Cue To Run is a student project from director Aaron Kurmey, cinematographer Joel Cheyne and sound designer Alex Wilkinson for their final first year project in film class at the University of Lethbridge.
Though the film is quite short it presented many difficulties for us, with tight schedules and late shootings. Most shooting was done very late at night. The first night of shooting in the alley went until nearly 3am. The following morning we were expected to be at the Zoo (the bar we shot at) to shoot for 8am when the bar opened so that we wouldn't be disrupting customers later on in the day, or filming them if they didn't want to be in it. Not to mention customers coming and going would cause a ton of continuity issues.
The main reason shooting took so long is that when we got out there we only had a really rough idea of what we wanted to do. Even the script that we used during the shoot ended up being worthless since we rewrote all the dialog for it when it was time to record. When we got out on the street the first night all we knew was that we had a guy that had to do a bunch of running. Then we spent over an hour setting up and filming the final sequence behind the dumpster where originally we had someone try jumping Ian (main actor) from behind. We didn't even think up the idea for the shadow until the next night when we went back to get some more running shots. We actually ended up refilming everything from the first night. I might have forgotten to mention as well that we were filming this during the coldest week we'd had all winter. I was wearing 4 layers, and it still wasn't enough for standing around in a back alley for 4 hours.
In the end though the film turned out quite a bit better than I expected. I started getting pretty discouraged when we were out on the shoot, especially since we really didn't know what we wanted the project to look like when it was finished. But I felt better about it once I actually started editing and putting a lot of the shots together.
What made this look good was quick cuts. We wanted this to be about 7 minutes long, but shortening it down really helps to deliver it with more power.
