HopkinsCinemAddicts

Cocaine to London: A Week of Breakthroughs

During my last post, I hated filmmaking. I am happy to report that things are looking up! I would like to take this post to update you all on our progress, primarily with the results of our Seed&Spark campaign as well as all of the meetings and decisions made over the last few weeks (I had a very busy Thanksgiving break). While this whole process is still extremely stressful, time-consuming and bothersome, these steps forward are reassuring. I can feel my second wind coming and I am very excited.

To begin, you’ll remember that we began our fundraising campaign through Seed&Spark and after a few days of filming a promo video and many more days of filling out all of the necessary text boxes on the site itself, we launched it to the public. Well, I am happy to announce that after a month of that site being up, we obliterated our goal of $3500! I am very grateful for support from my circle and even some complete strangers and am excited to put their contributions to good use. The extra money that we were able to raise also allowed us to tweak our budget sheet, giving us much more leeway for elements like craft services (food), production design and post-production elements. Again, I am very thankful to everyone who contributed and promise we will use your generosity well!

Our fundraising announcement photo posted on our Instagram! @cocainetolondon

With this big step completed, we were able to get the ball rolling on many other aspects of pre-production. For one, with this tweaked budget sheet being more or less set in stone, I was able to start messaging and meeting with the many departments and get their aspects of the pre-production phase started. Most notably, I am talking about the PD and costuming departments, who I was able to have meetings with, giving them their total budget so they can start shopping for the many necessary props and outfits which bring my script’s world to life.

On top of meeting with these departments, I also began meeting with my lighting department and my assistant director. This is because, at around the same time that the Seed&Spark came to a close, me and my camera team were able to finish our first draft of the shot list for the film! This is perhaps an even bigger moment than the Seed&Spark completing because while money is cool and all, it cannot compare to the creative milestones. After five weeks and about 12 hours of reading through the script and visualizing shots, we had created an outline for the film. The whole short film had been made, compiled together in a mess of Zoom sketches and incomprehensible hand-written notes… but it was there… in 69 meticulously planned shots.

This moment allowed us to begin creating everything we needed for shooting from the official Google Sheets based shot list to our shooting schedule (which is currently in the process of being built). It also made the entire shoot that much more imaginable. There are a lot of small things that go ignored in the grandiose discussion of set life, from where the cast and crew will relax between shots, to where to set up the video village (a location where the crew can watch the shot as it is being filmed) to how best we can have the crew multi task to finish the day quicker. With this shot list done, I was able to more easily visualize all of these gears in the giant mechanism that is making a film, fleshing the whole process out in my mind and making me much more confident in the feasibility and enjoyability that is possible on this set.

A sneak peek of our beautiful shot list!

Finally, we had another major breakthrough in the last week, this time in the casting department. You’ll remember, I was quite stressed out last post regarding our casting as we were having a very hard time casting our lead. I’m happy to report that with a lot of perseverance and a lot of cold DM’s on Instagram, we were able to secure many applicants and officially cast our protagonist! I am so happy with the person we picked, both for Viv (the lead) and for the recording engineer who we were able to recast successfully. Officially finding these two people leaves us with only one more character left to cast and a big weight off of our shoulders. Just like with the budget and the shot list, all of these breakthroughs help make the entire shoot so much more imaginable. I can see it, just over the horizon.

This does not mean we are in the clear. There are still a lot more things we have to do, but the ball is rolling on all of them and we are still within the schedule that we had created for ourselves so long ago at our first producer meeting. All I can do is keep it moving and look forward to the future, a topic I would like to explore in my next, and perhaps, final post, but we’ll deal with that when we get there.

 

Until next time…

                        Devin

The Return (2003): The Killing of a God-like Father

Green water ripples like a kaleidoscope, accompanied by a low, raspy melody that hints at the ocean's hidden secret. So begins Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return. Below the surface, the camera navigates the desolate seabed, revealing ancient coral reefs before settling on a sunken rowboat, its prow tied with a rope. Underwater, the boat is no longer visible to the world, yet the rope suggests its reachable presence, akin to the knowledge of God through faith. Built around days of the week, the film starts on Sunday, the weekly memorial of Jesus’s Resurrection. Two brothers, Andrei (14) and Ivan (12), alongside their friends, challenge each other to leap into the sea from a diving board. In an overhead shot, the two siblings stand on the board, their presence diminished by the vast ocean. Andrei follows suit, but Ivan steps back, fearing heights and the water suggestive of God. Likewise, when their father returns home after 12 years, the two brothers respond differently: Andrei is accepting while Ivan is skeptical, if not fearful, of this stranger’s appearance. So for Ivan, part of growing up is to come to terms with the unknown, whether the father, the ocean, or God.

Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, ca. 1483; Brera Gallery, Milan. Flickr, by Richard Mortel (2019).

In fact, the father is like God, appearing out of nowhere. When the mother announces the news, she simply says, “Your father’s sleeping,” as if his existence does not need to be confirmed. When Andrei gently pushes the door open, the two brothers see their father lying on the bed with the sheet covering him from the waist down, his head slightly tilted, similar to Andrea Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Andrei, like the mourners in the painting, is close to tears as Ivan hastily searches the attic, sifting through a dusty box. He discovers an illustrated Bible concealing an old photograph of his father. A close-up shot juxtaposes the foreground family photo with the sacrifice of Isaac, Ivan’s doubt overpowering faith. At dinner, after asking the mother to pour the brothers some wine, the father proposes a fishing trip with his sons. The Ichthys standing for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Our Savior” in ancient Greek further highlights the father’s God-like presence.

Church of the Most Holy Rosary, Tullow, County Carlow, Ireland. Wikimedia Commons, by Andreas F. Borchert (2013).

But the father, from forcing Ivan to call him “Dad” to engaging in street justice, is like Matthew’s Jesus, a violent revolutionary who supposes, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father (Matthew 10:34-36).” Without faith, Ivan is like the doubting Thomas who questions his father’s past and intentions. On the first night, Andrei and Ivan lie side by side in the tent. Andrei has his eyes closed when the still-awake Ivan initiates a conversation about their father's remark that he once had too many fish. “Where could that have happened?” Ivan asks. Andrei nonchalantly responds, “In the north, maybe.” Ivan shrugs off Andrei’s elbow as if to shake off his brother's faith. “He’s just lying,” Ivan concludes. “He could be a gangster. He could slit our throats.” As the father becomes more abusive and authoritarian, Ivan, in the next tent scene, promises that he will kill their father if he touches him. The frustrated Ivan then opens the journal and writes down his promise, foreshadowing its happening. Next to him, Andrei, head down, can only watch with concern like a helpless disciple.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Wikimedia Commons, by Sailko (2016).

