Making a Film

Chance is a true story of a teen love triangle where one of the boys takes his own life.  Chance was a young man that I coached in over 600 baseball games from the age of 6 until his death at age 16.  Above all, the film is based on a love of Chance.  

Community Mourns Smith - Article

The film is faith and family friendly. Matthew Modine (Stranger Things) leads the cast that includes Amanda Leighton (The Fosters), Tanner Buchanan (Designated Survivor) and Blake Cooper (Maze Runner). If you are a fan of Matthew, you will find lots of private moments with him in the behind-the-scenes clips that follow. The Chance film explores the depth of teen hearts.

The following uses the analogy of building a house for making a movie: 

• The Premise of a Movie is the Dream Home Conceived. Chance’s life and death had touched us. There were 1,200 people at his funeral, and all asked the question “Why?” Chance’s story had to capture his joy and emotion. It had to stay true to the facts. The story came from hours of recorded interviews with the people that took part in the true events, including text messages and police statements from the teens.

• The Screenplay is the Blueprint for the Home. My son Seth and I wrote the screenplay. Screenplays are approximately one page per minute of screen time. They detail what the audience sees and hears, but also provide instructions for the cast and crew.

This link below is the screenplay for three scenes from the film:

• The opening of the film where a sister makes a tragic discovery.

• Where 12-year-old Chance tells his coach he was held back in school.

• At the county fair where 16-year-old Chance is concerned about the “other boy.”

Screenplay - Three Scenes

Here are some photos of the real-life Chance:

Pre-Production – Early Planning

Early Leaders for the Film Team – A Group of 6.  The film needed people that loved Chance and his story.

And then the Key 3 – Producer, Director, Cinematographer

Producer Mike Hagerty

1st to be attached to the effort several years before filming. Mike ran the production hands-on. I met Mike H. through his wife, Fox Sports NFL sideline reporter Laura Okmin. Laura does a cameo in the film as Matthew Modine’s wife.

The key 3 traveled repeatedly to the Daly’s home at the Flash Complex to plan the details of an effort that involved approximately 50 crew, dozens of actors, hundreds of “extras,” and a 7-digit investment by the Dalys.  

Pre-Production – Assembling the Crew

In our home analogy, the production phase (where video and audio are created) is like manufacturing the building materials. Post Production is where the house is put together using the materials. The is no Home Depot – everything must be created.  

We had to assemble the crew to manufacture beautiful materials. The crew came primarily from Los Angeles, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Ohio (where the film was shot).

Corey (Cinematographer) brought key camera people with him from New Mexico, towing a trailer full of equipment (including very expensive lenses). The Dalys bought the two Panasonic Varicams (Ozarks and Better Call Saul used the same cameras) in an LLC that rented them back to the Production Company that they also owned. The Varicam is especially sensitive in low light. Productions normally rent cameras.   

Gaffers (electrical) and Grips (building) wire and build equipment necessary for the camera department such as lighting, car rigging, trolley tracks for moving shots, plexiglass to keep cameras from getting hit by baseballs, and much more. A lot of creativity goes into getting the camera in the right place at the right time with mobility and safety. A huge truck full of equipment was rented.

Production Design and the Art Department arrange what you see in a given location – walls, furniture, colors etc. Heather Paterson from Los Angeles and Dexlon Cooksey from Louisiana were chosen to lead those departments.  Details from the film like a house being toilet papered or a mailbox being destroyed were designed by them. 

Here is a clip of the two trying to figure out what to do for the mailbox scene:

Sound was a constant challenge for the film, and there was a change in the leadership in the middle of the film. A lot of the sound had to be “dubbed” (replaced) in Post-Production. Key to sound is the correct placement of the boom mike such that you optimize the sound without being visible in the frame causing a reshoot. The head sound person monitors with headphones and sensitive measuring equipment. Fixing sound problems was a significant effort as we brought actors back into dubbing studios in the cities where they lived (LA, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Washington DC).

Pre-Production - Casting

The casting of the seasoned actors happened primarily in Los Angeles. 

Casting Director Ricki Maslar was joined by the Dalys, Producer Hagerty and Director Crye at every casting audition session at Kappa Studios in Burbank, CA.  Here is a picture from the casting room with actor/stuntman Gattlin Griffith who played Chance’s best friend Ben at age 16.

The 6-year-old Chance actor (Lukas Eaby) came from Washington DC. 

