So the biggest thing that's happened to me since we last spoke is this:
I'm on the cover of this week's JHU Gazette! They did a piece on four of the senior Woodrow Wilson Fellows and subsequently took a photo of me staring down the camera while holding a camera in front of a computer and subsequently chose that image to grace the cover of their publication (we could get into how I then used a computer to take a picture of myself holding up a picture of myself but that would be EXTRA dumb). Because the main point of all of this is that--I won't mince words--I am now a celebrity. Nowhere on campus can I escape my own self-serious visage. Not to brag, but a student in one of my classes said to me "hey, I read that article about you in the JHU Gazette."
Besides throwing wood into the fire of my burgeoning celebrity, the article also served to substantiate this whole filmmaking process It publically and officially announced the premiere (May 12th, 7th P.M, my loyal readers). Right now the film is just an unexported (and half unedited) file on Final Cut Pro, but no matter what happens it will always have been a thing that was going to happen. And there's something cool about that.
Substantiation is something I want desperately. I really want to show the film to people. Not (just) because I'm desperate for people's approval, but because I'm growing increasingly interested in film as event. With this movie I feel like I didn't just bring to my fruition my artistic vision. I also captured moment in time. Most of my friends are in this movie in one way or another, many as heightened versions of themselves. Years from now we'll always be able to look back on the film and remember. Remember what it was like to be young, to be dumb, to have our futures ahead of us.
So I don't see it as just a movie screening, but also a community event. Even if it happens to be a tiny community. Maybe as I continue to work on movies my community will get larger. But that paradoxical feeling of both insularity and extreme inclusiveness is not something I want to lose, at least not yet. Because sometimes the love machine malfunctions a bit. It's easy to lose love for yourself at times, even your art. But when you've packed your film with a bunch of little buddies eagerly awaiting your finished project, it's hard not to crack a smile and keep plugging away.
So maybe that's why I go through all this trouble. To build communities. Or maybe it's just to get my big 'ol mug on the cover of as many magazines as possible. Either way is a model of nobility.
I've made a lot of mistakes. I've adjusted camera settings incorrectly (in multiple ways), leaving me with some interior shots that are far grainier than they need to be. (Making a film has made me want to murder grain.) I've tried to "shoot around" equipment that is in the shot rather than just clear it, meaning there are a number of unusable takes due to visible equipment. I've forgotten the camera battery at a location that is 45 minutes away, necessitating an hour and a half round trip before we even started shooting. I've had shoots involving over 10 extras that were poorly organized and thus sort of a nightmare, exacerbated by having to pause two or three times in the middle of shooting to charge the battery because I hadn't bothered to buy an extra and also forgot to charge it during the break in shooting that I designed specifically for completing such tasks as charging the battery. I've neglected to hire people as crew that would have been able to help immensely with things like lighting up a room and making sure the shoots are run efficiently and reminding me to charge the battery. I just simply haven't spent enough of my budget. I've neglected until this late in the process (only one weekend left of shooting) to really learn how my actors work and design a system to draw out their best performances.
In truth, there are at least as many (if not more) parts of the process that I consider to be great successes and feel very proud about. I want to segue into the corny "yet this is has still been the best experience of my life" part because in most ways it has. So far the hardest balance to find has been between a healthy obsession with the movie and beating myself up so much over my mistakes that I feel immobilized. Because ultimately film-directing is a very emotional game. You have to find a way to stay excited about the project without overlooking all the tiny flaws that might ultimately condemn it to mediocrity. My two maxims right now are that I should use every day of filming to learn something new and that I should treat every scene as its own short film. The former is an attempt to find some psychic rest about the mistakes that continually eat at me. I guess I shouldn't ever forget (with the risk of sounding mock-humble) that this is, after all, my first film. Maybe Scorsese doesn't learn something every day on his sets, but something tells me he wouldn't have reached his level of success if he didn't have that attitude at one point in his life. And in regard to the latter maxim, it is crucial to remember that no matter what mistakes you've already made, filmmaking is constantly offering you chances at rebirth. It's not quite like writing fiction where until it's published you can always go back and change things, but at least you can always go out there and shoot a knock-out scene no matter to what stupid depths you've found yourself descending earlier in the day.
That's why if you're looking for me on campus, you should know I'll be the guy wearing the custom-made t-shirt that reads "Filmmaking: The Ultimate RollerCoaster" with a graphic that includes the rails of a roller coaster subtly morphing into reels of film. Trust me, these shirts are gonna get huge, fast. You'll be purchasing and wearing one before you can even say "That's the dumbest t-shirt idea I've ever heard."
P.S Hope you enjoyed the movie stills included throughout the post! Did I seamlessly integrate them into the tight logical progression of the post? No, no I didn't. But did I include them? Well, yeah.
The young, cocky film director steps upon his first film set.
He looks unerringly director-like, in oversized red-and-white beanie, black windbreaker, and slightly off-kilter haircut peeking under aforementioned oversized beanie.
He doesn’t need a shot list because he’s sure he’ll construct the movie in his mind, on the go.
He’ll hold the camera in his very own hands, sensitive yet sturdy as a stone, perfectly divining the sensuous contours of his own constructed filmic reality.
After sixteen hours of filming like thus the young humbled director plans to plan out as much in advance as possible for this week’s shooting. I missed some stuff. Not crucial stuff. A boom mic here, not enough light there. But you feel it. Every mistake. Every little instance that so easily could have been better.
But in total I am thrilled. With the risk (or certainty) of sounding silly, I have taken to directing like a duck to water. I have never felt more focused and vital than I have while being in charge of a film set consisting of upwards of twenty people. Additionally, some of my hypotheses are working out. Casting people experienced with comedy in various small roles has led to a number of (in my opinion) hilarious moments that I couldn’t have anticipated while writing the script.
The key is to learn from erroneous methods and not convince yourself to keep them just to avoid cognitive dissonance. A film moves and progresses in a narrative entirely separate from the constructed narrative from the film itself.
A film, quite simply, is a journey. That’s the stupidest sentence I’ve ever written.
But seriously. I’m only like a third of the way through but I think it might not just be advantageous to continue learning throughout the process, it’s necessary. Well, as necessary as things can be these days. What you should take away is this: next shoot I’ll be using a (tentative) shot list.
P.S
Look at this desperate facebook page I made to extras for my film. Also, though, it worked! Seems like I’ll be writing at least fifteen personalized songs. Sweet!
--Positives: Good read-through today. Luke was even more perfect for the role of Bobby than I thought. Should be hilarious. Everyone present enjoyed the pizza and the Oreos. Thought of a good opening shot for film, as well as title sequence. Involves Thomas riding a bicycle.
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---Negatives: Difficult to transcend awkwardness of gathering around a bunch of people to read from a dense thicket of stapled pages containing silly words upon silly words all written by me. Pizza made me feel sick. Oreos made me feel sick. Should quit junk food. Having difficulty deciding how much of my limited knowledge of theater directing I should bring to film. I read in an interview with Ewan Mcgregor that Woody Allen doesn't even do rehearsals. Coming from somewhat of a theater background, that seems absurd. How can you get into the mind of a character without rehearsal? That said, I probably won't have them do much rehearsal.
--What does gimmicky high-concept for blog post signify? How about the devolution of syntax? Does it represent the way my thoughts are increasingly clipped and scattered as I attempt to force the various mental and physical strands of what shall one day be a completed "Westbaum in High School" into coherence?
--No, probably not.
--Had silliest argument of production so far. "What does Thomas Westbaum (main character of the film) eat for breakfast? Ian and I were saying he eats a full breakfast while Marc, the actor playing Thomas, said that he thinks that if Thomas eats breakfast at all he just eats a bowl of cereal. Seeing as this is a shot in the opening sequence of the film I might be biased because I want him to rip open an orange or a grapefruit so we can see those tiny little specks of juice that squirt out of the fruit in high light.
-- Today one of my actors repeated to me a leadership acronym that he had learned in some kind of youth thing. I won't reproduce the acronym here. Why I bring this is up is that it really made something hit home: that the role of director is in many ways just the role of a "leader." One who exudes leadership. The same kind of leadership taught in conferences attended nationally by Type A high school students. Directing can be kind of a "Type A" job at times. I'm unsure as to what degree of professionalism I should try to give off. Should I embrace the my own ramshackle charm in terms of my leadership style? Do I even have any ramshackle charm, and if so, what does that mean? Obviously a degree of efficacy and efficiency will help this film to be the best version of itself. But I still haven't figured out exactly how to get the best performance out of my actors, or even my crew for that matter. Guess I'm in for some on-the-job training!
--Filming starts April 1st. Spring break, to put it melodramatically, will be the calm before the storm. To put it casually, filming starts April 1st, and I'm pretty excited, and it should be nice to have all of spring break to prepare. To put it stupidly, filming may start April 1st, but that doesn't mean that it will be a FOOLish production!
--I've somewhat abandoned my conceit. Oh you've already forgotten it? That works just as well.
Since we’ve last spoke I made a Big Move. With about a 16th of my semi-considerable funds I hired myself a “producer.” I put producer in quotes because I’m not exactly clear what a producer in Hollywood does. In my case, my “producer” just does everything I need him to do. However, in line with the connections-based engine of Big Hollywood (I always try to embody Big Hollywood), I’ve hired one of my best friends, Ian White, to handle the job. While this might seem like a flimsy excuse to get one of my friends 500 dollars, he has actually turned out indispensable. In a week I’ve gone from having barely done any work on the film (besides the screenplay), to being almost ready to begin shooting. All it took was the power of Ian’s timely and spritely e-mail exchanges. It turns out plenty of people would love to work on a movie! To avoid burdening myself with working them into the complex narrative framework I’ve been sculpting with these blog posts, here are some of the achievements that just through e-mailing we have either reached or are within extremely close distance of reaching.
--Casting Ancillary Roles (mostly people who are not of college-age)
--Hiring people to record synchronous sound
--Hiring a cinematographer (mostly to help with lighting)
--Deciding once and for all one what kind of camera I will be using (SLR 7D)
--Making a concrete list of locations I will be using.
--Planning around everyone’s scheduling conflicts
--Last, and perhaps most importantly, creating a “Facebook Page” so that people can “like” my project. (This is a meaningless but psychologically important component of the film-making process because each time I get a new “like” for the movie, I feel a tiny little surge of cyber-encouragement that keeps me motivated.)
By the end of the weekend I will have a final version of the screenplay, and an (almost) completed shooting schedule. One issue I’ve had with fine-tuning the screenplay is that the words have started to feel dead to me. I didn’t have a co-writer on this project and I think I am the type of human being that would really benefit from a co-worker. For this reason I’m really happy that a few close “writer-friends,” (if you’re reading this I’m sincerely sorry I called you a “writer-friend)” have agreed to do a final read-through/workshop of the screenplay. I think fresh minds will help reinvigorate my attitude toward the text. I am confident that once we begin filming the words coming out of the mouths of my actors will entirely enliven the process, but it is my hope to give them the best possible sandbox in which to play. Part of the reason that I picked close friends as the main roles is that the way I conceive of a movie is as much in terms of shots and plots as it is in people. The way people think and move and react and respond is truly what fascinates me and in some ways a film is just my best conduit to an artistic study of…well, like humanity. I’ve self-consciously retreated into colloquialisms because I felt the tone was becoming too lofty, or too far shoved up my own head.
See, the hardest part is not getting down on yourself. I watched Superbad the other night and thought to myself "man, there's no way I'm ever gonna beat Superbad." But somehow I doubt that's the metric by which my film will be judged. Because it's not Superbad and it never could be. It's Westbaum. Westbaum in High School.
(Cue: Link to "Westbaum in High School" Facebook fan page)
A little pearl of wisdom that I recieved last Wednesday has really stuck with me. It came from local filmmaker Lotfy Nathan, known for his documentary "The Twelve O'clock Boyz," who was giving a talk in a class of mine called "Baltimore Filmmakers."1
Said Lotfy (in so many words, I'm not a stenographer):
"The first film is the best one to work on. This is because you still have the ambition of fulfilling your artistic vision as well as the ignorance of how insanely difficult it's going to be to actually do so."
Now while I don't recall Lotfy's exact wording, what I do know is that the sentiment immediately made a nice little home for itself in my mind. I was sitting there thinking: "Wow, he's right! I am really ambitious. I am completely ignorant of how horribly frustrating this process is going to be. I feel great!" Not only do I recognize my own cognitive dissonance, I embrace it. I have to, or else this movie I'm working on will never get made.
I should add that a healthy dose of naiveté is not all I took away from Lotfy's talk. He also gave us a good deal of much more practical advice, such as the type of excel sheet I should use to manage my budget, and that I should take my cast out to dinner every now and then on my own dime. But I think what's going to get me most through this entire project most of all is an insatiable drive to concretize what I've created in my head (and on the page). Because while I can't exactly call this my first film (I've made at least four or five shorts so far), I have never attempted anything even remotely close to the scale of the film that I intend to complete by the end of this semester. I look forward to the ongoing battle of Jake's Ambition Vs. What is Actually Possible.
As far as the practical stuff goes, I'm coming along. It has a title: "Westbaum in High School." It's script has a ridiculous page count: 45. I've casted all the leads for my film: all close friends of mine, nepotism be damned. (I'll return to this subject later.) Right now I'm working on the preliminary steps of pre-production: location scouting, script re-writes, deciding exactly which camera to use, finding someone to do my sound for me, figuring out which pizza place I should bring my cast to (ideally delicious yet affordable.) In later posts I'll go into more detail about my processes of casting, writing, and filming, as well as updates on my logistical adventures, which might be a little bit boring but will hopefully be useful to other first-time filmmakers.
But for now, I'll leave you with this: I'm fully aware that I will soon be facing challenges of which I am now completely unaware. But all these aside, I'm feeling pretty confident. And that has to count for something.
Truly Yours,
Jake Appet
1. The class "Baltimore Filmmakers" is taught by local filmmaker and DMC guru Jimmy Joe Roche. It's been really fun and informative so far. To avoid putting another footnote on the footnote I'll mention that the DMC stands for "Digital Media Center," which is a great resource for Hopkins students who want to rent out technological equipment and work on creative projects. This post would have been punchier without this footnote, so in a way, I'm sorry. But I guess it's a metaphor for... uh, the messy process of filmmaking itself? That doesn't quite work. Anyway, see you next time!
Artistic projects are never finished; they are abandoned. Well, I’ve finally abandoned my short film after a long, exhaustive editing process. I’m writing this as my film is burning to a DVD and I feel a bit like a parent on their child’s first day of school, fighting the instinct to grab it back before it get into the world, saying “Maybe he’ll be ready next year”.