In a fight with his father, Ivan, holding a knife, cries, “I could love you if you were different, but you’re terrible.” The father tries to approach and reason, but Ivan drops the knife and runs away. He climbs up to a watchtower and threatens to jump down if the father follows him. Close to executing his unrealized jump, Ivan, however, witnesses his father's fatal fall from the ladder. Echoing the diving scene, the film shows an overhead shot of the dead father on the ground, with a fallen log beside him. The doubting Thomas finally senses Jesus’s wounds. In the end, the two brothers witness their father's body descending into the ocean, along with all the rights and wrongs. The identity of the father, whether perceived as God or the Devil, becomes inconsequential when Ivan calls out, “Dad,” finally conquering his fear or lack of faith. But this achievement is not a result of taking a heroic leap but of enduring the agony that defines the adult world.

Cocaine to London: Casting

In my previous blog post, I discussed me and my producers hitting a major milestone in the pre-production phase: launching our Seed&Spark page and beginning to fundraise for our project. It was a moment that took a lot of planning, hard work and energy out of me and while I wish I could say that it was met with a moment of peace and bliss… I would be gravely lying.

See, the reality of the situation is that finishing the Seed&Spark process gave me a weird feeling; an odd, unexplainable mix of adrenaline-fueled excitement and dread. Dread for how much more had to be done and how time had already ticked so far away. At this point we were already almost three months into the pre-production process and I was very proud of the progress, we still had a lot more to go. At this point, the excitement of first starting the process was starting to wane and all of our work ethics were going along with it. Also, classes were starting to ramp up in intensity and I knew this would affect everyone’s availability. So immediately the next day, fueled by both excitement and fear, I began on the other major aspect of the pre-production process: the casting.

In our initial meeting, my producers and I were able to create the Backstage page for the film and even before I finished the Seed&Spark, I finished up the necessary requirements for this page as it seemed easier and I wanted to make sure that we got started on casting as early as possible. The requirements for a Backstage account, are similar to See&Spark in some ways as they require elements like a logline, a list of genres, shoot dates, etc. However, with it being a casting site, most of the preliminary information is relative to the characters of the film. I had to explain each character, giving the applicants information about their physical features such as gender and race (if applicable), their required talents such as singing, playing guitar, yelling (all of which are very relevant to my script) and also just information on the character’s headspace so that the actor can give the best performance they can.

The homepage to our Backstage listing!

It is this ability to give a performance that is why we chose to use Backstage for this process. The other major aspect of creating our Backstage listing is the inclusion of Sides for each character. Sides are a small section of the script that the site shows to all applicants which allows them to record a virtual audition video to see both their acting skills as a whole, but also their synergy with the role itself. Luckily, I found that my script gave each character a lot of really big, important moments that require strong acting that I could send for each role. While the script would change throughout this process, rendering some of the Sides outdated, they still helped show the actor’s ability to portray the character and I was able to cast multiple people based on these Sides.

However, it is not all smooth. We were successfully able to cast two of our characters very easily in the antagonist and his father (the lead singer and drummer of the band respectively) but the other roles turned out to be much trickier. For one, there was a character of a Camera Guy who we successfully casted and then was sadly written out of the script a month later. We had to sadly tell the actor for the camera guy that his role had been cut which was disappointing considering his acting ability, but it did give us practice in giving people bad news, a reality we will have to become accustomed to. At the same time, we casted the role of the recording engineer, however recently learned that the timing would no longer work for her as she would have to travel a long way for the shoot and with the actor’s strike recently lifting, she did not want to miss out on opportunities in her own area. This also turned out to be okay in the end as luckily we had a lot of applicants for this role and are currently in the process of interviewing two more possible actors for the role.

A still from our first Zoom casting interview!

The most worrisome aspect of this casting process, an aspect that has still not been solved, is casting our last two characters: the mother character and her daughter… who is the lead of the film! Part of the worry is my own pickiness, with this lead having a lot of tough scenes that do not work if the performance is not as perfect as it could be, but one of the major issues with this casting was the amount of skills our lead needs to have. From playing the bass to playing the acoustic guitar to singing to being able to scream, we were already casting a shallow net made shallower by the fact that we wanted them to be within the area due to our struggling budget.

Now, usually I end these posts with a shift to how we learned from the experiences we completed and how they gave me excitement for the film, but the reality is… this casting process has really been pissing me off. I will instead end this post by speaking to the world of the Internet and requesting that if anyone is at all interested in filling our remaining roles or knows of people who would be, to message this email: [email protected]. Shameless plug, I know, I know, but we are getting desperate and why not use every platform I have.

Thank you in advance and sorry for the non-optimistic ending. Maybe next week, I’ll be less annoyed by the filmmaking process. Anyways, thanks for reading.

 

Until next time…

                        Devin

The Eight Mountains (2022): From a City Boy to a Displaced Backpacker

A large pine tree at the foot of the mountain occupies the center of the frame, surrounded by rows of smaller pine trees. The sun shines down, casting a warm, golden light. Nature emanates tranquility until Pietro’s voice-over breaks the silence, such a voice empowered by the mountain. “I didn’t expect to find a friend like Bruno in my life.” Instantly, the scene builds up the connection between Bruno and nature, Bruno and the narrator, and more importantly, the narrator’s life and the intersection of nature and the unexpected friendship. A match cut to a tall, thin tree standing alone against a cloudy sky introduces the other side of the mountain: a desolate, unforgiving summit where life can barely survive. Only the voice-over bridges the gap. “Nor that friendship was a place where you put down roots, that remains waiting for you,” which foreshadows a sense of loss that ultimately results in Pietro’s displacement. So begins Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains, where Pietro searches for his place in the world through the mountain and Bruno, the last child in a village in the Italian Alps.

Valle d'Aosta. Flickr, by R Boed (2015).

