Onfilm magazine: You Move You Die

Steady As He Goes

Writer/director/lead actor Ketzal Sterling on how he shot his feature film debut,
You Move You Die, on HD in a matter of days.

After releasing the 'High Octane Detonate' DVD in September of 2005 I spent a month pondering on what to do next. I'd always planned on shooting feature films but had always wanted to do it digitally and with my own funding. 'High Octane Detonate' sold well but no better than our previous instalment. Given that we'd spent far more money making it, I was still not in the position to fund my first feature film. I spent the following month frustrated, very frustrated. This frustration was the catalyst for our feature film, 'You Move You Die'.
While away on holiday on Labour Weekend in October of 2005 I had the idea for a story, a story about gangsters, and on returning to Auckland I continued to ponder on the idea. The final twist in the story came to me while training at the gym. In fact, minutes after the idea was cemented I met the actor Jonathan Allen at the very gym I was training at and cast him as one of the four lead gangsters in the film.
I was under way. I called Julian Harrison, who we'd used in 'High Octane' and cast him as my co lead actor. The following day I opened a new script file in Final Draft and began writing.

Julian Harrison, Ketzal Sterling, Patrick Clarke, and Jonathan Allen strut their stuff in a scene from 'You Move You Die'.

This was not my first script, I'd written two previous screenplays. One was bad, the other serviceable at best, neither were good enough to move forward with. The second script had taken me two years to complete. I began writing 'YMYD' on the Tuesday and one week later delivered a finished script to Julian Harrison.
The reason for the haste was simple: equipment. I'd contacted our local equipment rental facility, Rocket Rentals, and learnt that we'd have access to a Sony 1080P HD Cine camera, the same camera George Lucas had used to shoot the latest 'Star Wars' installments. This changed everything, now we'd have theatrical quality and HD for future TV broadcast. The problem was I only had access to the cameras for two days before they were heavily booked. This meant I had to essentially shoot the entire film in two days. I'd never heard of this being done before with any kind of action content but was sure I could come up with a way of doing it.
This is where I began to innovate: instead of writing the film first, then working out how to shoot it, I worked it the other way round. I reasoned that the best plan was to shoot the film in a series of long continuous takes, each at different locations punctuated by driving sequences between locations to keep things interesting. Being a gangster film we wanted a hard-edge environment but due to cost and complexity there was simply no way we could shoot at night, so daylight was our only option. Furthermore, we reasoned that we'd be best off shooting the film in the area we lived in simply because we could use our very homes as locations and we knew every inch of the local landscape. Sadly, we lived in one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Auckland, Kohimarama, hardly very gangster at all. In the long run, though, it worked out just fine.

From here, knowing the gist of the story, I began driving the course of the film. As I picked each location I worked out the time needed for each scene and began writing. With each of the nine separate scenes written, I confirmed each location, then began timing the drives between each location. I would actually drive a car equipped with three cameras while acting from location to location in real time. I wrote the storytelling and character development of the film into these drives. If the drive was four minutes long, I wrote a four minute conversation. This proved very difficult as the characters couldn't actually talk about what was happening as it would spoil our final plot twist. I did all of this in seven days. When finished I had 80 pages of what felt like the best script I'd ever written. It had comedy, a bit of action and a little dosage of reality thrown in for good measure.
At this point there were a total of three people working on the project - myself, Grant Hyndman and Vince Lovrich, who was still holding down a full-time job at this point. We had a total of $10,000 to shoot a movie, which - if you know anything about filmmaking - will probably make you smile. Impossible, it would seem. Well, not for us. Our shoot dates were December 4 and December 11 2005.
We had five weeks to cast and complete all pre-production on the film and, on top of this, Julian Harrison and I had to learn 80 pages of dialogue. Julian also had a full-time job. I simple couldn't afford to pay him to leave it. We had to know the entire script from start to finish, ever single line, as we planned to shoot essentially the entire film in one day, with the second day to be used to shoot the driving segments. In addition, I hadn't really done any serious acting in many years and was becoming more nervous with every day. I'd cast myself as the lead in the film, so I simply had to be good. Everything hinged on that very detail.
The problem was, I sucked. Thankfully, a good friend of mine began running lines with me for an hour each day. I'd always had issues remembering lines, and having to know the entire film certainly made this 10 times harder, although I did have the advantage of being the writer, which helped massively. I had another advantage too - I wrote me. I wrote a character so close to me it was almost impossible to fail. I may have never shot anybody and certainly never treated women like the character does but everything else - the way he spoke, the way he walked - was all very close to me, or at least close to how I'd like to be: confident.
On the first day of rehearsal with Julian Harrison I was ready - we ran my favourite scene from the film (the Rolex Scene) and I felt I nailed it. Julian had arrived expecting Ketzal from 'High Octane'. He certainly didn't get that. I'd spent my entire life acting and dreaming of acting in my own projects, so I was very motivated. This must have hit home with Julian as he was rather shocked and promised to come back with something stronger. As we continued to rehearse Julian got better with every day. With a week left before production, Julian arrived with his head shaven and had very much become the character "Rob". Considering he was working a full-time job and we essentially shot the entire film in two days, he did a staggering job. His performance as Rob in the film is fantastic; both witty and intricate. I put together the supporting cast during the five week lead in and held multiple rehearsals. With a single week remaining I was happy we were all ready. All we needed was good weather. And that's exactly what we got.

