Alex Ferrari - Director/Writer/Producer/Editor/Colorist/VFX
Artist/Production Designer
Jorge F. Rodriguez - Writer/Producer/Production Designer
Sean Falcon - VFX Superviser/SHAKE Compositor
Dan Cregan - VFX Artist/Compositor/Storyboard & Concept Artist
Mark Roumelis - Sound Designer/Composer

Big - I’ve just watched your film “Broken” for the second time and I was struck by the high quality acting from leads Samantha Jane Polay, Derek Evans, and especially Paul Gordon. What are their backgrounds and where did you find them?

Alex:
They came to us through the open casting we had. We posted casting news on craigslist.org and we got about 200 people who were interested in working. We were very lucky.

Big - How did your past experiences in the industry prepare you for the challenges of Broken? You guys wrote, produced, directed, and edited it.

Alex:
I co-wrote, directed, edited, and produced BROKEN. I come from a post production background and when I was writing the original draft I was writing in the visual effects into the script that I need my team and myself could do. Editing really set me up to be a better director. When I'm
on set, I'm editing the movie in my head as I shoot. It really helps! I have been editing and post supervising commercials, music videos & features for about ten years and been directing commercials for about six. I own my own Production/Post Production company called The Enigma factory, Inc. (http://www.enigmafactory.com) and am based in South Florida.

Jorge:
I co-wrote and produced BROKEN. I have been producing for about 5 years. I also was a nurse for several years then became a fight attendant and did that for almost 13 years. During that time I also owned several businesses including a comic book store. Alex and I had been looking for something to work on for quite some time. He approached me with a story he wrote
during his college days. He'd rewritten it and both my wife and I thought it was really good. The he asked me to take a swipe at it and he liked the way I went with it. We then collaborated on it for a few months and Broken was born.

Big - Was it significantly different wearing all the hats compared to wearing only one, as in the past?

Alex:
I always have worn more than one hat on a shoot. It's just the way I work.

Jorge:
Alex handled the Directing, Post Production, and VFX, while I handled the bulk of the Production duties, practical FX, and props. We shared the production design, stunt coordinating, as well as writing the script together based on Alex's original story. With a budget this tight, wear different hats is a job requirement.

Big - What specific challenges did you come up against that were unexpected from this expansion of roles?

Alex:
The biggest challenge for me to learn how to slow down. We averaged about 125-130 setups a day. I need to learn to take a break on set. That was my biggest challenge.

Jorge:
One of the biggest obstacles, believe it or not, was for Alex and I to learn how to collaborate. It took some time but we found that writing alone then giving notes to each other was what worked for us. As far as the budget and time were concerned we worked on Broken after we got home from our "real" jobs and on every chunk of free time we could find. And since we
financed it ourselves we really didn't have much choice but to make this happen with the money we had. Quitting and Failing were not options.

Big - Can you tell me a little bit about the A.G. Holley State Hospital where Broken was filmed?

Jorge:
Broken was shot and written around A.G. Holley State Hospital and sho over the course of 5 days. Several other films had been shot there and the staff was very accommodating. As for it being an easy, that‚s another story. Consider that a hurricane hit the area the week we were scheduled to shoot and that we had to postpone the actual shoot for a week. When we got
there a week a later a lot of the areas we had already production designed for the shoot were either damaged or they had moved all our stuff to make room for plywood and equipment during the storm. We decided to incorporate a lot of the damage into the script and were ready to shoot the following week. Their only concern at the facility was that it was going to be used to hand out FEMA aid to victims of the hurricane, but they assured us that they only expected about 5,000 people. When we showed up on the first day we couldn't believe our eyes. There were people everywhere. By the end of the week over 200,000 people had gone there for aid. Needless to say we started and finished late everyday. And also on a personal note, my wife gave birth to my third daughter Jessie the night before we started, so I was pretty wiped out for the rest of the production.

Big - Where did the idea for Broken’s plot come from?

Alex:
I came up with the idea in college and kept it locked away for years until I decide to resurrect it for BROKEN. I wrote the original script for the short and then brought it to Jorge to see if he wanted to put his "stank" on it. I started to work on it with Jorge and then BROKEN was born. Together we developed the final script for the short and are currently working on the full screenplay. We always had a vision of making this story to a feature. The characters were just begging for it!

Jorge:
Alex brought me the story and immediately I saw its potential as the type of calling card we could use for our freshman project together. It was a feature waiting to be built. The short became act 1 and 2 of the feature... with a couple of new twists.

Big - What writers and directors are your greatest influences?

Alex:
My major influences for "Broken" were Robert "The Man" Rodriguez and David "screw the studio" Fincher among others. Both those guys make films their way and do it with a great amount of style and control. "Se7en" and "Fight Club" are on my top five of all time, and almost all of Rodriguez's films as well. Also, comics like "Sin City" and "100 Bullets" had an influence.
They have fun telling stories ... this is suppose to be fun. If not, we would get real jobs.

Jorge:
Action/Adventure, Sci-fi, and Horror. Although a good human drama is hard to beat. As far as Directors are concerned Roman Polanski and John Huston are two of my favorites along with modern filmmakers like David Fincher, Cameron Crowe, and James Cameron.

Big - How long did it take to create and produce Broken? I mean from the script writing to casting to shooting to editing.

Alex:
Pre-production started in August 2004. I wanted to have a long prep period so I could have time to work with the actors and design every aspect of the short. We all had jobs, so this was done at night and after hours. Principle photography began in October 2004 and lasted 5 days. We had a budget of $8000 to make the entire short. We finished post in January 2005. I was
storyboarding the shots in my head as we were writing the script. With the help of Dan Cregan (Storyboard/Concept Artist) we storyboarded almost every single shot in BROKEN. He finished having a 55 page book of storyboards. I think you need storyboards at a low-budget level indy because we were attempting to do some complicated camera moves. set ups and action.
The crew needed to have a clear idea of what I wanted and I believe that that prep work really paid off.