After the title, the film shows the young Pietro (11) looking at a mountain range in the background through an open window. Meditative, he sits within the wooden frame, indicating the barrier he carries along from the city when his parents rent a house in the mountain village to spend the summer. His red shirt, however, implies the innate vigor that sustains his quest for the unfamiliar nature’s freedom. An off-screen voice repeats, “Bruno,” and Pietro stands up to take a closer look as if what he hears is a calling. The young Bruno appears in a brown jacket, tending a cow under his aunt’s command. With only 14 of the 183 villagers left in the village, Pietro’s summer vacation turns out to be the village's busiest season as Bruno helps with the milking and grazing duties. However, Pietro is too young to understand the mountain’s cruelty. Guided by Bruno, Pietro ventures through nature and feels only delight.

With permission from Bruno's uncle, Pietro's father, Giovanni, takes Bruno and Pietro on a hike, which signifies the deepening of their friendship, with Bruno becoming an integral part of Pietro's family, almost like a second son to Giovanni. In fact, Giovanni wants to adopt and provide an education for Bruno. As the trio reaches the glacier, they confront a crevasse. While Giovanni and Bruno successfully jump across, Pietro slips and experiences altitude sickness, prompting their return. If the mountain embodies Pietro’s vision of a fulfilling life, the failed leap indicates his thwarted endeavor to attain that aspiration. Indeed, the ominous return leads to a series of misfortunes. Bruno's father disagrees with the adoption, which forces Bruno to leave the village and work as a bricklayer. Pietro blames his friend’s disappearance on Giovanni's unthinking proposal. So later when Giovanni invites the adolescent Pietro to go hiking, Pietro declines, saying, “That’s the sort of stuff you do with friends.” The unrealized hike ultimately drives Pietro to the low point of his character arc. When Giovanni disapproves of his decision to study documentaries and literature, Pietro leaves home and leads an aimless life in the city without a steady job.

Drawing, Details of Mountain Sheds, Houses and a Rock, Bernese Alps, Switzerland; Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900); Switzerland; graphite on light gray paper; Sheet: 11.7 x 20.5 cm (4 5/8 x 8 1/16 in.); Gift of Louis P. Church; 1917-4-165.

When Giovanni dies, Pietro (31) returns to the mountain village where Bruno conveys Giovanni’s final wish: to build a house on the mountain. “My life seemed partly that of a man, partly that of a boy,” Pietro confesses. The construction then offers him a second chance to reclaim his place in the mountain and in life. However, this is not the end of the quest. When Pietro and Bruno look at the finished house grilling food, Pietro expresses a sense of loss. “Too bad the summer is almost over now.” The project is temporary, and he is yet to find a life-long goal. On the other hand, Bruno decides to revive his uncle’s alpeggio. When Pietro asks if it pays, Bruno answers, “That’s not what I was born for,” which foreshadows both the financial difficulty that Bruno will face and his determination to be a mountaineer.

Why is Bruno so attached to the mountain? To find the answer so as to understand life’s purpose, Pietro goes to Nepal, a country most synonymous with the Himalayas, the youngest fold mountains, while Bruno marries Lara, raises a daughter, and tends to the pasture in the older Alps. Through hiking, Pietro finds his place in the world as he documents his travels and publishes a book. Back in Italy, Pietro reunites with Bruno and shares a story he hears when he travels. The flashlight strapped to Pietro’s forehead illuminates the dark house, indicating a newfound wisdom. A bit tipsy, he draws a circle in the notebook and divides it into eight pieces that represent “eight mountains and eight seas, and in the middle is Mount Sumeru,” the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology. Pietro asks, “Who will have learned more, the one who has traveled the eight mountains and the eight seas, or the one who has reached the top of Mount Sumeru?” Bruno says that he is the one who has reached Mount Sumeru and that Pietro travels the eight mountains. Pietro seconds the idea only to add that he is the one who wins. Partly due to the pride of being at the top, partly due to his profound tie to the mountain, Bruno chooses to die alone in the mountain house giving up his family when he loses his pasture, his purpose in life, due to mismanagement. 

Cosmological Mandala with Mount Meru. Wikimedia Commons, by Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017).

But is Bruno a loser? When Pietro decides not to return to the mountain house and lives in Nepal with his girlfriend after Bruno dies, the film indicates that the one who travels the eight mountains can never make such an extreme decision as the one who reaches Mount Sumeru. They can only look up to the summit in the center. But to admire or to be admired, for Pietro, the eight mountains are where he belongs.

Cocaine to London: The Promo Video

One of the most integral parts of ensuring that we were able to keep on track of the timeline we had created (as shown in the previous blog post) was filming our promotional video. This would serve as something like the trailer for the film (although nowhere near as high-budget and cinematic as trailers often are), a way of introducing the project, its goals, our crew and more, while also doing perhaps the single most important task in a film pre-production: raising money. 

See, for the first few months of us officially beginning pre-production on COCAINE TO LONDON, the only thing we cared about was the budget. The amount we were able to raise would determine everything. It would determine if we could cast actors from out of state (as we would have to accommodate their gas/train prices and housing) or whether we would have to cast locally. It would determine how much we could spend on creating the songs for the film, as well as how much we could spend on the instruments and other production design elements and most importantly it would determine if the people on crew would be able to eat a full Potbelly sandwich or would have to again settle for just a half one every meal (we all are okay with these conditions, don’t worry). 

In order to obtain this figure, though, we had to create our Seed&Spark page (a page that is open for contributions for the next 5 days only, so check it out here, sorry for the plug). On this page, we had to define the components of the story from the plot, to the crew behind the project to the reason behind why I want to make this to begin with. The crown jewel of the site though is the first thing you see when you open the link: the promo video. So before, we could move forward anywhere else, we had to create this first.

The homepage of our Seed&Spark website!

It started, like everything else I do, with a script I scribbled together at 3am. This script would not go through many changes, but then would proceed to almost be completely ignored on the day of the shoot as it simply was not at all funny… my bad. In many ways though, this process was our test run of a lot of the ideas and desires we had for the actual shoot (minus the part where my script wasn’t funny).

After the script was made, we began making the shot list and shooting schedule, which would help us gauge how long some of our shots in the real film would take and how feasible they were to begin with. We did many similar techniques and ideas that we would employ in the actual shoot in January such as the long, tracking shot and the two angles we would use for our talking head portions of the film. This gave us practice and knowledge of these shots, how difficult they were, what we would have to prepare for, etc… and boy, did we need that. 