Lukas lives for baseball, and was just perfect with his missing front baby tooth and spectacular energy. Veteran actress Jennifer Baxter plays Chance’s mother. Here are two pictures of Lukas with the one between scenes having his father Mike in the background.

Lukas’ father is a professional associate of Producer Hagerty’s wife Laura Okmin. 

The film was shot during Laura’s offseason from her NFL work, so she was on set with her dog frequently.

Here’s a 30-second clip of Director Crye “auditioning” some of the guys that made the 6-year-old movie team. 

The group was mostly 4 & 5-year-olds, with one real character I nicknamed Tank:

And Producer Hagerty personally auditioning a 6-year-old that made the team:

There was much debate about the 12-year-old baseball team (especially the 12-year-old Chance character), as to whether to cast actors from Los Angeles or boys from Cincinnati that were special baseball players and could learn to act.  I wanted the best youth baseball ever seen on screen, so the 12-year-old team was cast locally in Cincinnati with kids that could flat-out play ball.  

12-year-old Chance is played by Jake Hertzman, who exceeded everybody’s expectation with his touching performance. Actual tournaments were going on at the Flash Baseball location, and we had to schedule production and tournament game schedules to allow the actors to play for their real-life teams on break. 

Pre-Production – Training the Boys

Even though we chose 12-year-old boys that were already great at baseball, some of the drills and plays they had to make stretched the limit. 

The drills follow military precision.  I am the real coach Mike that Matthew Modine plays in the film.  I led the baseball training, and we had baseball practices with some test camera shots in the couple months leading up to production.  We hired my long-term baseball associate Roger Strunk to help as the “baseball wrangler,” and he also appears as Matthew’s assistant coach in the film.  The other assistant to Matthew is Coach Anthony, who plays himself in the film as we didn’t believe we could find an actor with as much personality as him.  Anthony played for me for years while also helping to coach Chance’s younger Flash team.  Both of these men coached Chance in real-life. Both the real-life team and the movie team loved Anthony, who played 4-years of college center field.

Me coaching the boys in one of the drills pre-production:

Matthew jumping into practice with the guys when he first showed up:

Right before production, Andrew from the movie team was throwing batting practice to his brother and was hit in the head with a line drive losing his ability to communicate. We had to replace him last minute. While he has fully recovered, it was a major injury. He was able to make it back for a cameo in the film:

We didn’t worry about the 6u boys playing baseball. At the T-ball level, we decided to just let it roll. Very little was scripted for the young ones. When Matthew shows surprise during those scenes - it was because they did the unexpected.

Since we were dealing with non-actors with the young people, those that had key parts needed some training. My wife Pamela coaches actors across the country, and took on the task of getting performance from these great young men. Here she is working with a 4-year-old who became known as “little guy.”

The SAG Union (Screen Actors Guild) has rules that greatly impact a budget beyond their union members. Any 6-year-old that spoke received the same daily pay as the adult actors working for “scale.”  Some of the boys bought great toys, some saved for college, and a few donated to charities for teen suicide prevention.

Pre-Production – Props & Locations

My son Seth was involved in every aspect of the movie. 

He was a serious ballplayer and gathered the metal bats which were time-period correct (2012), but no longer legal in youth baseball for safety reasons (exit-velocity). Seth also gathered 2012 era phones, including the one with the cracked screen that is in the saddest scene.

Another important prop was the “kissing monkies” that real-life Chance had given to his 12-year-old girlfriend Shelbi. 

The real-life Shelbi still had it (cherished it). She lent it to the movie. The real-life Shelbi was the last person to see Chance alive.

Here is a photo of a scene on swings which led to the actual first smooch for the young actors.

It was a spiritual decision to use the actual shed where Chance died.

Chance’s family no longer lives in the home. Producer Hagerty and I had been to the site several times before deciding to knock on the door. We were invited in and spent an hour at the kitchen table with Janet the owner. She had a remarkable story of how our paths had crossed in the past. I told her a story of how a dove had landed on the dock the night of Chance’s funeral and looked his father in the eye. Through tears she told us that the dove was still there by the back pond. We tried to capture the dove scene in the movie despite concerns that the audience wouldn’t believe it, but after much time and expense the trained doves were not that trained. Here is a video clip at Chance’s real-life home where the dove is supposed to land on a spot on the dock railing as it did in real-life:

Production – Logistics

Logistics were significant for a project of this magnitude. Dozens of professionals (Cast & Crew) descended on rural Brown County, Ohio, about 40 miles outside of Cincinnati.