Shooting was a crazy time, the location was hot as hell. About 95 degrees in that basement. I lost 10 pounds that week. All in all it was a great shoot.

I edited the first cut in 2 weeks. then started sending out VFX plates to the guys so they could start working. After the FINAL CUT was agreed by Jorge and myself I began color timing the short to get the look I was going for. As for the color correction, the filter packages I used were Magic Bullet, G Film, Stib's Simple Levels and a FCP's color corrector. I found that Simple Levels helped me crush the black in a way that the entire image wasn't affected. I also used garbage matte to cut out sections of the frame and color correct them individually. The key is good lighting and having a design in mind before going into post. I did a lot of experimenting and
layering techinques in FCP to get the look. Sometimes I look back and forget how I got there. Just play around ALOT with the tools.

Apple's SHAKE is the mac daddy of composting software. There is a reason Lord of the Rings and the Matrix used this software package. It is built to do one thing and one thing alone...COMPOSITE!! The ease of use and power of the software is crazy. It is a node based system while After Effects is a timeline based system, which is cool for editing but slows you down for VFX work. Anyone who has ever used a 3D program like Maya or a high end
GFX box like Inferno can tell you node editing is the way to go. BTW, we did ALL the over 100 VFX shots in about two and half weeks, working nights and weekends, this would of been impossible in After Effects. Shake allows you to render one project and keep working on another. Bottomline, SHAKE is the way to go! Sorry if I got to techie back there.

Jorge:
What he said. But we were developing the story for 3 months before that.

Big - What do you hope to accomplish with Broken?

Alex:
We want to show the "industry" what we could do with little or no money. To prove that you can make a action/thriller that has high production value and that has a story.

Jorge:
Our desire was to create a high concept action/thriller that incorporated both depth of story as well as visual and practical effects for a non-existent budget.

Big - Have you placed Broken into the festival circuit, if so where can Horrorview’s reader catch a screening?

Alex:
The next screening is in Las Vegas, NV - September 23, 24 & 25

Also, we will be releasing BROKEN on DVD in August and it will be jam packed with almost 3 hours of Special Features on how we made it. For more info goto: http://www.whatisbroken.com/dvd.html

Big - Have you decided on a next project? If so, can you tell me about it?

Alex:
Working on the feature version of BROKEN and writing the full screenplay with Jorge. We are currently in talks with producers about developing and making the feature... wish us luck!

Jorge:
My main focus is finishing the feature version of Broken, although I may be producing a romantic comedy this fall.

Big - Can you tell me a little bit about the score? (I know there was a credit listing the composer but I couldn’t find it when I went back to look for it…) Can you tell me a little bit about the composer?

Alex:
Independent movies are infamous for having dreadful sound and little or poor sound design. Our Mixer Eric Moorman worked closely with Sound Designer/Composer Mark Roumelis to avoid that. We recorded through both the camera and the DAT while on set, giving post sound two quality signals in case we had problems with one.

Mark:
The orchestration combined electronic and acoustic "instruments"; however, as a function of budget, the source of the score was entirely electronic. The sound design contributed much to the sustained tension and was crafted with attention to pitch, tempo, dynamics and timbre as they related to the musical score.

Big - It seemed like you went with post-production sound. Is that the case?

Alex:
Yes and no. We recorded live sound on location but add a lot of post sound design in post. The action sequence is entirely post sound.

Big - You describe 8000 visual effects in the marketing material for Broken. I noticed that for the most part I wasn't noticing the effects shots. Can you reveal what your favorite effects are? How about the effect that was the hardest to pull off?

Alex:
Actually, it was only 100 vfx shots. Though if we would had had 8000 vfx shot that would have been cool.

(Big: My mistake, the 8000 refers to the total cost of Broken's production.)

Sean:
All of the fx work was done inside of Apple's Shake. We only had a limited amount of time to do these fx, so once I finished a composite and gave it to Alex, I had to have to ability to make changes quickly as we were trying to make a January deadline. As for the matte painting shots, I had recently shot some stormy skies down here in Florida during our "record setting" hurricane year with my digital camera, so I combined a couple of those shots and made a sky. I then created the foreground tree using Maya's paint effects.

Dan:
Well, in most cases the best effects aren't noticed! I'd say my favorite effect is one that passes by in an instant and that would be the knife throw passing through Gabriel's neck. It was a CG knife made in Maya that was composited in and animated with Shake. Getting the timing right was the key and I think the effect came out pretty convincing. The spark hits, believe it or not were the hardest to nail down for me. We only had a few to choose from and making them appear different and random wasn't easy. In the end we were somewhat satisfied with what we were able to pull off.

Big - What was the ratio of physical effects to digital effects?

Dan:
I'd say mostly CG. The practical effects were basically the make-up, lighting and the guacomole gun... digital for everything else. I'd say... 70% digital and 30% practical. It's kind of hard to nail down though.

Big - And finally? No shell casings in the big gun battle… why?

Alex:
Dan can take this one.

Dan:
Well, I'll take this one. Originally, we intended a lot of shells for the big gun fight but in the end only one brief sequence has them. It was mostly a time decision. We had a number of effects that we needed topull off in a really short amount of time so we decided that they would be
added only if we could get to them. In the end we figured that if the viewer was thinking about the shells and not the story at that point we had lost them anyway. Very few people have actually noticed so I guess for the most part we accomplished what we set out to. Thanks for noticing though...

Big- A big thanks to the guys from Broken. Check out their website and catch a screening of their film. It’s well worth it.