Submitted by Scott Spears
So you’ve scraped together a few extra dollars to shoot film, but you’re still a bit tight on cash and somebody says, “Buy short ends!” Now, you’ve heard about them but aren’t sure you want to buy somebody else’s leftovers. Well, here’s the scoop on short ends. It’s film that was bought by a production that never got used, and to make some money it is being sold. It comes in four types; short ends, long ends, re-cans, and buy-backs.
Before we get into the details on these different categories you should first know where to buy short ends. My recommendation is to buy from a reputable dealer that deals in short ends and new film. There are many companies that sell short ends like; Dr. Rawstock, Media Distributors, and Short Endz, to name a few. Please note, I do not work for these companies, but have had good dealings with them. The advantage to going with an established company is they test the film they sell before it goes out the door. If you buy from somebody you don’t know, or from somebody on eBay, you don’t know if the film has been tested. For all your know it could have spent two long summer months baking in the trunk of some production assistant’s car who now wants to make some beer money by selling leftover film. Now, I’m not saying that all the film on eBay is bad film, but by going with a company that does this everyday and that lives by their long term reputation, you’ll most likely get good film stock.
Short Ends
Here’s where you save the big bucks, but there are always drawbacks to going the cheap route. Short ends are usually 250 feet and under. They are the cheapest derivative because they plentiful, but there’s less to them. On 16mm that’s about seven minutes of film which isn’t that bad, but on 35mm that’s three minutes which after a color chart, head slate, and regular slate isn’t a lot of film. If you go with a lot of short ends on 35mm, you better have a couple loaders ready to load magazines constantly. Short ends can be had for under twenty cents a foot. I once picked up some for six cents a foot.
I should add this, 16mm short ends are hard to come by because 16mm is the staple of independent filmmakers who tend to not buy more film than they need and use every inch of their film. 35mm is much more plentiful because studios and medium sized companies dump a lot of film on the market after principal photography has wrapped.
Long Ends
Long ends aren’t all that different than short ends except they are usually over 300 feet and in 35mm can be up to 980 feet. They are more expensive because they are rarer and have a longer running time, thus saving time by having less magazine changes. I like them, especially when shooting 35mm. These long loads are usually film that had been loaded and had a color chart and head slate shot on it, but never made it on set. They can run twenty-five cents a foot and up.
Re-cans
Re-cans are one of my favorites because they are usually full loads that were put in the camera, but were never exposed except maybe a foot or so for threading up. It’s almost like buying new film. They typically cost twenty cents a foot and up.
Buy-backs
These babies are rare and aren’t discounted a lot, but can save you a few pennies here and there. Buy-backs are film that was bought and never got out of the can. Often it’s the last batch of film ordered for a big picture or sometimes somebody gets excited and buys a batch of film, but then never gets anymore money to make the movie, so they are forced to call Kodak or Fuji saying they need to return the film. Usually the manufacturers say tough luck, but sometimes if it’s less than forty-eight hours or a long time client, they buy it back for a few dollars less than it was sold for in the first place. I shot a large part of feature with buy-backs with good results. Expect to pay ten to twenty percent off standard rates.
Under buy-backs, I also put just barely out of date film. Again, this is rare because the manufacturers don’t usually let film expire, but it does happen. When you start your search for film, you could call Kodak or Fuji directly and see of they have out of date film laying around.
An advantage of buy-backs is they will most likely come from the same emulsion batch which will make your cinematographer happy because they’ll be less variation in the stock. I should say, this isn’t that much of a problem today because the film manufacturing process is very consistent.
Closing Points
If you decide to try for short ends you should start buying them as soon as possible because assembling enough film, especially for a feature, will take some time. You never want to run out of film or be forced to pay through the nose for film at the last minute. If you need to though, Kodak does offer a last minute film ordering service, but you better be ready to break out the Visa gold card.
I’ve shot two features on 35mm with lots of short ends and one short on 16mm with primarily short ends, all with good results. On each of the features we did have one incident on each shoot even when dealing with reputable dealers. One time we had one roll that turned out to be two rolls that had been badly masking taped together in the middle. My guess is some tired loader was spooling up some film and didn’t even notice that he had one roll attach to another. The other incident was a mislabeled can and this is where having a good, heads up assistant camera person on crew can save you. My first AC noticed that a bit of film that was hanging out of a film magazine wasn’t the right color. Yes, unexposed film stocks of different ASA ratings have different colors. Some are lighter in color and others are darker. My AC caught this, told me, and I saw the problem. We put that roll aside.
If you do find a problem, contact the company that sold it to you as soon as possible and let them know. Most of the time they’ll replace the film immediately. Heck, sometimes if you gripe enough, you might get an extra roll or two.
The big thing to remember is short ends are a great way to save a few bucks, but if there are any questions about the film you’re using, don’t cheap out because for most occasions it will be far more costly to assemble all of the crew, cast, locations, and gear than the few dollars you saved with questionable short ends. Saying that, I’ve used short ends with great results and have helped the production values on some movies by upping the shooting ratio or getting a name actor in the cast with the savings. Final words of advice, do your research, have good a assistant cameraperson, and start buying film early.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Screenwriting Books
Submitted by Richard Hogg
Looking up at my bookshelves recently I noticed how many books on screenwriting I had. A dozen at least. Cursing not only my stupidity at wasting over £100 (that’s a good four or five nights out after all) I ended up with a few sobering thoughts.
How much of the thousands of pages I had read had I actually digested and more importantly been able to use in my writing. Act structure. Climax. Peaks and troughs. Pacing. Tone. Characters versus Characterization. This is not a rant denouncing help books. I don’t believe they’re all useless. The usual suspects, i.e. Story and Screenwriters Bible are and were most useful when going back over those early drafts when I had, quite frankly, written novels in a script format.
The main point I came away with is actually the central message of this whole piece. Just write. Yes I know you’ve read it before and even if you haven’t, of course you’ve got to write. How bloody obvious can you get. But it isn’t. Recently I found myself looking back over the last week. I had been to screenwriting class on the Thursday night and had been given a assignment and I had several rough ideas for a short story or short script. What did I do? Turn on my PlayStation and play a few hours of football (soccer to our American friends, though really our sport came first). Why? I have come to realize that I work in fits and starts. Other writers seem to churn out work on a regular basis with a routine at the heart of it. One hour on a morning or between half nine and ten at night, but gradually it all builds up. Instead I find myself writing ten to twenty pages of script a day for a few weeks then nothing for a month. I’m not blocked. It’s just lethargy. Have I tired myself out? I doubt it. I just suddenly seemed to prioritize watching those West Wing episodes I taped.
Anyway back to the point. Do write regularly. It’s been said before and will be said countless times again but I can’t reinforce it enough. If you really want to do it, sitting down and thinking about the rewards at the end won’t do anything. It has to be practiced.
My second point is to read a lot. Not just scripts. Writing is writing. I know there’s a whole different craft when comparing prose and scripts but at the heart is story. You do have to think visually. You can’t have a inner monologue to reveal character but you still have to have a feel for that character. They must be real to you. You must be able to make the reader care for them, empathize with them. The plot must excite. It must be something that you would want to read or watch.
Stephen King in his book on writing says he’s a slow reader but gets through about eighty books a year. Do you read more than one a week? And no, large print or children’s books don’t count. I read fifty, maybe sixty. And I thought I read a lot. But why is it so important? It’s all to do with that little thing that all the books bang on about, your subconscious. That part of you brain that is supposedly ticking away, filing away ideas, which it decides to let you in on whenever you don’t have a pen and paper handy. I’m wasn’t sure about the whole notion but as I read more I began coming up with ideas that had a hint of a character from one novel, a plot strand from a film, along with ideas from other sources mixed in.
On top of all this, King is right when he says if you want to be a writer so you have to study writing. He’s renowned as being able to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. How does he do it? How much does he show? Is it because we like the character and don’t want anything bad to happen to them? Is it the language? The pacing? The only way you’ll ever know is to read. And make it varied. Harry Potter one week followed by a history book on the down fall of Berlin the next, followed the week after by a Booker Prize winner.
Stick to what you’re interested in sure, I tried to improve my scientific knowledge with a few popular books on black holes. It took me four weeks to get through a hundred pages. I actually found myself volunteering to do the house work rather than read this monster.
Looking back over this I’ve ranted on a bit (nothing new there) but back to the original premise. All the time I’ve spent reading how-to books, playing games, and watching reruns could have been better spent. I want to write for film and TV so I will watch film and TV, obviously. But the other activities I find myself engaging in, let’s face it, they’re not that important. If I want to be a writer, I have to read a lot and write a lot. Even if the vast majority of what I write is crap.
If it’s what you really want to do, then don’t put it off or come up with a list of excuses like I used to. Do it. A few years down the line the benefits will be obvious.
Looking up at my bookshelves recently I noticed how many books on screenwriting I had. A dozen at least. Cursing not only my stupidity at wasting over £100 (that’s a good four or five nights out after all) I ended up with a few sobering thoughts.
How much of the thousands of pages I had read had I actually digested and more importantly been able to use in my writing. Act structure. Climax. Peaks and troughs. Pacing. Tone. Characters versus Characterization. This is not a rant denouncing help books. I don’t believe they’re all useless. The usual suspects, i.e. Story and Screenwriters Bible are and were most useful when going back over those early drafts when I had, quite frankly, written novels in a script format.
The main point I came away with is actually the central message of this whole piece. Just write. Yes I know you’ve read it before and even if you haven’t, of course you’ve got to write. How bloody obvious can you get. But it isn’t. Recently I found myself looking back over the last week. I had been to screenwriting class on the Thursday night and had been given a assignment and I had several rough ideas for a short story or short script. What did I do? Turn on my PlayStation and play a few hours of football (soccer to our American friends, though really our sport came first). Why? I have come to realize that I work in fits and starts. Other writers seem to churn out work on a regular basis with a routine at the heart of it. One hour on a morning or between half nine and ten at night, but gradually it all builds up. Instead I find myself writing ten to twenty pages of script a day for a few weeks then nothing for a month. I’m not blocked. It’s just lethargy. Have I tired myself out? I doubt it. I just suddenly seemed to prioritize watching those West Wing episodes I taped.
Anyway back to the point. Do write regularly. It’s been said before and will be said countless times again but I can’t reinforce it enough. If you really want to do it, sitting down and thinking about the rewards at the end won’t do anything. It has to be practiced.
My second point is to read a lot. Not just scripts. Writing is writing. I know there’s a whole different craft when comparing prose and scripts but at the heart is story. You do have to think visually. You can’t have a inner monologue to reveal character but you still have to have a feel for that character. They must be real to you. You must be able to make the reader care for them, empathize with them. The plot must excite. It must be something that you would want to read or watch.
Stephen King in his book on writing says he’s a slow reader but gets through about eighty books a year. Do you read more than one a week? And no, large print or children’s books don’t count. I read fifty, maybe sixty. And I thought I read a lot. But why is it so important? It’s all to do with that little thing that all the books bang on about, your subconscious. That part of you brain that is supposedly ticking away, filing away ideas, which it decides to let you in on whenever you don’t have a pen and paper handy. I’m wasn’t sure about the whole notion but as I read more I began coming up with ideas that had a hint of a character from one novel, a plot strand from a film, along with ideas from other sources mixed in.
On top of all this, King is right when he says if you want to be a writer so you have to study writing. He’s renowned as being able to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. How does he do it? How much does he show? Is it because we like the character and don’t want anything bad to happen to them? Is it the language? The pacing? The only way you’ll ever know is to read. And make it varied. Harry Potter one week followed by a history book on the down fall of Berlin the next, followed the week after by a Booker Prize winner.
Stick to what you’re interested in sure, I tried to improve my scientific knowledge with a few popular books on black holes. It took me four weeks to get through a hundred pages. I actually found myself volunteering to do the house work rather than read this monster.
Looking back over this I’ve ranted on a bit (nothing new there) but back to the original premise. All the time I’ve spent reading how-to books, playing games, and watching reruns could have been better spent. I want to write for film and TV so I will watch film and TV, obviously. But the other activities I find myself engaging in, let’s face it, they’re not that important. If I want to be a writer, I have to read a lot and write a lot. Even if the vast majority of what I write is crap.
If it’s what you really want to do, then don’t put it off or come up with a list of excuses like I used to. Do it. A few years down the line the benefits will be obvious.
Should You Edit Your Own Movies?
Submitted by Peter John Ross
Very rarely in the film industry does the filmmaker get to edit their own pieces. There are exceptions. The obvious ones are Robert Rodriguez and the Coen Brothers, who use the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. But then there are the director’s who co-edit their movies with another editor, like Kevin Smith and his producer Scott Mosier, or James Cameron who always edits alongside other editors.
On the micro-budget level, where the funding for the DV short is in the tens of dollars, there is the mythology that you should edit your own movie. Hell anyone with a ten dollar firewire card and a home computer five years out of date can now edit, so obviously all you need to do is learn what button to push. And this is why most DV shorts suffer, especially in the editing.
I guess for newbies, which we all were at some point, it’s hard to hand over such a crucial part of the moviemaking process to someone else. And since the technology is so readily available, the newbie often does not. Now, some people have a natural knack for editing and this is not always bad. Then there are those who cannot separate the objectivity of the big picture and the minutiae of the script when it comes time to do the editing.
If you are one of those directors that can look at the raw footage, or even edit a scene together, look at it in the context of the movie and make a decision to cut out one of the best moments the actor gave because you realize that the scene is erroneous, then skip this article. Or if you have what you thought was one of the funniest jokes on paper, and even if it’s not a one-hundred percent great delivery, but you choose to use it anyway because it might be good, then please read on.
There exists a misconception that you just hand the movie over to the editor and then you sit and wait to see if they made it the way you want. The editor’s job is to work with the director and producer to shape the movie with the NLE chisel. An editor brings objectivity and a fresh perspective to the table that isn’t there with a one-man show.
Since this article is geared more towards the extremely low budget movie, the first concern is money. An option for us no-budget moviemakers is to help each other out. Find another no-budget filmmaker and edit each other’s movies, rather than taking it all on by yourself. Give each other that new opinion or fresh idea that might enhance the movie. Creating movies in a vacuum can hamper the outcome for the best possible movie.
Much like working with an actor to help shape a character, collaborating with an editor can help make a better movie. It may not be what you, the director, exactly intended, but movies are a team effort. It’s less about the director’s singular vision, and more about the story and the finished movie. Much like a character, the movie can take on a life of it’s own. I say let it breathe and give it some freedom, rather than choke on the ego of one individual.
Objectivity is difficult for a director when they go to edit. The director was on the set. He knows the actors and he remembers what happened on those days. This jades the viewing of the raw footage. An editor will look at the raw material and try to build something and not see it as the shoot, but rather the pieces of the puzzle that need to fit just right. Another, more basic concept is the job of the editor to orient the viewer. A director may not realize that the edit they did does not reveal the location or the positions of the characters, because the director was there. Whereas the editor was not there and will more easily recognize that you need an establishing shot or a wide angle to give the audience a sense of spatial relations.
Now some people learn through time and effort that they can be objective. Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier are two of the most brutal editors of their own work. They will chop scenes out that do not stand up in the editing room. James Cameron also attacks his movies with fervor. To bring a movie down to its essence, he will cut out whole subplots in the editing room, even ones that cost several million dollars to produce. Just take a look at The Abyss: Special Edition, if you don’t believe me. Please take note though, that on the big movies, even though a director supervises the edit, if there is a fight between the editor and director, the producer is the boss that has to settle the dispute.
Everyone should at least attempt to work with a separate editor once. You can find that a different approach or a new idea will only serve to enhance the story, which is all a movie is supposed to do, tell a story.
Very rarely in the film industry does the filmmaker get to edit their own pieces. There are exceptions. The obvious ones are Robert Rodriguez and the Coen Brothers, who use the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. But then there are the director’s who co-edit their movies with another editor, like Kevin Smith and his producer Scott Mosier, or James Cameron who always edits alongside other editors.
On the micro-budget level, where the funding for the DV short is in the tens of dollars, there is the mythology that you should edit your own movie. Hell anyone with a ten dollar firewire card and a home computer five years out of date can now edit, so obviously all you need to do is learn what button to push. And this is why most DV shorts suffer, especially in the editing.
I guess for newbies, which we all were at some point, it’s hard to hand over such a crucial part of the moviemaking process to someone else. And since the technology is so readily available, the newbie often does not. Now, some people have a natural knack for editing and this is not always bad. Then there are those who cannot separate the objectivity of the big picture and the minutiae of the script when it comes time to do the editing.
If you are one of those directors that can look at the raw footage, or even edit a scene together, look at it in the context of the movie and make a decision to cut out one of the best moments the actor gave because you realize that the scene is erroneous, then skip this article. Or if you have what you thought was one of the funniest jokes on paper, and even if it’s not a one-hundred percent great delivery, but you choose to use it anyway because it might be good, then please read on.
There exists a misconception that you just hand the movie over to the editor and then you sit and wait to see if they made it the way you want. The editor’s job is to work with the director and producer to shape the movie with the NLE chisel. An editor brings objectivity and a fresh perspective to the table that isn’t there with a one-man show.
Since this article is geared more towards the extremely low budget movie, the first concern is money. An option for us no-budget moviemakers is to help each other out. Find another no-budget filmmaker and edit each other’s movies, rather than taking it all on by yourself. Give each other that new opinion or fresh idea that might enhance the movie. Creating movies in a vacuum can hamper the outcome for the best possible movie.
Much like working with an actor to help shape a character, collaborating with an editor can help make a better movie. It may not be what you, the director, exactly intended, but movies are a team effort. It’s less about the director’s singular vision, and more about the story and the finished movie. Much like a character, the movie can take on a life of it’s own. I say let it breathe and give it some freedom, rather than choke on the ego of one individual.
Objectivity is difficult for a director when they go to edit. The director was on the set. He knows the actors and he remembers what happened on those days. This jades the viewing of the raw footage. An editor will look at the raw material and try to build something and not see it as the shoot, but rather the pieces of the puzzle that need to fit just right. Another, more basic concept is the job of the editor to orient the viewer. A director may not realize that the edit they did does not reveal the location or the positions of the characters, because the director was there. Whereas the editor was not there and will more easily recognize that you need an establishing shot or a wide angle to give the audience a sense of spatial relations.