Not only were both shots much harder to light than we anticipated (especially with the much smaller crew we had to employ for the promo video due to filming it over the summer in Baltimore), but we also learned that the teleprompter we had planned on using to make our actor’s jobs easier for the talking head sections worked as a super strong matte box, darkening the image to the point that it was unusable. This forced us to have to create a second day to the originally one day promo video production, but it allowed us to solve this talking head problem, which means we already know what to do when we eventually have to repeat the setup on set. We also sadly had to cut the moving shot that we had filmed for the film (again, it was not funny) but it did allow us to have practiced the movements involved in the moving long take, as well as help us visualize the way we would have to light the space.

One of the two of our talking head angles, as seen in our promo video.

And okay, listen, I’ll be the first to admit that the promo video shoot was not the greatest thing of all time: we went three hours over on the first day, many shots were cut or changed day of, a cigarette was lit indoors (and then properly extinguished), but most of these issues came down to us simply not having enough time to consider them before the shoot. In reality, the shots in which my producers and my camera team (the wonderful Sophia Lin and Isabel Salas) were able to sit down and discuss in depth, went incredibly smoothly. The second day, especially, which we planned way more to ensure we did not go over time as we did the first day, was one of the most efficient and relaxed days of filming I have experienced in a while. 

By the end of the entire process (and another week or so of hating editing so much) we had a completed promo video and to be honest, there is a lot I don’t like about it. Luckily, though, I understand why I don’t like what I don’t like. I understand that these kinds of mistakes happen when I don’t plan as much as I should and don’t coordinate between all of my departments to the level I should be. Recognizing these issues is the first step though and we have already made steps to ensure that this form of under planning does not happen again, which I will go into more in future posts.

While I did realize this negative thing, I also realized just how much great there was in this promo video. From beautiful planned shots to fun dialogue to beautiful unplanned shots, I began to see my vision not only blossom, but expand to share the creative decisions and personalities of the crew surrounding me. 

Some beautiful (but not yet color corrected) shots from the promo video.

Proud of the work, of the people who created it and of myself, I uploaded the promo video, proofread the rest of the Seed&Spark page and launched the site. COCAINE TO LONDON was now open to the public. You can view the promo video (with its color corrected footage) here!

 

Until next time…

                        Devin

Strawberry and Chocolate (1993): More Than a Quest for Sexual Awakening

Into a cramped, poorly lit motel room Communist college student David guides his girlfriend Vivian. So begins Strawberry and Chocolate directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío. “It’s like we’ve come here to do something wrong,” Vivian says as she looks around the room, the walls marred by cracks and peeling paint. David stands by the door, paralyzed. “We already discussed that.” He reminds her, anxious that his plan to lose his virginity might go awry. An innocent boy in search of sexual awakening, David must confront both the sociopolitical climate that prioritizes collective causes over personal desires and his own moral conflict. Whether it is the billboard of CDR (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) across from the window or the hole on the wall exposing a woman next door having sex with a man, the motel room does not promise privacy for the private quest. And David is morally upright. When Vivian bursts out crying as she complains that David, like other men, wants only sex, he puts on his clothes to prove his love. “I won’t touch you until we’re married. And in a five-star hotel.” Thus, what follows is as much a quest for sexual awakening as it is a chance for David to introspect the world and himself.

Interestingly, this is just one of the film’s three beginnings. Following the title is Vivian’s marriage to an older, wealthier man intercut with the credits. The frustrated David stands with the crowd watching Vivian sign the marriage license; his promise comes to naught. His well-controlled life leads only to a failed quest for sexual awakening. Up to this point, the film strictly follows David's perspective, but a long tracking shot of Diego walking on the street with his friend German breaks the established point of view. German signals Diego to look at the disappointed David walking toward Coppelia, the ice cream parlor. David now becomes the prey, only that he is not so much to be exploited but to be rescued by this stranger.

Chocolate and Strawberry Ice Cream. Flickr, by Sabas Gonzalez (2019).

With the end of the credits comes the real beginning. Diego takes a seat across from David and puts down three items on the table: the strawberry ice cream, a bag of forbidden books, and some sunflowers. Respectively, they indicate that Diego differs from David in three fundamental ways. First, the strawberry flavor (feminine), as opposed to chocolate (masculine), indicates Diego’s homosexuality, a taboo in conservative Cuba. Second, he reads foreign works such as those of Mario Vargas Llosa instead of the books authorized by the government, politically aligning with the liberal values of the West. Moreover, he is religious when the government promotes atheism. The sunflowers are the offerings to the Virgin of Charity in his house. The unauthorized sexuality, coupled with the unapproved political and religious practices, characterizes Diego as a social outcast whom David, the good Communist, disdains. “Fly on the wings of imagination,” Diego suggests, as he invites David to his home to read forbidden works. However, David does not engage in the exchange until Diego mentions that he has some photos of David performing as Torvald in the school production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” In the play, Torvald, a shallow, middle-class husband, represents a social product of late 19th-century Europe. Likewise, David is also a product of the Communist regime blindly following the revolution ideal. To retrieve the pictures, David visits Diego’s home, and the visit made possible only with the photos as a lure foreshadows David's transformation from a mere social product to a man of agency.

Sculpture of Our Lady of Charity. Wikimedia Commons, by Andreas Praefcke (2009).

When Diego unlocks the door, David confronts an entirely different world. From the shelves laden with books to the walls covered by pictures of celebrities, posters of popular culture, indigenous masks, and religious icons, the cluttered room shows a mixed-interest owner open to different ideas. “Welcome to my hideaway,” Diego says, David paralyzed at the door. The apartment offers an exclusive space for intellectual freedom that the restrictive society is no match for, standing in stark contrast to the empty motel room defined by both social and moral constraints. David, eyes widening, though self-conscious, examines the decor when Diego asks him to sit in the armchair where Diego often reads John Donne and Cavafy. David has no idea of the poets, and Diego laments, “How can a country move forward if its youth don’t know John Donne and Cavafy.” Not a revolutionary, Diego, however, cares about the country’s future as much as David does. Born a Cuban, Diego believes that he also has the right to contribute to his country, even though society does not accept him. 

