ProRes422 4K (2.35:1 Letterbox)
– World Premiere: Birmingham Film Festival, November 2017
– Awards: Best Performance – Starburst Media City Festival – Francesca L White; Best Actress – Artemis Festival – Francesca L White
– Website: Dead Meet Website & Enborne River

indieactivity: Give the full Official Synopsis for your film?
Daniel J. Brant: Cleo is an assassin and has been for years. But it’s a lonely job- although you get to travel and meet people, you’re usually putting bullets in them… So she turns to internet dating and meets Ryan. Ryan is a nice, normal guy… and completely in the dark about what Cleo does for a living. When her next target turns up in the same pub and threatens to disrupt her perfectly planned evening, Cleo is forced to juggle her job and her personal life, and keep everything from crashing down around her. Is it a match made in heaven… or a dead meet?

indieactivity: Development & Financing?
Daniel J.Brant: I hadn’t directed a short film for a while and was looking for a new project. I’d posted on various film sites looking for scripts but nothing that was sent to me appealed, so I decided to write something myself.
I love action movies and in fact, the first things I ever shot and edited were fight sequences. My friends and I practiced martial arts and watched kung fu movies and if you let some nineteen year old Jackie Chan nuts near a camcorder, it’s fairly obvious what’s likely to happen! But I hadn’t directed anything with action in it for years, so I thought this would be something I should put in the script.

Director of ‘Dead Meet’ Daniel J. Brant’s Drills into his latest indie film

The film started out as a laundry list of things I wanted to include- I wanted to direct something with a bit of comedy, some pathos, some suspense and as many action sequences as I could cram into the runtime.
I was inspired by films like “Grosse Pointe Blank” to have an out-there character struggling with an ordinary world. They say that comedy comes from two places- an ordinary character in extraordinary situations or an extraordinary character in ordinary situations- and I chose to focus on the latter. Have a someone like a professional assassin in a normal environment like going on a date and see what comedy and conflict unfolds.

The script went through several drafts and because of all the different elements that were interacting in the film- who’s watching who and the internal logic of why they’ve made the decisions they have- the script became quite complex for something that was only going to be twenty minutes long.

Francesca Louise White & William in Dead Meet

This was where storyboarding really came into it’s own. I storyboard a lot of my films because I feel it’s a good way to make the movie before you actually shoot anything. I was able to work out where the lines of action would be and when we’d need to cut away to each element so I could build tension in the final film. The actual drawing was done on my iPad using an art app called Procreate. The app supports layers so I was able to create some fairly polished sketches that we could use on set as a visual shot list.

The money for the film was entirely self-financed from a tax rebate I had. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to pay for locations, buy a few key props and costumes, cater for the shoot and pay everyone’s expenses. Everything else was borrowed or repurposed and the kit we used was what Dom the DoP and I already owned.

indieactivity: Production?
Daniel J. Brant: “Dead Meet” had a very protracted production process, primarily because we had difficulty finding locations. I’d set the film in a pub because I figured that would be an easy location to get but I was mistaken! Most pubs are open from mid-morning til late, seven days a week, which didn’t leave much time for filming and made it untenable to shoot there.

I never thought that finding a location would be that difficult- instead, I thought that casting was going to be the tricky bit. For the sort of action I wanted to do, I knew I needed a physically capable actor to play Cleo and most likely an experienced fight performer to play her opponent, Anderson. So I went on CastingCallPro (now Mandy) and looked for any vaguely local actresses with any skills conducive to shooting fight scenes. A lot of actors have “stage fighting” as one of their skills and for most roles this is probably adequate, but for what I had in mind, that wasn’t going to cut it. I needed someone with very specific skills, the Liam Neeson of casting criteria, if you will. The sort of fights I wanted to have required rhythm, timing, coordination, dexterity and expression rather than genuine martial arts skills (although that would help no end!) so I found myself looking for actresses with a dance background because dancers are more likely to think in those terms and pick up the choreography and performance elements easier.

Francesca Louise White as Cleo in Dead Meet

Francesca L White was the only person I approached about the role of Cleo, mainly because she was the only actress I saw who had a stunt reel! Francesca has an extensive dance background, has done some of her own stunts and she trains regularly in Jeet Kune Do which made for a potent mix when it comes to screen fighting. Francesca also recommended Dean Williams, a stunt actor she’d worked with before, to play Anderson and help choreograph the action. So Francesca came on board in December and Dean was involved by about February the following year.