Now some people learn through time and effort that they can be objective. Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier are two of the most brutal editors of their own work. They will chop scenes out that do not stand up in the editing room. James Cameron also attacks his movies with fervor. To bring a movie down to its essence, he will cut out whole subplots in the editing room, even ones that cost several million dollars to produce. Just take a look at The Abyss: Special Edition, if you don’t believe me. Please take note though, that on the big movies, even though a director supervises the edit, if there is a fight between the editor and director, the producer is the boss that has to settle the dispute.
Everyone should at least attempt to work with a separate editor once. You can find that a different approach or a new idea will only serve to enhance the story, which is all a movie is supposed to do, tell a story.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Making the Reality
Submitted by James Cole
The Reality of Adding Special Effects to Your Low Budget Film
Too often I get producers and directors asking me to add an effect into their movie when the project is well into post-production and the deadline is all too close. Or else I’ll get asked to fix a shot where a do-it-yourself effect didn’t work. Most directors seem to think that with the advent of desktop computers and software like Photoshop and After Effects that anything is possible, and quite simply if you have unlimited time and money, almost anything is possible. Unfortunately, however, most of us do have limited time and very limited money. Many people seem to think that they can check out a book about special effects from the local library, learn what matte paintings and blue screens are, then go out and produce their own effects of equal quality to what George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic seem to pull off. If you are incredibly gifted this may be so. But then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?
So how do you achieve that great effect you imagined when you first wrote or read the script?
The first step is simple but most of you will hate it. Go through the script and make a list made up of all your dream shots. I can hear the cries already, “but I get a much better energy if I make the shots up on set,” and “I can’t do that, what if I see something on set I can use that I just can’t think off now?” Valid points, but putting together a shot list doesn’t mean you have to stick to it once you get on set. It’s just a guide, a road map of one way to get your finished movie. I find that it makes you think of all the little shots you need to get. Like the cutaways and close-ups that you usually run out of time to shoot cause you didn’t think of them before. A shot list will help in so many areas of planning your movie, not just the effects.
Once you have your shot list, go through it shot by shot and figure out how you are going to get each shot. At this point let me just ask the question you probably haven’t asked yourself. Why are you making this movie? There are many answers and all of them are personal. You could be making it to prove that you’re not a loser and that you can achieve something. You may want to be cool and say, “I am a film director” when all the people you meet ask what it is that you do. You may want to be a star and the only way you can get a lead role is to make the movie yourself. Or, and this is a wild one, you may just believe in the story you’re going to tell and want to share it with the world in the best way possible. What I’m getting at is, are you making this movie for the benefit of your own ego or is it to tell a story? If it’s for your ego go make your movie and don’t bother reading on. Oh yeah, and don’t invite me to the screening. If it’s to tell a story you must now swallow your pride and say the three magic words, “I don’t know.” Learn them, commit them to memory, get comfortable with them. Now as you are going through your shot list and you come to a shot you really want but aren’t sure how to get, can you guess what you are going to say? That’s it, ten points for the girl in the third row. I don’t know. It's simple isn’t it? Don’t be afraid of using these three words, no one will criticize you for not knowing something. Actually they will, but don’t listen to them.
The next step now that you have created a list of “I don’t know” shots, is to find out how to get them. One of the best and cheapest sources for this kind of information in this modern day we live in, is to find a movie with a similar shot, rent the DVD, and listen to the director’s commentary. This approach may be a bit hit and miss as the director could be talking about something else at the time or the bimbo actress who’s also doing the commentary won’t shut up about how good she looked in that shower scene ten minutes earlier.
Another approach is to talk to people who know. The best way to handle your “I don’t know” shots is to hire a special effects coordinator, or at least talk to one. Now don’t go calling up the guys at Industrial Light & Magic for your mini digital video short. Be realistic. Find an effects company or person that supports and understands the style of moviemaking you want to pursue. If you are a guerrilla movie maker, you don’t want a coordinator who takes six weeks to set up a shot that, no doubt will look magnificent, but is way more than you need. On the other hand, you don’t want someone who says, “that’ll do, no one will notice,” because I guarantee they will.
Now you’re probably thinking, “I can’t afford to hire a special effects coordinator.” Now this is another time to swallow your pride. Tell them the truth. I guarantee everyone who has worked on more than one movie has heard the lame bit about how “I’m going to make a movie and then get it into festivals. It will be really good for your show reel. You should be able to get more work by showing it off. When it’s finished we’ll get funding to re-shoot it properly and then we can hire you at your full price.” This kind of hype may work when getting volunteers to help out, but not when you’re talking to industry professionals. Even if you truly believe any of the above lines are going to happen (and who am I to say they’re not), please don’t use them. Speak the truth. Say “Hey I’m making a movie, I haven’t got much money, and I really want it to turn out good, but I’m not sure how and I would really like some help.” If you’re honest in your approach, there are no surprises later and you’ll gain more respect. You’ll find that many professionals will be willing to talk to you and give you advice simply because they love the business they are in and enjoy talking about it whenever they find someone who is interested. Once you’ve spoken to them, if they seem interested in your project ask if they can help out. You may find that if you have a good script and they feel they’ll enjoy working with you, they may drop their ten million an hour rate to something more workable. I doubt that you’ll get a professional for free but you never know. I have never met a person in the movie industry who’s price wasn’t negotiable.
Essentially a movie has three types of effects shots. The one that’s written in the script, the one that’s thought of on set when you think of something you couldn’t have thought of before, and the shot that went wrong somehow and needs to be fixed. Every movie has a shot fix-up job somewhere. Even if it’s just having to edit around that close up you really wanted but the moron sound guy keeps getting the microphone in frame. Unfortunately you can’t avoid these fix-up shots, but you can avoid turning the other two types of effects shots into fix-up shots. Simple advice from actually talking to a professional can often lead you to shoot something slightly different that, in turn, can save you hours, maybe even days, of work in post-production. The advise may be as simple as put the camera on a tripod and film with a static shot then when the digital effect is added you can add a little camera movement and everything will be in sync. Or in one example I came across, a director wanted a building to explode. They couldn’t afford to do a real explosion, or even a miniature explosion, so they came up with the idea of only seeing the reflection of the flames in a shiny car. They went out and got a magnificent shot of the actor walking towards the car. If I was involved during the shooting of this scene I would have recommended igniting a gas flame bar behind the actor and out of frame so that you captured the reflection of real flames in the car as well as getting a real light source. It would have taken ten minutes to set up and been relatively cheap. Instead the shot took more than a day to rotoscope all the elements and add the flames and in the end it looked like a cheap shot and cost more to get done.
Another common effect shot I get asked to do is to add muzzle flashes from guns being fired or to add bullet wounds on people. Although they are fairly simple to add in a computer, it truly isn’t that expensive to have real guns firing blanks and have your actors loaded up with squibs. It’s much more effective and realistic and probably doesn’t cost any more than getting it done in a computer. Of course there are occasions when you just can’t fire guns for real. Like when they are too close to another actor or in public places and you don’t really have a permit.
In the end it all comes down to your own personal choice and how you want your movie to end up. Having an effects coordinator on set can be of great value and can even save time and money, but if your production is unorganized or you just don’t have any cash at all, you can still benefit from just asking for advice.
The Reality of Adding Special Effects to Your Low Budget Film
Too often I get producers and directors asking me to add an effect into their movie when the project is well into post-production and the deadline is all too close. Or else I’ll get asked to fix a shot where a do-it-yourself effect didn’t work. Most directors seem to think that with the advent of desktop computers and software like Photoshop and After Effects that anything is possible, and quite simply if you have unlimited time and money, almost anything is possible. Unfortunately, however, most of us do have limited time and very limited money. Many people seem to think that they can check out a book about special effects from the local library, learn what matte paintings and blue screens are, then go out and produce their own effects of equal quality to what George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic seem to pull off. If you are incredibly gifted this may be so. But then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?
So how do you achieve that great effect you imagined when you first wrote or read the script?
The first step is simple but most of you will hate it. Go through the script and make a list made up of all your dream shots. I can hear the cries already, “but I get a much better energy if I make the shots up on set,” and “I can’t do that, what if I see something on set I can use that I just can’t think off now?” Valid points, but putting together a shot list doesn’t mean you have to stick to it once you get on set. It’s just a guide, a road map of one way to get your finished movie. I find that it makes you think of all the little shots you need to get. Like the cutaways and close-ups that you usually run out of time to shoot cause you didn’t think of them before. A shot list will help in so many areas of planning your movie, not just the effects.
Once you have your shot list, go through it shot by shot and figure out how you are going to get each shot. At this point let me just ask the question you probably haven’t asked yourself. Why are you making this movie? There are many answers and all of them are personal. You could be making it to prove that you’re not a loser and that you can achieve something. You may want to be cool and say, “I am a film director” when all the people you meet ask what it is that you do. You may want to be a star and the only way you can get a lead role is to make the movie yourself. Or, and this is a wild one, you may just believe in the story you’re going to tell and want to share it with the world in the best way possible. What I’m getting at is, are you making this movie for the benefit of your own ego or is it to tell a story? If it’s for your ego go make your movie and don’t bother reading on. Oh yeah, and don’t invite me to the screening. If it’s to tell a story you must now swallow your pride and say the three magic words, “I don’t know.” Learn them, commit them to memory, get comfortable with them. Now as you are going through your shot list and you come to a shot you really want but aren’t sure how to get, can you guess what you are going to say? That’s it, ten points for the girl in the third row. I don’t know. It's simple isn’t it? Don’t be afraid of using these three words, no one will criticize you for not knowing something. Actually they will, but don’t listen to them.
The next step now that you have created a list of “I don’t know” shots, is to find out how to get them. One of the best and cheapest sources for this kind of information in this modern day we live in, is to find a movie with a similar shot, rent the DVD, and listen to the director’s commentary. This approach may be a bit hit and miss as the director could be talking about something else at the time or the bimbo actress who’s also doing the commentary won’t shut up about how good she looked in that shower scene ten minutes earlier.
Another approach is to talk to people who know. The best way to handle your “I don’t know” shots is to hire a special effects coordinator, or at least talk to one. Now don’t go calling up the guys at Industrial Light & Magic for your mini digital video short. Be realistic. Find an effects company or person that supports and understands the style of moviemaking you want to pursue. If you are a guerrilla movie maker, you don’t want a coordinator who takes six weeks to set up a shot that, no doubt will look magnificent, but is way more than you need. On the other hand, you don’t want someone who says, “that’ll do, no one will notice,” because I guarantee they will.
Now you’re probably thinking, “I can’t afford to hire a special effects coordinator.” Now this is another time to swallow your pride. Tell them the truth. I guarantee everyone who has worked on more than one movie has heard the lame bit about how “I’m going to make a movie and then get it into festivals. It will be really good for your show reel. You should be able to get more work by showing it off. When it’s finished we’ll get funding to re-shoot it properly and then we can hire you at your full price.” This kind of hype may work when getting volunteers to help out, but not when you’re talking to industry professionals. Even if you truly believe any of the above lines are going to happen (and who am I to say they’re not), please don’t use them. Speak the truth. Say “Hey I’m making a movie, I haven’t got much money, and I really want it to turn out good, but I’m not sure how and I would really like some help.” If you’re honest in your approach, there are no surprises later and you’ll gain more respect. You’ll find that many professionals will be willing to talk to you and give you advice simply because they love the business they are in and enjoy talking about it whenever they find someone who is interested. Once you’ve spoken to them, if they seem interested in your project ask if they can help out. You may find that if you have a good script and they feel they’ll enjoy working with you, they may drop their ten million an hour rate to something more workable. I doubt that you’ll get a professional for free but you never know. I have never met a person in the movie industry who’s price wasn’t negotiable.
Essentially a movie has three types of effects shots. The one that’s written in the script, the one that’s thought of on set when you think of something you couldn’t have thought of before, and the shot that went wrong somehow and needs to be fixed. Every movie has a shot fix-up job somewhere. Even if it’s just having to edit around that close up you really wanted but the moron sound guy keeps getting the microphone in frame. Unfortunately you can’t avoid these fix-up shots, but you can avoid turning the other two types of effects shots into fix-up shots. Simple advice from actually talking to a professional can often lead you to shoot something slightly different that, in turn, can save you hours, maybe even days, of work in post-production. The advise may be as simple as put the camera on a tripod and film with a static shot then when the digital effect is added you can add a little camera movement and everything will be in sync. Or in one example I came across, a director wanted a building to explode. They couldn’t afford to do a real explosion, or even a miniature explosion, so they came up with the idea of only seeing the reflection of the flames in a shiny car. They went out and got a magnificent shot of the actor walking towards the car. If I was involved during the shooting of this scene I would have recommended igniting a gas flame bar behind the actor and out of frame so that you captured the reflection of real flames in the car as well as getting a real light source. It would have taken ten minutes to set up and been relatively cheap. Instead the shot took more than a day to rotoscope all the elements and add the flames and in the end it looked like a cheap shot and cost more to get done.
Another common effect shot I get asked to do is to add muzzle flashes from guns being fired or to add bullet wounds on people. Although they are fairly simple to add in a computer, it truly isn’t that expensive to have real guns firing blanks and have your actors loaded up with squibs. It’s much more effective and realistic and probably doesn’t cost any more than getting it done in a computer. Of course there are occasions when you just can’t fire guns for real. Like when they are too close to another actor or in public places and you don’t really have a permit.
In the end it all comes down to your own personal choice and how you want your movie to end up. Having an effects coordinator on set can be of great value and can even save time and money, but if your production is unorganized or you just don’t have any cash at all, you can still benefit from just asking for advice.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Rants and Rages
Submitted by Martyn Finn
Ripping Slasher Flicks
I recently went to view the spectacle that is Freddy vs. Jason. Not having seen many of the predecessors, I wasn’t much bothered as I knew it would pretty much be a stand alone film. Sadly the only bright spark in the entire film was the opening, and then sadly the ending, for which I had to wait far too long for it to arrive. In between was some ridiculously condescending filmmaking from a classic sequence of slash horror movies. Whereas Nigthmare on Elm Street and the original Friday the 13th previously found cult success in simplistic gore and blood bathing beauties, today it seems abandoning that theme altogether would be the way to go to in the search for a new audience. How wrong this is, how very wrong. Trying to palm off some sort of intellectual intrigue by getting into the minds of the killers does nothing to attract the more advanced moviegoer, when from every scene has more blood and more gore than the one before. Why not be honest about the film you’re making? This is a film about death, violence, and topping the previous death scene. Why then would you try to flog us into believing it is something it is not? It’s hard work to watch and even harder to accept that this is anything but a fading franchise. With only one bright spark coming from the news that perhaps a prequel to Nightmare on Elm Street is in the works, this film promises nothing whatsoever. Yet such a bad film is light years ahead of anything the British film industry could ever dream of churning out, but that’s another article. I hope you enjoyed reading my vented frustration, and if you think I’m exaggerating, please be my guest, and go and bore yourself to death.
The State of the British Film Industry
Here’s a little tip for aspiring young British filmmakers. First, realize that Britain is a crap place to make films. No one likes the fact that you have a camera, and unlike Americans, hardly anyone wants to be on camera. People hardly ever let you film, even if you ask them. Lastly the weather is crap as are the available locations. I’ve seen the work of many amateur filmmakers, and their films all look terrible, simply because of the locations and weather. For God’s sake, if your interested in this sort of thing as a career at least care about the places that you shoot. Go out and take pictures of every angle. If it’s not right scrap it and move on. Make it look like a place only a movie would portray. For God’s sake think about lighting. That’s what sets us apart from the Americans these days. If the weather is crap then don’t shoot, wait for a nice day, because that's what puts people off watching British movies. They look dull and miserable so people won’t watch them, because we know what it’s like to be dull and miserable. We have windows. What we want to see is a glamorous view of Britain, America does it, why shouldn’t we? Why is it that we always make films about the poverty of Britain, or the crime, or the hatred of Britain? The reason, it’s easy. It’s easy to do because it’s easy to show something as it really is. The difficult thing, the thing we don’t want to do is try and make something its not. We all know how fake Hollywood is, that’s because they make the effort to create the sets and lighting to make us believe what is not really there. So pull your finger out Britain and make something worth watching, not something to slit your wrists over. To be honest, I haven’t even really started on the British film industry. I haven’t even begun to talk about acting, so look out for more tongue lashings from me.
Willy Opened My Eyes
It’s difficult to believe you can walk away from a Bruce Willis film these days and have something worthwhile to debate. Possible exceptions being his collaborations with M. Night Shyamalan. Coming out of Tears of the Sun recently with family by my side, a fierce deconstruction of the fabric of the last two hours began to churn. Looking at events all but abandoned in film these days, Tears of the Sun went on to graphically and gruesomely tell the story of what the world is really like today. Of course, the film also had elements of cheese and the hero factor was thrown in for all the die hard Willis fans. For someone less prone to tears of his own during a screening, I found myself charged with emotion when quite vividly the subject matter at times spelt out just how awful this world can be at times. This is just a quick note to thank Tears of the Sun for doing what so many other films should do. Tears of the Sun tackled difficult subject matter and themes and explored a number of issues that needed to be highlighted. After all, isn’t that what film is partly meant to do?
Ripping Slasher Flicks
I recently went to view the spectacle that is Freddy vs. Jason. Not having seen many of the predecessors, I wasn’t much bothered as I knew it would pretty much be a stand alone film. Sadly the only bright spark in the entire film was the opening, and then sadly the ending, for which I had to wait far too long for it to arrive. In between was some ridiculously condescending filmmaking from a classic sequence of slash horror movies. Whereas Nigthmare on Elm Street and the original Friday the 13th previously found cult success in simplistic gore and blood bathing beauties, today it seems abandoning that theme altogether would be the way to go to in the search for a new audience. How wrong this is, how very wrong. Trying to palm off some sort of intellectual intrigue by getting into the minds of the killers does nothing to attract the more advanced moviegoer, when from every scene has more blood and more gore than the one before. Why not be honest about the film you’re making? This is a film about death, violence, and topping the previous death scene. Why then would you try to flog us into believing it is something it is not? It’s hard work to watch and even harder to accept that this is anything but a fading franchise. With only one bright spark coming from the news that perhaps a prequel to Nightmare on Elm Street is in the works, this film promises nothing whatsoever. Yet such a bad film is light years ahead of anything the British film industry could ever dream of churning out, but that’s another article. I hope you enjoyed reading my vented frustration, and if you think I’m exaggerating, please be my guest, and go and bore yourself to death.
