Erkki
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Posts posted by Erkki
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Almost a week has passed since we completed the first shoot. I have edited the material into a very rough cut, and tried to solve some audio problems. I think it will sound better than Hannah Takes the Stairs at least. I'm now already anxious to switch fully from the director-cinematographer role into the post-production jack-of-all-trades mode, and am learning some stuff about that from various online sources. But we still have to shoot the rest of the movie and ideally we should do it all during next week. I know I won't be able to do it fully next week, there is a stop-motion animation scene I could do any time myself, but will take a long time.
I hope we get good music in the end, either licensed or commissioned (I know a few people who do music). The footage without montage really looked very cheesy to me without a musical counterpoint. When I did a rough cut montage and added music that doesn't exactly match what is happening on screen, but sort of hints at some different undertones, I started feeling a lot better about it. Maybe this is not ideal, I feel like I'm trying to solve a script problem with music and montage. But it's ok cause I'm not going to rewrite the script and reshoot what I already have, so now I need to fix problems with other tools. Although shooting some additional scenes is an option.
I was not able to shoot even B-roll this week, my mind was not on the right wavelength. But tomorrow we will a close-ups we messed up the first time and I'll switch back into shooting mode and arrange the schedule for next week.
And then I'm doing a 3-week short film course at the local film school's summer program, in which we'll shoot another short film. I will try to take some different roles there, maybe something more specific and technical rather than being the driver for the whole short... we'll see.
Anyway, after I finish the shoot I'll do another rough cut, which I'll probably discard to start the real editing in August after I've learned some more about editing, sound mixing and so on. If I end up feeling good about the movie, I also want to get it to look good and sound good in a cinema, and maybe send it to a festival.
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I just edited the shot material together without any montage and it looks surprisingly like a movie. Maybe when we shoot the rest, it will actually make a comprehensible story. My only big remaining worry is that if the air conditioner noise can not be removed, it's going to sound as bad as e.g. Hannah Takes the Stairs.
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We now finished some loose ends shooting in the main location and now I'm starting too feel kind of depressed. Or at least I was before we did the final shoot. That raised my mood again. But now I'm afraid that I'm going to miss shooting a lot and will start getting depressed. Also as I look through it, I am realizing that there may be a lot more problems with the shot material than I thought.
But we still have to shoot about 7 more scenes in various locations.
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I have an even better feeling after the second day. I actually let the assistant director do most of the directing while I focused on the camera. We cut maybe half of the shots and had extras on the set for way less than initially planned. But we shot as many scenes as I had planned and I think we even got enough coverage everywhere except one bit which we will shoot tomorrow. We will reshoot one scene from yesterday as well, due to a continuity issue discovered today.
I had booked an extra day for rental gear for tomorrow night and we will put that to use as well.
I still have some of the same doubts as before, but I think in these two days we recorded some pretty good performances for the type of movie we are making. And I'm starting to get super excited about spending most of August doing the montage.
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I have a first full shooting day behind me now. Overall I have quite a positive feeling, but also some doubts.
Firstly, everything took much longer than I expected. And still somehow we managed to do almost as much as I had planned, although we had to switch around the shooting order.
I had great assistants. They had no experience, but one was doing excellent job with sound recording and boom pole holding. The other was handling all the things that needed to be handled and I didn't have time to do. She was also the script supervisor and actually also noticed more details about acting that I as the director should have noticed, but I was too busy with also handling the camera. So she kind of took over directing occasionally and I let her, some of the time, if not most.
Lighting and camera are really challenging. Most of the time we spent setting the lights so that the faces were lit as we wanted but without having lights or their reflections in the frame. This meant quite a bit of extra work occasionally.
I have some doubts about whether the lighting will look ok in the end. In the LOG footage it seems to match, but I haven't checked what happens after applying a REC.709 LUT.
Also the sound, I think we have great quality recording, but we had some heavy AC noise in both rooms where we shot. I hope it is somewhat removable (we did record room noise).
The image is occasionally put together in the last minute because of camera/lens/room constraints. I hope I got most of it right.
I dropped a lot of shots due to time constraints. My hunch is that there is enough coverage and inserts, but I'm not totally sure.
And lastly, I'm still having a lot of doubts about the script. Several people have told me that it's not bad, but I'm still not sure if what I want will come across or it will be a laughable effort at telling a story.
But overall, I think we got better footage and sound than I expected from this day. 1 hour 12 minutes or so, about 60GB.
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The shooting is approaching fast... in 2 weeks. Meanwhile I found some courses I could take before it starts, including one on lighting for video and one on directing actors. The latter I'm doing as an observer because they wanted the directors to have a 5 minute scene prepared and I wasn't really up to coming up with that long of a scene right now.
