It’s been almost 3 months since I started at the school and I am
working on my second film project now. It’s been very intense. Why I
say that? I say that because, personally, I realized that film making
isn’t just another career, but it’s a life. I feel that I’ve become
more in tuned with the under-current of human emotions that runs deep
inside of all of us. In order to create characters, your key
ingredient is to tap into that. I see the characters that I create
become alive in my script and film. It’s incredible to walk in these
characters’ shoes. I’m grateful to have around the faculty and the
senior students of the school. Their unwavering support and
willingness to nurture the members of the school is priceless. Also,
I have a new respect for people who write scripts and work in the film
productions. It takes so much hard work and synchronized team
coordination. You just can’t do it if you are half serious.

We have just entered week eleven, or twelve…despite the amount of weeks,
it has been a good amount of time since our first week of class. Many
changes have occurred since the beginning. I like to think I am more aware
of the industry and movie elements in general. I know I still have a lot
to learn, but I know more than I did, which is an accomplishment in
itself.
Stories and screenwriting. It’s not as easy as it looks or sounds. Having
a great idea does not mean it will make a great story. There are a lot of
elements which go into a script. For instance, the characters must have a
character arc, which basically means they must change over time. Having a
character stay linear, is not what most would call, unique or interesting.
Although, I must say on rare occasions it works. However, it is
recommended the character do something out of the ordinary, surprise the
audience, so to speak. I struggle with the surprise aspect of the
character. I know my character; she is the epitome of me, but what is out
of the ordinary? Can anyone really say? To think outside the box, to
really be creative, is something I still am in the process in developing.
Fred, our screenwriter instructor, is a very helpful resource, however, I
feel there is only so much that can be taught. This quality just comes
naturally for some people, others just need to work extra hard.
My next project, which I’m excited about, is going to be shot
this coming Saturday. The story mocks the concept of religion and how one
enters the “heavenly kingdom.” The traditional St. Peter has been
transformed into a feminist woman, who I have named St. Petra. The story
revolves around a recently deceased businessman who tries to enter heaven
but whose name is not found on the heavenly list. St. Petra, who has done
this job for many many many many years, sees this as just another sinner
who is trying to con his way into heaven, in the end finding he was on the
list the entire time. This comedy, although very light and fun, has had
its share of problems. Alex, my male character, always seems to be
underdeveloped next to the snarky Petra. No matter how many times I revise
this script, Alex just seems to come short of close to being strong. I
have accepted this, and realized that is who he is. He is a business man,
who has his way with the ladies, but is no match for the “all knowing,”
strong minded saint.
I have a wonderful cast, Francis Lansang (Alex), and Nsa Ntuk (Petra), to
go along with a wonderful crew. With my organizational skills, and knack
for getting lucky, I have high hopes that this shoot will run smoothly.
Especially because of the fact I have Ryan Emanuel, who has a skill with
the camera, and other great people with me on the set.

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!

Tonight was my first time getting to direct. I’ve directed real people during shoots before but never actors. It was fantastic! I like that role. I think what really made it a fantastic was that one of our instructors emphasized letting your crew take care of everything and just focus on working with the talent. I felt a picked a great team to work with, felt so supported.
Film school is getting better and better. I’m happy with the bar that is set here. I hope everyone else is.
I’m starting to feel more that this is totally possible, this filmmaking. I feel I’m on the right track.

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.

Happy 4th people! So, update: whoever couldn’t make it to Erica’s shoot totally missed out! It was awesome! For the first time at BDFI, I really felt the collaboration part of filmmaking on a shoot. Having started about 5 weeks ago, I felt like most of my time was spent adjusting to a new city, culture, people and film school in general.

Last night at Erica’s shoot, we did 10 set ups in about 7 hours. We had fantastic performances from the actors so we just ended up doing 2 takes per shot! I’m really happy from what I saw—I think Erica’s going to have fun in editing. Ryan DP’d and did a great job of lighting. My role was makeup and shot logging. We wrapped at two in the morning but I had so much energy. I think I felt useful so I wasn’t tired, whereas if I feel like I’m just another hand on the set, I’d just be bored.

I digress…I just watched “There Will Be Blood” and “Wanted” recently. I’m seeing the movies now in a way I haven’t before, instead of just being a passive audience member or geeking out on frame composition and lighting. I feel like I can now watch movies and learn about the ways they create from just learning the basics in class. It’s even more exciting because I know enough to start attempting imitation. It’s a really awesome feeling.

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 I will be shooting my first project! I am very excited and I hope I can get it all done in time. Last week I finished casting and my actors are great! I really lucked out and got two amazing actors that are exactly what I was looking for. This next week is going to be a lot of rushing around and getting everything ready for rehearsals, location, costumes and all the other little details. We are also going to be pitching our ideas for our next project this week, so we are jumping right into the next one before we are finished shooting. It’s good that they keep us busy, I know it will make me better at multi- tasking and organizing my time.

Last week was amazing we had two guest speakers. First we had Debbie Brubaker, who was awesome. She is one of the most prolific women producers in the bay area and she had a lot of great advice and wonderful stories to share. It made me realize how much producers have to be responsible for, it’s so much work! It really gave me a lot of respect for her and the work she does to learn how much she has to know and go through to see a project through until completion. Then we also had Randy Quaid and his wife come to our school with their movie project they have been working on with a few of our Senior students. It was a very experimental film and was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was interesting to see people’s different styles of filmmaking and learn about their process.