The State of the British Film Industry
Here’s a little tip for aspiring young British filmmakers. First, realize that Britain is a crap place to make films. No one likes the fact that you have a camera, and unlike Americans, hardly anyone wants to be on camera. People hardly ever let you film, even if you ask them. Lastly the weather is crap as are the available locations. I’ve seen the work of many amateur filmmakers, and their films all look terrible, simply because of the locations and weather. For God’s sake, if your interested in this sort of thing as a career at least care about the places that you shoot. Go out and take pictures of every angle. If it’s not right scrap it and move on. Make it look like a place only a movie would portray. For God’s sake think about lighting. That’s what sets us apart from the Americans these days. If the weather is crap then don’t shoot, wait for a nice day, because that's what puts people off watching British movies. They look dull and miserable so people won’t watch them, because we know what it’s like to be dull and miserable. We have windows. What we want to see is a glamorous view of Britain, America does it, why shouldn’t we? Why is it that we always make films about the poverty of Britain, or the crime, or the hatred of Britain? The reason, it’s easy. It’s easy to do because it’s easy to show something as it really is. The difficult thing, the thing we don’t want to do is try and make something its not. We all know how fake Hollywood is, that’s because they make the effort to create the sets and lighting to make us believe what is not really there. So pull your finger out Britain and make something worth watching, not something to slit your wrists over. To be honest, I haven’t even really started on the British film industry. I haven’t even begun to talk about acting, so look out for more tongue lashings from me.
Willy Opened My Eyes
It’s difficult to believe you can walk away from a Bruce Willis film these days and have something worthwhile to debate. Possible exceptions being his collaborations with M. Night Shyamalan. Coming out of Tears of the Sun recently with family by my side, a fierce deconstruction of the fabric of the last two hours began to churn. Looking at events all but abandoned in film these days, Tears of the Sun went on to graphically and gruesomely tell the story of what the world is really like today. Of course, the film also had elements of cheese and the hero factor was thrown in for all the die hard Willis fans. For someone less prone to tears of his own during a screening, I found myself charged with emotion when quite vividly the subject matter at times spelt out just how awful this world can be at times. This is just a quick note to thank Tears of the Sun for doing what so many other films should do. Tears of the Sun tackled difficult subject matter and themes and explored a number of issues that needed to be highlighted. After all, isn’t that what film is partly meant to do?
The Making New World, Reflections One Year Later
Submitted by Peter John Ross
Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, one more scene to go. February 2002, for me it was infamous, Scene 41, which had more FX shots than the rest of the movie combined. It was grueling. Working freelance, and working on FX all the time, wore me down and fried my brain.
I would work out each FX shot in Adobe After Effects, then set all the shots I worked on to render, or compile all the FX together in a compatible video clip, and not find out for another nine to twelve hours if it worked. Some FX shots took as much as twenty-three hours to render for four seconds of footage.
Upon completion of the scene, I looked it over and put together my final rough cut with what I thought was all of my FX. The movie was bad. Real bad. It was nothing but a collection of sometimes good and sometimes awful scenes, and there was no flow, or any really good transitions. I came up with the idea of releasing it in five or six minute online “webisodes.” I felt this was my only salvation. I didn’t think I could make it work otherwise.
I started releasing the “chapters” online. There are pockets of people out there who love low budget, B-movie science-fiction, and it’s even better online. Within a couple weeks I got e-mails of praise and scorn, but mostly scorn. After some fairly scathing reviews, I decided the best two chapters that are short and to the point were chapters six and seven. So I focused on getting these out there more.
I did receive an e-mail invitation to submit to a science-fiction convention in Little Rock, Arkansas called “Roc*Kon.” I sent a tape of the best two chapters. Within a week I got a phone call from the lady that had invited me to submit New World, where she promptly ripped me a new orifice. She wanted it all, not a part, not a piece, but all of New World. She also said I should re-edit it and make it one long movie, the very thing I dreaded since I tried and it didn’t work. But her passion for the project invigorated my efforts, and terrified me as well.
I tried again, but there were definitely some moments where I needed something more. The 3D animator, Don Drennan, a local animation genius, agreed to contribute five shots. He did several matte paintings of a CGI “hive,” like a 30 story high alien beehive. It looked amazing. He went way over the top and delivered some top-notch FX work, and made me want to cry whenever I saw my own FX shots.
I now had a forty-nine minute version of New World.
In May 2002, we decided to screen it publicly for the first time in our hometown. I rented a theater with three other independent filmmakers. The intent was to screen our movies to the public and for the casts and crews. We didn’t sell out, but we had very good turn outs for two showings at a local multiplex, even though we digitally projected. Running mono and stereo independent movies through THX created audio problems, so for the second show, I volunteered to ride it out in the projection booth raising and lowering the volume manually.
Understand my pain. My sole reason for making movies is to eventually sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers and experience the story. Well here I am, at one of the precious few times my movie plays in a dark room complete with strangers, and I’m in the projection booth. Immediately after the second screening, I am approached by Matthias Saunders, who caused so much disarray during the shoot, and his only words to me are “You made some editing choices I didn’t agree with.” Since he has never directed or really edited anything, I didn’t take too much offense.
Michael Evanichko, one of the other filmmakers with a movie playing, had the brilliant idea of handing out comment cards. We did and most people did take the time to fill them out. I learned a lot about my own movie from that. People can tell you what they really think unadulterated. Especially if they weren’t part of your cast and crew, they’ve got no reason to lie or hold back. And they didn’t. The results were still about seventy percent pro-New World, but even the positive cards had criticisms, and they were primarily valid.
I then made a decision. Based on the first screening, and sitting in the theater with an audience, the first twenty minutes of New World seemed to drag and drag on. I wanted to cut it out completely, but how do you cut it out completely and still have a coherent story? My girlfriend and I were driving along Interstate 270 one day discussing this, and she suggested a “previously on Buffy The Vampire Slayer” introduction with just clips. At first I told her that she was nuts because Buffy the Vampire Slayer footage wouldn’t work in our futuristic science-fiction movie. I then got slapped in the face, and then heard her say, “No idiot, make your own previously on New World.” Then the genius of her suggestion kicked in.
I edited together the footage of highlights from the first twenty minutes and cut it down to two minutes, added a professional voice-over saying “previously on New World,” and then I had a much tighter, much more fluid New World, that now runs at a scant twenty-eight minutes. I am now much more content about the status of New World.
I sent a VHS tape off to the lady in Little Rock, Arkansas, and then the idea of screening New World at science-fiction conventions as opposed to film festivals occurred to me. Film festivals with their black beret wearing latte sippers would never like New World anyway. It’s B-movie science-fiction, and not that good either. But I figured that if people still like the original Star Trek series, then I have a chance. I started submitting New World to science-fiction conventions around the country and it got around.
We screened the movie at several conventions here in Columbus, Ohio, as well as Cleveland, and as far as Fort Worth, and Baltimore. The new twenty-eight minute version plays much, much better now with audiences. I breathe easier, but I still notate every flaw and try to imagine what re-doing it will be.
Then I bagged the elephant, San Diego Comic-Con, the largest comic book and science-fiction convention in the world. This happened to be the first year of the Comic-Con Independent Film Festival and New World got accepted. We screened it for a decent sized audience there, and I got to do a Q & A afterwards. I even got to meet and have a conversation with Joss Whedon, my hero and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the green room.
What did I learn? A whole bunch, mostly what not to do. I learned to not bite off something this big and expect it to come off great. At least not until I’ve learned more about the basics of the craft. Moviemaking is a collaborative art, and planning is the key.
Be realistic.
Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, one more scene to go. February 2002, for me it was infamous, Scene 41, which had more FX shots than the rest of the movie combined. It was grueling. Working freelance, and working on FX all the time, wore me down and fried my brain.
I would work out each FX shot in Adobe After Effects, then set all the shots I worked on to render, or compile all the FX together in a compatible video clip, and not find out for another nine to twelve hours if it worked. Some FX shots took as much as twenty-three hours to render for four seconds of footage.
Upon completion of the scene, I looked it over and put together my final rough cut with what I thought was all of my FX. The movie was bad. Real bad. It was nothing but a collection of sometimes good and sometimes awful scenes, and there was no flow, or any really good transitions. I came up with the idea of releasing it in five or six minute online “webisodes.” I felt this was my only salvation. I didn’t think I could make it work otherwise.
I started releasing the “chapters” online. There are pockets of people out there who love low budget, B-movie science-fiction, and it’s even better online. Within a couple weeks I got e-mails of praise and scorn, but mostly scorn. After some fairly scathing reviews, I decided the best two chapters that are short and to the point were chapters six and seven. So I focused on getting these out there more.
I did receive an e-mail invitation to submit to a science-fiction convention in Little Rock, Arkansas called “Roc*Kon.” I sent a tape of the best two chapters. Within a week I got a phone call from the lady that had invited me to submit New World, where she promptly ripped me a new orifice. She wanted it all, not a part, not a piece, but all of New World. She also said I should re-edit it and make it one long movie, the very thing I dreaded since I tried and it didn’t work. But her passion for the project invigorated my efforts, and terrified me as well.
I tried again, but there were definitely some moments where I needed something more. The 3D animator, Don Drennan, a local animation genius, agreed to contribute five shots. He did several matte paintings of a CGI “hive,” like a 30 story high alien beehive. It looked amazing. He went way over the top and delivered some top-notch FX work, and made me want to cry whenever I saw my own FX shots.
I now had a forty-nine minute version of New World.
In May 2002, we decided to screen it publicly for the first time in our hometown. I rented a theater with three other independent filmmakers. The intent was to screen our movies to the public and for the casts and crews. We didn’t sell out, but we had very good turn outs for two showings at a local multiplex, even though we digitally projected. Running mono and stereo independent movies through THX created audio problems, so for the second show, I volunteered to ride it out in the projection booth raising and lowering the volume manually.
Understand my pain. My sole reason for making movies is to eventually sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers and experience the story. Well here I am, at one of the precious few times my movie plays in a dark room complete with strangers, and I’m in the projection booth. Immediately after the second screening, I am approached by Matthias Saunders, who caused so much disarray during the shoot, and his only words to me are “You made some editing choices I didn’t agree with.” Since he has never directed or really edited anything, I didn’t take too much offense.
Michael Evanichko, one of the other filmmakers with a movie playing, had the brilliant idea of handing out comment cards. We did and most people did take the time to fill them out. I learned a lot about my own movie from that. People can tell you what they really think unadulterated. Especially if they weren’t part of your cast and crew, they’ve got no reason to lie or hold back. And they didn’t. The results were still about seventy percent pro-New World, but even the positive cards had criticisms, and they were primarily valid.
I then made a decision. Based on the first screening, and sitting in the theater with an audience, the first twenty minutes of New World seemed to drag and drag on. I wanted to cut it out completely, but how do you cut it out completely and still have a coherent story? My girlfriend and I were driving along Interstate 270 one day discussing this, and she suggested a “previously on Buffy The Vampire Slayer” introduction with just clips. At first I told her that she was nuts because Buffy the Vampire Slayer footage wouldn’t work in our futuristic science-fiction movie. I then got slapped in the face, and then heard her say, “No idiot, make your own previously on New World.” Then the genius of her suggestion kicked in.
I edited together the footage of highlights from the first twenty minutes and cut it down to two minutes, added a professional voice-over saying “previously on New World,” and then I had a much tighter, much more fluid New World, that now runs at a scant twenty-eight minutes. I am now much more content about the status of New World.
I sent a VHS tape off to the lady in Little Rock, Arkansas, and then the idea of screening New World at science-fiction conventions as opposed to film festivals occurred to me. Film festivals with their black beret wearing latte sippers would never like New World anyway. It’s B-movie science-fiction, and not that good either. But I figured that if people still like the original Star Trek series, then I have a chance. I started submitting New World to science-fiction conventions around the country and it got around.
We screened the movie at several conventions here in Columbus, Ohio, as well as Cleveland, and as far as Fort Worth, and Baltimore. The new twenty-eight minute version plays much, much better now with audiences. I breathe easier, but I still notate every flaw and try to imagine what re-doing it will be.
Then I bagged the elephant, San Diego Comic-Con, the largest comic book and science-fiction convention in the world. This happened to be the first year of the Comic-Con Independent Film Festival and New World got accepted. We screened it for a decent sized audience there, and I got to do a Q & A afterwards. I even got to meet and have a conversation with Joss Whedon, my hero and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the green room.
What did I learn? A whole bunch, mostly what not to do. I learned to not bite off something this big and expect it to come off great. At least not until I’ve learned more about the basics of the craft. Moviemaking is a collaborative art, and planning is the key.
Be realistic.
The Making of In Memory of My Father
Submitted by Chris Jaymes
In Memory of My Father was shot over a five day period using three cameras following a four week on-location rehearsal process where the script was further developed. One week after returning from Southeast Asia, where I had been for three months, I wrote the script in five days after David Austin, the executive producer, asked me to write a script to film in his house. Austin lives in one of Samuel Goldwyn’s old mansions, off Franklin and Camino Palmero in the Hollywood Hills, and was planning to sell the house and wanted to have it documented before doing so.
I had been planning to see the revival screening of Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie all week at the Fine Arts Theater and it was Thursday evening, the last night of its run. So I rushed over for the 10 p.m. screening. An hour into the film, I realized that I hadn’t seen a single frame of the film as my mind had been running through images of what soon would become In Memory of My Father. I immediately left the theater and started jotting down notes in my car.
Five days later the script was complete. I sculpted three story lines to unfold throughout the house using specific actors that are friends, including Judy Greer and Jeremy Sisto. I wrote each of the actor’s story lines in a manner that would cater to their specific personalities and set each actor’s story amongst their friends, partners, and families to enhance the intimacy and comfort levels of the performers. On the sixth day, I had all of the actors come to David’s house for a reading, without allowing anyone to look at the script beforehand.
Everyone seemingly loved it and we were set to go. I rewrote for the next week, as I began producing the film with the ever so miniscule budget I was given. At the end of that week, we had another reading, which confirmed the reality of the production that would begin four weeks later as a weeklong shoot. With the limited budget and the availability of the actors, I honed it down to a five day shoot. Taking the blue prints of the mansion, I mapped out the set-up for each scene with the blocking of the actors, the placement of the cameras, camera movement, and other details in order to move quickly and as smoothly as possible.
Over the next four weeks, I produced the film and prepped the house. Abe Levy, my friend and director of photography who I had worked with as an actor in two of his films, worked with me for the final week and a half, setting lights and shooting tests. The actors were made aware that I would be at house prepping for the film, and that they could have access to the house at any time. The majority of the cast took advantage of this situation and on a voluntary and improvised schedule would show up with their scene partners to rehearse and prepare. I would try to spend as much time as possible with each of them, and during these sessions I would constantly rewrite in an attempt to bring out what seemed more familiar to them. Knowing them all as well as I did, it was easier to nurture their natural instincts and help find the beauty and core of what I had loved about them as people. The cast brought so much more to the script than I could have imagined and really took advantage of the freedom that I had given. Since we were shooting the entire film at this one location we had the benefit of pre-setting the entire house, which is the only reason we were able to complete the task of capturing seventy hours of footage in five days of shooting. The house itself was already nearly perfect.
Aside from re-decorating two of the upstairs rooms, all that really had to happen was to light the house in an invisible manner. We had a bedroom transformed into a make-up room and the rest of the house served as a green room, which was pretty amazing, and no one ever wanted to leave. The house has a fifties retro-Hollywood sort of feel to it. Large balconies overlook a swimming pool that is neighbored by a jacuzzi room (something you don't see much of anymore), both of which are set into a brick floor. An overgrown south of France yard surrounds the house and the trees seem to give you a feeling of privacy, regardless of the fact that you’re just a few steps away from Franklin Boulevard.
Unfortunately, upon David selling the Goldwyn house, the buyers gutted it and completely redesigned every last detail of the property turning it into just another ostentatious looking mansion, where prior to that there was absolutely nothing ostentatious about it. At the risk of sounding a little pretentious, there was definitely a nurturing quality about the property. It did feel like another character to a certain degree, however not a character that wanted any attention as much as one that just liked being a part of something. Not one piece of furniture or any part of the house was damaged with well over a hundred bodies moving around it at any given time, and that is something that I've never seen happen.
There was definitely a sense of wonder in the back of my mind; occasional flashes of what may have happened here forty years ago, and curiosity of the glamour and the darkness that lived inside the history of the house. The footage that I have will be the last true documentation of the property as it was originally designed, which is fortunate and yet unfortunate at the same time.
We’re currently looking for distribution and some additional financing. A short cut sneak peak of the film is premiering at the IFP market on September 23 at the Angelika Theater in New York City.
In Memory of My Father was shot over a five day period using three cameras following a four week on-location rehearsal process where the script was further developed. One week after returning from Southeast Asia, where I had been for three months, I wrote the script in five days after David Austin, the executive producer, asked me to write a script to film in his house. Austin lives in one of Samuel Goldwyn’s old mansions, off Franklin and Camino Palmero in the Hollywood Hills, and was planning to sell the house and wanted to have it documented before doing so.
I had been planning to see the revival screening of Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie all week at the Fine Arts Theater and it was Thursday evening, the last night of its run. So I rushed over for the 10 p.m. screening. An hour into the film, I realized that I hadn’t seen a single frame of the film as my mind had been running through images of what soon would become In Memory of My Father. I immediately left the theater and started jotting down notes in my car.
Five days later the script was complete. I sculpted three story lines to unfold throughout the house using specific actors that are friends, including Judy Greer and Jeremy Sisto. I wrote each of the actor’s story lines in a manner that would cater to their specific personalities and set each actor’s story amongst their friends, partners, and families to enhance the intimacy and comfort levels of the performers. On the sixth day, I had all of the actors come to David’s house for a reading, without allowing anyone to look at the script beforehand.
Everyone seemingly loved it and we were set to go. I rewrote for the next week, as I began producing the film with the ever so miniscule budget I was given. At the end of that week, we had another reading, which confirmed the reality of the production that would begin four weeks later as a weeklong shoot. With the limited budget and the availability of the actors, I honed it down to a five day shoot. Taking the blue prints of the mansion, I mapped out the set-up for each scene with the blocking of the actors, the placement of the cameras, camera movement, and other details in order to move quickly and as smoothly as possible.