I'd never been more nervous in my life; I spent most of the night awake, stressing. Come 8am we were all on location, ready to shoot. Suddenly it was all real. The first scene was in some ways the hardest of all. Thankfully we had one of the best Steadicam operators in the world, Rhys Duncan. Rhys was calm and confident, which gave me and the entire crew strength. The film was shot in sequence; the opening shot was long and very complicated. It ran for approximately nine full minutes. This meant that nobody could make a single error - no boom in frame, no accidental look to camera, no mistakes with lines, nothing. No mistakes for nine minutes. It took four takes and we had something in the bag. I'd got it done, even if I wasn't happy with my performance (I'd missed a few lines and simply replaced them with profanity). Julian had done a much better job than me and been near perfect.
We moved on to location two and my favourite scene, one I knew like the back of my hand. Which was funny, because I couldn't remember a single word, not one, when we tried to do a quick line run.
It's at this point I began questioning everything; self-doubt is bad and I was suddenly filled with it. This is also when we had our first technical drama - somehow the camera had been set to the wrong frame rate, basically making the first scene useless. We had another problem too - Julian's fake tattoo was coming off. So we decided to lose the tattoo and reshoot the first scene the following week. With that solved I simple decided to try and shoot the scene regardless of the fact I couldn't remember my lines. Thankfully the scene was with Simon Prast, a tremendous talent, and he carried me through the first few takes as my confidence returned. On take five I nailed it; Simon was perfect, as was Julian, as per usual.
The third scene was more complicated than the first two as it involved crossing roads and more complicated camera movements. At this point we were around 45 minutes behind schedule; we could possibly catch it up if we moved like the wind. Sadly that's when the camera died. For a reason we'll never know, it just stopped. Nothing we could do would raise it. Many frantic phone calls to various technical people didn't help, and as it was the only one in the country at that point, we had no back-up - we were screwed. Then 30 minutes later, as if by a miracle, it suddenly came back to life. Minutes later we shot the scene and moved on, now an hour and a half behind schedule, but with some small hope of getting it done.
The next scene (drycleaners) was by far the most complicated in the film. Eleven takes later we had it, but we were still an hour and a half down. However, the next scene - the dramatic scene with the ex-girlfriend - took just 30 minutes and only four takes, so in one swift stroke we made up 30 minutes. Now we had a chance; maybe we could shoot this film in the day we had.
The next scene was always going to be difficult; it involved Rhys running for long distances with a 45 kilo camera rig. We'd budgeted an hour, and we got it on the first take. We did another for safety and it was even better. We were back on and right on schedule, everything else ran like clockwork and at 8pm that night we wrapped our first day of production.
We shot 47 minutes of footage that we actually used in the finished film in a single day. It may not be a world record, but considering the cost and complexity of what we shot it must be some sort of record. The following Sunday we re-shot the opening sequence and shot all of the driving sequences.
By some miracle a good friend of mine had just opened a brand new HD post facility and had also given us the use of two Varicam HD cameras. With two cameras strapped to the car (one of them extending 1.2 metres off the side of the car), and a camera operator, a sound man and a dialogue assistant packed into the rear of the car, we simply drove the route and nailed it. Driving a car with half a million dollars of uninsured camera gear through busy pre-Christmas traffic, while acting, is without doubt the most stressful thing I have ever done in my life. Something I will never do again, ever.

Post-production begun. We did this over four months in one of HD Revolution's fantastic HD editing suites in Auckland. When finished I showed a copy of the finished film to my brother Shae. Basically he gave me the hard word - he liked it but told me I had to bin lots of the driving and fix the ending. The ending as he said "was shit". I took this on board and began writing an alternative ending. I needed action, I needed guns, I needed fighting, I needed peril and most of all I needed a couple of strong laughs to finish the film off. A week later I had it, and we quickly cast Bruce Hopkins and a six foot eight giant named Paula for the final scene. I raised a further $20,000 to cover the costs of the scene and further post-production. This time we shot conventionally - we'd be cutting now, as there was no way we'd risk doing this level of action in single takes. We shot with three cameras and in one day shot the eight minute final action scene a regular crew would have shot in a week.
September 2006 and we had a completed film. Or at least we thought we did. We screened the film to a test audience and it went down better than any of our wildest dreams. The audience laughed at ever joke, the plot twist worked and surprised everybody. We'd done it. We'd shot a film in less than five days. Not just that, we'd shot a good film as well, a unique film that we could all be proud of. A film owned entirely by the people who worked on it.
It was at this point, however, we discovered we simple couldn't afford the soundtrack we'd used. Not by a long shot. I took off to Los Angeles to begin the sales process while Nick Marsh began replacing the expensive music with an original score and Jonathan Campbell, our sound designer, continued to improve the sound mix.
Fast forward to February 2007 and we completed the film's new soundtrack with a mix of local New Zealand music and original score. The new soundtrack is not only considerably cheaper, it's also far superior. It's given the film the harder edge it's needed. A month later Sony Home Entertainment picked up 'You Move You Die' for local release on DVD and we've now had two offers for international distribution. This time next year the film will be available all over the world on both TV and DVD - a massive success on every level. No widely released film in the history of filmmaking has ever been produced faster or shot on such a low budget.
It just goes to show, you don't have to follow the leader. If you have any original ideas, then run with them. Don't let anybody tell you it's not possible, they are most likely just jealous you're prepared to take risks they are too afraid to take.

· 'You Move You Die' was released on DVD in New Zealand on 4 July with Sony Home Entertainment. A distribution deal for USA and the rest of the English-speaking world has been finalised with a North America distributor, and Ketzal is also close to beginning production of his new film, 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', in Los Angeles.