Upon completing a project, any humble artist will look back on a project and reflect on what could have been improved upon or altered meaningfully. Now, I will never call myself an artist, but as a college film student, I do look back reflect on all the stupid, stupid, stupid things I did. Someone once said that we are in the business of creating greater and greater failures. Well this is definitely my greatest failure yet, and I think it’s a good idea to review some of bigger lessons I learned the hard way.
Being a director and a director of photography at the same time is like being on a date with two women simultaneously, and neither date is going well. I am, in fact, exactly one person and, probably because I am a man, I multitask poorly. Whenever I am setting up a shot and getting the composition exactly right, I’m losing time with my actors, making sure they can connnect to the choices their characters are making and understand their actions. When I'm working with my actors, I can't be communicating what I need to the crew. It’s exhausting and unfair to both the cast, and crew, and to me. If possible, this will be the last film where I occupy both roles.
There is no "make my film look better" button. On set, it’s easy to get into the “Oh, I’ll fix it in post” mindset. And a lot of times, you can, especially if you oversee, or in my case, perform, both shooting and editing. If you have a cohesive idea of what you want, you can usually get close to that. For example, some of the stuff I shot at night is supposed to take place in the day. Even being inside, during the day, sunlight bounces around and makes the image bluer than if you shot just with artificial light. You can add this blue in color correction to make shots look like they took place during the day. Unless you totally forgot about the giant window in your shot and that shows that it’s clearly night outside. Oops. This being said, sometimes what you shot is just crap.
Checking your equipment periodically is always a good idea. I recorded roughly 180 different tracks to use for post-dubbing purposes. Basically recording sounds to get exactly what I want and syncing it up to the video and no one knows the sounds were recorded seperately. Unfortunately, I never checked the audio files outside the recorder so, while they sounded fine on the recorder, they were incredibly quiet when I imported them into my Final Cut Project. So the majority of what I spent a solid six hours recording was essentially useless. The price for stupidity is always high.
Don’t edit films to your favorite music. It’s common for me to listen to a song and thing Oh man; I want to use that in a movie. You might think it’s a great idea, that it fits the film perfectly, and that’s awesome, but I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. It’s a bad idea because you will never, ever want to listen to that song ever again after you’ve cut a film to it. It’s one thing to listen to a song on a loop; it’s another to listen to the same seven-second section a dozen times while cutting it into a scene. So long “Jesus Flag American Fish” by Cuckoo Chaos; it’s been nice knowing you.
So now the film is as finished as it will ever be. I didn’t prepare any real cathartic final statement to wrap all this madness up, but I’ll give it a shot.
Filmmaking is arduous, thankless, deprecating and filled with frustration, heartache, and disappointment. It’s also inspiring, enlightening, elevating, and filled with laughter, excitement, passion, and love. If you look at the first list and get excited, you’re a masochist. If you look at the second list and get excited, you’re an idealist. If you look at both lists and can’t wait to get started, you might just be a filmmaker.
I always give myself at least a week between filming and editing. When you’re shooting film, this buffer is built in to your schedule because you need to wait for your film to be processed and digitized at a lab, but when you’re shooting digital, there’s nothing to stop you from immediately hopping into the editing booth. So even though the film just sits on my hard drive for a week, I let it sit. There are two reasons for this. The first reason, this is the one I tell everybody, is because it’s virtually impossible to look at what you’ve shot objectively when you shot it hours earlier. You need a breath of fresh air before you come back and look at what you’ve got. My second, and more palpable reason for waiting a week, is that I’m scared shitless that I’ve screwed everything up.
Editing is a strange, purgatorial experience. When you’re writing, the possibilities are endless, and working on set everything is organic and kinetic and has life, but when you’re editing, to a certain extent it feels like the film is already made and you’re just pulling it apart and piecing it together. This is, of course, not true. And while it may give you vertigo to go from sitting in a tub filled with fake blood to sitting in a small dark room with large computer monitor, you need to be equally creative at doing both.
The first thing you need to do when editing digitally is transcode your video. While this might seem unnecessary, as the Canon 7D and Mark IV, both save the to .mov files, which is an incredibly common file type that can be read by Final Cut Pro, it is actually a crucial step. All .mov files are not created equal. Video files need to be read by something called a codec that decodes encrypted digital information, in this case it turns the digital information into video and audio. There are dozens of different codecs for .mov files, and while the one used for the Canon camera files can be read easily by virtually every media player, it’s a disaster to edit with. So you have to transcode.
Transcoding takes a very long time, it works at a ratio of about 1:1, as in it takes a second to transcode every second of video. While you can batch files together and let this run overnight, I like to stay in the room while my files transcode, not only because I enjoy the sense of progress, but also because if one file has a problem, the entire process stops nothing gets transcoded until you fix it. So the first four or five hours of my “editing” process were spent reading a book looking up ever so often to make sure things haven’t gone awry. Nothing went wrong.
My fears during the filming have been realized and I’m finding myself unable to wake from the nightmare that is sync sound. To put it plainly, I’m finally being forced to reconcile all the mistakes I made while I was bumbling around, not knowing what the hell I was doing. For example, I completely forgot to tell the PAs to call out the scene and take number before slating, so I now have a huge collection of audio files, and I have no idea what video files they match. Oops.
Some of the recordings are so low that they’re unusable, but others seem okay. For now I’ve decided to not worry about it. I organized all my clips by scene, which makes the whole editing process just so much more enjoyable, as you don’t have to constantly hunt for clips. I’ve been going through and picking my favorite takes, and crudely editing them together, just so I have everything in the right order. Once I’ve got my favorite takes in the right order, then I go back and snip them to the proper size and make everything fit.
So what else do I have look forward to besides long hours in a tiny editing suite? Post dubbing and foley. Once I’ve done the best I can with the unholy mess of audio that I collected during filming, I have to go back and add additional sound effects and music. This additional audio is often the difference between you having a very pretty home movie, and something you can ostensibly call a film. But more on that next time.
There is nothing more exhausting, frustrating, backbreaking, and incredibly rewarding than directing a film. At the independent level, filmmaking is all about long periods of frustration punctuated by moments of artistic and emotional euphoria. It took me three incredibly long days, but the film is in the proverbial can. I would reccomend giving yourself as many days to shoot as possible, but when your cast and crew can only come together for three days, you shoot your film in three days.
For this film, I experimented with not rehearsing anything ahead of time with my actors. We had a little dinner party to get to know each other, so everyone would be comfortable enough to get on set and start playing off each other, but that was it. I wanted to throw them into the space and let them settle into the material in front of the camera. Not giving your actors a lot of time to rehearse can get them to do some really interesting, creative things, but it can also make them second guess themselves. Two of my actors, in particular, had a problem breaking character and asking to start the scene over again. Unfortunately, what actors often think isn’t working really is, and many times they end up ruining perfectly good takes.
Shooting with a DSLR camera made me bold and I thought I could put the camera anywhere. While this is msy be true, on the first day of filming I soon discovered that I, unlike my small camera, cannot fit everywhere. A lot of this shoot was comprised of me contorting myself into various tiny nooks, car trunks, closets, and bathtubs. My style of directing is not sitting in a chair, drinking a latté, and issuing orders; you can’t do that on a small shoot, especially when you aren’t paying anyone. Also, how are you going to get an actor to trust you if there is always a camera between you? But even if I could sit back and watch, I’d still choose to wrap myself up in a giant garbage bag and contort myself in a tub for a shot.
While directing is a lot of work, I had an amazing crew and I am indebted to Abby, Andrea, Alec, Avidan, Emily, Janice, Michael, and Will, who all were essential to making the film work. Crewing on a shoot like mine, everyone does everything. Sometimes you run sound for a shot, sometimes you slate, sometimes you need to clean a couple gallons of fake blood out of a tub. There is very little glamor on my sets. The key is to believe in the end result so much that you don’t care.
Working long days with subject material that is somewhat dark, it’s important to keep the mood on set lively. I do this two ways, one by giving my actors and crew enough room to be creative and offer suggestions and ad-lib. Some of the best shots in this film were the direct result of suggestions that weren’t mine. As I wrote my script with my actors in lines, I encouraged changing things up and cutting lines that didn’t work. I don’t have an attachment to the script, so much as I have a commitment to making the final film as good as it possibly can be. The second way to keep people happy on set: buy them food. After four hours of filming, they joy you get when two crewmembers arrive with Subway is unparalleled.
This film marks the first sync sound film I’ve ever made, so I currently have a lot of video and audio files sitting on my computer that I’m nervous to look at. I have a lot of syncing, post-dubbing, and editing ahead of me. But, for now I’m taking a few well-deserved days off before I go through the hellish experience of post production. More on that next time.
Cheers,
John
Photo Credits
1. Production Still
2. From personal collection of photos of me in trash bags
Conceptually, pre-production is probably the least glamorous portion of the filmmaking process. In reality, there is in fact, no glamorous portion to the filmmaking process, particularly at the college or independent level. But I can understand the allure of the bustling film set, or even the romantic notion of crafting a great screenplay on a typewriter in the early hours of the morning. No one romanticizes about breaking down that screenplay into structural components and turning it into a shooting script.
This is something you must do if you have any hopes of running a smooth set. You need to walk onto set, knowing what you want. You also need to be able to throw everything you were thinking about away, but that’s a whole other subject. I start by taking each scene, and breaking it down into shots, the way I see the film being made in my head. Camera angles, lenses, movements, things of that nature all come into play. While making my shooting script, I’m also making a storyboard of sorts. A storyboard is basically a pictorial version of the shooting script; it looks a lot like a comic book. Unfortunately, I can’t draw. It illustrate, here’s me with a self-portrait.
So, instead of drawing my scenes, I create video storyboards. I take my camcorder, go to my sets, and walk through the scenes shot by shot. This is a very odd ritual to watch, my roommate was lucky enough to get to watch me attempt to have a conversation between three people in my kitchen all by myself. Video storyboarding is helpful for two reasons. First, you get see what the shots could potentially look like, just like you would in a storyboard. Second, you get to feel out the space you will be filming in. Obviously you won’t always be able to set foot on your set before filming, but you can find substitute spaces that help you get ideas. I am shooting in my apartment, so I didn’t have to travel far.
All of this is theoretically supposed to get your ready for your first day of filming. And it does. But that won’t stop you from feeling totally unprepared. Someone once told me “the realities of filming become really real really quickly”. While I cannot actually successfully speak this sentence aloud, I agree with its sentiments completely. The realities of film hit you immediately, the first being: you need equipment.
Today, you can shoot movies on pretty much anything. Chan-wook Park, the director of Old Boy, shot an entire short film called Night Fishing on an iPhone. The story is almost always more important than what you film it on. That being said, if you can make your film look nice, no one is going to complain that you didn’t film your movie with something you found in the dumpster behind a 7-Eleven. I’m filming my movie with the Canon 7D and 1D Mark IV. The 7D is pictured below, and the Mark IV looks very similar. These are DSLR cameras, capable of shooting 1080p at 24 frames per second. They may be small, and while they certainly have their disadvantages, they deliver a great image. They are also small enough to give you the creative freedom to put the camera pretty much anywhere, and are less intimidating to actors.
So, this Friday, I picked up my equipment for my shoot over the weekend. Because I felt like being an idiot, I forgot to notify any of my crew to help me move any of the equipment back to my apartment. Thankfully, the folks at the Hopkins Digital Media Center are awesome a couple of people clocking out helped me carry everything back. When I got home, I took every single piece of equipment out and made sure it worked correctly. There is nothing more frustrating on set than having equipment not work properly, and taking an hour or two to double check everything can save you so much grief.
So now I’ve got my shooting script and my video storyboards as guidelines, and I’ve got all my equipment ready for my first day of shooting. We’ll talk about how that goes next time.
Cheers,
John
Photo Credits
1. Photo from personal collection of sad, self-taken photographs
Casting a student film is remarkably different from casting a professional one. Working with a budget of whatever is in your pocket, you rarely, if ever, have the money to pay actors. My pockets are on the small side and so paying actors is not an option. Holding an open casting call for an unpaid student film is daunting and often unfruitful, so I decided to do what many young filmmakers do: I cast my friends.
Casting your friends has pros and cons. It changes the filmmaking dynamic, but usually not in a bad way since you have an established level of trust to work with. However, for this film I cannot speculate on this, as I obviously have yet to shoot anything. What I can speak on is its effect on writing.
I approach writing scripts for my own projects differently than I do scripts that I write when I know that I will not be imminently making the film. And that’s probably not great from a writing perspective, but it’s practical from a filmmaking perspective. When writing screenplays on spec, I have free reign to write about whatever I want, with as many locations, characters, or special effects as I want. When I write for projects that I will be making, I have to take into account my budget (or lack there of), what actors I have access to, what locations I can shoot in. All these things put limitations on the writing.
For example, one feature-length script I wrote with dreams of selling one day is a post-apocalyptic western. In that script, characters ride on horseback through open plains, gunslingers wield a wide array of firearms, and I burn down not one, but two houses. I do not have access to any horses or guns, and I can’t think of even one person who would let me burn their house down. So when I write, I work with what I’ve got.
Which brings us back to casting. I wrote the outline for the film and knew that I needed four actors: three men and a woman. Instead of writing a final draft of the screenplay and then finding actors, I first sent emails out to people who I wanted for the parts. Once I had my actors confirmed, I went to work on a first draft. This allowed me to write the script with them in mind.
I’ve done stage work with one of my actors, another I have seen act several times, and another is my roommate; I’ve seen him lie before which is basically acting. Having an idea of their acting styles, I was able to shape dialog and mannerisms in ways that accentuates their strengths. The female part was harder to cast. The part requires little acting, as she is dead when the film begins, but I needed an actress who could put a lot of trust in one of my actors. I ended up casting that actor’s girlfriend. So it all worked out.
Under these circumstances, writing the script was not difficult. Especially using Final Draft. Pardon the shameless plug, but for screenwriters it is truly an invaluable tool. So I sent the script to my actors and now I’ve got a couple days to get my act together before I meet with all of them and we start to break things down and set shooting dates.
My next big task will be to turn the screenplay into a shooting script. This is difficult and tedious, but saves lots of time on set. The big difference between a screenplay and a shooting script is that in a screenplay, the camera is never mentioned, nor anything else outside the world of the film. A shooting script breaks down scenes into shots and adds technical components, like camera angles. I will discuss my shooting script and other preproduction nonsense next time. So look forward to that.
Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing?
These are two questions I recommend asking yourself daily. They are much harder to answer than you’d think. I will attempt to answer these questions the best I can, at least insofar as they pertain to filmmaking. So here it goes.
Who the hell am I?
I’m not going to bore you with a biography; of no use to anyone. But I do think it’s good to find out where I’m coming from, as opposed to just trusting that I know what I’m talking about because I convinced someone to let me write for this website. I’m going to let you in on a secret: I very rarely know what I’m talking about. But, any 20 year-old who claims to know what he’s talking about is a liar. So at the very least you know I’m not that.
