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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Director/editor Michael Madison also plays character Shane Green in Delivered.

When Nelson Madison Films’ director, producer and editor Michael Madison and producing partner Linda Nelson set out to make their third feature-length crime thriller, Delivered, they quickly found themselves dealing with all the old familiar problems of independent filmmaking—a small budget being at the top of the list. Happily, thanks to new affordable technology such as the RED camera and Adobe’s Creative Suite 5, this story has a happy ending.

“We developed the story, characters and settings with the idea that we’d be able to raise a substantial budget, maybe up to $5 million,” reports Nelson. “So we thought big from the very start.”

She’s not kidding. Inspired by the films of Clint Eastwood and Michael Mann, with nods to such classics as Bullitt, True Romance and Vanishing Point, the film uses the Mojave Desert as the backdrop for a gritty story focusing on betrayal and redemption.

Cinematographer Ricky Fosheim with the RED ONE camera. The production shot in the Mojave Desert in 100º-plus temperatures, but the camera still held up well.

“Interesting characters were a priority,” notes Nelson. “So often indie films have just a few characters, all the same age, and they’re about the college experience, but we wanted something very different, with big ideas. So our characters are of all ages, with different ethnicities, and then, as it’s a thriller, we have beautiful women, cars and guns, and hopefully all the ingredients that make a movie exciting.”

The team wanted to achieve the best look and production value they could afford and decided early on to shoot with RED. “That was critical to us and was part of why we really researched all our editing options,” she adds.

Ultimately, the film’s budget came in “way, way under $1 million,” points out Madison. “We financed it ourselves, so anything that helped us in production and post, like the RED and CS5, were key to this project.”

Production
Although the film used more than 20 locations and a large cast, the team shot for just 27 days—a result of good prep. Madison storyboarded every scene, and their production board “was extremely well organized and worked through,” says the director. “So by the time we got on set, we knew exactly what we had to get in terms of coverage each day.”

The company wanted it to be a SAG film, so they went with the SAG low-budget agreement and used seven interns on set. Says Nelson, “It was also important that it was a good educational experience, and we actually had a teacher and classroom on set,” says Nelson. “The interns were theater arts students from South El Monte High School who had access to all the best equipment, so we had air-brush make-up, and they built all the props and worked on the film for months during preproduction. They did everything, from lighting to grip to data wrangling, and were a huge help.”

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