The Organist

We had a goal. From the 1st of January we gave ourselves one year. We wanted to complete a no-budget feature film. From having no script, no story; to finished product.
I’m proud to say that we failed.
It started out as four mates who loved making stuff, and watched too many films, wanting to learn as much as possible, making the jump from short films to a full feature. We began by throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. We looked at what we had access to and came up with the bones of The Organist by February. Since we really only had access to each others houses and apartments, we came up with the idea of Graham Sloane; a door to door salesman: except he comes for your organs.
Having no budget, meant no big name to be attached so we knew we had to rely on a strong concept to be attractive to audiences.
By March we had a first draft, and by July we were into production with a schedule that would last 18 days over 2 months whenever we could get availability from the crew in between their day jobs. The other part of this plan relied on having as small a crew as possible. Not uncommon for small features, but there were some days where we had 3 crew members on set, that’s it.
This skeleton crew relied on us all wearing multiple hats, we were all producing in different capacities:
Xav was our head writer and on-set scripty, and being a very quickly written script, there was a lot to that job since we were constantly re-writing and improvising, up until the very last day of filming.
George played Johnny, he designed the fight scene and any stunt we had to tackle; safety officer and runner on set.
Jack took on not only the role of Graham but also took care of casting, and acquiring music from small local artists. Together we worked on the performance aspect of directing. Since I was also DP and operating the camera, while I was setting up lights and blocking, it was great to be able to rely on Jack to talk through scenes from a performance point of view with the other actors as a kind of dramaturg.
The fluid nature of the scheduling to allow for the crew to take other jobs and attempt to afford rent while we shot, meant that those two months of filming turned quickly into 4 as we tried to accommodate everyones availabilities. We were getting dangerously close to that end of year deadline being completely overshot.
Then Luke, our supporting lead broke his ankle and we were put on hold for another 3 months.
By March the next year, we had finally completed principal photography; and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
We had started with just an exercise to improve our craft, and we had fell in love with the story and process. We were closer with this tight knit crew than I had ever expected to be.
We didn’t have the funds to reshoot anything, so getting it right on the first go was so important. Being able to take those extra months to re-write the final act to better suit the film we had made, was an absolutely invaluable asset.
The amount I have learnt not only about directing, but about story, producing and the emotional toll a feature can take has been invaluable and has solidified filmmaking as the addiction that I don’t want to beat.