Norvegiana, Henrik Ibsen. Flickr, by Øklands trykksaker - av Bergen Off. Bibliotek (2010).

Not necessarily in line with Diego’s progressive ideas, David gradually understands that different perspectives can co-exist just as the diverse decor in the house. When David’s friend accuses Diego, David defends Diego, asserting that Diego possesses principles. David forms his own judgment, not blindly adhering to the values established by the government and society. As the government blacklists Diego, forcing him to leave the country, Diego encourages his prostitute friend Nancy to develop a relationship with David, telling her that David is still a virgin. Before Diego leaves, he looks at the city landscape with David on a hill. David tells Diego about his first sexual experience. “You’ll never believe this. Nancy was my first woman.” Diego never reveals his plotting. “Impossible. Someone as attractive as you?” The joke conveys only bitterness of the unrequited love. And David and Nancy have sex in Diego’s bed! Diego’s indescribable agony nonetheless completes David’s sexual awakening arc. And it is not just about sex since Diego is now a man of his own thinking.

City of Havana Cuba. Flickr, by Cuatrok77 (2012).

 

 

Cocaine to London: The First Producer Meeting

On April 22nd, 2023, at 10:15 AM, I was still half-unconscious in bed, scrolling mindlessly through something probably not at all funny, when I received an email from Studio North. At this point, it had been a month since I submitted the application for the Studio North Film Grant. I knew results would come soon, but even then, my heart sank seeing the notification pop up. Over a year of work already put into this script, this moment felt like the first act turning point that the entire process had been building towards. Still to this day, I don’t think I’ve read the whole email. All I saw was the first word: Congratulations!

I took a minute (maybe an hour… okay, maybe a few days) to be excited, before I immediately channeled these emotions into something else: productivity. A fire had been lit underneath me and the struggle I knew was looming on the horizon could only be countered by one thing: planning. So in late April, early May, as classes were winding down, I got to work.

Part of the initial submission process involved me collecting a crew for my film, or at least the beginnings of one. While some of my crew and their roles would shift from April to now, two people would remain consistent and it would be amiss if I didn’t shout them out here: my wonderful producers Cierra Gladden and Kaori Taylor.

See, one thing I forgot to mention is while I did get very motivated from this grant victory, it also means I got very annoying. Not in a mean, awful way but in the ‘this-is-my-child’, ‘I’m so nervous’, passion kind of way. The result was me bothering my two producers pretty much every day and I am super grateful that they have put up with me up to this point and put me in my place when I needed it.

All that being said, a lot of my annoying behavior was, at least at its core, necessary. We were now in the thick of things. We had just started a 1000 piece puzzle and the first step we needed to take was laying out all the pieces on our coffee table and trying to visualize the full picture. Our first producer meeting occurred on May 19th, after many texts were sent between the three of us, (mainly me chaotically listing things we would eventually need to do). During this meeting, we began the process of eventually.

The first photo taken at our first CTL meeting! Featuring Cierra Gladden (front) and Kaori Taylor (back).

Of the things we would need to plan for, there were six major topics. The first, LOCATION, was the simplest of the six. I knew that most of the film would take place in the JHU-MICA Film Centre’s Recording Studio, which was extremely helpful both for access and for moving time. There were two other locations that were outside, but luckily both Kaori and Cierra are from Baltimore, so they were both very confident in their abilities to find locations that matched my vision. It was at this point that a big aspect of being a director came into play: the idea of delegating tasks. With these six things needing to be finished and all three of us being students, I didn’t want to overwork anybody. I also wanted to pick people who seemed the most excited or interested in tackling that specific topic. Kaori had a few ideas for the exterior location of the recording studio and she seemed interested in finding more, so I assigned her to location duty.

The next topic was ACTORS. It was at this point that I was very grateful to have Cierra on the team as she has been through this process, already having won the Studio North FIlm Grant last year. She directed me to Backstage, the site that Studio North grant films have been using to cast actors all for free. We took a minute to make an account and I was assigned to begin filling out the necessary requirements of the site to make our casting public. This involved the details of the shoot itself such as location, timeframe and reimbursements, but also the details of the characters themselves with things like descriptions, age ranges and sides (pieces of the script that actors can read for their audition). I would be the one in charge of this actor process for the most part, but it would start being split between me and Cierra for reasons I will get to in a later post.

The next two categories, BUDGET and SEED&SPARK, go hand in hand and they are the topics we explored the least about in this initial meeting, just because of how expansive they are. Compiling the budget is perhaps the most important topic we had to figure out and for that reason, we mainly just introduced its existence and waited until we had more details on things like production design costs, actor reimbursement prices and whether or not I won any other grants. In a couple of months, Cierra, who I assigned to budget, would make three different budget plans based on the amount of money we eventually make, which was incredibly helpful for giving other departments rough estimates in the future. As for Seed&Spark, it is a money-raising site made specifically for film and it is the site we would use to raise more money. We would spend this session making Seed&Spark accounts and beginning the extensive process of creating our film’s page, such as planning a bit of our promo video, filling out the logline of the film and beginning to make incentives people receive for contributing.

We also touched a bit into the idea of MARKETING, but similar to budget, we mainly just created our Instagram account and said we would discuss this later.

Our current timeline for the month of October!

This leads us into the final topic of discussion: THE TIMELINE. It was this that took the longest, as we now had to take everything we had spent the last hour and a half discussing and turn it into a plan. We would spend another hour color coding all of these different topics in our Google Calendar, defining the day we needed actors by, when we wanted to start doing camera meetings, when we wanted to launch Seed&Spark, etc. The result was our entire film… fully planned out. An 8 month long process, not even counting post-production. After our meeting, I would stare at this Google Calendar for a long time. Here it was… COCAINE TO LONDON. It had begun.

