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Failure as Creative Inspiration: How I Shot — and Recorded — My Christmas-Set Musical Long December in 12 Days
Shooting "Long December" (Photo: Joshaun Anderson) In 2015 I directed my first feature. It would be six years before I was able to direct my second. But once I had completed the first draft of that script, we had the film in the can within six months. It was a breakneck pace making Long December, a Christmas-set musical drama about a singer/songwriter chasing his dreams of stardom. Its process was complicated further by my choice to not only fill the story with musical numbers performed by the cast but to capture those performances live on-camera — with no lip-syncing or back-tracking. Pulling it off took a community of artists — musicians, first-time actors, recording engineers and sound designers. It was a wonderful way to spend the holiday season of 2021. And in 12 shooting days we had our movie, which will have its North American VOD release on November 12th.
Here’s how we did it.
During the summer of 2021 I was in the middle of rebuilding what I thought was going to be my second feature — a rural-set thriller that we’ll call The Southern Film. My first film, Fare, a single-location thriller about a ride-share driver, had already come and gone. Shot in 2015 and released in 2017, Fare was both my entry into the business and also where I learned fast-paced, low-resource feature filmmaking. Filmed entirely inside a moving car for $5,000, and in only three days, Fare was essentially a chamber drama with a cast of four. (In full transparency, we added a fourth day of shooting, weeks later, for some pick-ups shots, and we spent another $15,000 to complete the film in post-production. Still, it remains an incredible example of micro-budget filmmaking.) We premiered Fare at Newport Beach in 2016, won a slew of festival awards throughout the country, received glowing reviews from critics, and then sold the film to a boutique distributor for a 2017 release.
Two years later I was deep in pre-production for The Southern Film. We had an amazing cast assembled and financing — just under $1 million — was in place for an 18-day shoot. It was quite a step forward from Fare. But then, six weeks before shooting was to begin in May of 2020, the pandemic put the world into lockdown. At some point over the summer, as we all waited for the industry to cautiously tip-toe back toward production, our financier pulled out. Like many independent projects of that year, The Southern Film fell apart completely.
My natural reaction was to try to rebuild the project — that is, after I had sufficiently mourned the emotional devastation of my film’s shutdown. Like a lot filmmakers who manage to scrape together a meager first feature, I was putting an unhealthy amount of expectation on my second film. In many ways I assumed The Southern Film would be my “big break.” There was sufficient heat on the property to keep it moving — ICM had signed me based on the script, and the project was both the runner up to the 2021 Ford Producer’s Grant at the Sun Valley Film Festival and one of only two American films selected for that year’s Frontières Showcase at Cannes’s Marché du Film. But 18 months after the COVID bell first rang, I was no closer to rebuilding the project.
And so I finally did the thing that I wasn’t able to do prior — I let the film go. I shuttered it, logistically, but more importantly I put it away emotionally. And there, waiting in the shadows of a dream collapsed, was Long December. It was only a kernel of an idea at that time. I loved music films like Once and A Star is Born and I had long wanted to make my own version of something similar. I envisioned casting some of the recording artists that I called friends, and then filming the movie within my local community at the border of the Carolinas, in and around Charlotte. So when I let The Southern Film go, I threw myself into Long December.
By August of that year I had completed the first draft of the screenplay. It was only 47 pages long, but I gambled on the fact that the musical numbers would stretch the film’s run time into feature-length territory (they did). I pegged the budget at $250,000 with a 12-day shoot, a sum and schedule that I felt marginally confident I could execute. Set during the Christmas holiday, we would film in late December and take advantage of the natural decorative production value that the cities of Rock Hill, Fort Mill and Charlotte provided. I enlisted producing support from my friend and colleague Brad Jayne, a fellow South Carolina filmmaker, as well as Caravan, a Charlotte-based production company, and we plowed ahead into active prep.
Casting the lead role of Gabe, the struggling musician searching for his “big break” (yes, he was a proxy for myself), was crucial. I knew I wanted to cast a musician who might have to learn how to be an actor, as opposed to an actor who might have to learn how to be a musician. Over two-thirds of Long December is made up of live musical numbers, so not only was the curation of the soundtrack important, but so was casting the musicians performing those songs.
Stephen Williams was part of my larger social community, although he and I were only nominally acquainted. But I had seen him perform a number of times with his band, Jude Moses. And his brother-in-law was John Mark McMillan, a close friend of mine and by far the most successful recording artist from among our friend group. Stephen even toured with John Mark as part of his band.
Stephen has a unique quality about him. He’s unconventionally handsome and has a startling vocal range. He’s unequivocally singular. And when I saw him play one day during that summer of 2021, I thought that he’d be perfect as the lead of Long December. But Stephen took some convincing. Unlike my fictional character of Gabe, Stephen does not seek attention. Unlike myself, he was not asking when his “big break” would happen. In fact, he was quite content living his life as a local market musician who also laid tile to earn a living. His hesitation to be the star of a film about ambition and success made him all the more appealing to me.
