I was admitted into a Masters of Journalism program in Vancouver. Thiss meant my time at BDFI was at its end. With sadness (but with excitement for my next foray), I told Joel, who has become such a good friend and a creative pal to me, and Patrick that I would be taking off soon to distribute my finished documentary, work and save some money, and to start my 2 year program in the fall. Then I told my other classmates and the teachers. I hate goodbyes!
Patrick seemed genuinely happy for me. I told him how important I thought the experience and work I was doing at the BDFI was in my application, and how I was sure it was a very important part of my new school’s decision to admit me into what I’m told is a fairly competitive program. He and I both agreed that this would not be the last we saw of each other and I told him that I plan to be in touch with my classmates and the school regularly. Who knows what is just hidden around the corner?
My last few weeks at school were so busy. While I wanted to spend time saying goodbye to Berkeley and my Berkeley pals, I found myself more often than not still locked in the editing rooms, tweaking this or that, burning copies, organizing files…I even squeezed in one last shoot for a project I need to edit in the next few weeks and send back to my classmates for their critiques before the end of their semester.
What do I miss? The rest of Dan’s sound class. What a bummer! Sharif’s jokes and his always enjoyable editing class. Patrick’s pressure to do more, work harder. My classmates’ continued ideas, pitches, challenges…I miss all of that.
I premiered my documentary in Edmonton, Alberta to members of the Canada Youth Climate Coalition (a nation-wide coalition of youth environmental NGOs banded to confront with climate change challenges). Granted, this was a sympathetic first audience for my doc about the impacts of Alberta’s oil sands boom and a group of young people who are biking over 1300 km across the province to learn about them (check out the film’s soon to be available website: tothetarsandsfilm.ca), but the reception was incredible. A standing ovation!!! And since then, I’ve been receiving daily emails from people interesting in purchasing their own copy for their family, organizing screenings across the country. The big pay-off for all of those editing hours.
In the next month or so I’ll begin to find out if the film has been admitted into the film fests to which I submitted. I will be absolutely thrilled (surprised, too) if it is included in the programming for these festivals. Thank you BDFI! This film would be only a shadow of what it is were it not for the community, teaching, resources, even building at BDFI.
More to come as the next month unfolds. Excitement!
Jodie Martinson

Well, I haven’t been very diligent about blogging this semester but I have a good excuse: I’m in the final week of post-production on my hour-length documentary! It has absolutely taken over my life and the life of my selfless collaborator, Emmanuel. We’ve been editing, re-editing, sound designing, and test screening, everything but getting lots of sleep and taking weekends off.
Dan Olmstead, our second semester sound teacher, has been such a great resource for sound design. I am so blessed that he has offered to mix the doc in Stage 2, our classroom/classy mixing stage. So this coming Friday the 13th, armed with snacks and coffee, Dan and my class are going to do a full-out mix into the wee hours if necessary. Really, that is going to be an extraordinary experience and is a wonderful gift from Dan and BDFI.
Sound design and finishing my doc have enabled me to coerce several of my classmates into taking on roles in my project. Joel, Nick, and Marlenée have been helping with sound, and Franco has been doing the graphic animations for the piece. It has made me feel much more supported and challenged to have a bigger team on board.
Another surprisingly rewarding process was the test-screening experience. For a few weeks, Emmanuel and I sat with many of our peers and watched the documentary, noticing every flicker of their eyes away from the screen, the things they laughed at, what they thought didn’t make sense, what was interesting. Then we’d scramble to make the changes that we had seen necessary as a result of borrowing a fresh pair of eyes and try it out again on another unsuspecting pair. I was surprised to find that I did not struggle with accepting criticism, it was always contextualized nicely by those who gave it, and deep down I was always critical of the same things. Having my own criticisms articulated by someone else enabled me to summon the energy and creative brainpower to recut, change again and again, and most importantly, rethink almost every single clip in the documentary in at least some minute way. I was impressed by the level of the criticism as well.
In the coming week, I will complete this doc that has been haunting me/gracing me with its presence (depending on the day) for most of a year now, I’ll send it off to several Canadian film festivals, and I’ll be able to start something new. Well, maybe not right away. Maybe I’ll just take a few days to go to the beach.

For the first few weeks of this second semester, I’ve concentrated on documentary filmmaking in and out of the program. After my first two narrative shorts from first semester, which brought me a lot regarding prod and post-prod, I’m going back to my area of interest –doc-making– and applying everything I learned towards editing a feature-length doc Jodie shot last summer. Our new class, sound design, taught by Daniel Osborn, has really brought a whole other dimension to our editing process, which has basically taken over our lives.