 

Until next time…

                        Devin

Mandragora (1997): An Innocent Boy in an Unforgiving World

In the mournful tunes of sustained notes, Wiktor Grodecki’s Mandragora begins with a long tracking shot of an average town before dawn. Under the violet-blue sky and a smattering of streetlights, a handful of run-down houses are barely distinguishable amidst the uneven twigs. A supposedly ordinary setting becomes an estranged view, a long-buried reality contrary to everything positive. Unsettling is not just the landscape, but the characters. Three boys run across an open field, their figures barely discernible from the darkness in the extreme long shot. And the camera does not track their path: as if an omniscient God well acquainted with human sinfulness, it knows its destination, passing the field and the crumbling stone houses, and resting at a shop window, ironically the brightest spot in the town. Through the window, twinkling lights and shimmering ornaments adorn Western clothing and shoes on display, with an image of the Manhattan skyline in the background, reminiscent of the holiday window displays on Fifth Avenue, an American dream that hardly fits into the town. Yet this grandeur is transient: a black shadow appears at the center of the frame, smashing the glass. The other boys quickly join, seizing whatever attracts them.

Manhattan Skyline Colors. Flickr, by Manu H (2008).

One of the boys is the 15-year-old protagonist, Marek, who with a one-way ticket to Prague, runs away from the small town, from the technical school, from his neglectful single father. Passing the barren grasslands, the train approaches the city. Marek, a tag still attached to the jacket he just steals, stares at the leaden sky. A close-up shot shows his attentive gaze at the foreign view—the organized buildings, the steel structures, the Vltava River—his lips slightly parted, reflecting the just realized freedom. Yet the next second, he frowns a bit, unprepared for the upcoming journey. An innocent boy versus a sinful world. His pursuit of freedom is destined to fail. On the first night, he loses all his money at the casinos and goes home with a pimp where he gets drugged and raped. From then on, only tragedy besets him. He becomes a male prostitute, abused by pimps, clients, and other prostitutes.

Perhaps what is miserable is the human inborn ability to swiftly dismantle the most uplifting. Finally saving some money with his prostitute best friend David, Marek dreams of buying a restaurant and traveling to Egypt. However, the more practical David decides to invest their shared money in the business of the exploitative pimp Sacha, who then introduces Marek to an English client. The man leads Marek to a splendid room with high ceilings and golden walls carved with intricate patterns. A collection of silver vessels is on display in a wood cabinet. “Make yourself at home,” the man says. But this is a high-end palace to be admired, not the world Marek is familiar with. Marek looks around the opulent house, plays with the CD rack, and from the table, carefully picks up a cigarette, only to come across an open photo album that shows genitals in tormented poses. Within the refined mask lies the darkness of the soul. The man brings out a candelabra. “We’ll make classic light for your classical body.” The meticulous pursuit of perfection and beauty tracing back to antiquity reduced to mere imitation in form, all those in between—the creativity, the revolutionary spirit, and more importantly, the reverence and love of the people and the world—denied.

Caravaggio Rest During the Flight From Egypt. Flickr, by Carulmare (2008).

“Chiaroscuro,” the man says. “Do you know Caravaggio?” Marek has no idea; the man is elated. “Sweet unconsciousness,” he says. When artists still imitated ancient sculptures, Caravaggio preferred the vulgar, modeling religious figures after street prostitutes, because the divinities were divine only if they understood human emotions. The man imagines himself as the great artist studying this innocent boy, lamenting how impossible it is to copy God’s proudest creation. But the man is not Caravaggio: he does not elevate Marek but reduces him to an object for his own pleasure. In his order, Marek takes off his clothes, stands on a rotating pedestal, and holds a sword, mimicking Donatello’s David. The man sits on the sofa, pours a drink, and expresses his appreciation of this live sculpture in front. The scene cuts between the excited man and the baffled Marek, with the camera moving toward the man as he slowly reaches orgasm while pulling away from Marek. Clearly, the man sees Marek exclusively as an object of sexual interest with no interiority. And Marek bears no resemblance to David who after defeating Goliath becomes a hero well-loved by the people. Disempowered, Marek turns into a mere victim of this consuming gaze which with almost no physical contact, already subverts the sanctity of beauty, courage, art, and the human body created in the image of God.

Donatellos David in the Bargello Museum. Flickr, by Peter Visser (2009).

In the end, Marek overdoses in a stall in the train station where his journey begins, hallucinating worms crawling on his body and slitting his leg with a knife. His father, after searching for his son in vain, also arrives at the station to take the train home. In the toilet, the camera slowly rises up, once again transforming into an all-knowing God. The father walks in, leans against the stall partition, and smokes, not knowing that his son is now free and pure as the blood drains. In this unforgiving world, only the omniscient camera indicates a sense of redemption, uniting the remorseful father and the anguished son. After all, he is just an innocent boy looking for freedom, if only the world could treat him kindly.

Cocaine to London: A Pre-Production Mindset

Nine months after my initial first draft park session, I found myself at 11:55 at night, poorly-postured in the atrium of Gilman Hall. I was fervently typing, filling in the last information I needed to submit to the Studio North Film Grant. Months and months of work all leading to this moment. Stressed and sweaty, I melodramatically raised my finger high above the enter key, looked around to give the overdone cliche its proper pacing… not yet… and then brought my finger down. Before that, though… how did I get here?

A copy of the COCAINE TO LONDON draft submitted to the Studio North Film Grant.

The process to apply was expansive and multi-phased, however all extraneous material revolved around one thing: the script. For the rest of the summer I spent time working on that initial draft. I had already accepted that, in the short time before the application was due, I could not perfect it. So instead of nitpicking the story, I focused on one major aspect of this application process: logistics.

See, the application is judged in terms of two different categories: the effectiveness, creativity and success of the script, but also the feasibility of actually turning it into a film on a small budget. And currently my script was about fifteen pages too long, had about four or five too many characters and involved a literal POLICE CHASE. After a few weeks of lying to myself that this was shootable (“maybe they have some police cars for rent on Travelocity”) I finally accepted that making the script feasible would not be an easy feat. I had to rehash almost everything.

This time though, in order to avoid this same issue, I went into this rewriting process with a new mindset. While it was very cathartic to sit down for eight hours and write a nothing-off-the-table draft, I realized I needed to acknowledge and consider the logistical side of film as I wrote. So, when I sat down to write the new draft, it was not at some park. It was at my desk where I had full access to the internet and could Google any information I needed. It did not take eight hours like the first one, but multiple days as not only was I just writing, but experiencing my first taste of pre-production.

