Can one person make a film entirely by themselves with no outside help?

Answer? YES THEY CAN!

Late last year I took it upon myself to make a film where everything about the production was performed by myself with no help from anyone (not even any assistants on the set). But it wasn't just a case of putting the camera on a tripod, pressing record and just filming some mindless drivel. The aim was to produce a film of quality whereby the audience would forget it was made entirely by one person.

Well as it turns out there are now three films in the series.

Considering people come to these forums to discuss film making techniques, lighting, FX, music, editing, sound and the like, well here's an example of what can be done when you're reliant on no one else but yourself.

I hope you like them.

http://www.oneselftrilogy.net

 

Nearly did it myself. My production came to a halt when I couldn't get any more cast members. The film was based on merely two characters and I used normal, every day locations, but it really played out well on-screen. I was hoping for it to be around 60mins-90mins in length and I came close, but the script demanded a few more characters for certain scenes and I just never got down to casting it.

So yes, it is very possible, I'd say. It takes perspiration, effort and talent. But when attempted, you can learn so much it is untrue. It beats any schooling out there.

 

I saw your films. Fricken awesome.

 

Thanks dude. My friends are constantly hounding me to make a fourth one but three is enough.

The important thing is that I proved what I set out to achieve which is the main thing.

 

I'm doing 99% of my movie myself.

Script. Concept art. Storyboard. Location scouting. Videography. Directing. Lighting. Model design. Model making from sratch. Special effects. Screen tests. Software testing. "Matte painting" (cutting out a portion of a picture in AE and superimposing live action-footage onto it.) Filming in a garage with 1000 watts of lights that trip the circuit breaker and not having enough space in the garage to move the lights around to get the best lighting possible and now I have to rent a storage space to do my green/blue screen shooting. Wardrobe. Sound design(I'm getting a lot of sounds and music from links on this site and am inspired buy how Ben Burtt collects sounds)Buying cheap green fabric from Joanne's, using it, being unsatisfied with the results and now having to buy a real green screen and light kit from the internet. Buying a new camera other than mini dv because I loathe the pixelated/jagged/wavy edges around the talent. Figuring out how to backlight the talent to eliminate green spill without shining that light into the camera and reducing the size of the aperture and getting an inferior video image.

The usual

So, yeah, to answer your question, it is possible for one person to make a film with no outside help.

 

That's very commendable work but I think you're missing some elements here.
1) Talent? The talent should be yourself and no one else. If you need multiple characters, then you play all of them.
2) When on the set, you're there BY YOURSELF with no one else around, this means so you have setup and move all your lights, cables, cameras, monitors, props all alone.
3) Music, you have to create it yourself from scratch with nothing used from anywhere else.
4) Sound FX must all be created by yourself with nothing used from any other source.
5) Editing, audio mixing, colour grading, production design, makeup, must all be performed by yourself.

If you can achieve all that with the film you're making, then I bow down to you.

 

Well, good work on everything.

I dare you to make one of these outside your room, though.

 

To film outdoors would only work if you only had one character. Once you try split screening then you have to mindful of changing lighting conditions - still it's not beyond the realms of impossibility.

I did have an idea of doing a split screen sequence in a moving car, but that would be just too difficult to pull off and to make it look good. Remember when you have to move and setup all the equipment yourself, you WANT things to be easy

 

<whistles tunelessly>

 

Film at night. On a road with no other cars or streetlights.

Or in a dark garage doubling for night on a road with no other cars or streetlights.

 

Actually, filming at night with streetlights should work. It's the same lighting condition night after night (assuming none of the bulbs go out).
I haven't done a cloning test, but I did do a scene on the same location that was shot on several different non-consecutive days. There were a couple complications, but barring complete camera failure and having to shoot the second half of the scene months later with a different one, you wouldn't be able to tell.


Watched the first one so far. Scared me for a moment when you started talking about being in a movie, but then it got funny. That's some pretty clever writing.