I’m a third year film student at Johns Hopkins University. I spent my first year here discovering that I wasn’t going to make a student film that would change the world. Even if I believed a student film could change the world, I didn’t want to make it. I spent the first half of my second year asking myself what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I spent the second half of that year deciding that was a stupid question.
I made my first short film last year. It was a three-minute ghost story, but in reality, it really was just an excuse to drown someone in a tub on film. And since I am an overachiever, in the span of three minutes I drowned not one but two people. Was the film great? No. Was it bad? No. Was it a lot of fun to film? You bet it was.
It was so much fun, in fact, that I sought out an internship as a cinematographer’s assistant. So for the next three months, getting up at 5 a.m. for ten to sixteen hour shoots became a way of life. The food was bad, the hours were long, the pay was nonexistent, but the experience was invaluable.
What the hell am I doing?
I have no idea. I’ve got it in my mind that I’m going to make a movie this semester, but right now that’s about it that is set in stone. At the moment, I’m at the glorious stage in the process called brainstorming.
Now, everyone’s process for brainstorming is different. Mine involves taking about six-dozen half-baked ideas, throwing them against the wall and seeing which ones stick. Then I take those ideas, throw them in the oven and let them cook a little while longer. After that comes the taste testing. This is when you remind yourself how terrible a cook you are. Out of all the ideas you’ve sampled, there is going to be one that doesn’t make you want to vomit. That’s the one.
The rest of these journals will deal directly with the writing, planning, shooting, and editing of this short film. It will be an adventure. Until next time, enjoy this picture of a cat.
Film production can keep you up at nights. (On my last shoot much more literally, as we spent the entire night before doing prep work since most of my crew came from out of town for the weekend shoot. Suffice it to say, I didn't sleep and the rest of the crew took short naps wherever they found space on the floor of my apartment)
There is so much to worry about. Pre-production is the key to success.
I'm currently in a class with both MICA and Hopkins students called Narrative Productions. The class is split up into 4 groups of 5. Each group works on a specific project, and each person in the group holds a specific role (or roles). I took the class for two reasons: 1) To collaborate with different people and specifically MICA students, and 2) To be put in a position where I wouldn't have to write and produce my own project for once. The first goal was met easily. The second didn't pan out so well. My script was one of the 4 chosen by the class instantaneously making me the writer/producer.
The project is currently titled "The Ride Home" - although it's just a working title right now. It's the story of two vagrant musicians on the road. By examining their daily interactions with each other, their relationship is revealed as one of tedium and constriction but also comfort and mutual affection.
Writing the story came from several images I had wanted to use in a film for a while now - a bohemian man in a cowboy hat, a pickup truck, a gas station. It wasn't much of a plot, but that's how I work. Most of my films are comprised of moments that, when strung together, provide a muddied depiction of characters as they really are. I also wrote the story with the notion that I'd be making it, so I knew it had to be simple and all elements needed to be within reach. Few characters, few locations, few props. That's fine with me, seeing as I'm a minimalist.
Casting was a little challenging for this film, as we had to find either musicians who could act or actors who could play music. Luckily, we got a great group of people to play all 4 roles. Our leads, Kristin and Buttercup really embody the characters by the way they carry themselves. Ian, who plays a friend of the lead male, and Fred, who plays a gas station attendant, are two men who have stepped into roles that they can play to perfection, as well.
As a producer, you have a litany of things to look at in preproduction - especially with the team being so small.
You must take into account:
Budget
Schedule
Locations
Props
Actors
Crew
Equipment
Transportation
Food
Cover yourself legally (with any release forms, fees, rights, contracts with actors/crew)
Plan for every logistical nightmare
And each one of these categories has some other subset of related issues.
So as you can see there is a lot to do, and producing a film in a semester (from development to completion) is no small task. Needless to say, my phone anxiety has kicked into high gear, and I've had to make a whole bunch of calls to secure locations and organize some of the other details.
Luckily things are starting to come together and shooting starts in just one week now. More updates from the field next time.
I got my footage, I got my final cut pro, now it was time to put it all together. The editing process for this film was an approach I'd never taken before. I had 17 minutes worth of film footage to sift through and I had no idea where to start. I didn't know what I wanted to say, all I had were shots I loved and thought were interesting. So that's the first thing I did; I watched the footage several times and then one by one began to pull out shots that called out to me. Once I did that, I managed to narrow it down to just 8 minutes of footage. At this point my co-filmmaker and I had already aggreed we wanted to keep this project away from linearity and narrative. It was our chance to really try to experiment with movement, shapes, and space and create a piece wholly inspired by just those things. Well, as most things in life are, it was much easier said then done. I decided to approach it in an exclusively visual way; through the combination of movements and images that when juxtaposed flow together. The movement doesn't need to be fluid,I did include several hard cuts in the edit. What was really important was to find and combine the shots that had a sort of visceral connection between them.
Tossed (2010) - A Dance for the Camera
As I edited, I tried my best to avoid thinking about it logically. I wanted to prevent myself from implying a kind of story or relationship through the editing. That is, of course, exactly what I did the first time. After looking at the footage for a while, I began to invent a sort of relationship growing between the dancers. There was one dancer who's movements tended to be more powerful and dominant than the other dancer; this was apparent through her dancing technique as well as the choreography she was told to perform. I soon began imagining a relationship between the two in which one girl completely controls the other; this began affecting the way I organized the initial shots I combined. Soon enough, after 7 hours of looking at my footage and trying to figure out what I wanted, I finally hit a wall. Editing is interesting in the way; you can never stop editing, you can always change something. The important thing to learn when to stop and walk away.
When I finally showed my film professor my rough cut, the first thing he noticed was that this relationship didn't really work for the project. I soon realized that I was trying to create logic in chaos and that I had to chose one over the other. The style of choreography called for this anarchic non-linear and editing style, logic had no place there. Hearing this from my teacher sparked a new motivation and I was finally able to finish, making a dance for the camera I'm proud of.
If you'd like to see my film, please come and see it at the JHU Film & Media Studies student screening, Wednesday Dec 8th @ 6:00pm Gilman rm 50. There will be a reception afterwards! If you're busy that day, you can find it here online.
still from Untitled (2010) dancer Melissa Herchakowski
Today, I finally got back the footage I shot for my Dance for the camera class. This shoot was a tough one, so many things wouldn't go our way. For example, shooting was delayed because our choreographer needed surgery, it was hard to find dancers who could commit at the end of the semester, our locations were hard to lockdown. When we did find a location, the lighting situation was rough and we were worried everything we shot would be underexposed. But today I finally breathed a sigh of relief, our footage looks great! Some things worked and somethings didn't, but we captured some really beautiful images. I honestly don't know how we pulled it off.
still from Untitled (2010)- dancer Sarah DiNapoli
Before shooting, my co-filmmaker Lauren Carney and I decided we wanted to step away from the traditional approach we had taken in our previous class assignments. We had gotten into this routine of creating a narrative and linear dance for the camera. Though this is a very effective and worthy approach, it's very restricting. As a result, we spent a lot of time in the editing room closely matching every detail of the dance movements. This left us little room to play with our footage creatively during editing; our main goal was to create a consistent linear progression from start to end. For our final project, we had the opportunity to shoot on super 16 mm film which I think was the main impetus that lead us to think a little more about our options. The rare opportunity to shoot on a gorgeous film stock sparked a drive in us to be a little more radical. FIlm is so great that it would be a crime not to do something great with it. Also, there's no film to waste! It's not like digital where you can just shoot it over and over again. You only get one shot with film, and you had better take advantage of it. In my opinion, film as a medium calls for experimentation. Its totally unpredictable, the image that is created depends entirely on how the light hits the film the instant it is exposed. I take this as a moment to just totally play around and try new things because there's a good chance you're going to create something beautiful and totally genuine to your experience with the film. With digital there's no opportunity for that. What you see is what you get; and while it is rightly convenient and more appropriate for some situations, it's not as exciting.
still from Untitled (2010)
The choreography we developed with Towson dance student Rachael Dimmock wasn't inherently narrative like our others had been, so we were totally open to experiment. During shooting, we didn't worry about capturing too many wide or establishing shots. Again, the coregoraphy as a whole wasn't as important this time around. The quality of the 16 mm b&w calls for close ups; the film has this amazing grain and texture that with the right lighting and framing could really capture something stunning. Anyway, from the start we were interested in approaching the editing in a simlilar way. Instead of putting peices to create a linear choreography, our goal is to cut up the shots and the order and create an interesting visual collage of our footage. It's not going to be just a mess of cool looking images meshed together either.We're not exactly sure of what we want to say with our footage yet, but just by looking at the footage and the various ways we captured the movement, there's an interesting visual relationship going on between the two dancers we shot. Hopefully our hard cuts and quick editing style will establish that. For now, I'm going to be juxtaposing and cutting together images that compliment each other purely visually, either through contrast, direction of movement, speed of movement,and character. If we can successfuly do that, I think the deeper connection and meaning will shine through. I'll keep you updated on the editing process. For now, enjoy this stills!
Diana
p.s. our Dance for the Camera will be premiering at Towson University this friday December 3rd @ 6:00pm. Come by and see the work created by talented Towson and Hopkins filmmakers.
The most challenging thing in a dance for the camera for me is trying to finds new interesting way of capturing movement. A camera allows you to experience dance in a totally different way. The viewer is no longer committed to just seeing dance from one perspective. The camera can reveal the dance in so many different ways that the we could not imagine seeing in a traditional stage dance performance. A filmmaker can experiment with a variety of camera techniques; camera speed, angle, and framing are all simple but drastic ways one can change the traditional view of dance. Dance for the camera's are about more than just documenting a dance. The most intriguing dance for the cameras go to great lengths to find interesting new ways of presenting movement.
Capoeira is an art form that consists of beautiful movements that many have attempted to experiment with on film & video. From countless amateur youtube videos to commercial productions, the capturing of capoeira dance movements has been attempted (some successfully, other not so) by many filmmakers. For those of you who don't know what it is, here's a brief introduction. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art that was created by African slaves in Brazil to learn how to defend themselves against their slave masters. While capoeira is a martial art, it also incorporates aspects of dance and music. As a result, capoeira movements are fluid, graceful, and acrobatic; but they are also dangerous. Capoeira became an expression of Afro-Brazilian culture; playing capoeira in the street was a way for slaves to keep their culture alive and united. Capoeira became a means for these oppressed people to cope with their situat ion and express themselves. Capoeira, while combative, is not about attacking and hurting the other person, it's a game. We call it jogando capoeira, which means playing capoeira in Portuguese. The beautiful thing about capoeira is it's all about movement and expression making it a popular type of dance to capture on camera.
Dance Brazil dance company founded by capoeira Mestre Jelon Vieira (creative commons)
A recent commercial for a men's Dolce & Gabbana cologne experiments with an interesting way of shooting the movement of capoeira on camera. In the commercial directed by Baff Akoto, we see two capoeiristas (capoeira players) taking part in a game. The intriguing commercial is shot in extreme slow motion, every movement the capoeirista makes is elongated and stretched out for what seems like forever. The players are also shot in a variety of medium and extreme close ups. Every movement is emphasized because of it's slow speed; it's amazing seeing the shapes and swirls the dancers bodies make as they spin, kick and dodge each other. The tight framing of the shots also dramatizes the movement, the closer you get the bigger the motion looks. This a very interesting way of capturing the capoeira. These movements are actually high speed and very energetic; in other films and videos, it is usually presented through the use quick cuts and rapid editing to emphasize this energy. But Akoto does the exact opposite; the camera counters the speed of the movement but at the same time enhances it. Akoto is able to capture the sensual and smooth aspect of the game with the camera lens and really does a great job of it. The piece is beautifully shot and it presents the dance in a creative and innovative way. In the end, I realize that this dance for the camera is actually an ad; the funny thing is that it works! I have no idea what Dolce & Gabbana are selling here, but I want it.
The progression of a Capoeira movement (creative commons)
I have trained Capoeira for four years now and have never seen it that way Akoto's camera does. His commercial for me is an inspiration to find creative and cutting edge ways to capture movement in my own dance for the camera projects. This week I'm going to be working on my final project for the class. Time for me to start experimenting with movement. Next week, I'll update you on how the production of my own project is going. Until then, check out Baff Akoto's D&G commercial on Youtube. You can search, Dolce & Gabbana capoeira commercial and it's the first one on the webpage. The capoeiristas performing in the commercial are Mestre Poncianinho and Contra-Mestre Casquinha.
I recently got an internship working as a production assistant on an independent film being shot in Baltimore this month. I went in today for my first day interning and it was the biggest shoot I have ever been on. I've only worked on one professional production before and it was a very small budget. This shoot was different however; this was a large crew and everyone had something to do. It was interesting to see all the action and non action occurring; some people were running around back and forth on set and others sat there, simply supporting by being there if something were to possibly occur. Although some of these roles may seem like a waste of time, on film sets everyone is important. In my opinion the director is as important as the Director of Photography who in turn is as important as the assistant camera man, who is as important as the guy who brings him coffee to keep him awake. Everyone is vital to the smooth running of the set, and although it may seem like you're not doing much, just being there to help is enough. Sometimes just not doing anything and simply getting out of the way is also very helpful. Of course this a very idealistic view of what a production should be; there are horrible film sets to be on (thank goodness I haven't had to experience that...yet).This film shoot that I'm working on now is the biggest crew I've been on and seems that it's easy to get lost in the large group of people doing different things. I like this lost feeling,it's exciting to explore a new set and meet new people. Being on today's set made me reminisce about the more intimate shoots I've been on in the past.
Film Shoot (creative commons)
Two summers ago I worked on set during the shoot of Matt Porterfield's film Putty Hill. This shoot was the best kind of film to start working in; it was small and personal. I was working closely with my good friends, we felt like a family. No matter how long the working day was, or how grueling the task, I absolutely loved every second of because I believed in it. I was working with people I look up to and respect and I was doing something I loved. I could tell from the vibe of the shoot that this film was going to go far and it has. It is unrealistic to think that all of the film shoots I'm going to be working in the future will be like this; the producer of Putty Hill joked that something that would never happen again. But I disagree to some extent; of course you're not going to appear on hollywood blockbuster set and expect to get treated with any respect or dignity, but at the same time if you're doing production, you need to surround yourself with other filmmakers and artists that can become your go to crew.
Tomorrow I'm going to be helping on my friend (and fellow film major) Josh's senior project. It's exciting because our old film friends who have graduated are coming back just for the shoot. The production is a low key project, but everyone is interested in coming together to make a beautiful film. Before our friends graduated, we all promised each other to stick together and always support each other's film projects and life endeavors. Keeping this communication and contact is so important because these are the people you could potentially be working with. We've decided to form an official alliance between us and have created our own film collective.
