Ralph Dickinson shows us the right and wrong ways to make scenes seem dangerous when they're not through take-it-to-the-streets guerrilla filmmaking,

On tonight's show filmmaker Ralph Dickinson shows us some of his shorts and reveals how we can learn from his successes and mistakes in do-it-yourself, guerilla filmmaking. Take a look at the shorts and read his comments on them below.

  • Fishula Meets Sprinkles

    This was shot as a sketch for our character, Fishula. We worked with our friend's baby, Sprinkles, and we made it seem that she was abducted by Fishula and carried through a burning building. Some people who see the clip think we must have scarred the kid's mind.

    In reality, the mother was a few feet away the whole time and there were few people on the set, all of whom were family friends, so the kid was fine. We shot all the baby's scenes first, each in one take, so the baby was on the set as little as possible. Her real father played her father in the scene. The fire was inserted in postproduction, so the baby was never in danger.

  • The Shoplifting Scene

    This is an excerpt from our current project, "My Way." We shot the scene in a large department store because we figured they wouldn't notice us and we could do it quickly and without getting permission.

    Nobody bothered us, but during our final shot a worker saw our actor "shoplifting" and yelled, "Can I help you?!" We quickly told her that we were making a student film and put the item back. She saw the camera and didn't hassle us any more. Her line even made it into the final scene.

  • The Hold-Up Scene

    This is also an excerpt from "My Way" -- a scene depicting a convenience store holdup. We had gotten permission from a store and the police in a small town, but our actor couldn't make the shoot so we had to reschedule in a hurry.

    We found a store in San Francisco, but we didn't alert the police, because we knew we'd have to pay them (since it was San Francisco), and we thought we could get in and out in a hurry. Unfortunately, some neighbors saw us and called the cops. Eight cop cars showed up and the police forced us at gunpoint to lay on the ground.

    Not until they had cuffed us and confiscated our plastic gun did they listen to our explanation that we were shooting a movie. We had to agree that we should have notified them, or at least blocked the door and put a sign on it so that no one could see into the store. We got the shot, though, as well as a good story and some free publicity in the paper. But the moral of the lesson is still "get a permit."


If you want to know more about Dickinson and his films, be sure to visit the website of the "open-source" production company he co-founded, Shared Thunder Productions.