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.

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.

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.

Casting, casting, and more casting. Into the big pool of talented actors in the Bay Area, and we pulled out some great fish. The first set of auditions were for Joel’s characters. I was the handler, greeting actors at the entrance to the building, getting them the script, and helping them get warmed up. The first actor scheduled was a wonderful older actor who exuded all of the respectability and character that I knew Joel was looking for. And what an audition he had! I came into the room after his audition and asked Joel excitedly if he thought he had found his character. Joel, always cautious, admitted that he was very impressed and better, happy by the way his script came to life when read by such professional actors. And yes, this first actor through the door got the part.

On Saturday evening we had our first shoot as a class. Franco’s shoot was in Berkeley and started late at night. We started excited and focused. Franco was unhappy with his script and so wanted to do a lot of improvisation with his actors to attempt to get some interesting rewrites. One hour and some minutes of footage (mostly improv-ed) later, we all were still focused on the shoot, but less excited. Franco wanted to run long takes and at 4AM I was feeling pretty tired and distractable. We decided to can the last shot as it was not planned out properly, everyone was exhausted, and it involved a dolly movement.

On Sunday evening I rehearsed with my actors. It was really fun to work over my script in detail with them and see what underlying motivations and ideas came out through their intonation or movements: subtext!

Wow. What a day. Auditions, after auditions…. After scheduling 10 auditions with the help of Nicholas, my casting coordinator, only 2 actors showed up. Some were sick (kidney stones, yikes!), some forgot, some didn’t call…My assumptions: 1. Very bad luck or 2. Scheduled too far in advance. Joel, who scheduled the bulk of his auditions in the two days leading up to the casting date had almost perfect attendance. So back to the drawing board for me. Although I have a great female lead, even with only one audition for the part.

Joel was resident improver and reader today, alternating between the roles of racist old African American man, peppy 19 year old teenybopper girl, and 35 year old male librarian. He had some really great lines, but after a full day of auditions, his best tries at improv often lead to stifled laughter from the audience. He did such a great job.

Monday, January 28, 2008 – Friday, February 1, 2008

The race is on. As a class, we are roller coasting from pre-production to production with increasing momentum. Last week’s calm of ‘oh-the-shoot-is-week’s-away’ was replaced with “WHAT-DO-YOU-MEAN-WE-NEED-TO-CAST-NEXT-WEEK!” The scramble began with a bit of a panic on Monday, but by Friday it seemed that we had begun the process of settling into our new roles as directors, casting coordinators, producers, locations scouts, and artistic directors. Some have emerged and really stepped up to the various responsibility plates. Nicholas, for example, is the god of casting, using his Skype account to field casting calls for at least five of the projects in the works. “Production!” he answers his phone when it rings now.

I’ve revamped the characters in my script. Their names have changed and everything about their original conception has been replaced by more contrived quirkiness, and strangely they are feeling more natural to me because of it. They are now charming, but bookish, awkward and adorable. This makes more sense for my plot. However, it also heightens the challenge of directing my piece. Will the audience buy the bizarre ticks the characters will have? Can I find actors to pull it off? Will I be able to keep my vision forefront amidst all of the craziness that will be my first narrative shoot? It is all a learning experience, I am sure.

I suspect that for the next three weeks my classmates and I will be entirely immersed in the world of these first films. I will hopefully be able to let the other responsibilities in my life to my other work, my documentary video that I am editing…slide off the table for now and focus entirely on this little three-minute gem I hope to pull together. The rainy weather we have been having non-stop in Berkeley will I’m sure make it easier to stay in the mood of my film: dark, dreamy, and deliberate.

Tuesday, January 22

The holiday Monday pushed back our Producing-Directing class to Tuesday this week and bumped Cinematography out of the schedule. The first shoots approach ever more rapidly it feels and Patrick cleared up a lot of our questions about location and casting in today’s lecture. With a few horror stories to illustrate his points, Patrick gave us a laundry list of what to think about while we hunt for the perfect location to film our booth scenes. Is there access to enough power outlets? Is there a secure space for the equipment to be stored? Are there clean bathrooms for the crew and cast? Do you have a backup location in case you run into problems (and you will)? A backup for the backup?
Peter Burns from the “big kids” (as the student senior to our class are sometimes referred) had prepared a guest lecture for the second half of class. He talked about the casting process and filled us in on some great secrets for how to get the most out of auditions. He talked about the reputation BDFI students have for being very respectful and appreciative of actors and wonderful to work with. He also elaborated on the roles each of us will play for each other during the casting process. There will be someone to be the Producer, another to tape the auditions for screen tests, another will usher the actors in and out of the audition room and help them to warm up for the audition, and another to greet them at the door and guide them to the audition room. I’m very much looking forward to casting and am certain that I will love working with whichever actors get the parts. I’m also looking forward to repeating the audition process (good practice) with my other classmates.