Once Francesca and Dean were on board, we started designing and rehearsing the bathroom fight scene. It was something of a cyclical process- we’d come up with a few ideas for choreography, practice them and film them, then I’d put a sequence together using storyboards or edit a pre-vis. We’d then shoot that sequence, modify the choreography and camerawork as necessary and repeat the process. This was where we benefitted the most from the delays in finding locations because we were able to have several rehearsal days for the fight and I got to plan everything out extensively. By the time we shot the fight, we had a solid blocking tape and storyboards of the action and we knew not only what the camera was doing but also where the edit points were so everything was choreographed together.

I managed to find a suitable bathroom location to film the fight scene in thanks to a music video I’d shot in May. We were filming in a village hall and I noticed that the men’s bathroom there was large enough and clean enough and could be a good fit for the film. Since I didn’t fancy explaining to the venue owner that I just wanted to hire their bathroom to film a movie in, I hired the whole village hall so we wouldn’t be disturbed. We had this beautiful hall with wood panelling and a vaulted ceiling and there we were filming in the gents! After a delay where we couldn’t find the key, we finally got in to the place and shot the fight scene in one day. Dom Ellis, the DoP, worked very quickly, which was a godsend because of all the set-ups we had to get through. I think we shot somewhere in the region of sixty set-ups that day and that was only achievable because of a team effort and all the planning and pre-vis we’d done beforehand.

Dean Williams in Dead Meet

I cut together the fight scene straight away so we could see what we had and we decided to put it online as a bit of promotional material. Yeah, it gave away one of the big scenes from the film, but I felt the interest the sequence would gain was worth it. Most of the sound effects we used in the fight came from Triune Films’ fight sounds pack. Triune (the guys behind Film Riot) have a few of these packs and I heartily recommend them. We used their gun sounds later in the film as well and for the little you pay, the sounds effects are extremely well put together and really add to the production value.

I spent the next few months trying to find a pub location. As I said before, pubs are open all the time, so unrestricted access was impossible. Eventually I found a local community centre that had a bar that looked kind of pub-like. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind visually, but by this point, I just wanted to finish the film. We hired the bar area for a week in November, which allowed us plenty of time to get all the stuff we needed, but the film was still a logistical nightmare.

Emily Turton my AD and I had originally scheduled the first two days for the dialogue scenes between Francesca and Reuben Williams- who was playing her date- since this would give us a bit of time to rehearse as well and didn’t require any extras or stunt guys. The third day was when we’d do all the wider shots of the bar, all the cutaways and any shot that needed extras. This would leave the last two days for the gunfight.

Since I had storyboarded most of the film from beginning to end, we knew which shots and scenes needed extras, which didn’t and which could get away with just one of us in the background or foreground of the shot. This meant that on the third day, when we had the most extras, we could grab all these little shots from throughout the film and in the edit, really make the pub feel occupied. At several points in the film Cleo would look across to something happening at another table and there’d be reactions to things going on, so this level of storyboarding and planning the edit was necessary for the film to make sense and for us to get all the shots with the limited extras we had to hand.

Chris McGlynn (one of two henchman) in Dead Meet

But nothing goes easy in IndieFilmmakerLand… Most of the extras were just friends of ours and the golden rule of having friends as extras is that if twenty say they’ll be there, only six will turn up. So we had less extras than we wanted, and not all of them could make the same day. So we wound up rescheduling shots on different days depending on who was available. We also swapped out people in various roles- one of the bad guys (the one wearing a blue jacket) was at different times played by a male extra, one of our soundies, Cassie Rutledge and even Emily, the AD. Obviously, none of them look alike, but the jacket and beanie hat were enough for an audience to assume it was the same character. Most of the extras also became bad guys in the final gunfight (just change their costumes and give them a gun!) and I had to storyboard the gunfight on the fly to work out where I was going to use each bad guy and thus grab the right shot of the right extra on the day when they were there. The end result was that the gun fight was filmed on three different days, grabbing shots here and there while we had the people!

Our shoot days were quite short because we had to be out of the bar by 6pm since it was opening at 6.30 for business. This wouldn’t have been an issue were it not for the fact that the film was set in the evening and we were filming during the day and had to black out all the windows using black packing plastic (and then draw the bar curtains) to maintain that illusion, then remove it before the bar opened, only to do it all again the next day. And it took about forty minutes to black out the windows with the plastic and a paint roller every morning, which ate into our schedule. By the end of the week, I was arriving a couple of hours early just to start on the windows before we could even get inside the location.