• Housing everyone in a county without hotels was an effort. We rented and furnished a number of houses and apartments. They weren’t fancy.

• Our transportation department had over a dozen drivers who normally were the school bus drivers for the same high school we used as a location.

• Parking control was important at locations, as we could not have any car later than 2012 show up in a shot.

• When we moved from our main location, it was like moving a small city as we had 8 full size trailers for actors and hair and makeup.

• I gained a new appreciation for the role of makeup and hair. It was great watching the inexperienced boys being pampered.

Production: The Shoot – Creating the Building Materials

The film (105 minutes) has 3 sections:

1. Chance Age 6 – 8 minutes. The joy of being 6 comes through.

2. Chance Age 12 – 37 minutes. The joy of baseball and discovering girls mixed with coming of age challenges for an emotional guy.

3. Chance Age 16 – 60 minutes. A teen love-story with a tragic ending with a dose of hope and faith. A close look inside a true story and the impact on so many.

Age 6 Deleted Scene

It is difficult when you pay for expensive building materials that you love and are non-returnable, only to find out that they don’t fit with the final house.

When Chance got his 1st bike he crashed a few times trying to ride it and gave up. He would run alongside his bike with the neighborhood kids, and because he was so athletic he was faster than they were riding. We fell in love with a little girl actress (Kendyl), and designed a scene where the girls bike gang runs into the boy’s bike gang. We hired police to shut down the country road. It was by far the most difficult scene for me to accept not including in the film. Here is a close up on Kendyl from the edit room floor:

Matthew with the 6-Year-Old Boys 

At the heart of the film is Matthew’s (Coach Mike) relationship with his guys. It was real. This was a behind the scenes clip with the 6-year-olds.

A Funny Drill

There’s a funny drill Matthew runs with the little guys called “Kill the Rabbit” that creates an attach mentality for pitchers.  Matthew wasn’t sure how he felt about the thought, but ended up doing it.

Matthew with the 12-Year-Old Boys

Matthew Modine loves baseball almost as much as he loves kids. They had to keep track of him between scenes because he was always running off with the guys. Here they were hitting him fly balls and he got drilled in the wrist (“I can see the laces”), which the kids seemed to enjoy:

Matthew took one of the boys to the Cincinnati Reds game and gave him his cellphone number in case he lost him. Months later, while filming in Italy, he got multiple calls from Spencer (thinking he was calling his 12-year-old friend Matt in a 5-hour different time zone) in the middle of the night.  In the morning in Italy, Matthew Modine calls and asks “What’s up Spence?” Spencer replied that he thought he was calling his friend Matt.  Matthew answered “What – we’re not friends anymore.”

Matthew with the Teen Boys

We have a fire engine on the property that is used to water two of the fields. Matthew hoped up top and used the deluge gun to spray the boys in the canoes at the rate of 600 gallons/minute.

Coach Tom House

Tom House is a very famous coach to both Major League pitchers (Nolan Ryan) and NFL quarterbacks (Tom Brady, Drew Brees).  The Disney film Million Dollar Arm has Bill Paxton playing Tom as the coach that trains the young men from India.  Tom has been a baseball friend of mine over the years, and agreed to play himself in our film.  He knew Chance from training kids at Flash Baseball, and has done much research (PhD in sports psychology) on the impact of texting and social media on young minds.  A life purpose for Tom is to sound the alarm on the dehumanizing impact of texting and other concerns about how the brain works in young people and society’s response. While on set, we found him holding court with the 3 main actors from the 12-year-old movie team and their mothers where boys and moms were touched (3 minutes but worth it for your children):

Shattering the Van Window

The only significant trouble Chance got into in real life was over hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat.  In doing that he shattered the window of his van one night.  We bought special movie glass for the scene, and it still did not break easily.  They added a glass breaking tip taped to the bat.  Here is where it finally breaks:

So Hot

14-hour-days are common in production. Most days were over 90 degrees, and air conditioning was often turned off to reduce noise. We had coolers with ice and rags.

Camera Movement

There are a lot of techniques movies use to accomplish camera movement including Steadicam and cranes. For our film the most common were tracks with a cart for the camera operator, the back of a pick-up truck, and rigging cameras to cars. 

All of the equipment came with the grip truck package that we rented. Grips do little construction projects to support the camera department.Using the same mailbox scene.