Wednesday, January 23

We began screenwriting class an hour early again this week. For the first hour, we discussed our Top Ten lists: our favorite films, the most important films. I kept a list of films to see based on what everyone was recommending and it filled an entire page by the end! I’ve got a lot of them all queued up in Netflix now!
My heart rate skyrocketed as I passed around the first draft of my script for everyone to read silently before I asked Joel, Margaux, and Nicholas to read it out loud. Happily, the tone seemed to flow nicely and there weren’t too many sentences that sounded out of character at this point. As we went around the table commenting on my script, one thing emerged. “The ending is a little trite,” said Joel. This was echoed by Fred, our teacher. I agreed but recognized that I will have a hard time parting from that original idea that I had. Maybe it is just a problem with how it is written? Maybe the story can stay the same and just the way it is written needs to change? I will mull over it during the weekend and find a better way to express my theme. I am determined!
We went on with reviewing other scripts: Shy’s, Valerie’s, Joel’s, Franco’s. There were some real gems in the ideas they had written into the page and of course, each of us have a different problem to work out for draft 2.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I was so excited to see everyone’s first editing assignment. I hoped for a better-than-beginner-level of editing from everyone so that we could skip over the basics of how to operate Final Cut Pro and get right to the more interesting editing techniques, editing theory, and elaborate edits—the expressiveness of editing. I was not disappointed. Everyone seemed to a have a decent grasp on media management and a willingness to dive in and learn to cut up footage according to the principles of ballistics that we had been introduced to the week previous.
Interestingly, each of us already expressed a certain aesthetic and style. The challenge will be to develop perfect control over the edit suite so that what we create is not the product of what comes ‘naturally’ to us, our first instincts, but what we envision prior to any of the technology and tools that come into filmmaking.
Sharif is so entertaining. He just oozes his own personality and style. He is very humble too. And I get the sense that he is giving us nibbles of criticism and information so that we will digest well and won’t lose our confidence to try new things and really challenge ourselves in our edits. The work of my classmates also challenges me to “try harder” and really create things that I’m proud because of their technical level. That will be quite a few more editing assignments down the line, I’m sure.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Melissa started Improv Acting class by going around the table asking us what issues we were having with our respective scripts. She took notes of what problems we could use our class time and collective brainpower to work out. I was really excited to hear Melissa, “a real actress,” act out some of our scripts. I thought it would really help us get a sense of the possibilities our scripts held for our talent.
After working through Nikko’s script for tone and speakability, Melissa asked me what bothered me about mine. A read through and she was nodding her head agreeing. “I see what you mean,” she said. She had a few suggestions and then said, “I feel like you are happy with this and you don’t actually want to change it.” In a way she was right. I liked the way the characters were speaking and it felt genuine to me. However, Fred had made the excellent point that sometimes as a screenwriter you have to think seriously on altering something if multiple people raise it as a problem in your script. Many of my classmates had raised the same issue with my script. I thought hard about how to fix it.
Now, a few days later while I write this blog, I think I have come with a solution. I am rethinking my original ideas about the characters and I want them to be more quirky so that the words they say and the things they talk about feel authentic in their world, a world where I set the rules. Sharif talked a lot about this idea with regards to editing on Thursday but I see how it applies to filmmaking generally. The creators of the film make a universe with whatever rules they want. The only important thing about these rules is that once they are set, the film follows them.

Monday, January 14, 2008
In our second Producing/Directing class, we gained more technical knowledge that will help us in our approaching shoots. We also watched a series of clips from directors who did the booth scene well in their films. Patrick evaluated our pitches on his scale of one to three, all of us striving for that three, and no one there yet. He gave us lots of very constructive feedback and helped to ask the questions of us that will get our scripts up to par (maybe even up to a three!).

Tuesday, January 14, 2008
Moving into a new classroom, we reviewed our lab footage from last week with Allen. The camera helps put us ahead as even the most bland images have redeeming aspects when shot through the HVX 200. Allen carefully critiqued our explorations in cinematography, if they deserve being called that, and imagined with us the various scenarios in which one might shoot this way or that way.
Following our class, our lab assignment was to find the “sweet spot” on the HVX 200. We set out to get footage of our classmates every distance from 30 feet to 30 inches from their faces, asking them to sit still all the while. We skip our cinematography class next week due to MLK Day, so we’ll review that footage the week after that.

