Last week the acclaimed Red camera made an appearance in our cinematography class. What an amazing device! Basically, the Red camera brings digital film up to the quality of digital still photography and at one tenth the cost of anything comparable. The picture is simply stunning and since it is recorded in a raw format, there is a much greater range of picture adjustment and color management that can be done in post production. The trouble is that this camera puts out an absolute fire hose of data and current storage and editing systems are barely capable of handling it. But that’s a good problem to have. The capacity of storage and the power of computers and editing systems will only increase and the Red camera is driving the next wave of digital filmmaking. It’s a fine camera, but for now, I’m happy with the Panasonic HVX200’s that we’re using, which provide a fine HD quality picture. I love this kind of new technology, but I don’t want to get too distracted by it. We need to keep reminding ourselves to stay centered on the story and casting, then take as good a picture as you can.

Just finished shooting Frances’ second film ‘Drugged’ this past weekend, which I produced. Funny thing about this producer role is that no one can really tell you what to do or how to do it. Actually that’s a good thing… especially for me. It’s a great role for creative problem solvers. It’s also a job of herding the million cats that are part of making a movie. Of course, no funding and budgeting was involved, so, for the time being, we’re mercifully spared the overwhelming monetary aspect of filmmaking. To some, producing has too much going on and some serious responsibility associated with it, but being involved in all aspects of making a movie is what makes it so interesting, and ultimately, rewarding.

Photos from the set of ‘Drugged’.

As my second film project at BDFI gets underway, I find myself reflecting constantly on the first. After editing for the past few weeks, I’m getting pretty tired of it. In fact, I’m starting to hate it. All the problems stand out and the good stuff seems to have faded. I want to start over and fix the script and the framing and the lighting and the continuity and the editing. I’m wondering if I even want to show it to anyone. Then I screened it.

I showed it to a few of my cycling buddies at my home last weekend. I had to. I’ve been telling them about this project for weeks now and even had them read the script while it was in development. They demanded a screening, ready or not. And… what do you know, they enjoyed it! OK, so they’re my friends and they probably would have enjoyed anything about cycling, especially with beer and food. But still, real people were seeing my work for the first time and they reacted to it. They laughed. They wanted to know more and see more. And, of course that’s what filmmakers live for… to communicate, affect and touch others and to provoke thought and dialog. Maybe that seems obvious, but I can tell you that there is nothing purer than the inspiration and motivation you get from a viewer reaction, especially a positive one. It’s like pulling off a big magic trick. I’m motivated to do better. I’m hooked.

On to the next project!

This week, I got my chance to be DP (director of photography) when I worked on the set for my classmate Loan. We had a good crew, good actors and a fun script, so we were off to the races. We created the set in our sound stage here at BDFI and had all of the lights and equipment at hand without having to drag everything to another location, which was nice for a change. Also, now that I’ve seen the results of shooting several other projects, I’m becoming more aware of camera work and lighting strategy. My goal was to nail the angles and framing and make sure that we got the camera positioned as accurately as possible for each shot. I think we did that… or at least improved on previous efforts.

Figuring out how to get the right amount of light from the right angles and make it look natural is an art, and I suspect one that will take a while to learn. Things that look good to the eye, look way different on screen. Our brains ‘fix’ these problems in real life and we don’t notice, but the camera is stupid, so you have to tell it what to do. This requires learning to over-ride what your brain sees to understand what the camera is really seeing, then figuring out how to compensate for that from shot to shot. There’s nothing like getting on the set and doing it. As we’re all finding, the big learning experiences come from trying to figure things out yourself, without an expert around to guide you and instantly answer all of your questions. (Question of the evening: ‘Should we move that key light, or not?’) Fall down, get up, try again. We’ll see what happened in the edit room!