The specifics of the love triangle story came largely from interviewing the “other boy’s” mother. Pamela Daly plays her in the movie, and Tanner Buchanan (Kiefer Southerland’s son in Designated Survivor) plays the other boy.

City/Country Convergence

Things like huge bonfires are normal in the country. In this clip a very competent crew member is reviewing a very tiny fire extinguisher followed by me lighting a very large bonfire:

The script originally had a scene with Matthew shooting skeet with the 16-year-old guys - something I did regularly. The LA based crew was choking on that from a safety perspective so we ended up reluctantly giving in.

Brown County Fair

Brown County, Ohio is rural, and the Fair is the biggest event of the year.  This is where Chance developed his relationship with Brooke. The Fair happens in the fall, and schools are closed for the week. Since the movie was shot in the summer, we shot the actors at an extravagant summer church festival and Corey returned by himself to shoot the fair shots. In the magic of the edit room, everything came together. 

Wraps – It’s nice to know how people feel at the end of production.

Blake Cooper (Maze Runner) and Amanda Leighton (The Fosters) play the teen Chance and his girlfriend Brooke. 

They were a joy to work with and loved by all. Here is where they were surprised late at night on the final day with the “wrap” for their scenes and the entire film.

Here is director Crye in a short clip the same night of wrap.

Here’s Mathew Modine’s earlier wrap.

Post Production

Post Production is the phase where the building materials are finalized and the house (movie) is assembled. 

For the Chance movie, these were the steps:

• Director Crye worked with our great Editor Todd Sandler for approximately 6 weeks pulling together the first draft.

• The Dalys (Pamela, Michael, Seth) traveled from Ohio to Los Angeles in an RV where they lived for the next 4 months.

• We joined in the editing process with John and Todd for an additional 8 weeks until “picture lock.”

• We then moved the process from Todd’s apartment to Kappa Studios for approximately a couple of months. At Kappa, in order:

  • The filmed was rendered from Todd’s format to a format utilized in the next phase.

  • A color correction was handled 1st by Kappa then received detailed refinements with Seth.

  • After Todd’s picture lock, it was important not to fundamentally alter the video timeline.

  • Kappa’s VFX department (special effects) created the content for filling in phone screens, scoreboards and more with attractive realistic content. Patrick Murphy (my guy) is the general manager at Kappa and came from a VFX background. Phone screens were shot blank during production and the VFX content (a building material) was created by Kappa working with Seth. Text messages were either shown on the phone screen or as a bubble as in comics. Here are a photo and a clip showing the two techniques

• Once all of the visual content was finalized, we moved to the sound department.

• Matthew Modine came in to watch the film and give feedback when it was pretty far along. We incorporated his suggestions where possible.

Most of the building materials for a movie are created during production. Virtually all of the video was created for Chance during that phase.  

Post Production – Sound

For sound, there are significant additional building materials created during post production, including the music soundtrack, dubbing (re-recording of actor lines), and foley (natural everyday sound effects). The Sound Correction was the single greatest effort at Kappa Studios. Beto identified lines from approximately 20 different actors that needed to be replaced in studio (dubbed).

Seth is an accomplished violinist and worked with composer Ian Honeyman in his Santa Monica studio on days we weren’t at Kappa. Ian also spent several days in the sound editing room at Kappa with the team. All music in the film is original composition and performance.  

Angela Parrish (La La Land) wrote the lyrics to 3-original songs and did the vocals, accompanied by Ian who wrote the music. She sent me a recording on New Year’s Eve and it pierced my heart. I immediately forwarded it to Matthew Modine. Not one word was changed from her original iPhone recording. Here is a music video of Ian and Angela performing the song in Ian’s studio.

Distribution

I am handling the business end of the film myself.  We had two private screenings of the film:

• North Hollywood for 160 people. Cast, Crew, Distributors and friends.

• Cincinnati for 300 people. Here is Matthew Modine introducing the film in Cincy.

Major League Baseball teams have shown support for the film. 

Jake (12-year-old Chance) threw out the first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds Game, and Lukas (6-year-old Chance) did the same at a Baltimore Orioles game.

Theatrical Release

Our theatrical release, which was slated for April 2020, was cancelled due to COVID. We opened at a Cincinnati Drive in on May 22, 2020 and had 1,400 cars over 3 evenings, leading the nation in per screen box office for the weekend. Here is the drive-in in the rain:

In the era of COVID – we now move to digital release in your home.