This week in our dance for the camera class, we were assigned to shoot a dance video that was inspired by the close up. I love this project because close ups really force you to think about the shots aesthetically. You also really have to work hard to puzzle the shots together because you want to create an understanding of the close ups as part of a bigger picture as opposed to beautifully composed individual pieces. My class mate and fellow filmmaker Josh Gleason shot a very beautiful dance for the camera that I want to share with my readers and with the rest of Hopkins Cinemaddicts. The project, which is called Loss of Clarity, was shot and edited by Josh and choreographed by Towson dance major Maria Jaen. For me, close ups are the most telling shots and I think Josh & Maria really revealed something special in this piece.
Still from Loss of Clarity, dancers Danielle Yarusso and Bernardo Ordas (Photos courtesy of Joshua Gleason)
Loss of Clarity, somehow manages to capture a sort of narrative. It doesn't focus on trying to tell a story in the traditional sense of narrative, but after watching it I understood something bigger than just dancing. In the first shot of the video we see a girl looking frail, standing in the center of the frame. As the music starts, she suddenly breaks out and begins dancing wildly, her arms stretching and reaching outside of the frame. The close ups enhance her movement; it looks more exaggerated the closer the camera gets. Suddenly we are introduced to another character, a man who stands there with a pained expression on his face. The girl interacts with him, dances around him, even jumps on him, but no matter what she does he doesn't change his expression. We are made to understand through their movements and through their interaction with the camera that there is something going on between the two. Beautiful close ups of the characters reveal their contrasting personalities; she's constantly moving in and out of the frame completely free, only held back when the boy reaches out and grabs her. At the same time, he doesn't move very much and seems to hold back from expressing anything, only moving when she prompts him to. When the dance out of the frame, the shots reveal a dilapidated environment; something is falling apart here. Throughout the film, we see a cat and mouse game develop between them; the girl dances around the boy enticing him with her movements, the boy follows her at times even stalking her, she willingly falls into his arms and then suddenly pushes him away, and then she chases him again. The whole time, he looks so pained and she looks so fragile. While watching this painful back and forth, I wondered to myself, who would willingly play this horrible game with someone? Why would someone put themselves in a situation that will only end up in them getting hurt? Why does the boy keep following the girl if he knows that she's just going to push him away? Why does she push him away even when she wants and needs him? Then it hit me...everyone does this. There is nothing more sadomasochistic then the game of love. Josh and Maria just managed to capture the messed up relationships of so many people in this world. We watch a whole relationship bloom, evolve and then inevitably fall apart in a 2 minute dance for the camera. Brilliant.
Just two of the film's many beautiful close up shots.
I think this project is a perfect example of the kind of film in which the meaning comes out through the final result. I don't think either the filmmaker or the choreographer meant or expected to capture such an interesting concept. Besides the beauty of the cinematography and the close ups which are more revealing of the emotion, I think there's something in the act of dancing that makes this film such a success. So many of the mainstream films we see today haven't been able to capture and describe the feeling of this situation as well as Loss of Clarity. Perhaps it's because the situation of these kinds of relationship is not easy to describe with words. Maybe it's this raw expression through movement that makes dance the best way do describe how it feels to be caught up in the game. I guess sometimes the only thing you can do is dance.
D.
p.s. Check out Loss of Clarity for yourself! Here's the link to Josh's vimeo page where you can find it. Enjoy. http://vimeo.com/15519019
This semester I'm taking a film production class called Dance for the Camera where a few of my fellow film majors and I collaborate with dance majors at Towson University to create dance films. Every week we are asked to work with choreographers and come up with an interesting way of capturing their dance on the camera. It's harder then you'd think; first off the camera's job is not to simply document the dance. The challenge of the class is to realize the wide opportunities film has to offer the medium of dance. A camera can give people a whole new way of looking at dance that a stage could never offer. Just taking the dance performance off of the stage and putting it in front of the lens opens up a world of endless possibilities. With film, we no longer have to worry about the placement of the dancers in relation to the stage or the audience. We are now free to move around in any direction. Film gives us a totally different perspective than seeing a performance on a stage does. This great freedom is one of the most attractive things about dance for the camera films.
Stills from our project Elevator Music: boy and girl flirting
Of course, once the dancers get off the stage and in front of the camera, there is a much bigger environment to control which makes things a little more complicated. Location is one of the biggest things we need to consider when making a dance for the camera. The dancers I've met in class have emphasized their enthusiasm for getting out of the dance studio and experiencing dance somewhere different. In one of the projects my group made a few weeks ago, we decided to play around with location and experiment with how setting can manipulate and affect the dance. We decided to see what conflicts and interesting situations would arise from creating a dance based around an elevator; we called the project Elevator Music. It was really fun coming up with stories revolving around an elevator; we finally decided on a narrative dance for the camera that followed a girl and a boy who meet on an elevator. We turned the dance into a cat and mouse game where the boy chases after the cute girl in the elevator. They express their attraction for each other with their dance movements; the dance was choreographed to embody the curiosity and tension between the two. In the end the boy finally get's the girl, they both end up in the elevator together smiling as the elevator doors close. In terms of complications with the project, we were shooting in a functional elevator so every once in a while someone would call the elevator and the doors would close mid shot taking us to some random floor in the building. Though this did effect the length of our shoot (I think the elevator was called 10 times while shooting), we managed to pull it off and create an energetic and fun dance for the camera.
Dancers Maria Herdoiza and Nurney Mason dance battling on the elevator
Of course, the narrative route is not the only type of dance for the camera one can make. Some of the favorite ones I've seen are very abstract and don't necessarily follow a narrative. These more abstract pieces really work hard to evoke a certain mood or feeling through the choreography and the production. In my next project I want to explore this idea of approaching dance more abstractly. I'm especially interested in creating a visually complex and layered film that focuses on movement. I'm not exactly sure what I want to shoot, but as I develop this idea more, I will blog about it. Pretty soon I will post, Elevator Music to the blog but for now just enjoy the stills.
I finally have my footage back and am getting happier with it everyday. It's funny, I was talking with my fellow film majors about how they usually feel after getting their film back and almost all of them said they are never fully happy with it. Whenever I get my footage, I'm usually too nervous to watch it all at once. I always end up fast forwarding through it just to make sure it doesn't look like a total mess superficially. If I see things I like I stop and watch it regularly. It always takes a few days for the results to sink in and it's only after that when I can say that I'm happy and ready to work with what I have. Right now, I'm at the editing stage and am very excited to take the plunge and start putting it all together.
Ain't Got No Honey Baby Now - Elizabeth Cotten
Now that I am in the stage of putting these very images together, I need to start worrying about what sounds should accompany the images. For the hula hoop scene, music was a big part of my imagining of it. As I see the sequence replay in my head and now on my screen, the only way it works for me is with Elizabeth Cotten's song Aint Got No Honey Baby Now accompanying it. The song is repetitive and constantly goes back to the main theme, it's cycle imitates the hula hoop going round. For this scene, I had to have this song to make it complete. At the same time, for practical reasons I want to avoid having popular music accompany my whole film. What then should I do with sound for the rest of my film? I decided that I wanted the film to have a voice. Now this voice doesn't necessarily have to be character or narrative driven, but I wanted to take the film as an opportunity to say something.
"They want the essence, the Woman is the essence..." The Subteranneans
For me, the film is about memory and dream, new born summer love, and rejection. I decided that I wanted to use sound as another means through which to express this. To do this, I want to use voice over as the way of communicating these feelings to the viewer. My job as a filmmaker is to be able to convey my ideas visually; writing is not my strong point (that's why I want to be a filmmaker, not a writer). I decided that the best way to get my point across was to collect written works or music that evoked how my characters felt. Jack Kerouac's novel The Subterraneans happens to be exactly what I'm looking for. The Subteranneans is viewed as Kerouac's most romantic work; the novel chronicles the romantic relationship between the protagonists Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a relationship based on one of Kerouac's real life affairs with a woman named Alene Lee. In the novel, Kerouac explores the fresh love between the two characters and the fickle nature of their relationship. This concept is what I want to be understood as the link that connects my characters. Sketches opens with a girl falling asleep who imagines a boy sleeping beside her; she looks longingly at his illusion. Is this love lost? Or is this young love? Totally exciting and new but painfully uncertain. I was able to find quotes from The Subteranneans that compliment the individual images as well as the film's general theme. I'm going to be working with my friend Will (who has a great voice) who will be doing the voice over.
"...She lay like a mummy in the sheet and cast the serious brown eyes on me," The Subteranneans
While this film is about the easy going lifestyle of the summertime, I am in the middle of finals hell week making it. This film gives me hope for the near future, where soon I will be living easy. This is probably going to be my last post of the semester and I'd like to thank all of you readers for keeping track of my blog. I can tell you now that I will be back next semester with more blogging and it's going to be great. I'm traveling a lot this summer and am taking my nifty camcorder with me, maybe I'll have some good footage to post. Also, I have a huge film idea for my senior film project, and I want you readers there with me the whole way. In the meantime, come see my film Sketches in it's completion this friday May 14th in the Mattin Center SDS room (at JHU) at 5:00pm. Many other student films will be playing as well, it will be wonderful. These are the filmmakers of the future! Come and support us. Till then, have a happy summer and I'll talk to you soon.
I decided to name my project "Sketches" because it's a collection of images that are touched upon briefly, like an incomplete thought. It's is an exploration of these fragmented fleeting moments. It's like a sketchbook, but on film. I realize now that these images have occurred to me mainly while I'm in a state of being half asleep and half awake. They always come in this stage of my consciousness where my mind makes rapid connections between seemingly unrelated things; where my thoughts jumps back and forth between dream, memories, and real life.
An unmade bed: The start of my film and the place where all of these images come to life.
The risky thing about this project is that the images, though totally concrete in my head, might not be possible to recreate. For example, this week I attempted to shoot my favorite image of the lot. The scene focuses around a girl who is hula hooping in an alleyway at night. This shot for me is supposed to bring ideas of warm summer nights where nothing seems to matter and you are just carefree. The woman stands alone in the middle of the alleyway spinning in circles, her mind off somewhere else; her yellow summer dress flows as she dances. This image, which is so simple and straightforward in my head, is actually quite difficult to pull of in real life. In the shot, I imagined her to be illuminated by car headlights. I wanted her in the center of an extremely dark alleyway, lit by spotlights coming from some out of frame car. This effect was hard to actually create because of the restraint of the media. First of all, car headlights are not nearly as bright as I had imagined. It was hard to get the parts of her body (like her face) as bright as I wanted them. If I wanted to add more light, I would be mixing to many different kinds of light sources that would create hell in the color correction process since I’m shooting on film. Nothing about this shot was simple. Still, it can go two ways. This shot could look terrible; grainy, dark, unrecognizable. Or it could be one of the most striking images I’ve ever created; I hope for the light hitting her on all the right spots, the hula-hoop glinting with lights as it spins in and out of the frame.
While I wait for that footage to comeback from the lab, I have gotten the first part of my film returned and am extremely pleased with the results. My attempts to make my film dreamlike have been successful. I realize now that a very particular mood links these visuals together. As I compiled the shots in my head and as I see them now, I keep thinking about summer days and nights where everything is carefree and easy. Spending all day outside or in bed lazing around. Spending all night with the people close to you; the warmth of the sun still on your skin. The calm and cool tones of the visuals circulate around this feeling.
Serene summer mornings
The other day, I was talking with my friend and fellow film major Carlos about expecting the worst when waiting for film to get back. After thinking about it for a while, we decided that because of the rise of digital, the unpredictable quality of film is becoming something that people aspire too; they're now more open to it's irregularities. Because of the experimental nature of my film, I am definitely more open to film's little blips and imperfections because they add to the surreal mood I'm trying to portray. In one of the shots, which I've included in a still below, an interesting thing happened that I've never experienced before. I was filming footage of summer nature and really wanted to get some sunbursts and light leaks on film, and what came out was something really extraordinary. In the shot below you can see that the sunburst registered as a rainbow on the film. The spotlight looks like it's coming from some UFO in the sky, a streak of multicolored light flashes down the frame. It's these really cool spontaneous moments that occur on film that I love, I didn't expect this but it's pleasantly surprising. These are the kinds of moments you could never get from digital which is available for viewing then and there. Though it's convenient and a hell of a lot less stressful, there's something exhilarating about waiting for your film to get back. Maybe it's the excitement from the suspense of the media; it's like waiting for christmas morning. You don't know what you're going to get, it could be coal (which I actually did get once) or it could be that puppy you've always wanted (which I'm still actually asking for).
Interesting rainbow effect in this shot...very unexpected
Again, all I can do now is wait for the rest of my footage to get back, and until then I can only keep my fingers crossed. Once I do get it back next week, I will post up the stills. Wish me luck!
"There is no point to sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas,"Jean-Luc Godard
I’ve got good news and bad news.
Bad news first. You know the film I’ve been planning and raving about for the past few months. Well production has pretty much gone down the drain. Due to scheduling issues it seems like I wont be able to shoot that project this semester. This is really disappointing for me and for many people who were invested in the film, but with so little time it’s just not gonna happen at this time. I believe this a story that needs to be told, so hopefully I’ll be able to go back to it eventually. What may seem as a total failure and pretty much the worst thing that can happen on a film shoot, after some thought I see this more as a blessing in disguise.
I now have total freedom. I have the chance to just express myself without limitations. No one to depend on, no scheduling issues to worry about, just a clean slate. I am starting to understand film as a very rare opportunity in which the filmmaker has total liberty to say or show whatever they want. I shouldn’t feel the need to be restricted by a narrative just because it’s what I’m “supposed” to do. Don’t get me wrong; I am totally interested in telling a story. But sometimes people need to realize that stories can be told in many different ways and my next story is not going to be told through a traditional narrative.
So I’m putting my previous project aside for another day. There’s no time to waste sulking about how things never go according to plan. It’s time for action.
Moving on…
Good news! My new idea is one that I’m very excited about. For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced these unique moments where I see something that makes such an impression on me that the image imprints itself on my memory. These images can come from things I’ve seen in real life, they can be dreamed up, imagined scenes inspired by things I’ve heard or a piece of music. Whenever I experience these moments, I write down what I see in a little journal. As a result, I have a huge list of shots I’ve had in mind that I’ve always wanted to recreate on film but haven’t because the images don't seem related. This is what I want to explore in my next project. What if they did make sense? What if my subconscious purposely imprinted these images on me? Maybe they'll say something when put together. This really interesting theory was explored by some of my favorite artists and intellectuals in the Dada art movement. Tristan Tzara, the pioneer of the Dada art movement, explored this idea but instead of using images he used words.
1927 Portrait of Tristan Tzara by. Lajos Tihanyi creativecommons.com
He juxtaposed seemingly unrelated words that when apart didn’t connect but when put together made perfect sense. He explored this in an activity he called creating a Dadaist poem. Try it, it seems silly but it actually works.