Oy, the pain of filmmaking. It’s hard to believe all the problems that appear on film when you start editing. Camera angles are slightly off, actions aren’t the same from take to take, lighting changes as the shoot progresses, colors are funky, sound levels don’t match, helicopters and planes fly over, dialog deviates from the script at random, there’s no good alternate take, the boom mike dips in the frame, the lens is dirty, the characters now seem funny when I thought they were serious… on and on, all supposedly to be fixed in editing. I’ve now spent 4 or 5 sessions editing my film, Roadside Realizations, and I’m feeling like I should re-title this project ‘Film School Realizations’! The problems of turning a story into a script and a script into a film are now becoming blindingly clear as I traipse back and forth through the footage I shot, trying to find the gems and put the pieces together. It’s as if someone gave me a puzzle of a thousand pieces, but the puzzle parts come from many different puzzles and don’t really fit together. I’m also wielding Final Cut like a blunt machete as I try to figure out the best way to hack the film together, but our brilliant Final Cut Jedi master, Sharif is guiding us and hopefully I’ll one day be handling this thing with finesse. After 4 hours of editing today, I finally had to stop, mainly because I just couldn’t stand to look at and listen to it anymore (a common experience amongst my classmates and likely, most film editors.) Now that I’ve taken a deep breath and had a little break from it, I can say that this part of the filmmaking process is a huge learning experience and I’m just starting to understand what it’s going to take in future projects to hone the script and get great film, so that I have something worthy to edit. Editing really exposes the art form. If we can grasp it, we have incredible power in this media to mess with the viewer’s emotions and take them wherever we want them to go. The most fascinating aspect is that you can’t really tell what the full effect is going to be until the final cut is screened for fresh eyes. That’s a mystery that awaits us all.

Today we spent class reviewing an outstanding variety of scenes that Sharif, our editing teacher, collected to demonstrate subtext. In the first and most blatant example, from Annie Hall, the characters’ meaningless chit chat about art and photography is contrasted with their real thoughts - Woody’s sexual interest in Annie and Annie’s self-consciousness - which is provided in subtitles to a very funny effect. In other scenes, the subtext was exposed in the characters faces or in the surrounding elements in the scene or even in odd blocking of the characters in the scene. Some of these scenes demonstrated the amazing ability of superb actors (well directed) to deliver subtext in unbelievably subtle facial expressions, often while barely muttering a word. Subtext comes through the character’s actions and can often make the dialog between the characters virtually irrelevant. The lesson to be learned is that good performances can often be obtained by directing actors to understand the motives of their characters and the subtext being conveyed in a scene. All this is really timely for the scripting of my second film, which is currently making its way from my head to paper, and will rely heavily on subtext. Great stuff, Sharif!

Good stuff from Patrick this past Monday on directing and how important it is to be the leader, troubleshooter and decision maker. It’s a subtle art that requires juggling many things at once and being flexible yet decisive so that everyone on the set knows what’s happening and what’s expected. We reviewed some of the recent issues that we were encountering with our upcoming shoots and discussed how some tough situations were handled. Good learning experience for all.

I also started reviewing my footage from my shoot last week. The exposure and sound were good, as was the acting, but the position of the actors in the frame was not ideal and I learned a few good lessons about what to look for when setting up the frame. (Good to make these mistakes now and learn from them.) Although we spent some time on this in earlier classes with typical booth scenes, where the actors face each other, my set was a little different with the actors side by side. One of the interesting things about shooting a side-by-side dialog is that all the shots have both actors faces in the frame, which requires less editing and potentially fewer cuts. This also enables the viewer to focus on either actor, giving the effect of a more natural dialog.

Creating a film is really quite an amazing process. First you get this idea in your head for a movie, then you mess around for a while writing and rewriting scripts, casting, location hunting, pulling together a crew and developing a plan. At some point it all comes together and you get out and shoot. We’re also learning HOW to do all of this on the fly, which means, of course, that we barely know what we’re doing as we’re doing it. Somehow it all works out and, like riding a bike, you find your balance and suddenly there you are cruising along, camera, crew and actors in motion, shooting the actual film. What a trip!