One day, while we were filming the gunfight, one of the community centre staff said there were police in the building that wanted to see us. I was quite worried- we had loads of prop BB guns around and while they’re perfectly legal, they fall into a bit of a grey area because they’re older, realistically coloured models and not luminous like most BB guns are now. Not only could they have been confiscated, but I could’ve found myself in trouble over it! As the police officer is entering the room, Dean our stunt co-ordinator manages to hide all the guns in seconds. Never seen a man move so fast! Apparently, the reason the police were there was that they were driving past, saw the windows blacked out with plastic and were understandably suspicious that something was going on. After we explained that we were filming, they laughed, wished us luck and went on their way but for a moment there, I thought things were going to go south!

Reuben Williams as Ryan in Dead Meet

After we shot the bar scenes, I started editing the film together in FCPX. I know a lot of people hate the program, but I find it quite intuitive and I’m a faster editor on it than I am on Adobe Premiere. I already had the bathroom fight done so this was just fitting everything else together and I think I surprised myself by having a rough assembly done within a week or so just before Christmas.

But there were a number of shots we missed that we needed and fortunately, most of them involved me. I’d wound up playing one of the bad guys on set because the guy I wanted for the role couldn’t make it and since the character has to do a stunt fall, I didn’t feel it was right to ask another actor to do it. So I played Marcus in the film- enjoy my terrible acting!- and because of all the schedule changes, we’d missed a few shots we needed of me to make the story work. This was a simple case of Emily and myself going back to the location for an hour or so with my camera (a JVC GY LS300) and grabbing the pick-ups. But we were also missing a shot of me finding the body in the bathroom because when we were in that location filming the fight, it never occurred to me that a) I was going to be playing Marcus and b) that I needed those cutaways, even though I’d storyboarded them weeks ago. So I contacted the village hall where we filmed the bathroom fight, only to find that they’d repainted the walls in the bathroom. When we were there in July, the walls were yellow. Now they were a lovely baby blue. I tried for weeks to find any way to fudge things and get the shots I needed, but eventually gave up and cut round it. It’s a shame, because if we had those cutaways, there’d be a bit more tension in the sequence prior to the gunfight because the audience is seeing the body being discovered and Marcus putting two and two together all while Cleo’s trying to leave and Ryan’s saying his big speech. But that’s one of the joys of filmmaking – you learn from your mistakes and sometimes you just have to accept what you have and finish the project.

The last scene we shot was the opening sequence with the silenced sniper rifle which our production designer, Frankie Strange, had brilliantly cobbled together from a BB rifle, a photographic lens and some plastic tubing. Originally, the script had opened very differently, but we struggled to find a location for that as well so eventually I rewrote the scene using a location that was easily accessible with props we had. I think it was April by the time we shot that, so by this point “Dead Meet” had been in production for nearly a year! And still the journey wasn’t over…

STARBURST Best Performance Win

With the edit locked, we just needed music, visual effects and a final sound mix. The guy who was supposed to do our VFX- all the gun flares and CG blood (because we didn’t want to risk staining the bar location’s floor with fake blood)- went silent and didn’t return my emails. So rather than hunt around for someone else, I did it. Aside from basic compositing and keying, I knew next to nothing about VFX and wound up using a lot of stock gun flares and smoke assets (mainly from Triune Films effects packs) to create the gunfire and bullet impacts, along with some judicious use of Photoshop for impact decals. For the blood I used a HitFilm plugin that had a liquid simulation designed to create stylised blood sprays. I think if I knew what all the physics sliders were doing, I could probably have created more convincing effects, but it was largely trial and error and eventually I came up with shots that passed the squint test even if they wouldn’t survive more than casual scrutiny!

The music was created by a friend of mine, Tobias Miller, who offered to score the film for experience. We only had three music cues for the score- the opening title theme, the bathroom fight and the end gun battle. I’d had temp music in place while editing the gunfight so Tobias had something to go on, but for the bathroom fight and the opening, he had a blank canvas. One of the mistakes I made here was not having a clear direction for the music- I’m not particularly musical and I didn’t know what sort of thing I wanted. I liked the idea of having something Spanish-sounding and dance-like for the fight scene, but didn’t know how to explain it. In the end, Tobias came up with something that I think works quite well and makes the fight scene stand out.

The final sound mix was put together by one of our sound recordists, Graeme Rawson, who is a sound engineer by trade so he was able to really add a lot of production value to the soundscape of the film with various bits of foley and effects. We also had to get Francesca back to do a bit of ADR for the sniper scene due to wind noise and some vocals for the fights. Graeme managed to do the sound mix in under four days- which is especially noteworthy when you consider that the pick-ups, VFX and music had added months on to the post production time as a whole.