Over the next four weeks, I produced the film and prepped the house. Abe Levy, my friend and director of photography who I had worked with as an actor in two of his films, worked with me for the final week and a half, setting lights and shooting tests. The actors were made aware that I would be at house prepping for the film, and that they could have access to the house at any time. The majority of the cast took advantage of this situation and on a voluntary and improvised schedule would show up with their scene partners to rehearse and prepare. I would try to spend as much time as possible with each of them, and during these sessions I would constantly rewrite in an attempt to bring out what seemed more familiar to them. Knowing them all as well as I did, it was easier to nurture their natural instincts and help find the beauty and core of what I had loved about them as people. The cast brought so much more to the script than I could have imagined and really took advantage of the freedom that I had given. Since we were shooting the entire film at this one location we had the benefit of pre-setting the entire house, which is the only reason we were able to complete the task of capturing seventy hours of footage in five days of shooting. The house itself was already nearly perfect.
Aside from re-decorating two of the upstairs rooms, all that really had to happen was to light the house in an invisible manner. We had a bedroom transformed into a make-up room and the rest of the house served as a green room, which was pretty amazing, and no one ever wanted to leave. The house has a fifties retro-Hollywood sort of feel to it. Large balconies overlook a swimming pool that is neighbored by a jacuzzi room (something you don't see much of anymore), both of which are set into a brick floor. An overgrown south of France yard surrounds the house and the trees seem to give you a feeling of privacy, regardless of the fact that you’re just a few steps away from Franklin Boulevard.
Unfortunately, upon David selling the Goldwyn house, the buyers gutted it and completely redesigned every last detail of the property turning it into just another ostentatious looking mansion, where prior to that there was absolutely nothing ostentatious about it. At the risk of sounding a little pretentious, there was definitely a nurturing quality about the property. It did feel like another character to a certain degree, however not a character that wanted any attention as much as one that just liked being a part of something. Not one piece of furniture or any part of the house was damaged with well over a hundred bodies moving around it at any given time, and that is something that I've never seen happen.
There was definitely a sense of wonder in the back of my mind; occasional flashes of what may have happened here forty years ago, and curiosity of the glamour and the darkness that lived inside the history of the house. The footage that I have will be the last true documentation of the property as it was originally designed, which is fortunate and yet unfortunate at the same time.
We’re currently looking for distribution and some additional financing. A short cut sneak peak of the film is premiering at the IFP market on September 23 at the Angelika Theater in New York City.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Ten Things to Help You Prepare for a Film Festival
Submitted by R. Dekker Dreyer
Just like every other starry-eyed young director in America I had ambitions of traveling to Park City, Utah in January and showing off one of my masterworks to a crowd of adoring sophisticates and landing that well-earned three picture deal. After you get into one of the well-known festivals, you might imagine everything comes together like magic. This is a pipe dream. The film industry is an industry, a job. From my own experiences at festivals around North America, and more specifically Sundance and Slamdance, I’ve compiled a list of ten things filmmakers need to know about festivals. When I was selected for Slamdance 2003 I found very little information online about what to do as a filmmaker at a festival and I wanted to provide this information to other directors who may be packing a bag and hitting the circuit. If you’re a serious filmmaker I suggest you study this list and take it for what it’s worth.
1) Nobody knows who you are. You have to be very outgoing and make friends quickly otherwise you’ll have wasted your time.
2) Your movie needs an audience and it is your sole responsibility to bring in that audience. Bring flyers, posters, post cards, a bull horn, and a giant panda suit, anything to attract attention to your film.
3) Celebrities are available to give you advice, make sure you ask good questions. I can’t stand people who ask things to the effect of, “How do make it as a director?” Truthfully, asking this will make you look like a fool in front of very important people. If you’re asking this kind of question you’ve ruined a great opportunity. Questions of that nature are greedy and give the impression that you don’t care about the craft, only yourself. Ask questions that matter, like, “When you’re directing do you...” or “I’ve seen you in ______, how did the scene where you escaped the mental hospital come together for you as an actor?” These types of questions are things you can learn from and they make the person being questioned feel good that you are interested in their work.
4) Be prepared at any moment to pitch ideas in a professional way. If your film is well received you may be asked about future ideas. Have handy, non-disclosure agreements, treatments, budgets, demographic information, comparables reports, and press clippings. Make well presented packages, nice folders and business cards are a must. The Movie Producer’s Toolbox from www.movie-producers.net is great tool for putting this package together.
5) Participate in roundtable discussions. There will be many chances to sit in on discussion panels on wide range of film topics. Sit in on as many of these as you can and ask intelligent questions while sharing your own experiences.
6) A word on parties. There are lots of them. There is a lot of free liquor. Do not abuse the free liquor. Parties are a casual environment to meet up with your contemporaries. They may be the first point of contact with some important people, so be careful to make a good impression. Dress to impress, and do not get drunk.
7) Bring a camera. Take as many photos as you can, they can be used in promotional materials about you and your film in print or online. Capture it all and let the world see how great you are.
8) Film festivals are expensive. Visiting one may cost you upwards of $800 on the low end. Make sure you can afford this by saving money from the time you submit your film. Even if you are not selected you may have financed your next short, so remember to save.
9) Many of the people you will encounter are professionals so be smart when you talk to them. Even if they are not the president of Universal you still may need them as a valuable contact. If you’re serious about making a living in the entertainment business then you need to respect the fact that everyone in the industry can help you in some capacity.
10) Leave your pride at the door. Don’t ever be afraid to ask for what you want or tell people about your goals. The only time you will look foolish doing this is if you haven’t really thought about your future as a filmmaker. If you’ve done your homework and know what you want and you’ve made your own plan on how to get it people will respect you and want to help.
Just like every other starry-eyed young director in America I had ambitions of traveling to Park City, Utah in January and showing off one of my masterworks to a crowd of adoring sophisticates and landing that well-earned three picture deal. After you get into one of the well-known festivals, you might imagine everything comes together like magic. This is a pipe dream. The film industry is an industry, a job. From my own experiences at festivals around North America, and more specifically Sundance and Slamdance, I’ve compiled a list of ten things filmmakers need to know about festivals. When I was selected for Slamdance 2003 I found very little information online about what to do as a filmmaker at a festival and I wanted to provide this information to other directors who may be packing a bag and hitting the circuit. If you’re a serious filmmaker I suggest you study this list and take it for what it’s worth.
1) Nobody knows who you are. You have to be very outgoing and make friends quickly otherwise you’ll have wasted your time.
2) Your movie needs an audience and it is your sole responsibility to bring in that audience. Bring flyers, posters, post cards, a bull horn, and a giant panda suit, anything to attract attention to your film.
3) Celebrities are available to give you advice, make sure you ask good questions. I can’t stand people who ask things to the effect of, “How do make it as a director?” Truthfully, asking this will make you look like a fool in front of very important people. If you’re asking this kind of question you’ve ruined a great opportunity. Questions of that nature are greedy and give the impression that you don’t care about the craft, only yourself. Ask questions that matter, like, “When you’re directing do you...” or “I’ve seen you in ______, how did the scene where you escaped the mental hospital come together for you as an actor?” These types of questions are things you can learn from and they make the person being questioned feel good that you are interested in their work.
4) Be prepared at any moment to pitch ideas in a professional way. If your film is well received you may be asked about future ideas. Have handy, non-disclosure agreements, treatments, budgets, demographic information, comparables reports, and press clippings. Make well presented packages, nice folders and business cards are a must. The Movie Producer’s Toolbox from www.movie-producers.net is great tool for putting this package together.
5) Participate in roundtable discussions. There will be many chances to sit in on discussion panels on wide range of film topics. Sit in on as many of these as you can and ask intelligent questions while sharing your own experiences.
6) A word on parties. There are lots of them. There is a lot of free liquor. Do not abuse the free liquor. Parties are a casual environment to meet up with your contemporaries. They may be the first point of contact with some important people, so be careful to make a good impression. Dress to impress, and do not get drunk.
7) Bring a camera. Take as many photos as you can, they can be used in promotional materials about you and your film in print or online. Capture it all and let the world see how great you are.
8) Film festivals are expensive. Visiting one may cost you upwards of $800 on the low end. Make sure you can afford this by saving money from the time you submit your film. Even if you are not selected you may have financed your next short, so remember to save.
9) Many of the people you will encounter are professionals so be smart when you talk to them. Even if they are not the president of Universal you still may need them as a valuable contact. If you’re serious about making a living in the entertainment business then you need to respect the fact that everyone in the industry can help you in some capacity.
10) Leave your pride at the door. Don’t ever be afraid to ask for what you want or tell people about your goals. The only time you will look foolish doing this is if you haven’t really thought about your future as a filmmaker. If you’ve done your homework and know what you want and you’ve made your own plan on how to get it people will respect you and want to help.
Location, Location, Location: Scouting Tips
Submitted by Scott Spears
Just like in real estate, when you leave the studio (if you were ever in one) one of the biggest factors to a good shoot, is location, location, location. I’ve been location scouting many times and have seen some great locations and some not so great locations. One of the biggest things when seeing what looks like a great location is you have to think will it work logistically. The factors to locations are cost, sound issues, power, and logistics. We’ll break those down in a minute.
First, who should go on the location scout? As many crew people as possible. It’s not feasible to take the entire crew to each location (unless you have a small crew), so you need to pick department heads, the director, cinematographer, first assistant director, art director, sound mixer, and production/location manager. I like to bring my gaffer if possible. These people all look at locations in different ways and will have different and valuable input. When all of these people aren’t there, then somebody on the scout should be looking out for them. Sometimes when it’s just me and the director out scouting, we both have to wear different production hats and not just consider picture needs.
Cost
This is the easy one, either you can afford the location or you can’t. A good producer might be able to wheel and deal a better price. Sometimes you have to use some imagination with a place that doesn’t quite work, but is affordable. This is where the director has to envision the shots he will need. There’s a famous story from Akira Kurosawa when he was asked how he achieved a “perfect” frame for a period film he directed and he said, if I had panned to the right there was a modern factory and if I panned to the left, there were power lines, so the frame was set. I’ve been on scouts where people have said the location wouldn’t work because of some factor, but after talking with the director, we realized that element would never be on camera.
Sound Issues
Here’s a line I like to use on sound mixers (please sound folks, don’t take a offense, I’m joking), “they’re called motion pictures, not motion sounds.” It usually gets them riled up, but seriously, you have to not just look at a location, you have to listen to it. Is it on a street with heavy traffic? Is there construction nearby or the potential for it? Is it in the path of an airport? Do a bunch of college party kids live next door who will throw the world’s biggest party ever in the middle of your intimate drama? If it’s a multi-story building, who lives upstairs? Somebody who stomps around in combat boots? There are hundreds of noise factors that can slow or grind your production to a halt, so be on the lookout.
If you start to like a location and think it will be high on your list, take a moment and stand silently. Listen for hums and buzzes. Find out if they can be eliminated. You should visit it again at a different time of day to make sure there isn’t some factor that changes. Say you visit an apartment that looks perfect in the morning, but it sits above a bar that at night cranks up the music, well that would be a sound killer. Some smaller airports cut back on night flights, but during the day your location will have a flight overhead every two minutes. In general, try to think when you’ll be shooting and seek out any sound factor which would slow or halt shooting. Sometimes these things can come out of nowhere and cannot be predicted, but you should do your homework.
As a side note, refrigerators are the bane of sound mixer’s life, humming back to life in the middle of takes thus ruining the sound. The solution is to turn them off during the shoot, but often times they don’t get turned back on after the shoot and the production gets a bill to replace the spoiled contents. Here’s a clever way to avoid that. The person that is assigned be the last person to leave the location, be that the assistant director, the location manager, or a production assistant, should put their car keys in the fridge, that way when they go to their car and pat their pockets for the keys they will remember they put them the fridge for a reason and will remember to turn it back on. This was taught to me by a wise assistant director. I love tricks like this.
Power
A nightmare for gaffers is lack of power. If you need a shaft of sunlight pouring through a window that is created by lighting, not the sun, and the production can’t afford a generator, then you need lots of power. Older buildings should be given special inspections. I’ve shot in apartments that had only two twenty amp circuits which means if you plug in more than four lights, you’re going to start blowing breakers. We ended up borrowing power from an apartment two stories above and just dropped cables out the window to feed our lights. Not ideal, but it worked. Does the place have plenty of outlets? Where are the circuit breakers? You should know where they are so if you blow a breaker you can get at it to reset it. I’ve had hour-long production delays because a fuse box was locked in a closet and nobody could find a janitor to open it. Get to know whoever’s in charge of the keys to all the doors in a building and make them your best friend.
Another side note, here’s the Scott Spears lazy man math formula for calculating power needs for lights. Say you want to use three 1000 watts lights (1Ks for short) and a 500 watt light. You take the watts and add them up which makes 3500 watts, then you divide that by 100 (I know it should be 110, but that’s why I call it a lazy man formula) and that will give you the amps you’ll need, which in this case will be 35 amps. Most houses have 20 amp breakers, so you’ll need at least two dedicated breakers for your lights. Total watts divided by 100 is the number of amp you will need.
Logistics
Locations bring their own set of logistics, just like people. There are a lot of things you don’t think about as you walk around a cool location lining up shots and thinking how you’ll use the space, but there’s a lot more to a location than that.
Where the heck are the cast, crew, and equipment vehicles going to park? A film production takes up a lot of space so there better be parking. How do you get all the gear to the location? Are there elevators or is the crew going have to drag a ton of equipment up four flights of stairs? Exterior locations have these same concerns. I’ve had to hike about a mile uphill for a shoot with gear on my back and in each hand which isn’t fun, but you have to do what you have to do. Do that six times to start and end your day and you’ll think twice about that location.
Don’t forget about changing rooms for cast and a make-up area as well. Here’s a biggie, are there enough bathrooms? Nothing can get you booted from a location faster than having thirty people trying to use one bathroom and to have the toilet overflow.
Now that you and your stuff are on set, where do you put people and extra gear when they’re not working? All the grips and cast not on camera need someplace to hang out while shooting is underway.
Do you have a place for the cast and crew to eat? Is there a large space so everybody sit together and eat? That’s a great way to build camaraderie (as long as the food is good, but that’s a whole other topic). If you don’t feed people on site, are there restaurants nearby. Be careful letting cast and crew loose on the world because they’ll all come staggering in a few minutes late with the excuse that the waiters were slow or there was some other problem.
Some locations have special requirements, like no shoes, cover the floors, or be out at a certain time. Make sure everybody respects these rules or you may be looking for a new place. If a location throws on too many restrictions off the bat, you may want to look elsewhere because once you’re there, life may get even worse with more rules and complaints about even minor infractions.
Final Thoughts
I’ll close by saying my rule is to try to and leave a location better than you found it. Don’t leave a mess because eventually that reputation will catch up to you and you’ll start getting locked out of places.
Just like in real estate, when you leave the studio (if you were ever in one) one of the biggest factors to a good shoot, is location, location, location. I’ve been location scouting many times and have seen some great locations and some not so great locations. One of the biggest things when seeing what looks like a great location is you have to think will it work logistically. The factors to locations are cost, sound issues, power, and logistics. We’ll break those down in a minute.
First, who should go on the location scout? As many crew people as possible. It’s not feasible to take the entire crew to each location (unless you have a small crew), so you need to pick department heads, the director, cinematographer, first assistant director, art director, sound mixer, and production/location manager. I like to bring my gaffer if possible. These people all look at locations in different ways and will have different and valuable input. When all of these people aren’t there, then somebody on the scout should be looking out for them. Sometimes when it’s just me and the director out scouting, we both have to wear different production hats and not just consider picture needs.
Cost
This is the easy one, either you can afford the location or you can’t. A good producer might be able to wheel and deal a better price. Sometimes you have to use some imagination with a place that doesn’t quite work, but is affordable. This is where the director has to envision the shots he will need. There’s a famous story from Akira Kurosawa when he was asked how he achieved a “perfect” frame for a period film he directed and he said, if I had panned to the right there was a modern factory and if I panned to the left, there were power lines, so the frame was set. I’ve been on scouts where people have said the location wouldn’t work because of some factor, but after talking with the director, we realized that element would never be on camera.
Sound Issues
Here’s a line I like to use on sound mixers (please sound folks, don’t take a offense, I’m joking), “they’re called motion pictures, not motion sounds.” It usually gets them riled up, but seriously, you have to not just look at a location, you have to listen to it. Is it on a street with heavy traffic? Is there construction nearby or the potential for it? Is it in the path of an airport? Do a bunch of college party kids live next door who will throw the world’s biggest party ever in the middle of your intimate drama? If it’s a multi-story building, who lives upstairs? Somebody who stomps around in combat boots? There are hundreds of noise factors that can slow or grind your production to a halt, so be on the lookout.
If you start to like a location and think it will be high on your list, take a moment and stand silently. Listen for hums and buzzes. Find out if they can be eliminated. You should visit it again at a different time of day to make sure there isn’t some factor that changes. Say you visit an apartment that looks perfect in the morning, but it sits above a bar that at night cranks up the music, well that would be a sound killer. Some smaller airports cut back on night flights, but during the day your location will have a flight overhead every two minutes. In general, try to think when you’ll be shooting and seek out any sound factor which would slow or halt shooting. Sometimes these things can come out of nowhere and cannot be predicted, but you should do your homework.
As a side note, refrigerators are the bane of sound mixer’s life, humming back to life in the middle of takes thus ruining the sound. The solution is to turn them off during the shoot, but often times they don’t get turned back on after the shoot and the production gets a bill to replace the spoiled contents. Here’s a clever way to avoid that. The person that is assigned be the last person to leave the location, be that the assistant director, the location manager, or a production assistant, should put their car keys in the fridge, that way when they go to their car and pat their pockets for the keys they will remember they put them the fridge for a reason and will remember to turn it back on. This was taught to me by a wise assistant director. I love tricks like this.
Power
A nightmare for gaffers is lack of power. If you need a shaft of sunlight pouring through a window that is created by lighting, not the sun, and the production can’t afford a generator, then you need lots of power. Older buildings should be given special inspections. I’ve shot in apartments that had only two twenty amp circuits which means if you plug in more than four lights, you’re going to start blowing breakers. We ended up borrowing power from an apartment two stories above and just dropped cables out the window to feed our lights. Not ideal, but it worked. Does the place have plenty of outlets? Where are the circuit breakers? You should know where they are so if you blow a breaker you can get at it to reset it. I’ve had hour-long production delays because a fuse box was locked in a closet and nobody could find a janitor to open it. Get to know whoever’s in charge of the keys to all the doors in a building and make them your best friend.
Another side note, here’s the Scott Spears lazy man math formula for calculating power needs for lights. Say you want to use three 1000 watts lights (1Ks for short) and a 500 watt light. You take the watts and add them up which makes 3500 watts, then you divide that by 100 (I know it should be 110, but that’s why I call it a lazy man formula) and that will give you the amps you’ll need, which in this case will be 35 amps. Most houses have 20 amp breakers, so you’ll need at least two dedicated breakers for your lights. Total watts divided by 100 is the number of amp you will need.