We did the test shoot for practice, but I plan to do the actual one differently so I'm still not sure if the time scheduled will be enough. In the storyboard I had a lot of different camera angles, but I think I might have to do with less of them, otherwise it will be quite difficult. But there are several variables that might be tricky to balance:
- Can I get as many angles as I want from each scene? My current undestanding is that the best way to shoot is to do wide shot first, then close-ups of both actors (there are two in most scenes) and also inserts are probably best to shoot right after that so that nothing changes in between. In some cases I might want more than 3 angles, but I'm thinking I can solve it by doing the wide shot with a moving camera* in some cases. A moving camera could make editing harder, though.
- How can I save time with lighting set ups? I will have 3 lights and I think I need all of them or at least 2 for most scenes. Can I light the scene once and shoot both wide shots and close-ups with the same light? I think that way it would also look more consistent between wide shots and close-ups. But this means paying more attention that the lighting is already perfect for wide shots, which could be hard in such limited space that I have.
- Can I set up the lighting once for all scenes in the same location and then shoot all the scenes in that location in a row? I have 5 scenes in the same office with only one calling for different lighting.
- The actors want to have different costumes to visually mark different days in the movie - it takes place over 3 days. For me it's not important (it's a 10 min short after all), but I'll give them that. So if I shot 4 scenes in a row to save time with lighting - they would have to switch costumes 2 times withing shooting those 4 scenes and then probably once afterwards as well. Maybe it's better to shoot chronologically... On the other hand, a costume change can be rather quick compared to lighting change. But what if it also involves changing hairdo style...
- I also have one actress playing small parts in several scenes that are chronologically all over the movie. Can I minimize the time she needs to be on set and how do I account for that while considering the other variables... hm...
* actually I had an idea two days ago that maybe I could do some scenes with Hollywood style mix of wide shots and close-ups shot separately, but other scenes could be done more Tarkovsky-like where the movement of actors and the camera is what makes a wide shot become a close-up and so on. But mixing the two styles in one movie could be awkward?
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I think it's in cinemas somewhere, not sure. Revenge by Coralie Fargeat is pretty decent ultra-violent thriller, although it has some cliches/tropes, it flips some of them around a bit.
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I'm now trying to edit what we shot today and the close-ups don't seem to go well at all with the wide shots. Maybe because I lit differently for the close-ups...
[edit] I edited something together... it has several mistakes in it, but would anyone be interested in seeing? It's really my first time shooting with lighting and actors, so I'm very curious how it looks to others.
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No other goal, thanks for the feedback.
I had a practice shoot of my movie today. Man, it was kind of fun but also stressful due to time. Firstly, one assistant didn't show due to a misunderstanding, the other was later than I thought they'd be so the first two hours we just messed around with the actors and did some wardrobe tests. Then when we were about to start shooting, food courier showed up and spilled the food, leaving it for us to clean up. Another half an hour gone. In the end, we only managed to fully shoot one scene and walk through another. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with how it turned out. My lenses and camera combo is not the best as it turns out - the camera makes the lenses a lot longer than I would need so I have to turn the camera to keep actors in frame. I also realized that at the widest aperture on these lenses (F0.95), the color temperature changes significantly. So I might shoot with F1.2 instead, which should be fine though.
Initially one of the actors couldn't stop joking around, even when we started a take. But somehow after lunch break, he then managed it and it turned out quite well. But the actors are not very experienced, so their close-ups may not convey emotions as well as we'd like. I'm now thinking whether to try to get a better performance out of them or to skip close-ups... But skipping close-ups might make for a boring to watch movie. But I don't know anything about getting a performance out of actors, especially while also handling the camera, lights and other stuff.
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I made another video to test out my new gear. Would appreciate any comments about the montage - is it way too slow, should it be more fast cuts like the one with the bike near the end?
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Nope, but that blackface seems even worse than Orson's black&white one.
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I saw Orson Welles' Othello and the blackface is really offputting. In general this movie seems to have some rather weird cinematography, which doesn't seem to follow any established film language. And the dialogue is impossible to understand. I turned on Spanish subtitles for help (English were not available). Still, there's something in it, so I gave it a 3/5, but it's the first time I see what's behind saying that Welles remained an amateur. The composition of some shots and the super low camera angles make very little sense. Yet, I see some similarities to Chimes at Midnight, which is one of my favourite movies. But I think Chimes was much more polished even if it probably had a lower budget.
Also since this was on Mubi related to it's Cannes win, I see that Cannes has actually always favoured not-so-great movies from certain names, it's not just a recent thing. I haven't been following the flak Cannes has been getting, but it does seem deserved if they are favoring certain big name male directors, over women for example.
