Lee and Lin tried to minimize the turmoil of low-budget production through storyboarding, but this wasn't always adequate groundwork. Notes Lin, "You go to all the locations during preproduction and everything seems fine, but things change when you get on location due to time restraints. While storyboarding you can find the essence of each scene, so when some crisis occurs, you're prepared. For example, while filming the church scene [in which Phil accompanies a potential suitor to her house of worship], we had a power outage. I had to throw the storyboard away and go with what I could shoot given the situation. And for the football scene [in which the non-athletic Phil scores a personal coup by tackling Jim, a beefcake jock] everyone showed up at the wrong park in Brentwood; by the time we got everyone together, the sun was going down, so I had to cut the scene by a third."
Financial constraints were also evident in terms of lens usage: "Sometimes I planned on using a longer lens, but with the time constraints, I couldn't do that," Lin says. "With a longer lens, you need time to work things out more carefully, and we didn't have that kind of time."
Shopping for Fangs' best scenes are those in which the filmmakers transformed their limitations into assets. One such sequence is a sexual encounter between Phil and Sammi (Jennifer Hengstenberg) which occurs in a dark room lit with a strobing white light. "That was fun," says Wiegand. "We undercranked the camera and there was a grip holding a light, swinging it back and forth, trying to make it look as wacky and funky as possible." Adds Lin, "The hardest part was that I had assured the two actors that nipples and private areas were not going to show, so we had to basically glue bits of pantyhose onto them."
Another time-saving technique was the handheld shooting of Trinh's sequences. Comments Wiegand, "The BL-4 is pretty heavy, and we were shooting with 400' and 1,000' magazines. Sometimes all we had was a 1,000' roll, and we didn't have time to break it down into a smaller package for handheld work. So we'd have this 1,000' load on the camera, which, with the magazine, the lens, and the mattebox, weighed about 45 pounds. I only weigh 115 pounds, and I was carrying a 45-pound camera on my shoulder, trying to do these shots where I was bending over to follow someone's feet and then tilting up to their face. That was rough."
Another effective sequence presents Phil's transformation from respectable short-haired accountant into wild-haired werewolf. Lin wanted to reveal this metamorphosis in one continuous shot, but the budget couldn't accommodate the necessary special effects. The dilemma was solved with clever camerawork and editing. Wiegand explains, "First, we created a streetlight effect that would be bright enough to light Phil as he walked under it, but still allow everything else drop off to black. Starting in darkness, we dollied with him as he walked through the light and then back into black." This was repeated with successively elaborate makeup effects added to the actor. With the shots cut together in sequence, the result appears as a single shot in which Phil walks through a series of dark and light patches beneath streetlamps. As we catch sight of him at each interval, he's further into his wolfen mutation.
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