The sound class has done something great for the project: bring it into the curriculum to be used as an example to learn protools and sound design in general. Dan has offered to mix the final project in the 5.1 theater room, which is bringing the whole project to another level audio-wise. It’s also giving all of us an opportunity to see how the sound stems we have created work in a surround environment. Bottom line: D-10 and we still have to fill the audio tracks with ambient, SFXs, sweetening, replace some titles, finish motion graphics, color correct, mix, compress, send out….once again, it seems it’s time to take a big breath of air before going under for the next 2 weeks.

Its 10 am, I’m sleeping on a strangers couch in a crowded living room surrounded by my film crew. Someone is knocking at the front door. I wake up in a daze. For a moment, I forget where I am. Than I remember, I just finished an all night shoot on an abandoned mushroom farm. I am in Santa Cruz in a house of surfer-skater girls who are friends with my director, Rob Witt. Right when I start to orient myself, the person starts to bang loudly.

I awkwardly crawl off my pull-out-bed-couch and stumble over my wardrobe and make up artist. I answered the door as the person rings the doorbell again and again. A stranger in a strange place, I had no idea who’s abode I was intruding. Stumbling in at 5 AM I had yet to meet the other roommates.

I had no idea what to expect. I answered in my PJs. Is it the cops? Someone locked out, hung over, or maybe I blocked someone’s driveway with my car. Clearly the person knocking was upset. I opened the door to see a little old man in a walker smiling at me. In a daze I tried to understand what and why he was talking to me. I interrupted him saying, “I’m sorry, but we’ve been on a film set till 4 am last night, so I’m kind of groggy.”

As you can probably tell, it’s been an adventurous shoot. First off, as I mentioned, it is located on an abandoned mushroom farm. Second it’s at a great house on the ocean in Santa Cruz. Rob is friends with UCSC surfer students who happen to live in such a wonderful strange place and they gave him permission to film there.

The guys, Joel Pincosy, Nick Howard, Rob Witt and Nikko Deluna got there a day early and spent the afternoon cleaning and building the set. It was a music video for the band “This time Next Year” and had an Alice in Wonderland theme. Saturday, we, the girls, came. Margaux was in charge of wardrobe, Toni Huff did the makeup. Together they dressed the bassist in a torn shirt, muddy jeans and dirty face (he was the caterpillar). The lead singer, of course was the Mad Hatter, and the drummer and guitarist were Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dumb, complete with green suspenders and bowler hats. The hanger the guys built, with hanging light bulbs on flicker, harsh lighting and black tarp, looked really great.

The band said they were really impressed by the set and our professionalism. “This is like a legit set,” one of them said. Another said he felt a little intimidated, which was not our intention, he said “this is the real deal.”

My job, for this shoot, was crafts. Sounds simple, but very important. I had to keep the crew in constant supply of coffee, snacks and baked cookies in the wee small hours of the night. I had to go back and forth between the farm and the house separated by a steep hill and wilderness. It was totally dark, spooky, and looked like a scene from a horror/zombie movie. It looked even more eerie as the fog and moon set in. With my sturdy flashlight I trekked back and forth with my goodies.

The band was great, they did a great performance. Their fans were really easy to mange to (we had a call for 30 extras for a performance scene). As the night went on, the band did really great at keeping their energy up.

At the end of the night, the guys went down to the surfers house, and us girls drove to a house near the Boardwalk to stay at a friend of Rob’s. The poor girl was sleeping on the couch waiting to let us in. Now we are enjoying our morning at Rob’s friend’s house waiting for the second shoot to begin tonight at 6pm.

Anyways, this old guy is talking to me, well, sleep-deprived me, something about the internet, the neighbor, a guy named Dan (?) it was all very confusing. I had to interrupt him again.

“This may sound really weird, but we don’t know the people who live here. They just let us sleep here. So I don’t feel comfortable letting you in.” Someone from the back of the house woke up and took over. The guy repeated everything he said to me. He thought we were a bunch of crazy college kids.

“Looks like you had quite a party last night,” he said. I laid back down on the couch grumpy and exhausted saying,

“Yeah, right, a party. No way man, this is work.” And I went back to sleep thinking how awesome that was.

I applied for PA on a short film shoot.  I called the director and told her all the experience I had at BDFI in the past 16 weeks.  The next day she promoted me to Assistant Director.

The director said she had more confidence in me as an AD than the original person she hired.

I can’t decide if I love or hate editing. Somedays, I get totally lost in the footage and hours go by like minutes. Others, I catch myself counting minutes that feel like hours. I really enjoy the process of watching the piece take form. I really dislike the process of digging through the capture scratch, looking for the gems in the mound of discarded muck. I have all sorts of theories about this duality: maybe editing itself should be seen as many processes in one. So, I enjoy editing but dislike certain tasks associated with editing, such as hooking up external hard drives or the camera, logging and capturing, organizing footage. That must be it.