How to Make a Dadaist Poem
1. Take a newspaper
2. Take a pair of scissors
3. Chose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem
4. Cut out the article
5. Then cut out each of the words that make this article and put them in a bag
6. Shake it gently
7. Then take out the scraps one right after the other in the order in which the left the bag
8. Copy conscientiously
9. The poem will be like you
10. And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of vulgar.
-Tristan Tzara
Of course, the tools you use to make your Dadaist poem are not totally random. You cut the words out from an article that calls out to you for some reason. So to an extent, the words within it are chosen by you, they having some kind of meaning. I want to explore this same idea but with images that have called out to me. Hopefully when I combine them, they will say something like a Dadaist poem does.
Dashing Individulist by. Derrick Tyson flickr.com
Jean Luc-Godard said, “there is no point to sharp images when you’ve fuzzy ideas”. This is exactly the opposite of what I want my film to be about. I want it to become an exploration of these fuzzy ideas, and I think there’s a point to them. All I have to worry about is creating the sharp images and let spontaneity rule the rest. Perhaps when I see the images together, I will have more of an idea of where it’s going. Until then, I’m going to continue pulling out random images from my head and putting them down on film.
This week my film professor John Mann came up with an exercise that was to put us students as the filmmakers completely out of our element. In class, we discussed the phenomenon that most film makers or photographers hate being filmed/photographed themselves. I can tell you now, I am one of those people. There's a reason why I'm behind the camera and not in front. We were promted by our professor to behave as naturally as we could, to try to reveal some truth about ourselves to the camera by just being ourselves in front of it. The assignment seemed easy enough; to just be. But nothing was farther from the truth, it was unbelievably difficult for me. It made me uncomfortable, having the camera and a whole crew of people behind it watching my every move. As I stood there in front of the camera, my behavior felt almost forced and unnatural. I knew the camera was watching and I behaved accordingly. I tried to look my best; I straightened my posture, I nervously fixed my hair, my eyes awkwardly wandered avoiding the camera. Now if I could barely do this, imagine what it's like for my actors.
I think this picture is pretty definitive of how tough it is for an actor to be natural for the camera. The director has it easy in this sense. Flickr, Creative Commons.
The actors I'm using for my next film are all non-actors like myself, they've never had any experience in front of the camera. This exercise was very good for me because now I have a better understanding of what my actors go through as I work with them. I've put myself in their shoes, and they don't fit. Now I'll be thinking twice every time I tell Oscar or Jenn, "just be yourself". Easier said than done! As of now, I'm finalizing my shooting schedule, finding crew, and deciding locations to shoot in. Pretty much the most annoying part of pre-production, but it has to be done. As of now, it seems like my first shooting day is going to April 5th so I have about 2 weeks to get everything done! Wish me luck!
A picture from my camera phone of the Ritz Theater in Austin,TX where Putty Hill screened.
Before I peace out, I had a fantastic experience over my spring break last week. I had the privilege of being able to go down to Austin, TX and see the film Putty Hill screen at SXSW. For those of you who haven't read my previous posts, Putty HIll is a film I crewed on last summer that was directed by one of my professors and good friends Matt Porterfield. The film had it's world premiere at Berlin International Film Festival last month and it just had its US premiere at SXSW last week. My roommate invited me down to her home in Brownsville in the south of TX (a border city), and we made a 6 hour road trip up to Austin to see Putty HIll for just a few hours. It was so exciting to finally see the whole film on the big screen. I was physically there during production and experienced the scenes first hand, and yet I had no idea what it was going to be like when the film was cut together. Hopefully, y'all (yay texas) will have a chance to see it in several upcoming festivals (it's playing all around the world). It will be screening here in Baltimore at the Maryland Film Festival in May, so try your best to check it out!
Until next time,
Diana
p.s. Did I mention that I cried during Putty Hill? The movie is amazing.
Low budget "film"making is undergoing an interesting transformation. The means of production have recently changed in a way no one really anticipated. With the emergence of Digital SLRs (1,2,3) capable of recording high-definition, 24-frame-per-second video, the most adept videographers can create images that come closer to the much sought after "veiled look" of 35mm motion-picture film with significantly less overhead on prosumer-level equipment.
So now, essentially out of no where, we have light, compact cameras capable of taking both stunning digital photographs and more than merely passable video, both worlds in the same housing for under 2,000 dollars. Aside from media journalism and indie film, DSLRs have been embraced by many commercial and music video productions, as well as fully absorbed into the productions of several TV shows, including "24." Not to say that the DSLR video revolution doesn't come with a number of often debilitating limitations. Oddly enough these limitations don't even exist in some of the cheapest single-chip consumer-level video cameras. At the end of the day, though, for most projects the Pros outweigh the Cons. Here's a taste of that list.
Just as a caveat: I'm a filmmaker with a preference for 16mm motion picture. This article is primarily written for those filmmakers accustomed to shoe-string motion-picture productions and unfamiliar (as I was and still am) with digital still photography, as well as those somewhat unaware of the imminent (for better or for worse) DSLR video revolution.
Pros:
Beside a competitive price-range, one of the primary benefits of DSLR video is the option to interchanging lenses, which is a feature few prosumer-level HD cameras provide without the need for creative or pricey modifications. On top of that, you're working with 35mm still photography lenses, the optics of which can be superior to even the best fixed video zoom lenses. When it comes to making video look as "filmic" as possible, optics are high on the list along with image resolution and exposure latitude. While we're on the topic, it's worth mentioning that some videographers have managed to attach 35mm motion-picture lenses to these DSLR bodies (i.e. a prime Cooke lens on a modified Canon 7D [video sample]) without too much hassle. With a little bit of post-production work, results have fooled even the most seasoned viewers.
Next is resolution and speed. The better DSLRs are capable of recording up to 1080p at 24 frames, and 720p at 24 and 60. This is up to par with most prosumer-level video cameras. ISO,or film speed, which is often fixed for video at roughly 320, can be set at a number of different speeds on DSLR cameras, including those familiar film speeds: 100, 200, 250, 400, 500, and 800. The Canon 7D can reach up to 6400 ISO (not that you would, but you could), for documenting action in even the darkest of places (with significant and compromising grain). Shutter speed options are just as numerous, with film-like shutters ranging from 1/24-1/125. For me, the magic number is 1/50 (closest to 1/48, the "default" shutter speed of motion-picture film). Best of all, videographers can adjust white balance, exposure, shutter speed and ISO while recording on certain DSLRs such as the Canon 7D.
Video is notorious for "giving itself away" in both under- and over-exposed regions of the image. Unlike film, the exposure latitude of video is much smaller, so over-exposed areas blow out and lose detail completely after just a few stops above the set exposure. Plus, highlights in a video image are significantly less flattering than those on film. Underexposure on film yields pure black tones, as opposed to a sort of flat dark-blue on video, coated in digital noise. In many ways the same can be said about DSLRs, but some of these cameras allow users modify the picture styleand increase the dynamic range and by doing so improve latitude, resulting in a stock that behaves more similarly to negative film. Basically you'll get more detail in those over- and under-exposed regions of your image. Additionally, using these film-like picture styles, the raw footage coming out of the camera is ideal for post-production grading.
Cons:
That said there are quite a few drawbacks worth noting, and for the more fundamentalist cinematographers the cons list might make it a deal breaker. The main problem is nearly unavoidable, and it's called rolling shutter (causes). At mostly longer focal lengths, camera movement such as pans, either by hand or on a fluid-head tripod, creates a warped distortion most noticeable with vertical lines such as window and door frames. When forms don't maintain their true structural integrity the image is arguably compromised. The more drastic the movement, and the longer the focal length, the greater the degree of distortion. Moreover, videographers have to be constantly vigilant of potential moiré distortion. Any time the DSLR captures fixed patterns -- like striped shirts, window blinds, roof shingles, and sometimes even brick -- at wide angles, an interference pattern is created that is pretty much beyond repair. These limitations, both rolling shutter and moiré distortion, will ultimately affect what videographers choose to capture and how they choose to capture it.
Another issue is weight. I still cannot really comprehend how such a small device delivers full HD video, but the fact is that a DSLR's light weight poses a problem when it comes to stabilization with anything other than a tripod. The aforementioned rolling shutter effect is most apparent when holding the camera in-hand, without counterweights of any kind. It's so light that any minute hand jerk caused by repositioning results in a sudden and disagreeable warp in the image. Tacking on accessories, such as viewfinders, follow focuses, matte boxes, playback monitors and audio recording devices adds much-needed weight. At the end of the day, however, the camera should not be operated without the use of a tripod, a monopod, or some sort of counterweight or body mount. Otherwise the distortion is just unacceptable.
Some DSLR lenses are specifically tailored for HD video, silencing focus and zoom rings and providing an image stabilization option. For certain scenarios the image stabilization feature is ideal, but be warned: a kind of digital ghosting effect results that may be too much for some, especially with longer focal lengths and more dramatic camera tilts and pans. The silenced lens rings are a definite plus (if you're stuck having to use the on-board camera microphone) but I don't recommend making lens adjustment directly on the lens themselves, as it can often compromise image stability and give the pull-focus "illusion" away. Investing in a basic follow focus system, or making one yourself, is essentially an imperative. Too many hands by the controls will only over-clutter an already small device.
Then there's overheating to consider. In my experience with the Canon 7D, I've found the fact that it systematically shuts down due to overheating the most debilitating problem to deal with. It's a factory-set feature that happens when the LCD viewfinder on the camera body has been on for too long. Worst of all is that the camera does not make an exception when it's recording; it will simply shut off in mid take. So while actors benefit from the technically limitless data storage (more opportunities to land a take without stressing over how much footage one can allot to any given setup, so long as you have the time), many great takes are completely compromised if the camera suddenly decides to turn itself off. It's my guess that this can be avoided either by periodically turning the screen off or using an external playback screen for monitoring instead. But the cheap/perfectionist videographer always needs reference and doesn't always have the budget for a screen.
There's no doubt that video is taking over the entire industry. In fact, with Arriflex's recent release of a new line of professional "35mm" digital cameras, the blogosphere has officially recognized 2010 as the year motion-picture film will die. Whether that's the case or not, the video changeover is changing the way movies are made in both the independent and studio spheres. Time will tell if it's a change for the better, but by democratizing the tools of production and making them easier to use, you risk losing the discipline developed by having to respect materials and finite resources. For filmmakers such as myself, it always boils down to price, and DSLR video is too affordable to simply overlook. My experience with the 7D has been overwhelmingly positive and with a few workarounds the issues I've thus far faced can eventually be dealt with effectively. I intend to shoot my next project on DSLR video, and at this point it's really tough to say if I'll ever go back to analog.
I'm in the process of helping a friend shoot a short narrative project on his Canon 7D. I've included a video sample below. We used the standard 28-135 zoom with IS on. The camera was attached to a monopod and a simple follow-focus system. 720p at 24fps, ISO 400, 1/50, F4.0, with Superflat picture style. No post-production grading of any kind, and audio is straight out of the camera (for reference).
This is part 2 if my previous blog where I posted about my actor Oscar and his audition for my next film project. Recently, I met with a potential actress or (non-actress) named Jenn who auditioned for the role of Oscar's girlfriend Olivia. Like Oscar, Jenn has never had any acting experience and I quickly reassured her that she should not worry about it. Similarly to Oscar's audition, I asked Jenn to go through the one scene of dialogue I had written and to read straight through it. Once she was able to get a feel of the scene and of her character, I asked her to put down the script and just talk with me in character. I wanted her to respond in any way she thought her character would and the result was something that I didn't at all expect.
Jennifer Saaty - Still from her audition footage
When I originally wrote the script, the first dialogue scene between the couple was supposed to reflect their stressed relationship. My idea was that their interaction introduced the viewer to an already strained relationship. In the scene, Olivia (the main characters girlfriend) wakes up the hung over Oscar who has slept through work and is on the verge of being fired. The exchange between the two reflects how frustrated and jaded Olivia has become with Oscar and how she's at the end of her rope with him. My original idea was for the dialogue to be an angry back and forth between the two of them as she tries to convince him to get up and get back on track. The way I had it written, Olivia was so angry towards Oscar that I began to wonder why they have ever been together in the first place? It just wasn't believable, the dialogue had no human voice. What I really wanted to get across was that the two characters, though going through a rough patch, where sill in love with each other and were still hoping for things to get better. I wanted to express this through the films visuals and the physical gestures of the actors, but my dialogue wasn't expressing this and that needed to change.
Sweet Jenn - Stills from Jenn's audition footage
The second Jenn put herself into the role, everything changed. Her take on the character was sweet and tender hearted while still discontent with her boyfriend. She was able to humanize her character as well as Oscar's, just by being herself. I find this approach to the character and her situation much more powerful then I had originally written it because the contrast between the characters sweetness and the bitterness of the failing relationship I think makes a bigger and more realistic statement.
This wednesday, I'm going to bring both my actors together so that I can see how they interact with one another. If all goes well, I can make my final decisions on casting and move on to finally shooting the film. I'm also still working on the title. As soon as I figure it out I will let you know!
It's all happening! This weekend I met with my actor Oscar and we went over the script for my latest film project. We started off the audition with a direct read of the script. When I wrote the dialogue for the film, I decided that I wanted what the characters were saying to be totally natural and organic. I approached the script as a guideline; a skeleton the actors could use to build upon and play with. As Oscar read off of the script, it seemed forced and almost stiff. It was hard for him to get into the character. That's when I decided to do away with the script and just talk.I asked Oscar to put down his lines and just converse with me in character. This is when we made the most progress.
Still from Oscar's Audition Reel - Oscar Gonzalo Aspillaga
The character he's playing, who's also named Oscar, is a deeply complex and torn person. His life is slowly falling apart because of his inability to control his drinking. It's affecting his work and most importantly the relationship between him and his girlfriend Olivia who's becoming increasingly frustrated and is at her wits end. At the same time, his alcoholic dead-beat father is trying to get back into his life. Eventually, Oscar's denial of his drinking problem begins to dissolve as he becomes more and more like the father who he's spent his whole life rejecting. During the more improvisational part of the audition, Oscar was able to really open up to his character and try to understand him. It was great to see him take the character and make it his own in such a short period of time. Oscar has breathed life into this role and has brought the film into existence. Without actors the characters don't exist; they lay stillborn on the page. Now, thanks to Oscar, it's alive!
Oscar's audition footage - Check it our for yourselves!
This friday I will be meeting with my friend Jennifer who's auditioning for the part of Olivia in the film. I will be recording the audition so that I can edit it and put it together as well. Expect it to be posted sometime over the weekend!