Logistics
Locations bring their own set of logistics, just like people. There are a lot of things you don’t think about as you walk around a cool location lining up shots and thinking how you’ll use the space, but there’s a lot more to a location than that.
Where the heck are the cast, crew, and equipment vehicles going to park? A film production takes up a lot of space so there better be parking. How do you get all the gear to the location? Are there elevators or is the crew going have to drag a ton of equipment up four flights of stairs? Exterior locations have these same concerns. I’ve had to hike about a mile uphill for a shoot with gear on my back and in each hand which isn’t fun, but you have to do what you have to do. Do that six times to start and end your day and you’ll think twice about that location.
Don’t forget about changing rooms for cast and a make-up area as well. Here’s a biggie, are there enough bathrooms? Nothing can get you booted from a location faster than having thirty people trying to use one bathroom and to have the toilet overflow.
Now that you and your stuff are on set, where do you put people and extra gear when they’re not working? All the grips and cast not on camera need someplace to hang out while shooting is underway.
Do you have a place for the cast and crew to eat? Is there a large space so everybody sit together and eat? That’s a great way to build camaraderie (as long as the food is good, but that’s a whole other topic). If you don’t feed people on site, are there restaurants nearby. Be careful letting cast and crew loose on the world because they’ll all come staggering in a few minutes late with the excuse that the waiters were slow or there was some other problem.
Some locations have special requirements, like no shoes, cover the floors, or be out at a certain time. Make sure everybody respects these rules or you may be looking for a new place. If a location throws on too many restrictions off the bat, you may want to look elsewhere because once you’re there, life may get even worse with more rules and complaints about even minor infractions.
Final Thoughts
I’ll close by saying my rule is to try to and leave a location better than you found it. Don’t leave a mess because eventually that reputation will catch up to you and you’ll start getting locked out of places.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Advice to First Time Writer/Directors
Submitted by Scott Spears
Nothing is more horrifying to a first timer than realizing very early in your shoot that you're going way over schedule, over budget, and your crew is about to mutiny because of long shooting days. At this point, after shooting all day, you are forced to start cutting pages while trying to keep your film's story coherent and alive.
This little tidbit of advice is aimed at the beginning first time writer/director that is embarking on their first feature or even a long short. I hope this article can help you along in the scriptwriting and pre-production phase.
First, a little about my background; I have over seventeen years in film and video production, shooting over fourteen feature films, producing a couple of films and writing eight feature scripts, two of which have been produced. I have shot video features with tiny budgets and 35mm features.
Having worked with many first time writer/directors I've seen many great scripts and great plans and I've seen many of the pitfalls. I've seen writers who refused to cut scenes that were great little character asides, but bogged down the pacing and added very little to the plot. Many of the scenes were cut during editing because the film was running too long.
I've created an analogy for helping writer/directors gearing up for production. Think of your script as a wagon in the pioneer days preparing to make the trek across country. You have to carefully select what goes in your wagon before you start the long journey, just like with your script you have to select the scenes that are most important to your movie. Don't go loading that big old grandfather clock on the wagon and don't go adding a scene where a character goes to a bar and gets drunk with his friends that adds little or nothing to the story. You want to load on your meat and potatoes and the tools you'll need to set up your homestead. In your script, think of these as character development, sub-plots, motifs, plot points, and your major conflict. If your story is overloaded with extras (grandfather clocks and boxes of lace tablecloths), sometime during production, you're going to have to start throwing these items out and think of ways to patch your script back together. Doing this at the production phase is hard and can create plot headaches when you are cutting your script after a fourteen hour shooting day. Doing it at the editing stage is painful because you see all the expense and time that went into making those scenes land on the cutting room floor.
Here are a couple of stories from my rich life. A writer/director buddy of mine asked me to read his script. It was a long script and I recommended cuts. He made some of the cuts I recommended and some cuts recommended by others. It still came back a little long. He decided to stay with the length. As a side note, I did notice that his formatting was off and when he later formatted to the script into a shooting script is it ballooned to over 135 pages. On a low budget, that's huge. He ended up making cuts during production which he said were very painful because he was juggling shooting, prepping for the next day, and he was producing. Some were good and some muddied the plot. He regretted not making those cuts at the script stage.
On another film, the writer/director came in with huge sprawling script that he did cut after input. Again, he failed to format it into a shooting script and the thing exploded to 130 plus pages. So remember to get your formatting right. As a side note another friend just finished a first cut of his ninety pager and it ran only seventy-two minutes. So be aware of pacing and run time. I like to do a full cast read through with no stops so I can get timing. You can tape it to get pacing ideas.
So back to the sprawling epic, after the script grew to over 130 pages, he dug in his feet against any cuts saying that he didn't want to cut his poetry. We ended up shooting the script as written, but the days were long and nerves were frayed, but the director did adjust after some crewmembers did quit because of overwork.
Well, the first cut ran over 200 minutes. Over three hours. After much editing, they ended up with a ninety-one minute cut, so they effectively cut over half the work the crew did. It hurt because I think of all the wasted time we could have devoted to make those scenes that ended up in the final cut so much better.
What does all this mean? You have to focus on what is most important to your story. Only put in the wagon what you need, or in film speak only have in your script scenes that build your plot and streamline the story. Make those cuts before you start pre-production so you can focus your efforts on the scenes that matter, not the fluff which lands on the cutting room floor or, in today's editing room, being deleted off the hard drive.
My advice is to get as many people as possible to read your script and get a thick skin about criticism. Try to get people who have been through the process and understand filmmaking. Don't line up your close friends and family who love everything you do and aren't knowledgeable about filmmaking.
My final piece of wisdom is to raise a couple extra dollars and get yourself a producer. I know budgets are tight, but I highly recommend that you find yourself a friend, buddy, pal, right hand man or woman to help you because as writer/director you are already wearing some big hats. My friends who have tried it have said they wouldn't do it again. You'll spend too much of your time worrying about lunch, watching the clock, finding props, keeping the crew happy, setting up for the next day's shoot, and doing a multitude of other things that you'll hardly have the energy to direct and/or re-write if needed. Get somebody who's been there before, loves your project, and filmmaking in general. Some may work for free, but I always recommend that you try to pay them something. That makes them fiscally responsible to you. It doesn't have to be a fortune, but it will cover their time, any phone calls they make, and gas for the car.
In closing, during the writing process and even in the beginning stages of pre-production you must focus on what is essential to your story. You must be merciless and cut the scenes that don't help build or support your story goals. This makes you define the spine of the story, it saves you money because you don't shoot scenes you don't need, and it gives you more time to focus on the scenes that matter. Your crew will love you because they will not feel like they are wasting their time. You must FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS on story and do what's best for your screenplay.
Nothing is more horrifying to a first timer than realizing very early in your shoot that you're going way over schedule, over budget, and your crew is about to mutiny because of long shooting days. At this point, after shooting all day, you are forced to start cutting pages while trying to keep your film's story coherent and alive.
This little tidbit of advice is aimed at the beginning first time writer/director that is embarking on their first feature or even a long short. I hope this article can help you along in the scriptwriting and pre-production phase.
First, a little about my background; I have over seventeen years in film and video production, shooting over fourteen feature films, producing a couple of films and writing eight feature scripts, two of which have been produced. I have shot video features with tiny budgets and 35mm features.
Having worked with many first time writer/directors I've seen many great scripts and great plans and I've seen many of the pitfalls. I've seen writers who refused to cut scenes that were great little character asides, but bogged down the pacing and added very little to the plot. Many of the scenes were cut during editing because the film was running too long.
I've created an analogy for helping writer/directors gearing up for production. Think of your script as a wagon in the pioneer days preparing to make the trek across country. You have to carefully select what goes in your wagon before you start the long journey, just like with your script you have to select the scenes that are most important to your movie. Don't go loading that big old grandfather clock on the wagon and don't go adding a scene where a character goes to a bar and gets drunk with his friends that adds little or nothing to the story. You want to load on your meat and potatoes and the tools you'll need to set up your homestead. In your script, think of these as character development, sub-plots, motifs, plot points, and your major conflict. If your story is overloaded with extras (grandfather clocks and boxes of lace tablecloths), sometime during production, you're going to have to start throwing these items out and think of ways to patch your script back together. Doing this at the production phase is hard and can create plot headaches when you are cutting your script after a fourteen hour shooting day. Doing it at the editing stage is painful because you see all the expense and time that went into making those scenes land on the cutting room floor.
Here are a couple of stories from my rich life. A writer/director buddy of mine asked me to read his script. It was a long script and I recommended cuts. He made some of the cuts I recommended and some cuts recommended by others. It still came back a little long. He decided to stay with the length. As a side note, I did notice that his formatting was off and when he later formatted to the script into a shooting script is it ballooned to over 135 pages. On a low budget, that's huge. He ended up making cuts during production which he said were very painful because he was juggling shooting, prepping for the next day, and he was producing. Some were good and some muddied the plot. He regretted not making those cuts at the script stage.
On another film, the writer/director came in with huge sprawling script that he did cut after input. Again, he failed to format it into a shooting script and the thing exploded to 130 plus pages. So remember to get your formatting right. As a side note another friend just finished a first cut of his ninety pager and it ran only seventy-two minutes. So be aware of pacing and run time. I like to do a full cast read through with no stops so I can get timing. You can tape it to get pacing ideas.
So back to the sprawling epic, after the script grew to over 130 pages, he dug in his feet against any cuts saying that he didn't want to cut his poetry. We ended up shooting the script as written, but the days were long and nerves were frayed, but the director did adjust after some crewmembers did quit because of overwork.
Well, the first cut ran over 200 minutes. Over three hours. After much editing, they ended up with a ninety-one minute cut, so they effectively cut over half the work the crew did. It hurt because I think of all the wasted time we could have devoted to make those scenes that ended up in the final cut so much better.
What does all this mean? You have to focus on what is most important to your story. Only put in the wagon what you need, or in film speak only have in your script scenes that build your plot and streamline the story. Make those cuts before you start pre-production so you can focus your efforts on the scenes that matter, not the fluff which lands on the cutting room floor or, in today's editing room, being deleted off the hard drive.
My advice is to get as many people as possible to read your script and get a thick skin about criticism. Try to get people who have been through the process and understand filmmaking. Don't line up your close friends and family who love everything you do and aren't knowledgeable about filmmaking.
My final piece of wisdom is to raise a couple extra dollars and get yourself a producer. I know budgets are tight, but I highly recommend that you find yourself a friend, buddy, pal, right hand man or woman to help you because as writer/director you are already wearing some big hats. My friends who have tried it have said they wouldn't do it again. You'll spend too much of your time worrying about lunch, watching the clock, finding props, keeping the crew happy, setting up for the next day's shoot, and doing a multitude of other things that you'll hardly have the energy to direct and/or re-write if needed. Get somebody who's been there before, loves your project, and filmmaking in general. Some may work for free, but I always recommend that you try to pay them something. That makes them fiscally responsible to you. It doesn't have to be a fortune, but it will cover their time, any phone calls they make, and gas for the car.
In closing, during the writing process and even in the beginning stages of pre-production you must focus on what is essential to your story. You must be merciless and cut the scenes that don't help build or support your story goals. This makes you define the spine of the story, it saves you money because you don't shoot scenes you don't need, and it gives you more time to focus on the scenes that matter. Your crew will love you because they will not feel like they are wasting their time. You must FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS on story and do what's best for your screenplay.
Advice to First Time Writer/Directors
Submitted by Scott Spears
Nothing is more horrifying to a first timer than realizing very early in your shoot that you're going way over schedule, over budget, and your crew is about to mutiny because of long shooting days. At this point, after shooting all day, you are forced to start cutting pages while trying to keep your film's story coherent and alive.
This little tidbit of advice is aimed at the beginning first time writer/director that is embarking on their first feature or even a long short. I hope this article can help you along in the scriptwriting and pre-production phase.
First, a little about my background; I have over seventeen years in film and video production, shooting over fourteen feature films, producing a couple of films and writing eight feature scripts, two of which have been produced. I have shot video features with tiny budgets and 35mm features.
Having worked with many first time writer/directors I've seen many great scripts and great plans and I've seen many of the pitfalls. I've seen writers who refused to cut scenes that were great little character asides, but bogged down the pacing and added very little to the plot. Many of the scenes were cut during editing because the film was running too long.
I've created an analogy for helping writer/directors gearing up for production. Think of your script as a wagon in the pioneer days preparing to make the trek across country. You have to carefully select what goes in your wagon before you start the long journey, just like with your script you have to select the scenes that are most important to your movie. Don't go loading that big old grandfather clock on the wagon and don't go adding a scene where a character goes to a bar and gets drunk with his friends that adds little or nothing to the story. You want to load on your meat and potatoes and the tools you'll need to set up your homestead. In your script, think of these as character development, sub-plots, motifs, plot points, and your major conflict. If your story is overloaded with extras (grandfather clocks and boxes of lace tablecloths), sometime during production, you're going to have to start throwing these items out and think of ways to patch your script back together. Doing this at the production phase is hard and can create plot headaches when you are cutting your script after a fourteen hour shooting day. Doing it at the editing stage is painful because you see all the expense and time that went into making those scenes land on the cutting room floor.
Here are a couple of stories from my rich life. A writer/director buddy of mine asked me to read his script. It was a long script and I recommended cuts. He made some of the cuts I recommended and some cuts recommended by others. It still came back a little long. He decided to stay with the length. As a side note, I did notice that his formatting was off and when he later formatted to the script into a shooting script is it ballooned to over 135 pages. On a low budget, that's huge. He ended up making cuts during production which he said were very painful because he was juggling shooting, prepping for the next day, and he was producing. Some were good and some muddied the plot. He regretted not making those cuts at the script stage.
On another film, the writer/director came in with huge sprawling script that he did cut after input. Again, he failed to format it into a shooting script and the thing exploded to 130 plus pages. So remember to get your formatting right. As a side note another friend just finished a first cut of his ninety pager and it ran only seventy-two minutes. So be aware of pacing and run time. I like to do a full cast read through with no stops so I can get timing. You can tape it to get pacing ideas.
So back to the sprawling epic, after the script grew to over 130 pages, he dug in his feet against any cuts saying that he didn't want to cut his poetry. We ended up shooting the script as written, but the days were long and nerves were frayed, but the director did adjust after some crewmembers did quit because of overwork.
Well, the first cut ran over 200 minutes. Over three hours. After much editing, they ended up with a ninety-one minute cut, so they effectively cut over half the work the crew did. It hurt because I think of all the wasted time we could have devoted to make those scenes that ended up in the final cut so much better.
What does all this mean? You have to focus on what is most important to your story. Only put in the wagon what you need, or in film speak only have in your script scenes that build your plot and streamline the story. Make those cuts before you start pre-production so you can focus your efforts on the scenes that matter, not the fluff which lands on the cutting room floor or, in today's editing room, being deleted off the hard drive.
My advice is to get as many people as possible to read your script and get a thick skin about criticism. Try to get people who have been through the process and understand filmmaking. Don't line up your close friends and family who love everything you do and aren't knowledgeable about filmmaking.
My final piece of wisdom is to raise a couple extra dollars and get yourself a producer. I know budgets are tight, but I highly recommend that you find yourself a friend, buddy, pal, right hand man or woman to help you because as writer/director you are already wearing some big hats. My friends who have tried it have said they wouldn't do it again. You'll spend too much of your time worrying about lunch, watching the clock, finding props, keeping the crew happy, setting up for the next day's shoot, and doing a multitude of other things that you'll hardly have the energy to direct and/or re-write if needed. Get somebody who's been there before, loves your project, and filmmaking in general. Some may work for free, but I always recommend that you try to pay them something. That makes them fiscally responsible to you. It doesn't have to be a fortune, but it will cover their time, any phone calls they make, and gas for the car.
In closing, during the writing process and even in the beginning stages of pre-production you must focus on what is essential to your story. You must be merciless and cut the scenes that don't help build or support your story goals. This makes you define the spine of the story, it saves you money because you don't shoot scenes you don't need, and it gives you more time to focus on the scenes that matter. Your crew will love you because they will not feel like they are wasting their time. You must FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS on story and do what's best for your screenplay.
Nothing is more horrifying to a first timer than realizing very early in your shoot that you're going way over schedule, over budget, and your crew is about to mutiny because of long shooting days. At this point, after shooting all day, you are forced to start cutting pages while trying to keep your film's story coherent and alive.
This little tidbit of advice is aimed at the beginning first time writer/director that is embarking on their first feature or even a long short. I hope this article can help you along in the scriptwriting and pre-production phase.
First, a little about my background; I have over seventeen years in film and video production, shooting over fourteen feature films, producing a couple of films and writing eight feature scripts, two of which have been produced. I have shot video features with tiny budgets and 35mm features.
Having worked with many first time writer/directors I've seen many great scripts and great plans and I've seen many of the pitfalls. I've seen writers who refused to cut scenes that were great little character asides, but bogged down the pacing and added very little to the plot. Many of the scenes were cut during editing because the film was running too long.
I've created an analogy for helping writer/directors gearing up for production. Think of your script as a wagon in the pioneer days preparing to make the trek across country. You have to carefully select what goes in your wagon before you start the long journey, just like with your script you have to select the scenes that are most important to your movie. Don't go loading that big old grandfather clock on the wagon and don't go adding a scene where a character goes to a bar and gets drunk with his friends that adds little or nothing to the story. You want to load on your meat and potatoes and the tools you'll need to set up your homestead. In your script, think of these as character development, sub-plots, motifs, plot points, and your major conflict. If your story is overloaded with extras (grandfather clocks and boxes of lace tablecloths), sometime during production, you're going to have to start throwing these items out and think of ways to patch your script back together. Doing this at the production phase is hard and can create plot headaches when you are cutting your script after a fourteen hour shooting day. Doing it at the editing stage is painful because you see all the expense and time that went into making those scenes land on the cutting room floor.
Here are a couple of stories from my rich life. A writer/director buddy of mine asked me to read his script. It was a long script and I recommended cuts. He made some of the cuts I recommended and some cuts recommended by others. It still came back a little long. He decided to stay with the length. As a side note, I did notice that his formatting was off and when he later formatted to the script into a shooting script is it ballooned to over 135 pages. On a low budget, that's huge. He ended up making cuts during production which he said were very painful because he was juggling shooting, prepping for the next day, and he was producing. Some were good and some muddied the plot. He regretted not making those cuts at the script stage.