This week was editing intensive. We critiqued each other’s projects each day with a different lens: with Patrick, we assessed the pieces overall, with Sharif, we talked about them from an editing perspective, and with Allan, their cinematography. Interestingly, often the advice was contradictory. More interestingly, some of us found that by tweaking the piece according to the advice given by one instructor who may have blasted the piece to shreds with criticism, the next instructor remarked on how impressive it was for a first project. It shows that the little things make big differences.

We are also working on our next round of pitches for the upcoming project. I feel like we all thrive off of each other’s ideas when we start brainstorming on someone’s original conception. I often feel like I want to plagiarize the collaborated idea at the end of the class.

As an outside project from those associated with BDFI, I’m also working on piecing together footage for a doc that I shot this summer. This past week, I’ve finally kicked that project into gear realizing that it is already March and I will have let all of the fabulous resources I have at BDFI go to waste if I don’t get cracking on this much longer project. Also, there is a very narrow range for how long we can stomach our projects—our learning curve is just so steep! Only a few months/weeks/days even minutes after making a mistake or “creative decision” as I prefer to see them, we have already learned from it and are ready to move onto a new project, destroying the archive of that mistake as we go.

We had Patrick’s class today. We usually have it on Monday but we got Monday off cause of MLK day. Once again Patrick made Nikko more smarterful. He gave a script and location lecture, it answered ALL my questions. I also learned he got to work with WASP and Motorhead and now I’m jealous and I want to cry, Then Peter came (Senior Classmate) and talked to us and he cleared up EVERYTHING, I think it is going to be super awesome-o to do a professional casting call.

Week 2 was dope. I had an awesome time in all my classes once again. Id say within two meetings of Patricks class I quadrupled my knowledge, this is definitely the school for me. Unlike other schools, that will stay unnamed for legal reasons (poo on you other school), I actually feel like I’m a filmmaker.

So far my first project is coming along nicely, that’s right my FIRST project and it’s only the second week. The critiques I got from my screenwriting class were great I love you guys for that stuff. Only ten people are there but they’re already great friends and I only known them for a little while.

Well anyways my first project is about two friends who have a conversation about one of them tag teaming a hot chick with a ladyboy. It got a good rise out of the class so apparently I’m on the track to writing a decent comedy. I got my first editing project to do, it’s a 1 min music video with clips from a movie,

I saw that Saul Zaentz was parked in his spot, instantly I got all giddy like a school girl at a Chippendale stripper party

Well production week. What can one say. I’m glad it’s over and I already miss it. The Wonderful intensity of being on a set. All the planning and energy suddenly paying off in a day/hours on set. All one has to show for it is on two little tapes, digital images on magnetic tape. But that tape is magical, it’s a story, a scene, it’s art, it’s life, all that on these ephemeral little tapes.

Production Week- began with Franco’s shoot, it was a late night shoot, that from all I can tell ruined me for the week to come, on set I felt like a dynamo, ready to go on and on, but I could feel that many of the others on the set were plenty tired by the end of the shoot. I was DP, and felt that the lighting was good, working well with Jodie as Grip/Gaffer, we came up with lighting that used the location to the best effect. However I struggled with the tripod head and found out later that some of the footage was not as sharp focused as I would have liked, —use that monitor, the view finder only gives so much info.

My next shoot was Jodie’s on Tuesday, we hurried after school to get the equipment to the location, which was this wonderful bookstore. Jodie and Emmanuel struggled to get the lights the way she wanted, which delayed the start of the shoot a bit. Jodie also made a bold choice of having her actors whisper, which I think if it turns out will really add to her piece. As Producer on her shoot I tried to deal with the practicalities of the location and food for cast and crew. However after Franco’s shoot I got pretty sick, coughing a lot and having a low grade fever on both monday and tuesday and beyond, I have yet to recover, and the rigors of production week didn’t help. I wished I had been more present and able to try to help more in solving some of the creative problems on set.