 

Actually, filming at night with streetlights should work. It's the same lighting condition night after night (assuming none of the bulbs go out).

Syncing up the lights and the light on the subjects (unless someone turned on the interior light in order to cheat), as well as any bumps the car goes over could be fairly hellish for a two shot.

 

Ah.
I wasn't talking about inside a car. Your best bet for pulling that off is probably compositing, if the Alanis Morisette - Ironic route isn't what you're going for. Branco actually has a good example of how one could do this, except it's just a test and he didn't film a background plate.

Break Ya Neck
Warning: Language

 

All sounds good and could possibly work, though keep in mind the focus isn't just on filming yourself in multiple roles, it's all about setting everything up and operating it by yourself.

If you were to do a moving car shot then the only thing I can think of is somehow film a background plate on a road from a moving car, then project it on a screen in a dark garage and then act out the scene in front of it. The problem is that you have to film the background plate by yourself and find a way to project it, control the lighting AND the camera by yourself whilst getting the timing right for the split screen to work. It all sounds like a decent challenge but I'm not doing it

 

A film I did a couple years back, Adopt a Rifle, comes close I think. By choice I had someone else do the voice over, but I could just as easily done it myself. Music is the main thing I couldn't do on my own, but nowadays there's software for that. Everything else is just me and a camera-on-tripod.

I?d mentioned before with this film how a lot of film titles (e.g. positions) are redundant. A Producer makes the film and assumes all roles ? chief, cook & bottle washer ? by default.

 

The clone vs clone (vs clone, some day) thing I entered in LCC8 was all me in the first 2 shoots.
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I ended up reshooting from scratch with a camera operator just so I could get everything in one (loooong) night. My fully-realized vision of that is languishing in post atm, but that's because I've got a few other things (speculative money gigs) above it in the pile of crap I'm working on. My proudest moment in the LCC judging-- and I have to reach to find any of those -- was when half the panel hadn't realized that both fighters were me. It's more obvious that I didn't simply split-screen it in the non-saber-time-constrained version where I have a few close-ups, and thus a viewer can easily be convinced that I actually have evil twin(s).

The focus on being a one-man show for it's own sake seems wrong-headed to me. Sure, you get some bragging rights for having done it all by yourself, but split-screening isn't so technically impressive that it'll hold a viewer's attention on its own. I watched the first few minutes of Dags's "part 1." My sense was that it was stuck on referencing the absurdity of it's own premise, so I quit it.

 

Yeah but it wouldn't have been as sweet.

Just teasin' ya, Laz.

 

I happen to agree

Still, making a film on one?s own (with clones or not) is worth it if only as a character building exercise.

 

Absolutely, Laz. I've done some fairly flawed stuff this way, and released it in that state when I didn't see myself achieving 100% with resources at hand at the time. It's still been very satisfying for me and I've accumulated a wide array of skills and resources both technical and personal. There are others around here who've made some very good stuff this way, and I wannabee more like them.

My comment was more about Dags's stated ideological position that there's something superior about going it completely alone. I'd much rather share the work with more people, and get more done overall as the benefit. That is one of the many reasons I've volunteered on so many other people's work, to get experience at the infantry level of more complex projects than I have the wherewithall to direct on my own.

 

Sounded more like an experiment than an idealogical position.

Especially since he's made a stack of other flicks that aren't all done by one person.

 

Seriously, I'm not here to quarrel with the gallery.

 

Ah right, I get ya. Yeah I agree; while there are some bragging rights to be had it's not an inherently superior style.

Kind of like how photography isn't inherently better by committee.

 

Exactly.

So I finally watched the whole Oneself trilogy, and I do appreciate the closure, circularity and infinite regress that you've built there, Dags. At it's core, I respect the concept and you've certainly executed it as well as anyone else could.

So I guess I'll post the fx test I did for the LCC8 clone trial, but it only goes to show why I needed help during production.

 

If your clone wasn't any help you only have yourself to blame.

 

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