On another film, the writer/director came in with huge sprawling script that he did cut after input. Again, he failed to format it into a shooting script and the thing exploded to 130 plus pages. So remember to get your formatting right. As a side note another friend just finished a first cut of his ninety pager and it ran only seventy-two minutes. So be aware of pacing and run time. I like to do a full cast read through with no stops so I can get timing. You can tape it to get pacing ideas.
So back to the sprawling epic, after the script grew to over 130 pages, he dug in his feet against any cuts saying that he didn't want to cut his poetry. We ended up shooting the script as written, but the days were long and nerves were frayed, but the director did adjust after some crewmembers did quit because of overwork.
Well, the first cut ran over 200 minutes. Over three hours. After much editing, they ended up with a ninety-one minute cut, so they effectively cut over half the work the crew did. It hurt because I think of all the wasted time we could have devoted to make those scenes that ended up in the final cut so much better.
What does all this mean? You have to focus on what is most important to your story. Only put in the wagon what you need, or in film speak only have in your script scenes that build your plot and streamline the story. Make those cuts before you start pre-production so you can focus your efforts on the scenes that matter, not the fluff which lands on the cutting room floor or, in today's editing room, being deleted off the hard drive.
My advice is to get as many people as possible to read your script and get a thick skin about criticism. Try to get people who have been through the process and understand filmmaking. Don't line up your close friends and family who love everything you do and aren't knowledgeable about filmmaking.
My final piece of wisdom is to raise a couple extra dollars and get yourself a producer. I know budgets are tight, but I highly recommend that you find yourself a friend, buddy, pal, right hand man or woman to help you because as writer/director you are already wearing some big hats. My friends who have tried it have said they wouldn't do it again. You'll spend too much of your time worrying about lunch, watching the clock, finding props, keeping the crew happy, setting up for the next day's shoot, and doing a multitude of other things that you'll hardly have the energy to direct and/or re-write if needed. Get somebody who's been there before, loves your project, and filmmaking in general. Some may work for free, but I always recommend that you try to pay them something. That makes them fiscally responsible to you. It doesn't have to be a fortune, but it will cover their time, any phone calls they make, and gas for the car.
In closing, during the writing process and even in the beginning stages of pre-production you must focus on what is essential to your story. You must be merciless and cut the scenes that don't help build or support your story goals. This makes you define the spine of the story, it saves you money because you don't shoot scenes you don't need, and it gives you more time to focus on the scenes that matter. Your crew will love you because they will not feel like they are wasting their time. You must FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS on story and do what's best for your screenplay.
Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Contracts and Low Budget Moviemaking
Submitted by by Peter John Ross
Have you ever heard of success stories like Kevin Smith making Clerks, Edward Burns directing The Brothers McMullen, or Spike Lee shooting She's Gotta Have It? Well, what if they forgot to cross every “T” or dot every “I?” We might not have ever heard of them. It would have been very easy for an actor or the owner of a convenience store to screw them over if the filmmakers had not gotten signed contracts. If you do not have a signed release form for the actor, or a signed location agreement with the property owner, they might become the owner of your film, or at least ruin any chance you have of publicly playing your movie. By getting certain blanket legalities in order, you can maintain control and ownership of your movie. A lot of independent filmmakers forget the business half of the movie business. Contracts are a very serious aspect of making movies. All too often it's enticing to go out and shoot your movie with a camcorder and then put it out there.
Even putting your movie on your own personal website is considered a public performance and if you don't have written permission to use the likeness or performance of your actors they can change their minds and legally there is no recourse. Interestingly enough there were some producers in Texas who worked with an up and coming local actress, actually had contracts, and even used the SAG Experimental contract which everyone thinks is a safety net. There's one problem with that. There’s a big loophole for people that are actually SAG members. If you use the SAG Experimental contract and then land a video distribution deal, any SAG actors have the right to veto the sale. This particular young actress made it big in movies like Jerry Maguire, and then these really bad movies made several years earlier became valuable, and the producers lost the sale because she exercised this little loophole. Even if you do a non-union digital video short with your friends, GET THEM TO SIGN RELEASE FORMS. This allows you to send it and screen it at film festivals, and if you should be so lucky to get the movie broadcast on television or distributed in any way, you are protected. You never know if this actor might become famous ten years from now, and if you don’t have a signed release form, you can’t sell your movie with them in it.
Locations work differently. Each state, and even each city, will have different laws and complications. Private property needs signed location agreements pretty much without fail. I know in Ohio you do not need any permits to shoot on public property, but then certain cities and towns have made their own laws concerning that, so it's not one-hundred percent statewide. In California you almost ALWAYS need a permit to shoot anywhere. Building exteriors work a bit differently. Usually a building that is large, public, and unable to be obscured is fair game, but if there is a trademarked logo of a company visible, you enter into a different arena of legalities. Trademarks are similar to copyright laws, but these protect the image of the company much more so, and lean heavily toward the corporations.
Again, if you shoot at your friend's parent’s house, but you don't get written permission, and later they felt the use of their house in the finished movie portrays their neighborhood poorly, they can stop your movie from being released. However, they can't say much if you can present a signed location agreement where they gave you legal permission to use their house in your movie.
On the flip side of things, when working with friends, read the contracts carefully among yourselves. I have personally been screwed over by people that, at the time, I would never have believed would make things difficult. Now I have lost all the rights to two of my movies that I wrote, directed, produced, and edited. Whenever I put them on a short film site, shortly thereafter, a cease and desist order comes to the site from my former partners. No real reason, they just want to be annoying. Similarly, I know a filmmaker who had an idea for a movie and went to his friend and asked for help to turn his idea into a movie. Now he is legally entangled over who owns the character from the movie. In this case, the filmmaker did not get contracts signed beforehand, and never knew that his friend was going to screw him over until he presented the contracts after the movies were screened at film festivals and had some early buzz. Now he can't have any screenings without getting letters to his attorney about “alleged monies lost” for their client. We aren't Kevin McClory fighting over rights to Thunderball and James Bond, we're a bunch of morons who made some digital video shorts with a camcorder in four hours.
If your movie gets selected to play on television in Canada on the “Moviola Channel for Shorts,” or the Sky Network's “Short Film Channel” in the United Kingdom, or the “Sundance Channel” or “IFC” in the United States, they will be unable to play your movie without signed contracts. There's this thing big budget movies have listed called “Errors and Omissions” that deal with this kind of thing. Since most filmmakers are on the low end of the financial scale, simple contracts for locations and actors can be found for free online. Use them. Always.
Protect yourself and get it all in writing, that way if your movie is a success, you can grab on and enjoy the ride. Otherwise you may become one of the “almost got famous, but I forgot to get the contracts signed.”
Have you ever heard of success stories like Kevin Smith making Clerks, Edward Burns directing The Brothers McMullen, or Spike Lee shooting She's Gotta Have It? Well, what if they forgot to cross every “T” or dot every “I?” We might not have ever heard of them. It would have been very easy for an actor or the owner of a convenience store to screw them over if the filmmakers had not gotten signed contracts. If you do not have a signed release form for the actor, or a signed location agreement with the property owner, they might become the owner of your film, or at least ruin any chance you have of publicly playing your movie. By getting certain blanket legalities in order, you can maintain control and ownership of your movie. A lot of independent filmmakers forget the business half of the movie business. Contracts are a very serious aspect of making movies. All too often it's enticing to go out and shoot your movie with a camcorder and then put it out there.
Even putting your movie on your own personal website is considered a public performance and if you don't have written permission to use the likeness or performance of your actors they can change their minds and legally there is no recourse. Interestingly enough there were some producers in Texas who worked with an up and coming local actress, actually had contracts, and even used the SAG Experimental contract which everyone thinks is a safety net. There's one problem with that. There’s a big loophole for people that are actually SAG members. If you use the SAG Experimental contract and then land a video distribution deal, any SAG actors have the right to veto the sale. This particular young actress made it big in movies like Jerry Maguire, and then these really bad movies made several years earlier became valuable, and the producers lost the sale because she exercised this little loophole. Even if you do a non-union digital video short with your friends, GET THEM TO SIGN RELEASE FORMS. This allows you to send it and screen it at film festivals, and if you should be so lucky to get the movie broadcast on television or distributed in any way, you are protected. You never know if this actor might become famous ten years from now, and if you don’t have a signed release form, you can’t sell your movie with them in it.
Locations work differently. Each state, and even each city, will have different laws and complications. Private property needs signed location agreements pretty much without fail. I know in Ohio you do not need any permits to shoot on public property, but then certain cities and towns have made their own laws concerning that, so it's not one-hundred percent statewide. In California you almost ALWAYS need a permit to shoot anywhere. Building exteriors work a bit differently. Usually a building that is large, public, and unable to be obscured is fair game, but if there is a trademarked logo of a company visible, you enter into a different arena of legalities. Trademarks are similar to copyright laws, but these protect the image of the company much more so, and lean heavily toward the corporations.
Again, if you shoot at your friend's parent’s house, but you don't get written permission, and later they felt the use of their house in the finished movie portrays their neighborhood poorly, they can stop your movie from being released. However, they can't say much if you can present a signed location agreement where they gave you legal permission to use their house in your movie.
On the flip side of things, when working with friends, read the contracts carefully among yourselves. I have personally been screwed over by people that, at the time, I would never have believed would make things difficult. Now I have lost all the rights to two of my movies that I wrote, directed, produced, and edited. Whenever I put them on a short film site, shortly thereafter, a cease and desist order comes to the site from my former partners. No real reason, they just want to be annoying. Similarly, I know a filmmaker who had an idea for a movie and went to his friend and asked for help to turn his idea into a movie. Now he is legally entangled over who owns the character from the movie. In this case, the filmmaker did not get contracts signed beforehand, and never knew that his friend was going to screw him over until he presented the contracts after the movies were screened at film festivals and had some early buzz. Now he can't have any screenings without getting letters to his attorney about “alleged monies lost” for their client. We aren't Kevin McClory fighting over rights to Thunderball and James Bond, we're a bunch of morons who made some digital video shorts with a camcorder in four hours.
If your movie gets selected to play on television in Canada on the “Moviola Channel for Shorts,” or the Sky Network's “Short Film Channel” in the United Kingdom, or the “Sundance Channel” or “IFC” in the United States, they will be unable to play your movie without signed contracts. There's this thing big budget movies have listed called “Errors and Omissions” that deal with this kind of thing. Since most filmmakers are on the low end of the financial scale, simple contracts for locations and actors can be found for free online. Use them. Always.
Protect yourself and get it all in writing, that way if your movie is a success, you can grab on and enjoy the ride. Otherwise you may become one of the “almost got famous, but I forgot to get the contracts signed.”
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
The Truth About Robert Rodriguez
Submitted by Peter John Ross
It's been ten years since El Mariachi burst onto the scene and it's still as prevalent in the filmmaking community as ever. How many independent filmmakers have been affected by reading Rebel Without a Crew or by watching the DVD extra Ten Minute Film School? Hundreds? Thousands? I know I was. I remember renting the laserdisc back in 1994 and seeing the movie made for $7,000 and even listening to the rare pre-DVD commentary track, which Robert himself dubbed “how to make a feature film for under $10,000.” I can say that without a doubt, I felt empowered by the commentary and everything I read about Rodriguez and how he became a major Hollywood player with a movie that was meant to be a Spanish language video release.
After having been down the path of making my own movies now for a little over four years, I recently re-read the book Rebel Without a Crew and went back and watched Ten minute Film School with a new set of experienced eyes. Let's just say that a few clarifications are in order.
1) $7,000 was only kinda-sorta the budget. Rodriguez never hid it, but Columbia Pictures and ICM Talent did. The $7,000 got Rodriguez a ¾” master tape of the movie and that's it. Columbia spent a hell of a lot more money to get a 35mm print made that they could screen at festivals. The $7,000 bought 16mm film stock, processing, transfer to video, and a few dollars worth of props. This is important to note because there is a misconception about what the movie cost and what that means. It means saying that the movie cost $7,000 is a great marketing ploy that paid off well.
2) One of the only reasons you, me, or anyone has ever heard of Robert Rodriguez is because the state film commissioner of Texas gave him a referral to International Creative Management. The dichotomy of Hollywood is that you cannot get in unless you know someone. It's an insider’s club, and Rodriguez got a free pass. This is underplayed by the book, Rebel Without a Crew, but it's crucial to understand that the second largest talent agency in the world can manipulate the studios. I do not mean to denigrate Rodriguez’s obvious talents, but based on seeing movies like Glitter and From Justin to Kelly, there is evidence that talent is not a prerequisite for getting a movie made. Rodriguez was lucky that he had the talent and the skills to back up the promise that El Mariachi displayed.
3) No one seems to remember that Rodriguez had made well over 200 movies on video from the time he was nine years old. How many other filmmakers, even in our cheap DV 1394, non-linear world, can claim to have made over 200 movies? I've been making movies for four years, and I'm barely over thirty movies. Let's just say that Rodriguez had a distinct advantage when he decided to make El Mariachi. It’s called experience and it's highly undervalued if you went solely by the descriptions made in Rebel Without a Crew and in the Ten Minute Film School.
4) “All you need to know about filmmaking, you can learn in about ten minutes.” I have never heard anything more dishonest in my entire life. This coming from a guy who had been making movies, and honing his skills, and mastering his craft for over ten years, not ten minutes. I think if Robert had never made a movie before, and this was his first or second effort, then maybe I could take this at face value. Instead we get a lot of alleged “rebels” that have no clue how to tell a story with a camera or even the slightest concept of editing. Too many people feel like they can do as good their first time out. Try making 200 movies first and then maybe you can pull off El Mariachi.
5) Rodriguez suggests to not use a film crew. A film crew, specifically a cinematographer, is not a bad thing. Yes, Hollywood big budget movies spend too much money, but honestly having a sound guy or a camera man who has a clue can enhance your movie. A good production assistant can save serious money when you need something fast. Rodriguez preaches not to use a crew at all if you can help it (a notion which caused him serious union problems on From Dusk to Dawn) and I think that is a filmmaker’s choice, although not usually the right one. A good crew can add a lot of support to a director's vision, not detract from it. Shooting your own movies can also shut down the input from someone who can offer options you never considered. Again, a bit misleading is that fact that Rodriguez shot all of his own movies and knew more about framing a shot than most NYU film grads. A wise friend of mine constantly reminds us all that filmmaking is a collaborative art, and it takes several people to make a movie. Even Rodriguez had actors. They are collaborators and bring something different to the table than a one man show. Also note, Rodriguez has never made a movie without a crew since El Mariachi.
When I watched the Ten Minute Film School all I could think was how this guy really, really knew what the hell he was doing. When he made his choices of shots and describes how he would edit it all together, I was in awe. There is no way in hell a person who has never shot a film before would have a clue as to what he was really doing. It's taken me nine years to start to get a grasp on the genius of what Rodriguez pulled off. Rodriguez barely had a 1.5:1 shooting ratio (if you don't know what a shooting ratio is, then you need to take more than ten minutes to learn). The kind of risk that shooting on 16mm presented was only viable because he had a great deal of pre-planning and experience. Not everyone, I daresay hardly anyone could have done what Rodriguez did and had results that good.
I am not saying that everything that Rodriguez advises is bad. The idea of writing a script for the locations and props that are already available to you is very true. There is a lot of wisdom in what he writes and says, but be aware that this came from someone who already learned what not to do from making 200 movies before he wrote and directed El Mariachi. Don't expect the same quality results if you've never made a movie before.
I don't dislike or disrespect Robert Rodriguez. As a matter of fact, I have met him twice and found him to be the most unpretentious and modest filmmaker on Earth. But I lost count of how many filmmakers quote his book or El Mariachi as the inspiration for kick starting a digital video endeavor. It's just that he has started a trend of “anyone can direct” and it's misleading. Everyone can direct, but not many people can direct well. The inspirational words from Ten Minute Film School and Rebel Without a Crew are great, but you have to read between the lines. There was a lot more to it than the way it is presented. I still believe everyone should go out and make their movie, I just think a more realistic approach is required.
It's been ten years since El Mariachi burst onto the scene and it's still as prevalent in the filmmaking community as ever. How many independent filmmakers have been affected by reading Rebel Without a Crew or by watching the DVD extra Ten Minute Film School? Hundreds? Thousands? I know I was. I remember renting the laserdisc back in 1994 and seeing the movie made for $7,000 and even listening to the rare pre-DVD commentary track, which Robert himself dubbed “how to make a feature film for under $10,000.” I can say that without a doubt, I felt empowered by the commentary and everything I read about Rodriguez and how he became a major Hollywood player with a movie that was meant to be a Spanish language video release.
After having been down the path of making my own movies now for a little over four years, I recently re-read the book Rebel Without a Crew and went back and watched Ten minute Film School with a new set of experienced eyes. Let's just say that a few clarifications are in order.
1) $7,000 was only kinda-sorta the budget. Rodriguez never hid it, but Columbia Pictures and ICM Talent did. The $7,000 got Rodriguez a ¾” master tape of the movie and that's it. Columbia spent a hell of a lot more money to get a 35mm print made that they could screen at festivals. The $7,000 bought 16mm film stock, processing, transfer to video, and a few dollars worth of props. This is important to note because there is a misconception about what the movie cost and what that means. It means saying that the movie cost $7,000 is a great marketing ploy that paid off well.
2) One of the only reasons you, me, or anyone has ever heard of Robert Rodriguez is because the state film commissioner of Texas gave him a referral to International Creative Management. The dichotomy of Hollywood is that you cannot get in unless you know someone. It's an insider’s club, and Rodriguez got a free pass. This is underplayed by the book, Rebel Without a Crew, but it's crucial to understand that the second largest talent agency in the world can manipulate the studios. I do not mean to denigrate Rodriguez’s obvious talents, but based on seeing movies like Glitter and From Justin to Kelly, there is evidence that talent is not a prerequisite for getting a movie made. Rodriguez was lucky that he had the talent and the skills to back up the promise that El Mariachi displayed.
3) No one seems to remember that Rodriguez had made well over 200 movies on video from the time he was nine years old. How many other filmmakers, even in our cheap DV 1394, non-linear world, can claim to have made over 200 movies? I've been making movies for four years, and I'm barely over thirty movies. Let's just say that Rodriguez had a distinct advantage when he decided to make El Mariachi. It’s called experience and it's highly undervalued if you went solely by the descriptions made in Rebel Without a Crew and in the Ten Minute Film School.