My Shoot followed on Wednesday, yes still under the weather, and frankly dreading some location issues, that I knew I would run into. Because of the time of day I was to shoot, it was and afternoon to evening shoot, the room was large with lots of windows. I reached the location to find that my actors had already arrived, which inched up the pressure on me, not feeling that the location was prepared, with many problems to deal with. In one of Patrick’s classes he talked about having enough Bandwidth to deal with problems on the day of the shoot, and that was exactly what I did not have. So I made the best of the situation, luckily I had casted two pro actors, and I felt for what my script was it was pretty locked in. This helped when with little more than half the shoot done, the manager of the location entered and told me that I had half an hour to finish shooting. Well this meant losing the background lighting and pushing everything to go much faster. All in all I was pleased with how it turned out, especially with my crew Nick, Margaux, Franco, Marlenee, Marcy, and Jodie, Dick Martin one of my actors mentioned, that he was pleased by how professional we all were. Notes for next time: Have more Bandwidth, allow that space for creative energy and time with actors, get a location that will be film friendly.

Friday was Shy’s shoot, once again DP, and now a little more than tired and still sick. No time to work out a shot list with Shy resulted in some miscommunication on the set, and difficulties. But focus was much better this time, and we had time to do a dolly shot which was fun. But with a different seating arrangement it made it difficult to get matching pairs, hopefully Shy will be able to work with the footage I shot for her.
Saturday was Marlenee’s shoot and she was on top of it, maybe a little stressed at the beginning, but once things got going she handle it well, and with extras and a larger cast, very impressive, and her knack for production design and the time to work the location helped alot.

Sunday was Emmanuel’s shoot, as producer I did my best, being tired from the week, and still sick, as with Jodie’s shoot, I felt there was more I could have done to solve problems, and be a creative assist. Emmanuels told me he wanted me to push the crew for time, and I did that I think it was a help to making things move on the set.

Well one shoot to go still, and many lessons learned, many things I will take into the next round of shoots, including a little more boldness to be even more creative.

CASTING WEEK FLASH-BACK
Ok…the first wave of productions is over…I can breathe a little…I even thought I would swim to the shore and paint you a little picture of what being at sea was like…but we’re already diving into the next project….pitch, story, structure, characters….I guess I’ll have to let you know what’s been happening while I’m still soaking in the water…let’s see….gloup…
Two weeks ago, we had a full week of casting auditions, and given the high number of responses most of us got from actors, it was essential to put together casting teams to greet, handle, film, and of course assess the actors that came in. It was really good to see the slowly forming bonds between all of us (first semester students) finally coming together in a real way as we helped make each other’s casting auditions run surprisingly smoothly for both the actors and ourselves…My auditions, pooled together with Jodie’s and Valérie’s, went by really well, with “only” ¼ of all actors failing to show up. I was left with the luxury of having a hard time choosing between three different actors for one of my roles, and 2 actors for the other…we then all had call-backs…more decisions… plus pre-production planning…and here we go…we were all propelled into production week for this first project.
OFF-SHORE REFLEXIONS
Following some advice I received from a second semester student during my first week at BDFI (“don’t spread yourself too thin”), I chose no more than 5 projects outside mine in which to get involved. And I’m happy I didn’t do more…it was plennnnty. Working on 6 shoots each averaging 8hr is probably nothing unusual time-wise for a production week in the industry, but when everything you do is a learning experience, and you’ve got not one single project unfolding, but 6 different ones to work on…it can get a little complicated. I’m thankful to the students who entrusted me with a piece of their project by having me on their set. A lot of the theory came into play and into place. Some of the details covered in class became major issues once on location, and that was good…since the lighting and sound problems we encountered helped me think about how to work with/around them for my own shoot, which came around on Sunday.
All in all, I feel that none of the shoots I was on had to endure any major catastrophes.
But I still have at least one “if only” for every shoot…so, let’s see:
MONDAY
On Nikko’s shoot on Monday, working as a gaffer in a relatively small space, I was satisfied with the comedic tone we were able to give Nikko’s piece by using appropriate light textures and balance. But the shadows our lights casted on the backwall made it hard for the boom operator to get close to the talents with the mic without casting a shadow on our background. Even though I kept an eye on the boom-pole shadow through the first half of the shoot, several takes ended up having a moving shadow in the right corner of the background…I hope none of these takes ends up being the “money shot” Nikko needs once in the edit room.
Lesson 1: if you know something is not right, say it BEFORE the take.
TUESDAY
On Jodie’s shot the next night, I worked as DP. The location –Serendipity Books- provided amazing instantaneous art direction for our set, but for some reason, I just could not get the lighting right. It took almost 2 hours of moving lights around and tweaking before Jodie finally got what she wanted and the whole process probably through her off the creative state of mind she should’ve been in. She still managed to radically change the tone of her script to make it work with her actors (and the location) by asking them to whisper the whole dialog. This simple direction for the delivery of their lines completely transformed the mood of her piece and I can’t wait to see the whole thing in post.
Lesson 2: When it comes to lights, keep it simple at first, tweak afterwards.
WEDNESDAY
On Wednesday, I was only able to come in at the end of Joel’s shoot at the Berkeley Marina (bar area of the Berkeley Yacht Club). The set was much bigger that the two previous ones, and Jodie (who was DP) really had a chance to move back to the proper distances to shoot the dialog in MCU and CU. What Joel was missing was not space but time. The not-very-cooperative manager of the location became a constant pressure for Joel who still managed to get all (but one?) of the shoots we needed before getting out.
Lesson 3: Time is of the essence.
FRIDAY
Shy’s shoot on Friday took place at the Berkeley Artworks Foundry gallery. It was easy setting the lights for the different angles, being in a large space with room to work with.
And I was glad to have 2nd semester student Charles Steadham around. He gave me some input on the lights, and I think that with Joel’s help (DP), we really got the lighting down.
Lesson 4: Setting ground-rules and expectations is essential
SATURDAY
Marlenée’s shoot was stressful to think about in the pre-production phase, but it was a pleasure to be on once we actually started production. Marlenée’s been preparing and thinking about her set for so long that I was worried we might witness some break-down on set if anything went wrong…instead, we had a really smooth production with great actors, a great producer, a great director, and a great crew. For me (DP), The shoot ran smoothly thanks to Marlenée who had taken me to the location a week earlier + we had gone through the whole shot list, etc…in short, she had done the necessary planning. The only thing I have my doubts about is the last part of her piece where we got ambitious and had an extra 4 camera set-ups moving from inside to outside the house…let’s wait and see how this all cuts once in a FCP sequence…
Lesson 5: Planning planning…
SUNDAY
This was finally my own project’s shoot…conclusion you ask?…I’m not sure what to think. I should log and capture all my footage from this Sunday shoot to get a clearer picture of whether I’m satisfied with it. From a logistical point of view, I think things when well: the location being in the heart of SF, in a small café, I think we handled parking and space management once inside the place well. I also had a great, focused crew to work with. Thank you all! Let’s give it up to my producer Joel, to my gaffer Chuck, my sound (and actor: waitress) Marlenée, to my PA Shy, and to Jodie, my DP. Jodie did an impressive job, especially on the dynamic close-ups I asked of her. Kudos. I just feel I got tangled up into the technical elements of the shoot and lost track of the performance. We had some really light changes over the course of the shoot and spent a lot of time adjusting to these changes as the sun poured into the room around 3pm. My actors being relatively inexperienced, and being new as a film director myself, I struggled at times to bring them in the direction I needed them to go….cutting up the screenplay into short takes ended up confusing them …I had worked with them doing a lot of improvs around the relationship between the two characters…but I should have worked the script directly too…