The story was still only an outline at this point, and I wanted to hold off writing the screenplay until after I had cast the Gabe character. I knew a small film like this one needed to draft off of the real lives of its actor-musicians. So once I pegged Stephen as my Gabe, I wrote the script around him. I even created a role for his rock star brother-in-law John Mark, who would play Gabe’s rock star cousin Darren. I knew that John Mark had a tour coming up, and if he and Stephen agreed to do the movie then I could get some amazing concert footage of the two of them on stage.
John Mark was harder to convince than Stephen. As a successful musician, John Mark had more to lose if the project made him look bad. But both men found a measure of comfort in the idea of the other one also doing the film. And when I suggested that we all do a screen test to see if they could even act, they agreed. And that was the linchpin. I found their natural charisma inspiring, and they realized that the words I had written for them were words they had said countless times before. They wouldn’t have to act so hard, after all. We forged ahead, full steam.
Raising the financing was uncharacteristically speedy. As the budget ballooned north of $300,000, I had incredible support from friends, family, and colleagues, with investment shares coming in from $10,000 to $25,000 to $50,000. Rounding out the cast in the non-singing roles were three industry pros: Emily Althaus (Orange is the New Black, Licorice Pizza), Charley Koontz (CSI: Cyber, The Boys), and Maximiliano Hernández (Captain America: Winter Soldier, Griselda). By December of 2021, we were beginning principal photography — only four months after I had let go of The Southern Film.
By far the biggest production challenge was capturing all of the music live on-camera. It was a choice that I made for both economic and creative reasons. It would have cost us more money and time to pre-record all of the film’s music so the musicians could lip-sync on set. If we could effectively record the performances on the day, we would not only capture the music quicker and cheaper, but we’d also harness an authenticity that was central to the story. Nothing pulls me out of a film quicker than when I see a musical performance that is lip-synced for a scene that is intended to feel live and in the moment. For Long December, that feeling of in-the-moment authenticity was crucial.
Nearly every day of shooting, or at least it seemed, we had some musical number to capture. I hired my friend and Nashville-based music producer/composer Kevin Dailey to oversee all of the music for the film, which included original songs written for the story as well as covers of some classic Christmas carols. To capture a song, Kevin and his sound engineer Jacob Early would hide microphones throughout a particular shooting location, or in some cases leave the microphones in plain sight, if a scene allowed for it. Once the audio equipment was in place, Stephen would perform a song just as he might if he were playing it live in the room, to whatever audience of background actors were present. Sound bleed between instruments would be acceptable to us, since the finished result was intended to sound live, as opposed to overly clean and polished like a studio-recorded track. However, audience noise would have to be controlled, so in every take where musicians were playing, any present audience would have to react silently, miming any sing-alongs or applause. Then, after we had captured the various musical takes, we would do a few takes of only audience reactions. And this time it was Stephen and the band who would be miming their actions. For every song, Stephen had a small earpiece blasting a click-track metronome in his ear, so that each take matched rhythmically, allowing us to piece together the final song in the edit.
Naturally, our camera would be adjusting angles, lenses and focal lengths for each take of a song. My director of photography, Chris Calnin, was in tune with each musical number and would prioritize the camera’s shot based on how much steam Stephen might have left in his performance. But invariably, in the edit, I was presented with many instances where I would have to choose between a good sonic take versus a good visual take. Thus, each song’s edit was a creative pull between image and performance — in much the same way that a scene of dialog might be. By and large, whatever you see being performed musically in Long December was the way it was captured there on set, in that very moment. The grand result is, I hope, the authenticity that I was striving for.
In the end, Long December couldn’t have been made had The Southern Film not fallen apart. And I don’t mean that because of timing (although the Long December’s speedy process was integral to its creation). I mean that the emotional pain I was forced to embrace as a result of a failed project was only possible because of that project’s failure. And if we’re whole-hearted artists, we know that our art becomes the place where we wrestle with pain, which can then lead to growth. Long December is a story for every artist who has ever asked if it’s time to let the dream go, as each new year brings with it that heavy hope of “making it.” It’s a film that strives for an authenticity in how it answers that question, and is, I hope, a worthy reflection of one artist’s idea and many artists’ creative efforts. It certainly was a damn joy to make.
Long December won the One In A Million prize at the 2024 Sun Valley Film Festival, which is awarded to the best film made for under $1,000,000. It is available on VOD in North America on 11/12/24, from Electric Entertainment. The film’s soundtrack is available now wherever you stream music. Follow the film on Instagram @longdecember.movie.