4) “All you need to know about filmmaking, you can learn in about ten minutes.” I have never heard anything more dishonest in my entire life. This coming from a guy who had been making movies, and honing his skills, and mastering his craft for over ten years, not ten minutes. I think if Robert had never made a movie before, and this was his first or second effort, then maybe I could take this at face value. Instead we get a lot of alleged “rebels” that have no clue how to tell a story with a camera or even the slightest concept of editing. Too many people feel like they can do as good their first time out. Try making 200 movies first and then maybe you can pull off El Mariachi.
5) Rodriguez suggests to not use a film crew. A film crew, specifically a cinematographer, is not a bad thing. Yes, Hollywood big budget movies spend too much money, but honestly having a sound guy or a camera man who has a clue can enhance your movie. A good production assistant can save serious money when you need something fast. Rodriguez preaches not to use a crew at all if you can help it (a notion which caused him serious union problems on From Dusk to Dawn) and I think that is a filmmaker’s choice, although not usually the right one. A good crew can add a lot of support to a director's vision, not detract from it. Shooting your own movies can also shut down the input from someone who can offer options you never considered. Again, a bit misleading is that fact that Rodriguez shot all of his own movies and knew more about framing a shot than most NYU film grads. A wise friend of mine constantly reminds us all that filmmaking is a collaborative art, and it takes several people to make a movie. Even Rodriguez had actors. They are collaborators and bring something different to the table than a one man show. Also note, Rodriguez has never made a movie without a crew since El Mariachi.
When I watched the Ten Minute Film School all I could think was how this guy really, really knew what the hell he was doing. When he made his choices of shots and describes how he would edit it all together, I was in awe. There is no way in hell a person who has never shot a film before would have a clue as to what he was really doing. It's taken me nine years to start to get a grasp on the genius of what Rodriguez pulled off. Rodriguez barely had a 1.5:1 shooting ratio (if you don't know what a shooting ratio is, then you need to take more than ten minutes to learn). The kind of risk that shooting on 16mm presented was only viable because he had a great deal of pre-planning and experience. Not everyone, I daresay hardly anyone could have done what Rodriguez did and had results that good.
I am not saying that everything that Rodriguez advises is bad. The idea of writing a script for the locations and props that are already available to you is very true. There is a lot of wisdom in what he writes and says, but be aware that this came from someone who already learned what not to do from making 200 movies before he wrote and directed El Mariachi. Don't expect the same quality results if you've never made a movie before.
I don't dislike or disrespect Robert Rodriguez. As a matter of fact, I have met him twice and found him to be the most unpretentious and modest filmmaker on Earth. But I lost count of how many filmmakers quote his book or El Mariachi as the inspiration for kick starting a digital video endeavor. It's just that he has started a trend of “anyone can direct” and it's misleading. Everyone can direct, but not many people can direct well. The inspirational words from Ten Minute Film School and Rebel Without a Crew are great, but you have to read between the lines. There was a lot more to it than the way it is presented. I still believe everyone should go out and make their movie, I just think a more realistic approach is required.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Music and Independent Film
Submitted by Peter John Ross
The Problem
One of the things that can make or break a movie is the music. Can you imagine Jaws without the John Williams music? What about the techno music in The Matrix? As no-budget filmmakers, we often times forget that sound is fifty-percent of the experience of seeing a movie, whether it be a thirty second joke, or a four hour Lord of the Rings DVD. Thanks to technology, we can physically add any music we can get our hands on into our movies. Since we can take an audio CD from any musician, put it in a CD-ROM drive and quickly load that digitally mastered song into the timeline of our handy editing program, temptation has an all-new meaning. It's like having a piece of forbidden fruit on every tray at a buffet.
Let's talk about why you should not do this. First and foremost it's illegal, as in against federal law. Maybe you've heard the term copyright. Everyone already knows this, but dirt poor, no budget filmmakers think this law doesn't apply to them. Popular music costs a lot of money to use in your movies. That's probably why most people steal music and use it without permission.
Secondly, you have to consider another point of view other than our own selfish, “I'm the filmmaker” point of view. If you can take their music without paying for it, then why should anyone ever pay for any aspect of your movie? Music is intellectual property, just like your movie will be. If you can steal their music without paying, then someone at a television station or a website should have equal rights to steal your movie and never have to pay for it.
On a moral and ethical level it's wrong to use music without permission. I am quite sure if you saw someone selling copies of your movie without paying you, it'd be like restraining Chris Farley at an all you can eat lunch special. What is the difference between stealing your movie or stealing someone else's music? Nothing. What kind of arrogance makes us think we are more important than musicians?
I remember being on a filmmakers panel at a science-fiction convention in May of 2002 and an audience member asked us all what our opinion was on using copyrighted music. I said I was against it. Another no-budget company piped in with a speech about how it's okay to steal copyrighted music.
They even said, and I have to preserve the accuracy in quotes, “If someone catches you using copyrighted music in your movies that's a good thing. That means someone important saw your movie.”
That is another perspective, and they have the right to think that. Although I do think it's important to note that they recently lost over half of their hundred movies online for copyright violations.
Who am I to preach? Have I ever put copyrighted music into my projects? Of course. Virtually every first time filmmaker puts music that's copyrighted into their movies. I did it a lot when I first started. Since then I have made every effort to get original music into my projects or I make actual arrangements for obtaining the rights and pay the necessary royalties.
The Solution
There are struggling musicians and songwriters just as there are struggling independent filmmakers. Make a connection. Help each other out. You can get their music played in a venue previously unavailable to them, and you can have original music that doesn't make you nervous to play at every film festival. It's also much classier to have your own music. It differentiates your movie from the dozens of others using the same songs.
You can also get cheap loop programs like Fruity Loops or Sonic Foundry's ACID. You can quickly and cheaply create music from loops and customize the speed, tempo, and pitch to make the music fit your exact needs. It's better than a “cease and desist” letter from an attorney and it's legal to use once you buy the program. Illegally copying software is a whole other article.
Stock music libraries are another option. These cost money, but in the end it's much cheaper than popular music. Music ranges from the low end where you buy a CD of music for $250, then use it any time you want for free. This is also known as “royalty free” music because you buy it once and own the right to use it anytime. Then there is the top of the line, which is very expensive, but incredibly good. They charge a “per needle drop,” meaning you pay for each usage of the music. If you use it online there's one fee, and if you use it on television, there is a different price, etc.
If you are dead set on obtaining a popular song, secure the rights. Go to ASCAP or BMI and find out how to get the proper licensing. “Internet Only” rights are cheap, and they invented something for no-budget filmmakers with “Festival Only” rights to songs to make this more affordable to independent filmmakers like us. Try to do it legally, because if the RIAA is going after individual users that download a John Mayer song on Kazaa, then what do you think they'll do to a filmmaker trying to make money from using a song in their movie? It's not a slap on the wrist anymore. It's a lawsuit.
In Summary
Will you get caught? Probably not, but lately the risk is going up. I recently got a letter from an attorney for music I used in a movie I did in February 2000 that still lingered on a short film website. It wasn’t even a popular site. I have since removed the movie from the site and I’m re-editing the film to add original music.
And because I am a former musician myself, let me say that I am not unsympathetic to the plight of independent musicians. Resist the temptation to steal music. I am giving away nine songs for free to be used by any independent filmmaker completely free or charge with full rights. These aren't the best songs, but they're free. You can download them at www.sonnyboo.com/music/music.htm.
Some other completely free music resources available online for independent filmmakers are www.freeplaymusic.com and www.compositeur-arrangeur.com. I hope this helps.
The Problem
One of the things that can make or break a movie is the music. Can you imagine Jaws without the John Williams music? What about the techno music in The Matrix? As no-budget filmmakers, we often times forget that sound is fifty-percent of the experience of seeing a movie, whether it be a thirty second joke, or a four hour Lord of the Rings DVD. Thanks to technology, we can physically add any music we can get our hands on into our movies. Since we can take an audio CD from any musician, put it in a CD-ROM drive and quickly load that digitally mastered song into the timeline of our handy editing program, temptation has an all-new meaning. It's like having a piece of forbidden fruit on every tray at a buffet.
Let's talk about why you should not do this. First and foremost it's illegal, as in against federal law. Maybe you've heard the term copyright. Everyone already knows this, but dirt poor, no budget filmmakers think this law doesn't apply to them. Popular music costs a lot of money to use in your movies. That's probably why most people steal music and use it without permission.
Secondly, you have to consider another point of view other than our own selfish, “I'm the filmmaker” point of view. If you can take their music without paying for it, then why should anyone ever pay for any aspect of your movie? Music is intellectual property, just like your movie will be. If you can steal their music without paying, then someone at a television station or a website should have equal rights to steal your movie and never have to pay for it.
On a moral and ethical level it's wrong to use music without permission. I am quite sure if you saw someone selling copies of your movie without paying you, it'd be like restraining Chris Farley at an all you can eat lunch special. What is the difference between stealing your movie or stealing someone else's music? Nothing. What kind of arrogance makes us think we are more important than musicians?
I remember being on a filmmakers panel at a science-fiction convention in May of 2002 and an audience member asked us all what our opinion was on using copyrighted music. I said I was against it. Another no-budget company piped in with a speech about how it's okay to steal copyrighted music.
They even said, and I have to preserve the accuracy in quotes, “If someone catches you using copyrighted music in your movies that's a good thing. That means someone important saw your movie.”
That is another perspective, and they have the right to think that. Although I do think it's important to note that they recently lost over half of their hundred movies online for copyright violations.
Who am I to preach? Have I ever put copyrighted music into my projects? Of course. Virtually every first time filmmaker puts music that's copyrighted into their movies. I did it a lot when I first started. Since then I have made every effort to get original music into my projects or I make actual arrangements for obtaining the rights and pay the necessary royalties.
The Solution
There are struggling musicians and songwriters just as there are struggling independent filmmakers. Make a connection. Help each other out. You can get their music played in a venue previously unavailable to them, and you can have original music that doesn't make you nervous to play at every film festival. It's also much classier to have your own music. It differentiates your movie from the dozens of others using the same songs.
You can also get cheap loop programs like Fruity Loops or Sonic Foundry's ACID. You can quickly and cheaply create music from loops and customize the speed, tempo, and pitch to make the music fit your exact needs. It's better than a “cease and desist” letter from an attorney and it's legal to use once you buy the program. Illegally copying software is a whole other article.
Stock music libraries are another option. These cost money, but in the end it's much cheaper than popular music. Music ranges from the low end where you buy a CD of music for $250, then use it any time you want for free. This is also known as “royalty free” music because you buy it once and own the right to use it anytime. Then there is the top of the line, which is very expensive, but incredibly good. They charge a “per needle drop,” meaning you pay for each usage of the music. If you use it online there's one fee, and if you use it on television, there is a different price, etc.
If you are dead set on obtaining a popular song, secure the rights. Go to ASCAP or BMI and find out how to get the proper licensing. “Internet Only” rights are cheap, and they invented something for no-budget filmmakers with “Festival Only” rights to songs to make this more affordable to independent filmmakers like us. Try to do it legally, because if the RIAA is going after individual users that download a John Mayer song on Kazaa, then what do you think they'll do to a filmmaker trying to make money from using a song in their movie? It's not a slap on the wrist anymore. It's a lawsuit.
In Summary
Will you get caught? Probably not, but lately the risk is going up. I recently got a letter from an attorney for music I used in a movie I did in February 2000 that still lingered on a short film website. It wasn’t even a popular site. I have since removed the movie from the site and I’m re-editing the film to add original music.
And because I am a former musician myself, let me say that I am not unsympathetic to the plight of independent musicians. Resist the temptation to steal music. I am giving away nine songs for free to be used by any independent filmmaker completely free or charge with full rights. These aren't the best songs, but they're free. You can download them at www.sonnyboo.com/music/music.htm.
Some other completely free music resources available online for independent filmmakers are www.freeplaymusic.com and www.compositeur-arrangeur.com. I hope this helps.
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Basic Editing Advice
Submitted by by Peter John Ross
Just because it's digital video doesn't mean you shouldn't log your shots during principal photography.
Logging details about the takes, the camera angles, and all the basic information can make your edit session more economical and timely. If you know there are only two good takes on an entire digital video tape and you know from a log sheet where on the tape the good takes begin and end, you can just type that into the batch capture mode of most non-linear editing systems.
Then you can be creative with the footage at hand, and not waste time looking for the good shots, or filling up valuable hard drive real estate with gigabytes of unusable takes.
For myself, I edit the whole piece together, not necessarily in sequential order, but from the most obvious scenes and takes and then assemble a rough cut. From the rough cut, I then chisel away at the unnecessary lines and scenes to get to the final edit.
Check out my previous Timecode Burns article to help you become more efficient. You may find using a dedicated script supervisor incredibly helpful in familiarizing yourself with the footage so that you are aware of your options.
After working as an editor, I am always shooting for the edit. I will start or end a scene with push-ins or pull-outs of something like a light bulb or the dark part of a painting or wall for natural transitions. Pre-planning these kinds of shots and storyboarding before shooting helps focus on what to shoot and how it will tie into the editing later.
You should always be aware that for every scene, you should try to cover the two C's, coverage and cutaways. These are the things that make editing possible. Finding something relevant to enhance the story as a cutaway is essential to shooting for the edit. What is coverage? Coverage is getting multiple angles of the same scene. Coverage allows someone to edit out unwanted dialogue and also tap into reactions, not just people speaking.
If you are one of the new digital video filmmakers that write, direct, produce, shoot, and edit your own movies then prepare yourself for a completely different mindset as an editor. This job is very different than the other aspects of filmmaking. This job is about telling a story with the raw footage. If you were there when it was shot, you have a bias in that you know what the geography was, and how the ambience felt. As an editor, it's your job to orient the viewer who has never been to the set and didn't see anything. It's your job as editor to give the viewer a sense of the location, and tie it into the acting, the costumes, the set design, and most importantly the story the director is trying to tell.
Of course, if it was not shot with anything other than close-ups, you can't really edit much, so it's a team effort. The director needs to shoot for the edit, making sure all aspects of the scene are shot so that editing can help shape the story in post-production.
Just because it's digital video doesn't mean you shouldn't log your shots during principal photography.
Logging details about the takes, the camera angles, and all the basic information can make your edit session more economical and timely. If you know there are only two good takes on an entire digital video tape and you know from a log sheet where on the tape the good takes begin and end, you can just type that into the batch capture mode of most non-linear editing systems.
Then you can be creative with the footage at hand, and not waste time looking for the good shots, or filling up valuable hard drive real estate with gigabytes of unusable takes.
For myself, I edit the whole piece together, not necessarily in sequential order, but from the most obvious scenes and takes and then assemble a rough cut. From the rough cut, I then chisel away at the unnecessary lines and scenes to get to the final edit.
Check out my previous Timecode Burns article to help you become more efficient. You may find using a dedicated script supervisor incredibly helpful in familiarizing yourself with the footage so that you are aware of your options.
After working as an editor, I am always shooting for the edit. I will start or end a scene with push-ins or pull-outs of something like a light bulb or the dark part of a painting or wall for natural transitions. Pre-planning these kinds of shots and storyboarding before shooting helps focus on what to shoot and how it will tie into the editing later.
You should always be aware that for every scene, you should try to cover the two C's, coverage and cutaways. These are the things that make editing possible. Finding something relevant to enhance the story as a cutaway is essential to shooting for the edit. What is coverage? Coverage is getting multiple angles of the same scene. Coverage allows someone to edit out unwanted dialogue and also tap into reactions, not just people speaking.
If you are one of the new digital video filmmakers that write, direct, produce, shoot, and edit your own movies then prepare yourself for a completely different mindset as an editor. This job is very different than the other aspects of filmmaking. This job is about telling a story with the raw footage. If you were there when it was shot, you have a bias in that you know what the geography was, and how the ambience felt. As an editor, it's your job to orient the viewer who has never been to the set and didn't see anything. It's your job as editor to give the viewer a sense of the location, and tie it into the acting, the costumes, the set design, and most importantly the story the director is trying to tell.
Of course, if it was not shot with anything other than close-ups, you can't really edit much, so it's a team effort. The director needs to shoot for the edit, making sure all aspects of the scene are shot so that editing can help shape the story in post-production.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Timecode Burns
Submitted by Peter John Ross
Want to know a trick to save your expensive digital video camera from getting editorial wear and tear? Especially all you Canon GL1 owners, or people trying to pay off their cameras.
After the shoot, when you have all your footage, and your tapes all numbered, most people log their footage as they go using their non-linear editing program (Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or Avid). Which is really cool because you can mark in and out points and you can make a digital log of your footage on each tape.
But you are running a master tape in a deck or camcorder, rewinding, fast forwarding, and playing the footage multiple times. That’s wear and tear on your equipment, your irreplaceable master tapes, and it’s also extra time.
Here’s the not so secret tip, but surprisingly most people don’t know about it.
Make a VHS tape with the timecode showing onscreen. Most camcorders will allow you to select data or timecode output in the menu or on the remote.
Now you can rewind, fast forward, and play over and over again your raw footage and not risk your master tapes or add mileage to your camcorder.
The next step is to watch and log your footage and write down on a piece of paper the timecode of the in and out points of only the footage you need. An important step when logging is to think about the filename for each clip. The official name for your sheets of paper is an EDL (Edit Decision List). You can basically edit your whole piece using the paper edit selecting angles and takes. You use your EDL’s to make the editing decisions and make an offline edit.
All of this while only wearing out the heads of your twenty-nine dollar VCR as opposed to your $2,000 GL1, which some people are still making payments on. Not to mention watching the footage again, making yourself more familiar with the raw, unedited takes.
At this stage you can then use your non-linear software to type in the in and out points you wrote down and use the filenames you made up for each clip and then tell the computer to capture the footage and it will record all the footage from the whole tape, or even multiple tapes if you like, to your hard drive.
Make sure to save the batch capture list. It can be handy later on, such as after you edit your masterpiece, delete all the raw footage and want to make changes a year or two later. If you save the list you can easily use it to recapture the raw footage. On my first few projects I can’t do this because I don’t have a capture list or even a paper EDL to refer to, so I can’t re-edit unless I start from scratch, but I’m only a little bit bitter.
Please note the other benefit – hard drive space. If you do an offline, paper edit from your EDL’s, you are only capturing the footage you need, as opposed to capturing takes and footage you do not need, and filling your hard drives with large video files that you don’t use.
So by copying your raw footage to a VHS tape with timecode you get to:
Want to know a trick to save your expensive digital video camera from getting editorial wear and tear? Especially all you Canon GL1 owners, or people trying to pay off their cameras.