1. At my shoot, I was concerned that my actor’s were acting too theatrical for the intimacy of the film scene I had envisioned. On a whim, after talking with Karen Dea from the third semester, I asked my actors to rehearse the piece with two rules: 1. only moving the eyes, and 2. whispering. What a change! It was so appropriate for the bookstore setting. So we scrapped the first few takes I had done and filmed in whispers.
2. The lighting on Joel’s shoot was the first time we actually controlled for what the director had envisioned. As Director of Photography on that shoot, I was really proud of our crew. Joel wanted to use harsher light, without much diffusion and I was envisioning a John-Grisham-like scene of testosterone and suspense. We darkened the background, closed up the iris, and really popped the lit sides of the talents’ faces.
3. Nikko saved the dolly shot for last at his shoot. We were all prepared to pack up and go home, having already completed the multiple takes required to get the dialogue down. But, Nikko asked for the dolly shot and we set it up. Franco was the dolly operator, and I was DP and we nailed it on the first take. The footage looks good and I think it will really add to his project.
4. Emmanuel’s shoot had a hard out time because his actor had an appointment to get to. Emmanuel is not the most punctual and can be a bit of a perfectionist, but to his credit, and with the help of Joel, the Producer, he really kept us on time. We finished right on schedule and the actor was grateful to be able to make his appointment.

Some things to try harder on for the next round:

1. No one filmed outdoors for this project. I think we were all intimidated by the added variables associated with shooting outside. Hopefully next round of projects, a few of us take it on and we gain experience with that.
2. There was a declining amount of enthusiasm from some classmates as the shoots went on, particularly from some who already had their own shoots over with. This disappointed me, particularly because I often felt that the classmate who was now directing had previously worked really hard as a grip, for example, on someone else’s shoot and now that director turned grip was slacking off.
3. I think that every director got too distracted from the art of the piece by the technical side of filming the projects. Maybe next time we will each be able to trust our crews better and we will not be so focused on sound problems, troubleshooting video, or whatever comes up at the expense of the story.