Ideas come and go in the most interesting ways. They appear like a stream of consciousness brought about by music, or some story you heard, or a dream. This time, mine came from a person. I stared at my good friend Oscar and something about him just clicked. Something about who he was and the way he was made me want to talk about him, to film him; I had found my muse. This is the first time for me that the subject came before the story. There are two filmmakers who work with this approach that have inspired me to experiment.
Putty Hill (2010) Non actor Jimee Buchanan being himself. Photo by: Sophie Toporkoff. Courtesy of Matt Porterfield
Filmmaker and Baltimore native Matt Porterfield is a director I look up to because of this kind of filmmaking approach. I had the privilege of working wth him this over the past few months casting and shooting his latest film Putty Hill. What I love about Porterfield as a director is his amazing talent for finding people who spark life into his characters and films. He has a tremendous amount of love and trust for his actors and it shows in the way he directs them and captures them on film. Porterfield sees them as more than actors; they are people with lives and stories and things to say. Putty Hill was not really scripted, it was a 5 page treatment that gave the actors (who were almost entirely non-actors) room to improvise and above all be themselves. The result: an interesting blend of narrative and realism in which real aspects of the actors' life come out. It's these intimate and heartbreaking moments of uncertainty that really pull me in. You're not sure if what they're saying is fiction or truth; it's total manipulation but you don't care and you want more. By the end you feel close to them, it's a brilliant way of establishing a connection between the viewer and the film.
In fact, Matt Porterfield's style reminds me of filmmaker Harmony Korine. In an interview about his film Gummo (1997), he stated. "...I like to work with non - actors because they can give me what actors can never give me, they give themselves. When the magic comes out, they give you something that is very personal and unrehearsed." This is exactly what Porterfield manages to do in Putty Hill and what I aspire to do in my next film project.
Gummo (1997) Actor Nick Sutton playing Tummler. Harmony Korine's inspiration for the film. Flikr Creative Commons
My film is about a few days in the life of a guy who's life is going down hill as he deals with pressures from his life and his estranged alcoholic father trying to get back into his life. At the same time, he seems to be going down the same booze fueled path as his father did. The film is very narrative but I want it to have this same realist quality that directors like Korine and Porterfield capture in their films. Part of the film is based on the real life experiences of my non-actor Oscar so I'm going to work heavily with him to create a script that is organic and natural. Once I take tome footage of him, I will post it so you can see what I'm talking about.
till then,
Diana
p.s. Check out Matt Porterfield's film Putty Hill which was accepted into Berlin International FIlm Festival as well as SXSW! http://puttyhillmovie.com/
The first thing any film student learns in school is that film runs in normal time at 24 frames per second. Usually, people take that as a simple matter of fact...that the human eye cannot detect any flash of an image that runs at less than 24 frames per second. This idea is even further neglected when entering the realm of digital where frames don't tangibly exist. Capturing someone on film is like seeing the world in slow motion. Every single twitch and movement is precisely documented on individual celluloid frames. All of these fleeting moments that not even the eye can detect are preserved. For example, to the human eye a blink lasts less than 1 second, it's fast and often missed. When we blink ourselves, our vision is virtually uninterrupted. We live on knowing that there is a small fraction of a second of obstructed vision, this lost time goes by and we barely miss it. But on film, the progression of the eyelids closing is caught in individuals frames, therefore elongating the process. Film has the ability to divide movement into this kind of progression, while we can only see action as a unified entity. These undetectable fractions of a second are frozen on film, making them visually available to us. The lost time is found in the film and it presents to the viewer a new and otherwise unnoticed way of seeing things. How great is it that film can uniquely present us with the ability to capture the world as we know it as well as the world as we've never seen it?
She senses that something is wrong.
This idea of 24 frames per second became very real for me while putting together my last project. As described in my last post, I shot my project Panic on b&w 16mm. Inspired by the great Stan Brakhage, I decided to scratch onto my film to try and capture the emotion of panic. The scratches were to represent the evil negative energy of anxiety that wakes up my subject and drives her into a horrifying panic attack. The film follows the progression of this girl sensing a bad presence and eventually giving into hysteria; by the end of the short her mouth gapes open as she screams. The scratches pour out of her mouth and eventually take hold, overwhelming the frame and distorting her face. At the end shot, I scratched her entire face out; I wanted to show that the girl has completely lost herself in panic.
Still from Panic...the panic won this battle
The process of scratching is where the whole 24 frames per second concept hit me. It wasn't until I began that I realized what I was in for. In order for anyone to see what I was scratching, I'd have to scratch it in 24 times for it to appear for just 1 second. Throughout the process, my comprehension of time was completely lost. As I edited the film ran according to the speed of my arm spinning the spool. There was no sense of minutes our hours, I worried that I was miscalculating everything and that I was spending all my time putting together something as short as a 1 minute film (which still meant 1,140 individual frames for me to scratch). All I had to comfort me was the solid and reassuring fact of 24 frames per second. In the end, everything worked out. My film was longer than 1 minute (ended up being around 2 minutes and 30 seconds = estimate of 3,600 individually scratched frames!!!), and it gave the emotional effect that I wanted; it succeeded in raising the heart rate of my classmates. Once I get my film processed and transferred digitally, I will post it online. Till then, stay tuned for news on my next experiment which is supposed to be a sound project (unchartered territory for me). Until next time!
"Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way"
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
Still from my next project Panic
It's really easy to get caught up in a storyline. Narrative has become so important in films today that it's hard to imagine a film without one. There are very few films that come out of mainstream hollywood today that don't have a planned out traditional plot. Unfortunately, many movies end up sacrificing the most important aspects of film in order to put all emphasis on the narrative. The visuals end up suffering as a result of this. The shots only purpose is for the revealment of plot information. There is no room or need for a creative eye therefore destroying the visual importance of film. For me, visuals are the most important. In order for me to really like a film, it has to engage me visually. The shots need to be dynamic and thought out; they have to have more purpose than just giving plot information (which is what most Hollywood blockbusters do). I want to see more! I want beautiful shots that move me.
Maybe the best idea is to throw away all narrative and focus on the visceral visual experience of watching a film. This is what many avant-garde film directors have decided to do and so this week in class, we reviewed the works of many of these greats. The director that called out the most to me was Stan Brakhage. I was especially impressed by his great ability to capture an emotion or feeling without entering the narrative realm. I found myself most attracted to his films; his amazing ability to capture these raw emotions is moving. He is also a true filmmaker; the physical film is very important. You see this through the way he physically manipulates the film; by his scratching and painting directly onto the celluloid. I found that through the lack of story line or plot Brakhage was able to better focus on capturing the emotions that inspire him.
As you can see, the theme of my week has been this idea of non-narrative. For my next project I was prompted to become inspired by these past great avant-garde filmmakers. I decided to honor Stan Brakhage and try to capture an emotion. I decided to try to capture the feeling of panic through film; to do this I used an actress and used some experimental camera techniques. I originally wanted to shoot in color. I wanted to experiment with color (as Brakhage did) and use it as an instrument for expressing an emotion. Unfortunately, I also wanted to scratch the physical film as well, but that was not going to be possible because that would require an extremely long and complicated process that I simply would not have time for in this 2 week deadline. So, I decided to shoot on black and white 16mm film which I could easily edit manually; good old scissor and tape holding the film together. I shot again on the old Arri-S camera. The shoot was difficult, but only because I was my own crew. It was difficult working the lights, using the heavy arri-s camera handheld, and directing my actress all at the same time. But I managed and the footage turned out relatively well. In terms of experimentation, I played with lighting and focus to represent the chaos and derealization one experiences when having a panic attack. I just got the film back, and will begin editing manually this weekend. I'm going to be adding scratches and perhaps coloring onto the film. For this project, I'm just going to let it all go.
Stills from Panic: The slight defocus of the shot really throws things off and makes everything a little creepier; which is exactly what I wanted.
Next blog, I will try to include pictures of these same frames but with the scratches. Until next time.
Still from my last film Lovely Lane. The sky painted dome in the main sanctuary of Lovely Lane UMC.
Last week, I shot my first color film. Though it might not sound like a big deal, this is a huge step in my young and unexperienced filmmaking career. Before this, I'd only ever shot on 16mm b&w film. Though this isn't unexpected considering I've only made four films before this, I always found my self avoiding the color realm. There's just something magical about b&w. Maybe it's the striking contrast between the shades of dark and light. Perhaps it's the way it makes the light look. Or maybe it's the fact that everything; people, places, and things just look better in b&w. I am in love with b&w and somewhat hesitant towards color. For my last film, I was asked by my teacher to take Eisenstein's soviet montage and apply it to my own project. I decided to shoot at a church because they have a lot to offer aesthetically. To avoid complicating my film by making great Eisensteinian statements about religion, I decided to focus on the architecture of the church. Churches tend to have their own personalities and moods that I thought would be interesting to capture. I finally shot at Lovely Lane United Methodist Church. Lovely Lane is the oldest Methodist church in Baltimore and is well-known for it's gorgeous romanesque architecture. The second I walked into the church I was blown away. Its unique dome shaped sanctuary is awe inspiring. I was impressed the most by the sky painted on the dome's ceiling which is apparently astronomically accurate. The people at the church were very welcoming. One of the members was even nice enough to take me around and show me the church's nooks, crannies and secret passageways. I decided for this film that it was time for me to explore and experiment with color. How could I not? The church is saturated with it. The stained glass windows, the rich red and gold tones of the main sanctuary, the cool colors of the old chapel. It was time for me to let go of my inhibitions and taste the rainbow.
Still from Lovely Lane. The organ in the old chapel of Lovely Lane UMC.
It's funny because I used to have the complete opposite opinion of this. Ask the average person what they think about b&w films and they'll say they don't like them. Ask them, why? "Because they're boring". The plot could be perfectly engaging, the cinematography could be gorgeous, but for some reason the fact that it's b&w predisposes a film as boring. Many years ago when I was still a kid, I was one of those people. One Thanksgiving, my family and I were having dinner at a family friends house like we did every other year. Understanding that my sisters and I were children and that we'd eventually get bored of "adult talk", Michael (the head of the house) tempted us with a film. Instead of the usual Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 version...not that Johnny Depp nonsense) we watched every other Thanksgiving, he suggested we watch Cyrano de Bergerac, the 1950 film directed by Michael Gordon. When I saw the black and white stills on the back of the VHS box, I was instantly turned off. "Oh. It's in black and white? Boring." My sisters agreed. Michael assured us that the film was very funny and wonderfully made, but nothing he said could convince us. Poor Cyrano didn't stand a chance against the technicolored glory (and chocolate) of Willy Wonka. In the end we won, and despite the lecture we received from our mother later on for being difficult, we felt it was worth it. It wasn't until I saw the film noir Laura (1945) a few months later that I began to appreciate b&w films. Later on, I also began to take a photography class which shot in b&w. Soon enough, I was transformed and I found myself in love with b&w.
Stills from Lovely Lane. The contrast and richness of colors are so beautiful in this church.
Now that I've broken through and seen the beautiful results color can bring, I'm definitely going to explore the color world more in my next project, a sort of homage to Stan Brakhage. Hopefully I'll be able to get some beautiful color images in this project as well. I'll keep you posted on how that's going.
One of my absolute favorite parts of production is editing my footage. Putting together the pieces and making them whole; mixing and cutting each element till together they make a film. It's in this process where the film gets its power. Here's an analogy for you: the shots are words and editing is putting the words together to form a sentence. No one is going to understand what you're saying if you just say random words. Once you take the time to put the words together to express what you want to say, people will finally hear and understand.
Still from Trav'lin' Light: actor Jacob Israel Chilton
I recently spent 16 hours in the computer lab putting my last film Trav'lin' Light together. For two nights, I sat and stared at a computer screen for 8 hours looking at the same photographs over and over. Thought this may sound like an extremely boring process, it's everything but. It's exciting, thought provoking, and oh so satisfying when you see the final result. Editing is mathematical and very calculative. Though I vowed never to take a math class again once I graduated from High School, I love making a+b=c: putting shots together to create the whole film. I enjoy the puzzle of cutting film together. My eyes might not have appreciated the strain and my legs may have began to suffer from muscular atrophy, but it was totally worth it.
For some filmmakers, editing is everything. In one of my classes, we've been discussing the works of the great Soviet Montage filmmakers Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin. To them, editing was the key to communicating certain things to the viewer. Eisenstein felt that creating conflict between images was the golden rule of editing and successfully putting together a film. My favorite kind of conflict he created was through intellectual montage; which is basically putting together images to get across some kind of intellectual (often propagandistic) message. For example, in his film Strike (1925), Eisenstein talks about a factory worker strike in pre-revolutionary Russia. In one climactic scene, he focuses on the violent and brutal manner the military used to stifle the strike. In this scene, he juxtaposes images of innocent workers, women, and children violently beaten and killed with some very atrocious images of a bull being brutally slaughtered (Eisenstein actually filmed a bull being killed - the guts and organs falling out are real). Of course, by putting these images together, one gets the idea that the military are treating these innocent people like animals. In result, the audience becomes further disgusted and outraged at what's going on. This scene is the perfect example of how he juxtaposed images to create some kind of idea or emotion.
It's moments like this where I realize how manipulative film and editing can be and how vulnerable that makes us. At the same time, being an aspiring filmmaker, I got the power (menacing laugh)! For class, my next film assignment is to include Eisenstein's theory of soviet montage and editing in my own project. It's due next thursday, so once again you'll find me living in the DMC till then. It's very exciting though, I will be shooting in the oldest methodist church in Baltimore. Wish me luck, and I'll let you know how that goes down.
Still from my production for Trav'lin' Light (2009) - Actress Zippi Diamond having fun in the grass
Production time! Oh the stress! Anything can go wrong...the whole experience is temperamental. Anything is subject to change depending on the mood swings of both your talent and the equipment. Who knows when the camera will suddenly become unfocused and uninterested; ready to switch off, shut down, and explode. Did I mention actors do the same thing? Anyway, even in my small student productions, I've had quite a range of experiences.
From the way Moleque turned out, you would never guess the hell I went through during the production. Every day we shot, something went wrong! I either couldn't get a hold of my actor and we'd start hours late. Or the equipment would suddenly decide to fail me. The Arri-M camera I shot with is so old and complicated; the fact that it's labeled MADE IN WEST GERMANY is proof enough of this. Now don't get me wrong...the equipment might have made my production a thousand times harder, but it was all worth it. Working with 16mm film and the Arri camera is a completely different process and added a lot to the look of the film. It would not have been the same if I had shot it digitally. There's something about the physical process of film that is just so special that in my opinion digital just cannot capture. Besides that, we shot in the middle of the winter. My actor, Marquise Williams, is a skinny kid and no matter how many oreo's and candy bars I stuffed him with, no one could distract him from the cold. Being the good sport he is, he persevered and held on with his freezing cold fingers. Marquise is special and still managed to have a good time despite all the failures, but not many kids would add that on their list of fun things to do on a Saturday afternoon.