And looking back on it, many of the decisions and realizations I made at this moment have stuck all the way until now. For example, this is the moment where I recognized that I simply had too many locations for how much I wanted to do with this script. I recognized this from doing some research on normal setup times for the camera I wanted to use (an ARRI AMIRA) as well as asking some past grant film winners how long it took them to move locations when they did. In order to accommodate for these high times, I decided I would make the script something of a bottle film with most, if not all, of it taking place in a recording studio. Through some more research, I found that the JHU-MICA Film Centre has a recording studio in its building, which meant my crew would not even have to move location at all since all equipment would be in the Film Centre to begin with. This was the first major breakthrough in terms of logistics and while it did mean that I would have to force my script into the confines of one location, I strangely did not feel at all restrained. In fact, I felt rejuvenated. As someone who has never dealt with the producer side of film, and was very skeptical if they would enjoy it or not, it was very surprising how rewarding this moment felt.

The JHU-MICA Film Centre Recording Studio where COCAINE TO LONDON will take place.

From that moment on, I had a strange desire to work on the producer elements of this pre-production phase and I found myself moving away from the script and onto the Pitch Packet, the other major element of this application. A Pitch Packet is a large document that includes nearly all aspects of your project from a summary of the story and its characters, to the way you plan to shoot it and even a preliminary budget sheet. Surprisingly, these next few weeks were some of the most fun I had during this entire pre-grant process.

I found the production process was much less rigid than I anticipated and actually involved a lot of thinking on the fly and finding clever solutions around things. I found myself researching everything from restaurants that offered the most coupons and how to obtain them to how to properly time a shot and make a shooting schedule to prop and production design research. I truly felt connected to the script in a way I hadn’t before. It felt like the fleshing out of a character. My script was no longer just its story, but a living, breathing organism.

While this did make me more invested in the project, it also made me realize just how much work and stress it would take. This early production phase was not all perfect. As I began researching more and more I realized just how much I would have to juggle from making shots to casting to budget, etc. Worst of all, though, I realized just how much money I would need. The grant would only give $2,000, a figure that because of my plan of an 8 day shoot, would barely cover the cost of on-set food. I would need to do a lot more fundraising, a lot more promotion and even then probably have to make budget cuts. I realized this film would not be a walk in the park and while it worried me for a moment, the emotions then turned to excitement. I realized I was ready and at that moment I decided… this film would be made. I’d make sure of it.

 

So as 11:59 hit, I finished my email, read it over once, thought back to my preparation and this promise I made to myself… and hit the enter button. Then, I actually clicked send with my mouse because I remembered the enter button doesn’t send an email. Whoops.

 

Until next time…

                        Devin

Simple Men (1992): Trouble and Desire in the Quest of an Anarchist Father

Early one morning at the loading dock, a fierce young woman (Vera) aims a gun at a blindfolded security guard. “Don't move,” she demands, but the guard remains unfazed. “My foot's asleep,” he replies, unclear if he is just being ready to surrender or if he is so detached that the fear doesn't register with him. In the background, a man (Frank) in shallow focus loads a truck with boxes. A robbery is in progress. Such is the opening shot of Hal Hartley’s Simple Men, where deadpan humor intertwines with troublesome desire. The protagonist Bill, in love with Vera, appears from the foreground taking charge of the guard when Vera and Frank board the truck. Bill is the gang's leader, yet unaware that Vera and Frank have plotted to betray him. Hidden desire has taken shape, but what interests Bill is the medallion that the guard wears: it bears the image of the Virgin Mary. “She’s good-looking, huh?” Bill asks the guard if he can have it, and only when Bill assures that the guard is not in danger does the guard agree to let it go. “Be good to her and she’ll be good to you,” the guard says. But what does “good” mean, whether to the people in the intimate circle or to the larger society? Bill, double-crossed by his partners, is on the lam for the crime, and morality is the last he would consider. Therefore, his following journey with his younger brother Dennis to find their father, himself on the run from the feds for an alleged bombing, is not so much to understand another person, but to piece together his destabilized character against the backdrop of good and evil.

Virgin Mary. Flickr, by iProzac (2009).

Such an attempt takes place on the first night of the quest, in an abandoned cafe, chairs tilted and collapsed, graffiti scattering the walls. The two brothers sit side by side sipping a bottle of scotch, their figures visible only with the few beams of light slicing through the windows at their backs. The darkness and chaos, along with the alcohol, foreshadow this failed attempt to become a better person. Bill insists, “The difference between Dad and me is that I just fuck with the law. He fucked with the government.” Bill feels no remorse for his criminal deeds, believing that as long as he does not get caught, it is fine to break the law. Dennis not wanting to argue with the unreasonable Bill shuts himself in a telephone booth, but Bill takes pride in his distorted philosophy, even hoping to lecture their father on criminality if they find him. “The old man’s a fool,” Bill says. Apart from his lack of guilt, Bill remains an immature child blaming his parent for familial neglect, refusing to acknowledge his own accountability. Dennis gives the final remark, “Nobody’s perfect,” leaving Bill at a loss of words. Instead of projecting anger and shame on the father, Dennis reminds Bill to first think of his own defect.

Bill then laments his “broken heart,” slouched in his chair, like a child acting out for attention. Walking out of the booth, Dennis tells Bill that he will get over it. Bill then transforms this despair into hatred as he says, “Women don’t want you to love them.” Again, Dennis is tired of Bill’s childish talk, takes off his glasses, and lies on the sofa. Bill faces the window, his figure completely in shadow, plotting to seduce “the first good-looking blonde woman” he sees tomorrow but not falling in love with her. He turns away from the window and walks closer to the camera, gradually entering the dimly lit space, with his reflection slowly manifesting in the window—a new persona starts to take shape. “Mysterious. Thoughtful. Deep. But modest.” This is what women are drawn to, and Bill intends to conform to this mold. Instead of seeking revenge on Vera or Frank, Bill goes further astray, harboring hatred for all women. Ironically, the next morning when Bill acquires a motorcycle from Ned, the cafe’s owner, to continue the journey, Bill gives Ned the medallion as a present and repeats what the guard tells him, “Be good to her and she’ll be good to you.” Bill has decided to distance himself from human goodness, but the guard’s teaching at least leaves an impression. And the displacement of the medallion does not indicate the ultimate failure of the quest, as a real Virgin-Mary-like figure—Kate—is about to enter the film and offer redemption to the morally troubled Bill.

The Pieta by Michelangelo. Flickr, by Dennis Jarvis (2011).