I had only heard of BDFI about 8 weeks ago, and here I am directing my first film… actors are speaking my script, camera people are filming and there I am, in the middle, trying to say ‘action!’ with some conviction, so that it seems like I know what I’m doing. Good thing I worked on a couple of other film sets in the past week or so, standing for hours holding up a flag to control the lighting. As dull as that sounds, it did give me the opportunity to watch the process up close and get at least a few hours of experience by osmosis before getting behind the wheel. Amazingly, this worked quite well and I actually felt like the team and I, as green as we were, had significant confidence that we could pull this off and get good results. Nothing beats learning by doing.

Our set was out on a horse farm behind the Berkeley Hills, on a quiet idyllic dirt road under a massive live oak. My characters were two bike racers out on a training ride who stopped to take a break under the tree and have a little chat. We had a small crew of 7 and minimal equipment, since we were filming under full battery power and sunlight. Starting early, at around 6:30am, to catch some good morning light and stay out of the heat (which eventually got into the mid 90s) we had a quick breakfast and got set up and started shooting almost right on schedule at about 8:30. At about this time, our beautiful, tranquil set started going berserk with sound… the birds and bees got louder, the horses snorted and stampeded around, jets flew over every few minutes and it seemed as though a local helicopter training school started class right above the Berkeley Hills, circling endlessly. Ambient noise continued to torture us throughout the day, but we made it through and wrapped on schedule, exhausted, but also exhilarated, and looking forward with hope that our efforts result in something worth viewing.

Quote of the day (overheard from Anthony as he was holding the boom mic): ‘Right now, I’m a frickin’ airport for flies.’

Photos of the shoot can be see here

This week we were hit by the first big wave of auditions and the reality that our scripts might actually turn into films. Everyone jumped in and helped and it was fun to do all the different roles, from greeting the actors to reading scripts to directing and doing the camera work. It’s fascinating to see real people breathe life into the words that we wrote and how different the characters can be depicted by different actors. You also start to see where the script is working or not. I got lots of ideas and feedback from my auditions and it seems like I’m practically rewriting the whole script now.

The other really cool thing about this week was a couple of special guests that Patrick brought in. We got to meet Debbie Brubaker, one of the top producers in northern California, and hear what it’s like to be a serious film producer. It’s pretty mind boggling, actually, when you hear her talk about the million dollar budgets (for SMALL films!) all the crews, equipment, actors and especially the unions and how she worked her way from the smallest film jobs up to the top of the heap. On one hand, producing sounds very removed from the creative side of film making, with all the effort that goes into developing the budget and managing the people. On the other hand, she clearly shares in the thrill that a producer has of being involved in every aspect of making an idea into a movie. The producer role is one of the harder movie making roles to understand, but after meeting with Debbie and hearing her stories, it’s much clearer why this is the role with the most responsibility and the biggest rewards, and why it’s not for everyone. Great stuff.

The second special guest of the week was actor Randy Quaid (brother of Dennis) and his wife Evi, who directs and produces. Randy is a veteran actor of hundreds of films including an Oscar nominated performance in The Last Detail (1973). I also discovered that he was in Midnight Express, Missouri Breaks and Paper Moon, a few movies from the 70’s that I really enjoyed. We were treated to a special screening of some early cuts of an avant-garde art film project that Evi is working on with Randy… very interesting and great for pushing our notions of the creative limits film in new directions.

Starting our 4th week at BDFI we’re building momentum towards our first film project, the 3 minute dialog. I’m into the second draft of my script and just got my casting call posted. Getting a script to sound like two people having a conversation is harder than it seems. I’m looking forward to hearing real actors rehearse the script so I can get a better feel for it. I also scouted my location in the Berkeley hills last weekend and it looks great. Casting auditions start next week and filming shortly after. Gotta go get my crew together now… whew! LOTS to do!