Berlin Wall (1989) - Arri-M made in WEST GERMANY. Surprisingly, not too long ago.
On the other hand...
For my last film, which I shot last week, the production ran surprisingly smooth. The film is called Trav'lin' Light (thanks Chet Baker!) and is about a young girl discovering a camera and experiencing the freedom of the photograph for the first time. The project is a photo-roman, which is a film made up of still photographs. Because of the nature of the film, the production was very small; I was the director, camera operator and sound recorder all in one. I shot the whole thing on a Canon Rebel, nothing too old or complicated. Everything I used was made after the Berlin wall fell. So, the equipment was pretty easy to handle. Besides that, my actress Zippi had a great time! This makes sense considering most of what her part consisted of was playing on a tire swing and running around taking photos. Still the shoot went flawlessly and we all enjoyed working together.
Still from Trav'lin' Light (2009)
So...in the words of my film professor Matt Porterfield on the last day of shooting his film Putty Hill this summer, "Enjoy it while you can! They're not all this fun."
"So many fail because they don't get started - they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin,"
W. Clement Stone.
For me, the beginning is always the hardest. Starting; stepping out of the comfort zone of the thinking process and actually doing. Throwing myself out there, exposing myself and my ideas out there in the open for all to see. This stage of transition between possibility and action scares me the most. Sure, this idea could sound brilliant in my own head, but how will people react when they come across it? What if they hate it? What can I do? Panic!
The only cure I've found that can get me out of this state of inertia is finding something that inspires me; discovering that spark that can transform my idea into something visual, then eventually something tangible. This can be anything, a piece of music, something I heard, an image, an experience. This experience is the key to my engine. Without it, I wouldn't find the energy or drive to go forward.
In my last film project Moleque (2009), something I saw drove me to take the idea out of the mind, expose it to the light, and document it on 16 mm film. I found the inspiration for Moleque one summer when I was in Dominican Republic visiting family. One day we stopped at a gas station where outside sat two young boys who were shining shoes for money. They waited there patiently for clients, but for some reason there was a sense of animosity between them. They were competitors after all, trying to survive in the cut throat business of shoe shining. They were both struggling to find clients to shine shoes for, in a beach town nonetheless were everyone wears flip flops. Feeling bad for their ordeal, my dad took off his shoes and gave them each one. Their worries were put aside for the moment, and they were happy. Satisfied with this solution and with the fact that they were temporarily getting along, they asked us to take a photo of them and we did.
Nagua, Dominican Republic (August 2008)
After going home, I contemplated using the experience as the premise for my next film project. Of course, I spent months thinking about it, but I couldn't manage to pinpoint exactly what I wanted. It had been a while since that day at the gas station, and I couldn't manage to visualize the thoughts in my head. It wasn't until months later when I was looking at pictures from our vacation that I came across the photo of the boys sitting on the stoop of the gas station. For some reason, the image struck me; it wouldn't get out of my head. I couldn't stop seeing that frozen moment where the boys smiled and laughed at their success, even if only for a short while. Eventually, the image became my inspiration for creating Moleque, which is about a young boy shoe shining on the street who unsuccessfully looks for clients.
Once I found my inspiration, I was able to put my vision down on paper and then bring it to life through film.
Still from Moleque (2009)
Some might see the final cut of the film as the end of the line. In my opinion, for a filmmaker the final cut is just the beginning. What is a film if no one sees it? No inertia for me! I quickly submitted my film into a festival before I let thinking get in the way.
Now that I've finished with Moleque, the process is nowhere close to done. I've begun to move onto my next project which I'm going to be shooting this weekend. Here we go again! I wonder how this production is going to go down.
Until next time,
Diana.
p.s. Fortunately for me, Moleque was accepted as a finalist for the student film competition in the Mid Atlantic Black Film Festival. The festival is in Norfolk,VA where it will be showing this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes!
Dave Dittell is an '06 alum of the Johns Hopkins Film & Media Studies and maintains the blog Alphabet Soup Kitchen, devoted to young writers.
There's a saying in Hollywood that nobody wants something new, just a new twist on something old.
For a truly creative person, this is a nightmare. This seemingly hard-and-fast rule pushes back against pushing boundaries, reins in experimentation, and asks that filmmakers keep themselves from testing the very limits of their abilities.
To this I say: Good.
The nightmare comes not from the actual situation, but from the way it is presented. It's not about staying with tired, old conventions even when they don't work. It's about deciding what's more important to you: being good, or being new.
As you may have noticed, Hollywood, with its "something old" attitude, has been doing quite for itself lately. In fact, storytelling has been around with us for as long as we can remember. And, throughout all that time, there have always been certain story elements that most appealed to us. Whether it's a love story, a rivalry, or a betrayal, people relate to stories built on real emotions.
One of the reasons Hollywood has been so succesful this year is because the stories it's presented appeal to that basic love of traditional storytelling. Films have not only been surpassing expectations and breaking opening weekend box office records, but those films that have captured the public's attention have also been sticking around in theaters longer. This is what's called "word-of-mouth," and it comes from people liking your film.
To use two recent examples, let's take a look at Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken. Now, if you're the type of person who feels like he has to create something "new" in order to be a valid artist, you're probably already half-way to your gun closet, ready to give it all up. These seem to be two of the most unoriginal, homogenized pieces of tripe ever put to film.
But people, god damn them, love these films to hell.
While you may hate the watered-down Bad Santa-ish notion of Paul Blart: Mall Cop or the warmed-over Ransom-ness of Taken, the truth is that their unoriginal "flaws" are in concept, not in execution. These two represent traditional story structures -- one of the underdog facing insurmountable odds, the other of revenge -- with slight tweaks and fancy trappings that make them appear wholly new. And each one delivers on its promise of gags, action, and tender moments.
They may be unoriginal, but they're certainly well-made.
So there's no wonder that these are two of the most successful films of the year so far, and two of the most successful films to ever come out in the pre-summer months. These films are made specifically for people to like them.
Fine, you say, but not everybody is solely concerned with box office receipts. Of course, this is to a certain degree naive, as almost all non-government funders of film production expect to make their money back. Truly groundbreaking films, which stretch the boundaries of film language, have abysmally low budgets not because they have lesser requirements or because of widespread prejudices against the arts, but because they need to be cheap in order to be profitable.
But let's expand to look at films that, when made, were designed not for the common moviegoer, but for the elite critics. This year's Oscars telecast highlighted the best of 2008, at least according to the old white men who run Hollywood, and the films they championed, the ones deemed to be the most artistically valid, all had one thing in common: They were new twists on something old.
The groundbreaking editing in Slumdog Millionaire? Not to disparage the Oscar-winner Chris Dickens, whose work truly is remarkable, but it's pretty much the same exact editing style also found in Boyle's previous critical darling Trainspotting.
The gritty, realistic look at the world of professional wrestling in The Wrestler? Is it really anything more than Rocky -- including even the details of the last climactic fight -- with some Super-16 grain on it?
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Reader, Milk, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Doubt, and WALL-E all have previous films and previous stories coursing through their veins and entwined in their DNA. There's something very primal about the level of storytelling here -- the basic patterns harken back those many centuries, to when stories were still told in the dark, but over a campfire instead of in a movie theater.
That's not to say that the Oscars are the final determinators of quality. They're not. But critical darlings not as clearly rewarded there -- like The Class and Waltz With Bashir -- though more ostensibly "daring" in their filmmaking, ultimately still bear strong resemblances to films of the past, whether it's Dangerous Minds or Waking Life.
Films that don't follow conventional storytelling inherently cannot fulfill or surprise audience expectations; they can only dissapoint. When you look at, Synechdoche, NY or Watchmen, two films I personally enjoyed very much but which failed to connect with audiences, you can plainly see what made them disappointments. They're dense, inaccessible, largely incoherent, and just too damn "new."
Ultimately what matters most, however, is not how novel a film is, but how well made it is. Once a filmmaker picks his style and conventions, he needs to commit to them fully. The idea of Hollywood as a factory for uninspired filmmaking comes not from the traditional plotting of so many of its features, but from the failure of moviemakers to live up to these standards. The creative energy used to devise that "new twist," to upset expectations, to create indelible characters to live these time-tested plots is a necessary ingredient, but it doesn't exist for its own sake. The problem with the "new" stories that get short shrift is that they get the creativity part down but contain none of the emotional elements audiences pay to see.
So the next time you're at square one, trying to decide how to channel your creative energies, don't become discouraged when you find yourself walking down a familiar path. Put that creativity into a new take on the material or a specific character we've never seen before. And remember, the execution -- the part that really matters -- is still all up to you.
Top photo by creativedc (Flickr Creative Commons) Second photo by techbirmingham (Flickr Creative Commons) Third photo by cliff1066 (Flickr Creative Commons) Bottom photo by Aaron Geller (Flickr Creative Commons)
On April 16, the Film & Media Studies Program hosted a screening of Works & Works in Progress by the program's four faculty filmmakers. The audience in attendance was a mix of both university students and the general local public, and a reception after the showcase brought the evening to an agreeable close.
Filmmaker John Mann opened the screening with an excerpt from a documentary entitled, Shelter, which concerns the experiences of homeless men living in shelters in Kansas and North Carolina. Shot in only six weeks, the film is structured around of a series of sit-down interviews. In one interview a man speaks about having participated in a study where he was paid to allow for his heart to be stopped and revived. In another, a man confesses that while anchored to his socio-economic status he feels little self-worth. Mann joked that the most critical responses to the documentary centered around the fact that it "provided no viable solution to homelessness," although that was hardly his intent. Afterward he screened an excerpt from Locust Point, which represents a departure from the traditional documentary form. Comprised of exquisitely composed reenactments over narrated journal entries and personal letters, the film portrays experiences of immigrants living in the Baltimore neighborhood during the early 1900s. Lastly Mann presented his most recent -- and what he suspects to be his last -- documentary, Running to Keep from Falling. As a reaction to the notion of the hyper real ever present in modern life, the film clearly delineates the trajectory Mann's directorial career has followed. Over static shots of descending elevators, ascending escalators, and passing trains, a series of automated phone messages and voicemail entries are assembled -among other things- as dialogue exchanges and statements addressed to the viewer. The content of these messages either clashes with or recontextualizes the associated image, and the coupling demands active spectatorship to arrive at meaning with respect to the whole.
Filmmaker John Mann listens intently. (Photo courtesy of Hannah Spangler)
Writer/director and photographer Matthew Porterfield, who teaches screenwriting and film production, presented test footage of actors and location studies for his next film, slated to begin production this summer. Entitled, Metal Gods, Porterfield’s second feature is best described as, "exploitation meets the art house genre." Set in southeast Baltimore during the reign of metal music, the period piece explores a week in the lives of Sean and his older brother, Trevor, as they are forced to rectify a conflict disturbing their social sphere. The filmmaker has been casting since November of last year, and has thus far held over 400 open auditions. What has resulted from months of work is an eclectic cast of largely non-professional actors. While Porterfield normally skipped to the best segments of each audition screened, he insisted on playing one video all the way through. In it, an audition with a young non-professional prospect on his front porch is cut short by a phone call from the kid's mother. From behind the camera we hear Porterfield on a cellphone as he struggles to quell the concerns of a woman having an understandably hard time with a stranger videotaping her son. The accidental material makes the audition a short in and of itself. Afterward he screened test footage of a few location studies, including an abandoned paintball field and a pipeline on the side of the road that seemed to recede infinitely. Porterfield has managed to generate positive interest in Metal Gods well before its production.
Writer/director Matthew Porterfield.
Animator and videographer Karen Yasinsky teaches both animation and visual language courses at the university. Yasinsky first screened a stop motion animation short entitled, I Choose Darkness, which adapts its subject matter from Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar. Yasinsky combines fluid animation, emotive and expressive lighting design, and a rich and engaging soundtrack of carefully foleyed effects to both evoke and echo the sense of filmic realism characteristic of the Bresson feature. Yasinsky has also created a live action animation short that derives its subject from the opening of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. While her works are often adapted from live active feature films, the filmmaker frequently takes the narrative in different directions, establishing similarities while subverting expectation for the astute viewer familiar with its source material. The adjustments and modifications always service the medium and acknowledge that the practice of adaptation has its own set of complexities. Since she prefers to steer clear of spoken word, gesticulation is a high priority. She noted that the subjects of her animations express themselves through different modes of rubbing, or physical interaction. Once accustomed to this unique gestural vocabulary the result is affective. Yasinsky humorously admits she finds comfort in the work she does and the discipline it entails because it aligns naturally with her tendency to stay indoors and willfully removed from social settings. She says the work ethic associated with both stop motion and line drawn animation conforms to her obsessive personality as well as her sensitivity to detail. Yasinsky's acclaimed shorts will also be featured at the upcoming Maryland film festival this year.
The most recent addition to the Hopkins Film program faculty is Douglas Sadler, who co-teaches narrative production, a course offered to both MICA and JHU students. Sadler presented three distinct works that mark a clear transformation in both aesthetic and thematic preoccupations. Demonstrating directorial range, Sadler began by presenting an excerpt from a student film depicting a charged dream-state experience. The second excerpt screened was from a Samuel Beckett teleplay of Ey, Joe?. Influenced by the Dogme95 movement, Sadler's next excerpt from a digital feature entitled, Riders, illustrated the extent to which a shoe-string budget, a small crew, limited technical means can deliver a gratifying cinematic experience. The fourth, a mainstream narrative feature film entitled, Swimmers, which garnered a number of festival awards during its run. The most mesmerizing of the set was the clip of Joe, in which the subject is depicted in one take listening to a voice addressing him off screen. The take is uninterrupted and eight minutes long. Abiding by the strict stage direction presented in the original script, the subject was not permitted to blink for the entirety of the take.
Animator Karen Yasinsky makes a gesture. (Photo courtesy of Hannah Spangler)
A wine and cheese reception provided the ideal setting for students and locals to exchange a few words with these active and award-winning contemporary filmmakers. We look forward to similar showcases in the future as faculty members continue to develop their bodies of work.
So my name is Carlos and I'm a film major working on my third year at Hopkins. This Spring semester I've taken up an Independent Study course within my major, which means I get to put together the first half of a year-long short form film project. This is very exciting for me...
And I've been asked to log the process from concept to completed work on this very esteemed blog as a kind of, sort of student-production diary. This is initially helpful for me because I get to consolidate all the pre-production elements into one overarching framework, rather than having them haphazardly scattered all over the floor on crumpled post-it notes and deli napkins...
As a heads up expect some cool posts -- if I can keep up with it. I'll be uploading excerpts from shooting scripts and shot lists, maybe even some location shots (as I scout about), wardrobe/exposure tests and, fingers crossed, some clips of the short once footage starts rolling in. I'll also try to log about day-to-day experiences once I slip into production. Trust me I cut plenty of corners given time restraints and a shoestring budget, so my process is definitely not one to model. Fair warning.