Wednesday, January 15, 2008
In Screenwriting, we reviewed approximately half of the classes scripts. I had so much fun imagining the scenarios my classmates had constructed and I was impressed by the level of intelligent criticism that everyone had to offer each other. I go next week and I’m sure I’ll be very nervous and the harshest critic of myself.

Thursday, January 16, 2008
In Editing, we had our first introduction to what I am most excited to learn: the BDFI editing style “Ballistics.” We watched some clips of previous student work to see Ballistics in action and were given an assignment to cut up some of our favorite footage according to the principles we had learned. I think we all were excited to have an editing assignment that had such simple requirements (1 minute long to music, any footage) so that we could really work on everything we’ve been learning.

Friday, January 17, 2008
In Improv Acting we worked on establishing relationships. Two of us would take two cards: one giving us a scenario and the other a relationship. We would then have to act out the scenario with our classmates guessing the type of relationship between the two of us. We saw that lovers were very easy to convey, while siblings, particularly older siblings, could be hard to differentiate from friends (or enemies!). Overall, I think we all were a lot more relaxed and at ease and felt less pressure to try to be funny in this game and instead just tried to act well.

And we’ve begun. I was happy to see that term 1 started with a bang and that my fellow classmates and I are expected to dive right in. To start off Producing/Directing, our Monday class, we introduced ourselves to each other. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of commitment my classmates seemed to already have to movie-making. Many had already at least a few terms of formal instruction in film studies or filmmaking. Everyone was keen to get started on learning.

We used an asset that Patrick had made to get a primer in good directing. Using the film “Seven,” we watched scenes closely for headroom, postive and negative space, and movement and direction. We reviewed a scene in the film that is a conversation in a booth between Morgan Friedman and Gwyneth Paltrow. We knew that the goal of our first project would be to recreate a conversation in a booth between two characters, so we watched the cinematography and directing intently. Patrick has promised us that the topics we overviewed in this first class will be comfortably in our filmic vocabulary by the end of the term. In fact, he says they will even put us to sleep. I don’t know about that, but I’ll aim for being able to direct great pieces in my sleep by the end of this term.

Allen, our cinematography teacher, ran us through the basics of the Panasonic HVX200, the camera we will be using while at BDFI. Thankfully for me, I am very familiar with the Panasonic DVX 100B, which is a step down from the HVX200, but has essentially the same set up. He talked about colour balance, f-stops, the setup of a camera department on a typical film set, and the nomenclature of different shot types, all of which I’m sure we will spend more time on over the next few weeks.

We split into groups to get a feel for the camera, practicing proper headroom and framing with our fellow group members. We’ll be reviewing our footage next week with Allen to learn about better technique and the strengths and weaknesses of the camera that we will be spending a lot of time with over the next term.

Scriptwriting was a class I had been very much looking forward to, and I was happy to meet Fred, our teacher. After some introductions and some basic scriptwriting instruction, we took turns pitching our ideas for the first project. Fred was impressed that everyone had already put some thought into it and seemed to be well on their ways to developing interesting scenes and scripts. Time was short at the end of the three hours and so there was not much critical instruction or discussion about the pitches. Presumably more critical exchanges will be possible next week when we have actual first drafts of the scripts prepared.

I was glad to be once again impressed by my classmates in our editing class. Again, they exceeded my hopes. Everyone seemed to show a lot of potential for editing and many were already quite advanced. It made a fast pace through editing basics towards more advanced editing techniques seem likely for our class.

The editing rooms at BDFI are a welcome change from some of the computers and set-ups that I’ve used to edit video in the past and I’m excited to spend some long days and nights editing there. There are lots of students at the school who I’m sure will prove invaluable in helping to solve the editing “challenges” that we may come up against in the future and I’ll be thrilled to have more experienced eyes helping me with my projects

The roster of impressive teaching staff continued with Melissa, our acting teacher. What a character! She cracked lots of jokes and was fun to listen to. I had been so nervous about the improv part of our class. I have never had the desire to be an actor and was intimidated by the improvisational part. Melissa made sure we understood that we were in a supportive environment and that we should put away “the man in the yellow hat” as she calls the part of ourselves responsible for self-censorship and feel free to express anything. We had a good time improvising and while most fell flat, there were some good lines by some of my classmates that had us laughing.

At the end of week 1, I can report that my classmates, our teachers, and our first week at school far exceeded my expectations.