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More Than Friends? (2002)
Production Notes
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Nearly 150 people came out to the casting calls for the film, which took place during the first week of June 2002.
“More Than Friends?” was shot from the first week of July to the first week of August 2002 (two days of shooting each week).
It took nine days to shoot the film. An average day of shooting lasted 10 hours. The longest day was the interior computer center shoot, which lasted 13 ½ hours.
The film was shot on DVCam with the SONY PD150, a prosumer digital video camera.
About 14 hours of footage was shot. The film’s running time is 26 minutes.
The film cost about $2,000 to make.
While all the main actors in the film had performed on stage, none of them had starred in a film before.
The film marked the second collaboration of Director Jeff Burns and Director of Photography Keith Andrews.
About half of the film was shot at the Darrow School in New Lebanon, NY. The Darrow School, which was used for all the interior dorm room scenes, is a boarding school for high school students.
Over 90% of the items used to dress Alex and Kevin’s room in the film belonged to Director Jeff Burns.
Over $50 in ice cream was purchased at Kurver Kreme to use in the ice cream stand scene in the film since the ice cream kept melting on the hot summer day. The owner of Kurver Kreme was kind enough to reduce the price to about $30.
A swimming pool cleaning pole, purchased by Director of Photography Keith Andrews for $20, was used as the boom on the production.
The exterior campus scenes were supposed to be shot at Siena College. However, the night before the shoot, Director Jeff Burns found out that about 300 screaming kids were going to be participating in a fair at the college, very close to where shooting was going to take place. Jeff called all the cast, crew, and extras that night to tell them that the shoot was being changed to a new location. The shoot went off successfully, even though he did not have permission to shoot at the backup location. Siena College was used for the interior and exterior computer center scenes.
For the exterior campus scenes, a dedicated group of about a dozen extras was repeatedly reused to represent all the background in the scene.
It took 15 takes to get the first frisbee hit of Alex right and a dozen takes for the second frisbee hit.
While shooting the scene where Alex sends Ashley the e-mail, Joe Starr (Kevin) fell asleep in the middle of a take.
For about half of the shoot, Director Jeff Burns was driving around with a donut as one of his tires as he was putting all his money into the production and didn’t have enough money to buy a new tire.
Lunch on the production consisted of pizza, pizza, subs, and more pizza.
The film was edited by Jeff Burns and Keith Andrews over a period of four months using Adobe Premiere 6.5.
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