No need to draw this out any further, so I'm just going to get started by giving a general overview of what's been developed so far.
The Concept
The original idea was to develop a short film (roughly 30-35 mins. in length) throughout the course of one year, documenting the seasons from February to November. This got me thinking that it would be neat to create natural partitions within the story, sort of like assigning each season a unique and distinct chapter. The more I tried to flesh it out the more I felt cubby-holed into a formula I had imposed on myself, so I took a step back and started from the top, keeping in mind the appeal of toying with the narrative's structure.
Long story short I convinced myself that the structure should be informed primarily by the logistics of production -- I have Spring and Fall semesters to put together a senior project and at the end of each I need to have some sort of work to show. Finally I decided on two somewhat mutually exclusive parts and that got me thinking about structuralism and then I was off...
Now that I had binary oppositions on my mind I started listing out a few and settled on one in particular: Conciousness/Unconsciousness. It was too primal and appealing to pass up. A film theory course at Hopkins brought to mind the relationship between spectator and projected image. In "The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus," Jean-Loius Baudry says the following:
"A parallel between dream and cinema had often been noticed: common sense perceived it right away. The cinematographic projection is reminiscent of dream, would appear to be a kind of dream, really a dream, a parallelism often noticed by the dreamer when, about to describe his dream, he is compelled to say 'It was like in a movie...'"
I decided to make Part 1 of the short film the lucid dream experience of its central character. The mid-century American film noirs (notably) were particularly attractive to proponents of Psychoanalysis because they saw these films as illustrative of the unconscious drives and desires of its filmmakers, reflecting the psychology of American society as a whole. This is really interesting to me...
It felt very natural and admittedly appealing to make Part 1 a stylized period piece -- a crime noir seen through the psychoanalytic lens. In the development of the story, it also felt wise to precede Part 1 with a short prologue, which would introduce central characters and establish the conscious plane, set in a naturalistically portrayed waking-state real world. After delving into the protagonist's artificially-induced dream state (the unbridled world of her unconscious) in Part 1, we return to the conscious plane of the prologue -- the day after. From top to bottom these parts will be distinct, I'm talking all the elements: direction, cinematography, camera work, production design, character performances, and ultimately how it's cut together.
Why? Why not? I have this crazy idea that it'll be fun to play with different approaches to storytelling within the medium, to question (and negate) prevailing notions and shake up an arguably stagnant creative community. I too often come across filmmakers who limit their scope in pursuit of a kind of general consistency either within one work or across an entire body of work. I don't have too many films under my belt, but I want to challenge myself early on to try things I otherwise wouldn't. I'm looking forward to making many mistakes... at this point that's kind of the idea.
That's basically my way of saying that this script is a significant departure from the way I would normally do things, and the story's substantively edgier than what I'm used to adapting to screen. That said I'll be brutally honest about the myriad problems I expect to encounter along the way, because in the end this is more a learning experience than anything else.
Next time, a full out treatment, casting, location scouting and maybe a few excerpts from the script. Who knows?
I’m sorry folks, I posted something earlier tonight (technically it was yesterday but I was rushing to get some school work in so I didn’t check if it actually got posted) and it didn’t go through… so I’m back for you guys. Things have been hectic, but hey they always are when you’ve been done with academia since the 7th grade and you’re in the 16th grade. But it’s how you approach your problems right? If you approach them with fear and doubt, or swag (that’s the ebonic truncation of the word swagger) and style, and with that our topic for tonight is style.
People always talk about a director’s style. Oh, that’s Scorsesse’s style, or that’s Lucas’s style (I guess for Lucas he only made 3 different kind of films, or should I say 2 and a ½, but you know him so I picked him), that’s Tarantino’s style, et cetera… it’s all BS -at least to me. Style is connected to the content; to talk as if it’s totally detached is wrong. And I’m not trying to say that some films are not all about visual style, but that doesn’t mean those films don’t have a story, or are not about something. (I remember some girl telling me in 4th grade that a particular film didn’t have a story…for some reason that statement pissed the hell out of me… just because a film didn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean we’re all that narrow minded). Films always have something to translate to you if they don’t tell you through dialog. Let me paraphrase a great film quote I heard:
Film… Some tell a story and leave you with a feeling. Some tell you a story, leave you with a feeling, and give you an idea. Some tell you a story, leave you with a feeling, give you an idea, and reveal something about you and the people around you. How you tell that story relates to what the story is about –if not, you as a filmmaker are neglecting a vital part of film.
I mean don’t you think that’s what style is… the way in which you tell a story (just say yes – it makes things easier)? Once you decide what a film is about, your whole crew -whether it’s you and your friend, or hundreds of people- mobilize to portray that story in the best way possible. Form follows function. Now you can talk about all this auteur hoopla, but lets take a look at one auteur and from there analyze why so many auteurs seem like that have one distinct style seen in all of their films. Lets take Godard for example… in their simplest forms, how many of his films were about contemporary culture of the time (both French and bastardized American) that starred either Anna Karina or another beautiful woman with a suave male? So many. This is not a knock on his brilliant work at all, but this basic template seen in his early work was certain to make his films have a certain style. Plus you add the certain techniques, limitations, and crew he used in many of his films (especially Raoul Cotards very natural camera work)…damn right he is gonna have a distinct style. Now look at any auteur and tell me that they don’t work with certain players for a good amount of their films, DP’s, story types, and so on. I bet you can’t find one without a constant trend. Let’s move on to how style comes into the film making process…for me.
I decide on style a few different ways. Usually, I examine what the film is about and try to create a visual language to accompany the philosophy of the film. I like philosophy, so this always comes up. For example, if the film draws inspiration from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations work (a philosophical treatise about the increasing non-reality and mediation of our lives through technology and society), I might tell the DP to make sure the camera works as much as a frame within a frame in the film (shots of windows and mirrors, and shots of different media objects in the film, etc.). Sometimes the style I’ll pick is apparent because the film is a blatant genre piece, ala film noir, western, et cetera. Many times it’s based on accentuating the particular actors that are in the film. You will decide on style depending on your character, the story, and your crew.
Film is composed of thousands, and sometimes millions (I hope I am alright with these numbers cuz math is not my strong suit) of frames you have to set up (I’m lying you don’t have to set up every frame, but that leaves hundreds of set ups unless you want one of those Andy Warhol films of someone play masturbating in one place, in which case you can pretty much say screw style), all different to come together and make one coherent film. It is best you and your crew know how you are going to represent it visually. If you know this and successfully execute it, you can make a brilliant film out of the most mundane or hackneyed story. Lets not forget, film is a visual medium.
It's been a long day of filming... hell it's been a long week of filming, but in film's defense I will say it is the most sublime masochism...the most magnificent fakery, and if i didn't have it in my life at this point I don't know what I would do.
I promised in an earlier post to talk about settling on an idea...I'm a man of my word, well at least 85% of my words, so lets keep one of my foolish, human scruples afloat.
(This is aimed more towards those working on short student films, as well as those indecisive, extremely picky, extra-perfectionist film makers -notice I employ extra because all of us film makers are perfectionists, at least I hope so.)
When you have the means to make a film, the first thing to do is make sure you know what film you're going to make. The definite, grand process of making a movie makes it where you go all bonkers concerning the multiple ideas you have in your head. You say should I make a drama, comedy, or magical realism; you say is this tiny idea worth developing, would it work as a film; you say what would my friends say, what would my teachers say, what will the people at film school say; you say if I am famous one day will they spot any potential genius in this early film... but overall you say I have to make something great, encompassing all facets of the universe, hitting all genres, a post-modern masterpiece, setting precedents, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. This type of thought is fine and dandy in its youthful sincerity and naivete, but it holds you back...and it is sisyphean in nature (step your vocab or greek mythology game up if you don't know that one). If you don't commit to an idea, when you do eventually start your film you will never be happy, constantly saying to yourself "I should have done this film", or "Jimmy's film is so much cooler than mines."
But first you need to know what kind of film maker you are. If you know this it cuts down a superfluous selection of film ideas to a select, relevant (to you) few. Are you into racial politics, sociology, anthropology, gender issues, science, etc.? These subjects will be the supporting beams for your film. Then start small, with an impetus for a narrative that you are really passionate about. The impetus is the reason for the primary/main action in your film to occur, i.e.,why do the college kids go on a road trip, why does the friend steal from the other, why does the father shoot the son? Once you have this, build from the ground up. I began one of my films with an interest in Hegel's master-slave dialectic and how it pertained to actual life. I took the idea of young love and its power struggles and developed the film from there.
If you have a concrete idea and it turns out that you execute it perfectly, and make a good film, you will hit on both the small and big concepts you wished to and more. But you have to make sure those small aspects of the film are there, and they are well thought out and executed.
On another note,I shot some rough dance for the camera footage this Tuesday and it sucked. Well not what I shot but the shoot in general. How the hell are you going to tell someone (who has to bring a bunch of heavy film equipment around, by himself -thats me!) you are going to be on set at 9:00 and consistently come 20 to 30 mins. late, then come 40 mins. late, be in a rush to leave, bitch, and act like it's all good? You should slap yourself for that one! That's just total indecency... I feel like cussing but this is school regulated, Feivel decided to stay on the east and go in my closet, and I gotta go to sleep, peace.
I've been gone for a while and I am sorry about that, but I'm back, I'm relatively good, and that's what matter's right?
Today we are going to talk about making decisions when it comes to a possible film idea/project, but before that I want to talk about organization. The whole process of film making (no matter the scale or phase you currently are in -pre-production, production, post) is cluttered. As a filmmaker you are trying to remember multiple things in each phase of a film (locations, budget, neutral density filter, Jeanie is lactose intolerant, flash the film, cut that shot, tell Rob the young actor to stop hitting on Erica the make-up artist -true story, etc.). The only way to have a semblance of calm, because the nature of film is mercurial and won't allow you much ease, is to get you a trusty notebook or something you feel comfortable with, and use it for the pre-production and production phase of your film. In this (insert whatever trusty thing you have chosen) you keep storyboards, scripts and extra scripts, master shot lists, schedules, location/actor photos -if your not into the whole digital thing, ideas, et cetera. Sounds like a lot, but trust me one notebook can hold all of this stuff together so as you won't fall apart...completely.
For the post production phase you should try to keep all of your digitized footage on one drive (they have those 1 terrabyte joints now, get one). When it comes time to edit only create a few files. When you 'save project as' every time you make a new cut, you take up alot of space and make it harder for your processor to to help you edit your footage (you also end up with titles like (The indelible Sharpie 2 Dir. cut copy copy copy of another copy of that copy -at least on Final cut).
When it comes to film throw your finished reels in the refrigerator until you're ready to send them out. Write on the reel cases how you want the lab to process your film (i'll probably talk about that in the future, 'that' being the different ways you can process film and the results). When you get the film back always keep the reels together and label them. If you are sitting down at a Steambeck throw some gaffers tape at the tips of the film strips and label them so you don't confuse or have to constantly look at the homogenous film strips in the viewfinder every time.
Well I was going to talk to you about deciding on projects, but I changed my mind...gotta keep you wanting (not really I'm just lazy and want to spread my material). I promise to talk about ideas next time but philosophy calls and I'm tryna get my Terrence Malick on, ya feel me?
So I just broke down and moved alot of film equipment by myself (3 trips worth), and I'm kinda irritated, plus I have to pee bad, but whatever. You crave edutainment, and I'm here to deliver. See, film people (and I mean film makers) even though we are all creative and cool, and artsy, and smoke cigarettes, and are francophiles, and are kinda emo sometimes, and like scarves, and the color black, and shades, including a host of other things the French and the Beatniks played out decades ago, we are pragmatists -for the exception of Oliver Stone, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Gilliam, and some underground film makers who if I mention their names would just make me sound like a pretentious snob...which I'm not...I'm an elitist. Sounds alot classier don't it? When I say we are pragmatists I mean we understand the logistical limitations our medium imposes upon us. All those other kind of artists are nuts...and we would be too if we could pee on our cameras without themshort circuiting (still love ya Jack and Andy). But from my personal experience, other artists seem looser than us film people who are sticklers about time, money and such, and that's fine...just means their art isn't to be taken serious...I kid, people.
What brought me to juxtapose members of the artworld is my current pairing with dancers. See those from the Dance planet are a very particular species... they are incredible workers, fit for those 16 hour shooting days, it's just that they see things different... like time. When film peeps say be present at 8:30, be there at 8:15 and coil a freakin cord or something. Because most likely something is going to go wrong, or we're going to have to adjust for something...count on that. In fact I don't even want to talk about dancers in relation to film anymore...let's talk time.
Time is of the utmost importance in any production. Before you go out to shoot you sould sit down and make a preliminary shooting timetable. The crew should arrive an hour and thirty minutes before the cast. The thirty minutes is an arbitrary time, but this time however much you allot, should be used for crew to eat/warm up to work, or warm up to each other if they haven't met one another, then the next hour is really used for lighting set up, director and DP talks, and grips to dabble in some pre-shooting misogyny. The call time for the talent should always be after lighting is set up. So if your crew call time is 7am and you knowit will take a hour to get the lights up, you make the talent call time 8am. It's rude to make the talent wait around for crew issues. Plus if they get to come in a hour later than everybody else it makes it harder for them to bitch about things, which they'll do anyway.
And always start as early as you can in a day because most likely, if you can, you will go over time, way over time. My longest day has been 18 hours, a friend of mines went 48 hours, but he's working on that Avatar flick by James Cameron, who has tanks and fighter planes in a concrete storage area with no windows on one of his private properties. Also if you are late on set, film people will look down on you, blame you, and fire you if they can (well this is more Hollywood people behavior). Plus you have to uphold the great tradition of fIlm peeps always being early. This isn't as true with video people but they prefer tape and squares over film and circles. Plus, what the hell is a videographer? What a lame title. But yes, time is important in film world, very important.
I'll talk more about time later on but I'm tired, I need some time off. Good night.
As you can tell by the title of my post my name is Dik, and I will be sharing my thoughts and experiences concerning the production aspect of film and video (yes, the two are different). This semester I am working with a choreographer from Towson University and we are combining our mediums to create a few Dance for the Camera pieces. I have worked with writers, producers, directors, and others involved in the film making process, but never have I collaborated with someone outside the realm of film... so it should be interesting and lead to a lot of good and bad experiences to detail in this blog.
My posts will probably be extremely idiosyncratic, and continue in a stream-of-conscious like manner, so don't be alarmed if you come upon any awkward language, grammar, et cetera. I meet with the choreographer and a few dancers tomorrow for some practice runs of our routine...after the run through I will begin writing specifically about production. Until then, watch films, read the others‘ blogs, and I look forward to sharing my ideas/experiences with you. Au revoir!