Bill meets Kate at a small town where the motorcycle breaks down on the way. Kate, the matriarch of the community, sent her ex-husband to jail because she stuck to the principle that she didn’t lie for anybody. Steadfast in her moral principles, well-loved by the men, Kate embodies virtues and beauty, akin to the Virgin Mary. Even the misogynistic Bill falls in love with Kate when she reiterates the four qualities that Bill mentions in his speech last night to describe her impression of Bill at a burnt-down house that the father’s address leads to. Embarrassed, Bill does not expect his scheming to be articulated in such a forthright manner, denying all the characters that Kate puts forth and suggesting leaving. Kate, however, wants to dig up and transplant a tree before returning, which further aligns her with the Virgin Mary as they both are givers of life. At night, Bill confesses to Kate. “Be good to her and she’ll be good to you,” Bill says to Kate after she laments, “All of those men have gone out of my life.” Now that he has found his love, Bill promises that he will be different from other men and will make Kate happy. To Dennis, Bill even expresses his wish to settle down and run a tree farm for Kate. “Crime isn’t a way of life for me,” he concludes.

However, Bill has to pay the price for what he did. The next morning, the police arrive, and Dennis encourages Bill to run away with their father. The father and the son meet at the dock. They stand afar. Neither attempts to bridge the physical gap, choosing to remain silent. Bill comes to his epiphany. He envisions the life he wants, unlike his father's fugitive existence, so he returns to Kate and embraces his imminent arrest. The quest of the father ends with Bill taking up his responsibility, mending the troubled past so as to welcome a better future. In the final shot, Bill leans on Kate’s chest when an off-screen officer says, “Don’t move,” mirroring the opening, only that we don’t feel any unsettlement. Kate is peaceful, like Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà, as she understands all the trouble that passion and desire have to bring.

 

Cocaine to London: The First Draft

Exactly 15 months ago, in the midst of the worst string of writer's block I have ever experienced, I decided to drive to a local park, lean against an oak tree and hope the stereotypically hipster vibe would finally give me inspiration to write a screenplay. Looking back on it now, I did not realize just how much this one drive, this one oak tree, this one script would take over my life. A little over a year later it’s all I think about and even then, the whole process is just beginning. This is the story of how Cocaine to London was born.

I am not good at writing. I know that may come off as self-deprecating, but it isn't. See, when I do write, it is very often something I am proud of, but the key phrase of that sentence is when I write. My writing process often alternates between a week of heavy inspiration and several months of not being able to even write a single action line: a bad ratio. Never, though, was this writer's block as bad as the summer of 2022. In 10 months of trying to write the pilot to a new television idea I had, I did not even open Final Draft once. It was very emotionally taxing and after a while of stressing over it, I decided to just push it aside and let the writer’s block end when it ended (hopefully soon). Then, I learned of the Studio North Film Grant, a monetary award given by Johns Hopkins University's student-led production company to two student filmmakers to produce and premiere their own short film. This opportunity was CTL's spark.

Cierra Gladden (middle) and Christian Reidy (right) after the premiere of their grant winning films.

As I arrived at the oak tree, I set an ultimatum to myself. No longer could I let this writer's block persist, let it hide in the background silently and eat away at my dwindling time. I decided, no matter what, by the end of the day, I would have something that I could work on through the summer and eventually submit to the Studio North grant. So with a charged laptop (73% is close enough) and an angry, writing-withdrawal-ridden heart, I took a seat and opened up a fresh Final Draft document. 

The first hour was a lot of brainstorming. Coming into this writing session, the last things I worked on had been high concept teleplays: ensemble stories of eclectic towns, cowboy sci-fi plots, etc. After some thinking about it, and wanting this script to be more shootable, I decided to follow the age-old piece of writing advice: write what you know. Right away, the answer came to me: music. 

I am no musician myself, but music has always surrounded my life from long car rides with my dad playing Metallica and The Mars Volta through his green iPod Nano to my mom throwing folk tunes and Christmas songs into our old CD player. Now, nothing makes me happier than discovering a new artist, hearing a new sound or even just talking about music with other audiophiles. All that being said, very often people who obsess over music are incredibly insufferable. 

This was CTL’s launching point: a script that includes both my love and very valid critiques of the process and people involved in making music. This developed into a story: a punk band carrying all of the angst, anger issues and pretension associated with the genre and the talented, but disrespected bassist just trying to make a living in the industry. 

Very quickly, I found a rhythm to the script, a framing similar to The Office that allowed me to cut to talking heads of the band members. This gave me the ability to explore each of the character’s internal thoughts as well as added a new layer of comedy I had not experimented with before. This, along with the sheer joy I had writing the different musical sequences finally broke me away from my writer's block. In fact, it propelled me into a flow state I had never experienced before. There were page long sections where I didn't even take a second to pause and think. It was all coming naturally. The dialogue already felt witty and layered. The action lines were messy, but potent. I even found myself inserting even more aspects of myself into the script from my fear of monetary stability as a writer to my stubborn, argumentative personality to my writer’s block itself. No more sci-fi cowboys or silly towns. I was writing a script that, for the first time, felt truly personal… and I couldn’t stop.

At 9:42PM (yes, I checked) I finished my first draft of Cocaine to London. A 30 page musical drama with everything from nepo-babies to fleeing the cops to implied profane acts with an orange, the script was a rollercoaster and as I closed my laptop (4%), I couldn’t not smile. The most elated I’ve maybe ever felt, I got back into my car, turned on some Carly Rae Jepsen and drove home.

My BeReal, the day after, reading the first draft for the first time.

The next day, I reread my masterpiece and realized it was perhaps the messiest thing I had ever written. Everything I loved about it the night before now felt like the worst possible decision I could have made. All that being said, I did not get discouraged. In fact, the exact opposite. I had proven to myself that I was still able to create a story, a fact I had begun to worry was no longer true. No longer did I feel trapped in my own head. Instead, I felt motivated. Tomorrow, I told myself, I will go back to the oak tree and I’ll try again and I’ll do that as many times as I need until I read it and have the same unwavering smile I had when I wrote it. No matter what it takes, CTL will be perfect.

 

I’ll be honest, though… I didn’t expect it to take 27 DRAFTS!

 

Until next time…

                        Devin