After the shoot, when you have all your footage, and your tapes all numbered, most people log their footage as they go using their non-linear editing program (Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or Avid). Which is really cool because you can mark in and out points and you can make a digital log of your footage on each tape.
But you are running a master tape in a deck or camcorder, rewinding, fast forwarding, and playing the footage multiple times. That’s wear and tear on your equipment, your irreplaceable master tapes, and it’s also extra time.
Here’s the not so secret tip, but surprisingly most people don’t know about it.
Make a VHS tape with the timecode showing onscreen. Most camcorders will allow you to select data or timecode output in the menu or on the remote.
Now you can rewind, fast forward, and play over and over again your raw footage and not risk your master tapes or add mileage to your camcorder.
The next step is to watch and log your footage and write down on a piece of paper the timecode of the in and out points of only the footage you need. An important step when logging is to think about the filename for each clip. The official name for your sheets of paper is an EDL (Edit Decision List). You can basically edit your whole piece using the paper edit selecting angles and takes. You use your EDL’s to make the editing decisions and make an offline edit.
All of this while only wearing out the heads of your twenty-nine dollar VCR as opposed to your $2,000 GL1, which some people are still making payments on. Not to mention watching the footage again, making yourself more familiar with the raw, unedited takes.
At this stage you can then use your non-linear software to type in the in and out points you wrote down and use the filenames you made up for each clip and then tell the computer to capture the footage and it will record all the footage from the whole tape, or even multiple tapes if you like, to your hard drive.
Make sure to save the batch capture list. It can be handy later on, such as after you edit your masterpiece, delete all the raw footage and want to make changes a year or two later. If you save the list you can easily use it to recapture the raw footage. On my first few projects I can’t do this because I don’t have a capture list or even a paper EDL to refer to, so I can’t re-edit unless I start from scratch, but I’m only a little bit bitter.
Please note the other benefit – hard drive space. If you do an offline, paper edit from your EDL’s, you are only capturing the footage you need, as opposed to capturing takes and footage you do not need, and filling your hard drives with large video files that you don’t use.
So by copying your raw footage to a VHS tape with timecode you get to:
- Preserve the life of your camcorder.
- Preserve the life of your master tapes.
- Have the safety of being able to easily recapture your footage.
- Become more familiar with your footage.
- Save valuable hard drive space.
Timecode burning – this is an old, but very effective technique.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Independent Film Clichés: An Opinion
Submitted by Peter John Ross
From the Actor’s Point of View
The Casting Call
Here's a story that will probably sound familiar. You hear about an audition. Someone posted a flyer that said something about a short film that's in the Sundance Film Festival. This sounds interesting.
You, the actors, and aspiring actors go to a cattle call for a no budget digital video short. You wait in line, although the group pf people sitting around at the public library is hardly organized enough to be called a line. You get asked to read sides and the first time director doesn't know what a slate is, but he isn't taping the auditions anyway. You leave wondering what kind of movie this could possibly be given that you read a fragment of a script that had dialog as interesting as an insurance actuarial table. After your call back a week or two later, you read the lines again, and talk about other stuff with the director including your dreams an aspirations.
The Call Back
At this point, they tell you the game plan for this incredible movie. It's a twenty minute opus about an everyman that is in some kind of struggle and it's completely original. The goal is to shoot the movie on digital video, send it to film festivals, and then get the money to re-shoot it on film. Of course there's no pay. They can't afford it. But this is a unique opportunity because the script and idea are just that good. You ask about distribution and you are assured that after the film plays at several festivals it will have a distribution deal. At that point everyone will get paid. They say this with such conviction that you buy into it.
The Shoot
You work twelve hour days on your weekend off, the first time director is giving you line readings, and there is barely any craft services to munch on while everyone stands around. Eventually you finish, and you can’t wait to see the movie. Over the next few months you try calling, then e-mailing the director to get a status report. It's still being edited. Eventually you may or may not ever see a finished product, but waiting for that film festival screening seems to be as likely as finding weapons of mass destruction in the filmmaker’s basement.
If this has happened to you more than five times, then you are an ideal candidate to attend an Amway meeting with me. I have just the right opportunity for you.
And now for the flipside...
The Filmmaker’s Point of View
You rent movies all the time. You go to the movies all the time. You have always loved movies, and you just saw the latest Steven Seagal movie that went direct to video on Showtime and you say to yourself, “I can do better than this piece of garbage!” and you have this idea that has been brewing for at least ten minutes. You download the latest freeware screenwriting plug-in for Word and start banging away. The story unfolds and the dialog sounds really good in your head.
Now what?
You read about Soderbergh and George Lucas using home camcorders to make their movies, so all you need is a Sony Handicam and you can become the next Kevin Smith! Because it's a camcorder all you need to do is point and shoot. There’s no need to know anything about lighting or cameras. You remember seeing something about Kevin Smith and the Sundance Film Festival, so when you finish the movie, you'll just send it there, it will be accepted, and you'll get signed to my three picture deal at that point. It should take about three months.
Now you need to get people to be in the movie, your masterpiece. You can hold a casting call. The casting notice reads “Actors Needed for Short Film for the Sundance Film Festival.”
The Casting Call
You can't believe these people want to be in my movie. Look at all of them. You want to savor this moment and see each actor one at a time. Then you see her and she looks really good, so forget first come first serve, get that girl Jennifer in here now! You want someone to look and act exactly as you pictured the movie in your head. With sixteen people waiting to see you at least five of them should be perfect.
The Call Back
Why isn't anyone exactly as you pictured in your head? Jennifer was really good looking and she really seemed to like you. Should you cast her solely based on looks? She can't act her way out of a paper bag.
The Shoot
Nothing is as good as you thought it would be. The actors aren't doing exactly what you want and you even tell them how to deliver the lines. You know you wanted to do more camera angles, but you were running late. Everybody is mad at you and you can't seem to get it right. You can fix it all in the editing. You can't afford to buy another pizza, so whoever is late, is just out of luck. No food for them.
The Edit – Day 2
This is fantastic, this is great. Sure there are warts, but the core of this, the idea, it's so good. You can't believe you made a movie!
The Edit – Day 30
You don't feel like editing today. You just worked a full shift at the store and you’re tired. Instead you see which re-run of Seinfeld is on.
The Edit - Day 66
You’re finally finished. You can't believe you edited the whole thing yourself on a home computer with your bootleg copy of Adobe Premiere. Every word of the script is included and it's perfect. You show it to your friends and family and maybe the cast. They'll tell you if anything's wrong because they are completely unbiased.
Screening Day
You can't believe it! Your mom, your best friend, and the lead actor loved the movie! You were right. This is a masterpiece. You wonder what time the limo will be here to pick you up. Hollywood can just somehow smell talent and no doubt they'll find you. When they do, you'll hire all your friends and all these actors to work with you and Tom Cruise and make Mission Impossible 4.
After the Screening – 11 Days Later
It's been almost two weeks and still no limo. Maybe the people who smell talent have a head cold or there was a flight delay in Chicago for the connecting flight.
After the Screening – 17 Days Later
You get an e-mail today from one of the bit-part actors, what's-her-name, and she has the gall to ask if you had submitted the film to any festivals yet. She doesn't understand that you are an artist and that you have a day job too. You'll get on it soon.
After the Screening – 24 Days Later
You looked into submitting the film to Sundance and it costs twenty-five dollars. Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, all of these film festivals want money. What kind of sick bastards charge filmmakers money to submit their movies? How many submissions can they possibly have? You can only afford two, so you will definitely send your film to Sundance because that's the big one. For some reason you were under the assumption that either the film festivals were free or that the entry fees wouldn't apply to you. You guess you should have done the math. Twenty-five dollars by eighteen film festivals equals $450. That's more than your Sony Handicam camcorder.
Rejection Day - Late November Every Year
You get a letter in the mail. You can't believe they didn't pick your movie. You went to the Sundance page and looked at the movies that did make it. Why would they pick movies directed by Matthew Modine or Danny Glover? What’s this? Kevin Smith got in too? I thought these people were already famous. Why are they premiering these Hollywood movies? Why didn't hey pick my mediocre movie with no stars shot on digital video? I better avoid all contact with anyone associated with the movie. I'd rather them not know than have to tell them.
I guess I won't be able to make another movie...
How to Avoid This Very Common Scenario
Actors
When you audition, ask about the plan and the distribution. If they can't afford to pay you but plan on sending the film to several film festivals then something is wrong. Do the math. Each film festival costs at least twenty-five dollars whether the film makes it in or not, and because of simple odds (thousands of submissions, tens of slots) the movie won't get into a lot of film festivals. If the filmmakers can't afford to pay for decent meals, how in the hell can they afford to submit the film to festivals?
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do the movie. That's not my point at all. I guess my point is just BE REALISTIC. Know that you are doing it for the experience. There are pearl's in the clams occasionally, and you won't find them if you don't look. There are some good movies and good directors, but it may take time and a few movies before a first time filmmaker becomes one.
There are other options that can make the experience and the work worthwhile. Don't be afraid to suggest...
Filmmakers
Plan for the entire movie. Budget for the entire movie. That includes money to market the movie. The common mistake is that you spend all of your money making the movie, and then it sits and collects dust because you find out that everything costs more than you thought. Plan for it. Whatever you think it will cost, have double the money. Did you really think that because you shot your film on digital video that it would be that much cheaper? That's insane.
BE REALISTIC. The chances of getting into Sundance are slim, and winning anything, or getting distribution is a pipe dream. First of all, digital video shorts with no stars are generally as valuable as rat feces. There is no real distribution and short films, even with stars, have very few outlets for display, and even more rare are places that pay for them.
Film festivals are great but they are expensive. Plan ahead for the money you will spend submitting your film to festivals and know that you may not get in. They don't refund your money when you don't get in. Also for your information, audiences at a regular film festival range from twelve to seventy-five people, and most of them are the filmmakers and actors of the other films that got accepted. Unless your movie is about filmmaking, this may not be the best audience to judge your work.
Make movies for the experience to start. Don't be delusional. Do you want to help yourself, your film, and the actors who starred in it? Get some exposure. Get your work seen by as many people as possible. Put your film on the internet, public access television, and anywhere else you possibly can. Get your actors seen by as many people as possible. That's the least you can do.
You have to ask yourself why you made the movie or why you got involved in the first place. Was it to get famous or make money? You're better off buying lottery tickets. You'll have much better odds in a casino. Did you make your movie to tell a story? Great, now share it with people in as many venues as possible. Film festivals are good but expensive. Have other options available.
From the Actor’s Point of View
The Casting Call
Here's a story that will probably sound familiar. You hear about an audition. Someone posted a flyer that said something about a short film that's in the Sundance Film Festival. This sounds interesting.
You, the actors, and aspiring actors go to a cattle call for a no budget digital video short. You wait in line, although the group pf people sitting around at the public library is hardly organized enough to be called a line. You get asked to read sides and the first time director doesn't know what a slate is, but he isn't taping the auditions anyway. You leave wondering what kind of movie this could possibly be given that you read a fragment of a script that had dialog as interesting as an insurance actuarial table. After your call back a week or two later, you read the lines again, and talk about other stuff with the director including your dreams an aspirations.
The Call Back
At this point, they tell you the game plan for this incredible movie. It's a twenty minute opus about an everyman that is in some kind of struggle and it's completely original. The goal is to shoot the movie on digital video, send it to film festivals, and then get the money to re-shoot it on film. Of course there's no pay. They can't afford it. But this is a unique opportunity because the script and idea are just that good. You ask about distribution and you are assured that after the film plays at several festivals it will have a distribution deal. At that point everyone will get paid. They say this with such conviction that you buy into it.
The Shoot
You work twelve hour days on your weekend off, the first time director is giving you line readings, and there is barely any craft services to munch on while everyone stands around. Eventually you finish, and you can’t wait to see the movie. Over the next few months you try calling, then e-mailing the director to get a status report. It's still being edited. Eventually you may or may not ever see a finished product, but waiting for that film festival screening seems to be as likely as finding weapons of mass destruction in the filmmaker’s basement.
If this has happened to you more than five times, then you are an ideal candidate to attend an Amway meeting with me. I have just the right opportunity for you.
And now for the flipside...
The Filmmaker’s Point of View
You rent movies all the time. You go to the movies all the time. You have always loved movies, and you just saw the latest Steven Seagal movie that went direct to video on Showtime and you say to yourself, “I can do better than this piece of garbage!” and you have this idea that has been brewing for at least ten minutes. You download the latest freeware screenwriting plug-in for Word and start banging away. The story unfolds and the dialog sounds really good in your head.
Now what?
You read about Soderbergh and George Lucas using home camcorders to make their movies, so all you need is a Sony Handicam and you can become the next Kevin Smith! Because it's a camcorder all you need to do is point and shoot. There’s no need to know anything about lighting or cameras. You remember seeing something about Kevin Smith and the Sundance Film Festival, so when you finish the movie, you'll just send it there, it will be accepted, and you'll get signed to my three picture deal at that point. It should take about three months.
Now you need to get people to be in the movie, your masterpiece. You can hold a casting call. The casting notice reads “Actors Needed for Short Film for the Sundance Film Festival.”
The Casting Call
You can't believe these people want to be in my movie. Look at all of them. You want to savor this moment and see each actor one at a time. Then you see her and she looks really good, so forget first come first serve, get that girl Jennifer in here now! You want someone to look and act exactly as you pictured the movie in your head. With sixteen people waiting to see you at least five of them should be perfect.
The Call Back
Why isn't anyone exactly as you pictured in your head? Jennifer was really good looking and she really seemed to like you. Should you cast her solely based on looks? She can't act her way out of a paper bag.
The Shoot
Nothing is as good as you thought it would be. The actors aren't doing exactly what you want and you even tell them how to deliver the lines. You know you wanted to do more camera angles, but you were running late. Everybody is mad at you and you can't seem to get it right. You can fix it all in the editing. You can't afford to buy another pizza, so whoever is late, is just out of luck. No food for them.
The Edit – Day 2
This is fantastic, this is great. Sure there are warts, but the core of this, the idea, it's so good. You can't believe you made a movie!
The Edit – Day 30
You don't feel like editing today. You just worked a full shift at the store and you’re tired. Instead you see which re-run of Seinfeld is on.
The Edit - Day 66
You’re finally finished. You can't believe you edited the whole thing yourself on a home computer with your bootleg copy of Adobe Premiere. Every word of the script is included and it's perfect. You show it to your friends and family and maybe the cast. They'll tell you if anything's wrong because they are completely unbiased.
Screening Day
You can't believe it! Your mom, your best friend, and the lead actor loved the movie! You were right. This is a masterpiece. You wonder what time the limo will be here to pick you up. Hollywood can just somehow smell talent and no doubt they'll find you. When they do, you'll hire all your friends and all these actors to work with you and Tom Cruise and make Mission Impossible 4.
After the Screening – 11 Days Later
It's been almost two weeks and still no limo. Maybe the people who smell talent have a head cold or there was a flight delay in Chicago for the connecting flight.
After the Screening – 17 Days Later
You get an e-mail today from one of the bit-part actors, what's-her-name, and she has the gall to ask if you had submitted the film to any festivals yet. She doesn't understand that you are an artist and that you have a day job too. You'll get on it soon.
After the Screening – 24 Days Later
You looked into submitting the film to Sundance and it costs twenty-five dollars. Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, all of these film festivals want money. What kind of sick bastards charge filmmakers money to submit their movies? How many submissions can they possibly have? You can only afford two, so you will definitely send your film to Sundance because that's the big one. For some reason you were under the assumption that either the film festivals were free or that the entry fees wouldn't apply to you. You guess you should have done the math. Twenty-five dollars by eighteen film festivals equals $450. That's more than your Sony Handicam camcorder.
Rejection Day - Late November Every Year
You get a letter in the mail. You can't believe they didn't pick your movie. You went to the Sundance page and looked at the movies that did make it. Why would they pick movies directed by Matthew Modine or Danny Glover? What’s this? Kevin Smith got in too? I thought these people were already famous. Why are they premiering these Hollywood movies? Why didn't hey pick my mediocre movie with no stars shot on digital video? I better avoid all contact with anyone associated with the movie. I'd rather them not know than have to tell them.
I guess I won't be able to make another movie...
How to Avoid This Very Common Scenario
Actors
When you audition, ask about the plan and the distribution. If they can't afford to pay you but plan on sending the film to several film festivals then something is wrong. Do the math. Each film festival costs at least twenty-five dollars whether the film makes it in or not, and because of simple odds (thousands of submissions, tens of slots) the movie won't get into a lot of film festivals. If the filmmakers can't afford to pay for decent meals, how in the hell can they afford to submit the film to festivals?
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do the movie. That's not my point at all. I guess my point is just BE REALISTIC. Know that you are doing it for the experience. There are pearl's in the clams occasionally, and you won't find them if you don't look. There are some good movies and good directors, but it may take time and a few movies before a first time filmmaker becomes one.
There are other options that can make the experience and the work worthwhile. Don't be afraid to suggest...
Filmmakers
Plan for the entire movie. Budget for the entire movie. That includes money to market the movie. The common mistake is that you spend all of your money making the movie, and then it sits and collects dust because you find out that everything costs more than you thought. Plan for it. Whatever you think it will cost, have double the money. Did you really think that because you shot your film on digital video that it would be that much cheaper? That's insane.
BE REALISTIC. The chances of getting into Sundance are slim, and winning anything, or getting distribution is a pipe dream. First of all, digital video shorts with no stars are generally as valuable as rat feces. There is no real distribution and short films, even with stars, have very few outlets for display, and even more rare are places that pay for them.
Film festivals are great but they are expensive. Plan ahead for the money you will spend submitting your film to festivals and know that you may not get in. They don't refund your money when you don't get in. Also for your information, audiences at a regular film festival range from twelve to seventy-five people, and most of them are the filmmakers and actors of the other films that got accepted. Unless your movie is about filmmaking, this may not be the best audience to judge your work.
Make movies for the experience to start. Don't be delusional. Do you want to help yourself, your film, and the actors who starred in it? Get some exposure. Get your work seen by as many people as possible. Put your film on the internet, public access television, and anywhere else you possibly can. Get your actors seen by as many people as possible. That's the least you can do.
You have to ask yourself why you made the movie or why you got involved in the first place. Was it to get famous or make money? You're better off buying lottery tickets. You'll have much better odds in a casino. Did you make your movie to tell a story? Great, now share it with people in as many venues as possible. Film festivals are good but expensive. Have other options available.
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