Short Movie Story: ATM
For a while, between 2010 and 2013, I watched way more TV than I did movies: the early 2010s were the era of peak TV, and I got into everything from Mad Men to Breaking Bad to comedies like 30 Rock or New Girl, spending an amazing amount of time watching serialised narratives.; I was also listening to tons of podcasts, and, more generally, getting really into words, and dialogue, more than images and music. TV is a writer's medium, not a director's medium - even if more recently that is less true than before.
I wanted to try and write something with the same tone as a mainstream comedy, inspired by the evolving language of TV shows and by movies from Judd Apatow, Kevin Smith, and Paul Feig. I was still in need of a "calling card" project after all, and I believed this could be an ideal one.
ATM Poster, by Polina Tikk, picture by Gunther D.
Around the same time, my friends Jim High and Caryn Stringer, excellent actors living in Prague, approached me with the idea of doing an acting-heavy short film. We brainstormed some ideas for a short, and being those the years when viral videos on YouTube were starting to become a phenomenon, I got the idea of basing the short around the idea of someone who accidentally became a web sensation because of something extremely embarrassing. Viral videos were already big at the time, but not as massive as they became just a few years later, so the idea felt original, and it was quite possible to put it together on a small budget.
So, after a month or so of writing, the script for ATM (a title that really shows my Kevin Smith fandom) was ready.
A note about small budgets.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding about small-budget projects. Some successful and well-known movies have indeed been made with truly tiny budgets, like El Mariachi, or Blair Witch Project, thanks to a mix of ingenuity and extreme technical versatility on the part of the filmmakers. But just as often, the amount of money you put in a budget can be extremely deceptive. It's not the real representation of the value of what is invested to make the project happen.
ATM is a good case for explaining this. Our budget was 5000 Euros, which is probably a third of what a very small indie movie costs per minute.
Yet, a project like this was made possible because a lot of people donated their time, and that should be counted in the budget; it’s just hard to do that precisely.
Using the Robert Rodriguez method, I built ATM around what surrounded me: my friend Jeff was managing a pub in the centre of Prague, so we filmed there for three days before it opened for business; (Jeff, thanks again for waking up extra early to open up for us. And also for acting!). The other two locations were my place and Caryn’s place at the time.
Almost everyone worked for free, and a lot of people involved were already professionals, with some good experience under their belt. Jim was shooting ATM at the same time that he was shooting Jon Bong-Ho's Snowpiercer. And I very much lucked out on the technical side, as well.
I am not sure who I had in mind for shooting the short - I think I was asking a good cinematographer I met during film school; I was also looking for one of the female leads, and then I got really lucky. I met with Cédric Larvoire and his wife Eva at my friend Ken's place and it turns out he is a cinematographer and she's an actress, and they liked the script; my working (and personal) relationship with them is, to this day, one of the best and longest in my career.
Mission-critical art and its dangers
The reason why making movies is expensive is not just a factor of how much each element of them costs, but it has a lot to do with the fact that filmmaking is a mission-critical enterprise, because it requires the coordination of a large amount of people at specific dates and times, in specific places. Because of this, most productions spend more money than strictly necessary.
When you are renting a location for three days, and you need 80 people to show up, and you need gear to work perfectly, the reasonable thing to do is to build contingencies to make sure that the shoot goes well. So you get a backup camera, you get insurance, and you have more people than you need on set in case something goes wrong. Spending 20% more than needed to ensure everything is shot is a better strategy than risking losing 100% of your investment because something goes wrong and an entire day of shooting is gone.
That, of course, is one of the things that you can’t afford when shooting a super low-budget short movie, so you need to get lucky.
At the time of the ATM shoot, Cédric just got a new RED Scarlet camera, a huge investment at a time when Digital Cinema Cameras were still quite rare. This was thrilling since it allowed us to immediately reach production quality levels that would have been very hard to achieve by shooting with a lesser camera. In 2012, that was really not a common tool. The issue was that we had one camera, and any other cameras we had access to at the time were not even remotely at the same level, so we didn’t have backups.
So, as it happens, during the dance scene in the pub, possibly the most complicated scene in the movie, involving a live band and a decent number of extras, the camera just stopped working, probably because the space was too hot for the camera. We had just two days to shoot in the pub, and we got together the largest amount of extras we could get together, and our camera was done for.
But then we got very lucky: Michael, the camera assistant who was accepted to work for us (for a very tiny fee), was also working for the only camera rental place that had a RED Scarlett in their catalogue at the time. Cédric sent his camera back to RED, and almost immediately we got another one: I think at that moment, shooting a tiny indie short, we had the only two RED cameras available in Prague in the summer of 2012.
On value
I think all those elements are a clear indication of the "actual budget" of ATM. If one counts the amount of time spent by professionals in making this film, including post-production (where Sype's Jakub Simandl composed a very effective score, and Jidrich Kravarik mixed the project perfectly), the actual budget of this short was probably closer to 70.000 Euros.
Joseph Kahn, one of the most underrated directors of the last few decades, explained how dangerous it can be to romanticise the idea of zero-budget movies, and how important it is to explain the amount of value that cast and crew put into the project beyond the money budget.
Indeed there has been an expectation from some filmmakers and producers that is fine not to pay people for the promise of a "calling card" project, and the main problem is that the way some of those projects are put together is far from transparent, and when it comes to spending people’s time, transparency is key.
Even after ATM, I have worked on more “no-budget” projects, and I am working on another one right now. But the key is that I have always been very transparent with everyone I involve in these projects about every aspect of them. This means collaborating creatively; being flexible about schedules; and feeding people (even if you have just a tiny budget, spending it on food is never a bad idea).
Money is just one currency; for artists of any kind, in a field where not every project will be able to sustain itself financially, it's still important to be clear about this and understand you can give your collaborators something of value even when you don't have money.
And, crucially, when you do get a paid project, that's the moment to hire people who helped you out; and make sure that they get paid the right amount, if not more, since client work needs to be paid decently.
Friends and Family Dinner
With all of that said, the shoot went well and incredibly smoothly, all things considered, and we had a thing to show at the end. I still like a lot of ATM: I really like the "ping pong challenge scene" towards the end, the most cinematic one; I am not as happy with my writing and pacing for the rest of the movie - it works, but I was going for a more frantic, Edward Wright style that I had no sense of how to do yet. At times, it looks like a drama trying to be a comedy, but not necessarily on purpose; Chris Miller and Phil Lord made the point that comedy works best when you make the fun and the silly stand apart from the background in a very clear way; that element of isolation and focusing on the absurdity that creates the fun is something I don't think I quite grasped in that moment. But the performances hold, and the general concept is solid.
Plus, the fact that the film is filled with friends, and places I used to hang out in, makes it a sort of time capsule that brings me back to a specific time of my life; an added nostalgia bonus, and a great reminder that creating with friends is a good thing to do.
ATM went to a couple of festivals, mostly in the US, which makes sense since it's very much a riff on a specific kind of North American comedy. I suspect it might have travelled a bit more if I made it a bit shorter - 21 minutes is a lot for a comedy short (10 minutes is a lot for a comedy short). But don't worry, *I will* repeat the same mistakes in the future.
Was it a good calling card? Not really. I think I understood why almost 10 years later, but that's another story.
