I’m excited to show you my first serious short film ,”Terminated”. Please make use of the HD feature, use good speakers or headphones, and enjoy the show.
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The film’s website with credits & links to crew, Behind the Scenes photos by Mizuki Yoshimitsu and further links in different languages: TERMINATED – Official Website
TERMINATED Film Poster
Preparation
We shot the film on two days in December 2010. There was one preproduction day before the shoot, where I asked everyone (most of the crew, all the actors and some extras came) to meet at the Santa Monica College hangout room. We introduced everyone, went through questions, and did a rehearsal (i.e. 4 chairs instead of a bus) – in order to be able to shoot rogue and with no permits on the street; some shots had to work because we could only do one take, so bringing the DP and the actors on the same page – physically – as I was in my head and what I had gathered from the location scoutings, was very important. There is a few of these rehearsal videos actually online, one of it below – the rehearsal of the first scene:
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Shooting
We used the Canon EOS 7D and self-built rigs for the continuous shots; there was about 25-30 people on set for the two shooting days, most playing double duty in the process – as extras and crew. Even the actors helped build parts of the set, and if I can remember one thing the best, then it was the vibe on set; it was like a big group of friends that knew each other for a long time; so much collaboration, self-motivatedness, efficiency and friendlyness, all under a lot of time pressure, with risk and guerilla-style filmmaking involved – probably the coolest set I’ve ever been on.
Within ten days of the shooting date, I had the VFX and cut finished (ready enough to show it to my classmates at SMC; I made the film within the scope of a Film32 class), and submitted it a few weeks later to Cannes. I waited, got a response along the lines “Bon Jour mon bon ami, thank you for submitting – you have been rejected! Bonne soiree.” and was bummed but optimistic; sent it to the next and the next and the next, and got rejected in all of them. I need to mention that I was a bit overly confident and only submitted it to world-class festivals (Berlinale, Venice Film Festival, Sundance etc.), but in the end I waited about a year and a half for all these festivals to tell me no, and paid so many application fees – as much as the entire film cost, pretty much – that I just decided to put it online.
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Fried Hard Drives and Recuts
Back in 2011, I uploaded a file of the film in SD resolution so the crew and actors could use it for their reels. Now that I wanted to publish it, I obiously needed to render out a Full-HD master. So, I am walking over to the work desk at the production company (www.prodigium-pictures.com) I co-founded in the meantime, take my hard drive that contains the final cut of the film, grab and plug in a power cord that I see on the desk, and “Rrrrzzzz” – the drive literally fries. I accidentally used my laptop power cord, and now my hard drive with the Final Cut Pro project file on there is mush. I try everything to retrieve the data, take the drive out of its shell, dig through autosaves on multiple computers etc. – nothing, the cut is lost. I still had some backups of the AfterEffects files, some sound mixes and the source footage, so I could frankenstein something together again; spent a week perfecting little imperfections, and recutting the cut based on the SD version (what a waste, nearly as long as I took to cut the entire thing in the first place) and what came out of that recreated, re-cut version is what you could see above. I hope you liked it.
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Making Of & Behind the Scenes
The Making Of of TERMINATED is closely documented through blog articles on my blog U, S, and Toby; most of the articles are written in German and English translations can only be read through google-translate at this time. These translations are quite funny. Find the articles below:
- Location Scouting Phase 1: Too good to be true, too impossible to get
German Original | Quite Funny English Translation - Location Scouting Phase 2: We got it
German Original | Quite Funny English Translation - Casting Process Part 1: Casting online on LACasting
German Original | Quite Funny English Translation - Casting Process Part 2: The actual Casting
German Original | Quite Funny English Translation - Tutorial for building the Shoulder Mount we used in TERMINATED
English Original
That's how the police saw us filming, of course without a permit or any sort of protection - but that's why you need to have a ballsy producer (Yonatan Mallinger, I can recommend him) that knows how to deal with the law. 
Related posts:
Tobias Deml is an Austrian Filmmaker and Visual Artist.
2012 Cinematography Reel: 