By the end of the process, I just wanted the film finished and off my plate so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore! For a twenty minute short film, it sure took up a large chunk of my life (nearly three years from writing to first festival showing!) and by the end, I wasn’t that enthused about it. I was burnt out. But we still had festivals to send it to and all the promotion that came with that and if I’m honest, I’d have given up on it if it weren’t for Francesca and the others pushing me to send it to festivals and getting people to watch it. So I’m truly grateful for them sticking with the project and keeping me motivated.

indieactivity: Festival Preparation & Strategy
Daniel J. Brant: I’d never submitted a film to festivals before. I kind of thought of them as a waste of time because while we all grow up as filmmakers with the dream of being discovered at a festival and being hailed as the next Robert Rodrigues or Kevin Smith, the reality is that there are so many festivals and so few headhunters that the likelihood is slim to none. But I’d decided that I’d submit “Dead Meet” to festivals while I was writing it and that actually shaped the film. I knew that most festivals didn’t want shorts longer than twenty minutes, so I made sure “Dead Meet” was under that (by one second, but still…) and I knew that while an action film wouldn’t go down well at the more arty festivals, it could find an audience at the more entertainment-focused ones. So that was what we aimed for.

While we were shooting, I went on FilmFreeway and browsed the festivals, looking for any I felt were a good fit for the film. Artemis came up straight away because it was all about female empowerment and women in action and we had both of those things in our flick! So I had a small list of festivals I wanted to submit to and I set aside a bit of money to cover the submission fees- which can add up pretty quickly! I think I spent nearly £150 on submission fees and aside from a couple of big hitters like Artemis that I thought we’d play well at, most were £10-15 each. I’d been advised to set myself a budget and stick to it when it came to festivals and that was good advice- you can easily spend a lot of money and not get anything when it comes to festivals so be smart and be frugal!

One of the festivals we submitted to wanted premiere status on the films- meaning you couldn’t show them anywhere else including online until after the festival had screened it. Now, I can see this as being useful if they’re a film market and you’ve got a feature to sell, but for a short film this just didn’t sit right for me. So I put the film on Youtube anyway. I think you have to if you want to build an audience and get people to see your film. Most people are lazy and it’s hard enough to get them to watch an online film, let alone get them to come to a festival.

So far, the film’s played at the Birmingham Film Festival, Starburst Media City Festival and Artemis Film Festival in Los Angeles. It’s also playing at Austin Action Festival at the time of writing. There are still a few more we’ve submitted to and are waiting to hear back from, but even if all we get are these, I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. Artemis and Starburst are established high profile festivals and for our film to not only play at them but also for Francesca to win awards for her performance at both has really given the film a presence and her career a boost, so that’s been awesome. Personally though, I feel the Birmingham Film Festival really did it for me. I’d become so sick of the film and how long it had taken to finish that when the festival rejections started rolling in, I was quite prepared to draw a line under the whole thing and call it quits. Move on and do something else. But showing the film at BFF made me realise why I make films. It was great to not only see my film on a big screen but also to watch it with an audience, watch them react to the action and connect with the story. And it was great to do a quick Q and A with people who genuinely wanted to know more about the film. So I think without the screening in Birmingham, I probably wouldn’t have continued submitting to the likes of Artemis and some of the other festivals. It was a great morale booster for me.

indieactivity: The Release?
Daniel J. Brant: For the Youtube release, I cut together a trailer and we pushed it through social media. We set a date and had banner art with the date on it that we put up everywhere. The idea was to make people aware of the film without pushing it down their throats. I think a lot of people are very heavy-handed and attention-seeking with social media and that just results in mutes and unsubscribes, so the trick is to build awareness and engage with people. Build a rapport. We set up a Facebook page for the film and started with engagement posts (“What are your favourite movie fight scenes?” “What did you think of John Wick 2?” etc) because even if all you get are a few comments, that goes into Facebook’s algorithm and adds to the prominence of your posts for those people. So when you have something to announce, you have a better chance of people seeing it.
Francesca’s very proactive with social media which is great, because I’m generally not! She would tweet often about her work and the festivals and push the film whenever she could. So far the film’s got about 19,500 views on Youtube- which isn’t bad considering none of us have an established fanbase and haven’t gone nuts with the marketing.

indieactivity: Advice from the Filmmaker
Daniel J. Brant: People will often tell you to stay away from genres like action or sci-fi if you don’t have deep pockets, but the truth is you can make an engaging action movie on a shoestring budget if you put in the time and effort to create something memorable. Focus on the characters, write a strong script and tell a good story and not only will you get talented people on board to help you make the film, you’ll also win over an audience with something they’ll actually want to see. And that’s something that works whether you have £500 or £5 million to play with!