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Found another interesting Soviet film from the 60s - I Am Twenty (It's on Mubi here for a few more days). It's about the generation who entered their twenties in the 1960s, and so were born around the end of WWII. Like many Soviet movies, it has some propaganda in it (ends with a visit to Lenin's mauseleum), but it was also initially banned like many great works. It mostly deals with ennui and coming of age and mostly due to the presenting of ennui I would compare it to Antonioni. Perhaps some elements of French New Wave are also seen in it, and I would also compare it to other contemporary soviet work such as I Am Cuba. It's not quite as polished as the latter, but something in the camera movements seems familiar between them.
One thing I noticed is that the camera is often kept below chest level, even at waist level perhaps, leading to the characters having more stature than is common in western cinema. Now that I think of it, I think Kalatazov and Urusevski did the same in The Cranes Are Flying, I Am Cuba and Letter Never Sent. I could also be wrong that this is a soviet thing or uncommon in the west, I haven't actually paid that much attention to the height of the camera when watching movies.
[edit] Forgot some more notes: I kind of think the film focused too much on men, though, and did not present women as equals to men. Also, Tarkovski has a small role in it and gets slapped.
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I had some random thoughts about average ratings on different sites.
On Letterboxd, a movie that is for me good, but unremarkable, usually might have a distribution of ratings like this:
A movie like this can have close to 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though. Here's the same movie there:
Basically Rotten Tomatoes seems to be favouring "safe", average movies. A movie that no critic dislikes, but everyone thinks that it's rather fresh than rotten, even if it's not great, can achieve a 95% or 100% rating. I guess this can actually be good, and it worked for me for a while, but I do think it can be elevating some movies undeservedly compared to others.
On another note, the movie these are taken from is not really "safe" in all ways though - it's "Paris 5:59 - Theo & Hugo" and has a hardcore gay orgy in it. And it has some good cinematography, but on the average it didn't seem anything to remember for ages. Yet, I'm kind of glad to have seen it, and if I had just gone by the Letterboxd rating - I would have filtered it out (generally I go for >3.6). But it was just about to expire on Mubi.com and so I decided to see it after checking RT.
On the other hand, a movie like Phantom Thread, probably overall less interesting for me.
Letterboxd seems to have a bias for some very new movies... They can take the top easily, but start falling down slowly. But then again I thought RT also has a bias for newness, when checking the top lists last year.
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I watched two films directed by women on Mubi yesterday.
Lynn Shelton seems to be somewhat associated with mumblecore, which is a genre I’m starting to appreciate more and more. I have seen Your Sister’s Sister before, which I liked a lot and yesterday saw her debut We Go Way Back, which is a rather unique (AFAIK) story about a 23 year old confronted by their 13 year old self. Liked this one quite a bit too.
Angela Shanelec is currently under focus on Mubi and I will definitely check out more than Marseille, which is about a young woman who doesn’t seem to know what to do with her life. I liked the first half of the movie a lot, but while I see why the second half exists, I didn’t enjoy it that much. [edit] I have now also seen Orly, Afternoon and The Dreamed Path. The latter is perhaps the most interesting, but they are all pretty low key movies and nothing super memorable. I do like the overall mood, but all of the movies seem to have some technical or dramatic peculiarities which I'm not fond of (digital zooming shot seems to be utilized - does not look good).
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Yeah it’s a cool look. I would leave more margin space.
On the weekend we did photos based on the storyboard with the two principal actors. I realized that I might have a problem since one of them makes a lot of jokes and then is able to quickly convey different emotions right after, but the other needs the exact opposite kind of atmosphere to get into the role. But I hope we’ll figure it out during a practice shoot.
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20 minutes ago, Cordeos said:Is there a term for when a director/writer inserts a monologue or dialog that has a distinct feeling of the director/writer just wanting to spout some of their personal philosophy at the audience? Might not be the best example but Tarantino seems very guilty of this, the feet conversation in Pulp Fiction and the tipping conversation in Reservoir Dogs come to mind. (Its possible I am just misinterpreting ham handed character building)
I don't know the term, but I think nowadays I would look down on this. Definitely did not care for it in Reservoir Dogs when I saw it recently. Pulp Fiction was my favourite movie for a while, I wonder if now I would find it rather dumb in some regards. I don't even know why it appealed to my teenage self and so many others - what's so cool about different names for Big Macs or what the main character thinks about how much mayo people in a different country use? It does absolutely nothing for the story, and I'm not sure if it helps build the character at all.
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God damn, how small stupid tech things can ruin one's mood. I got a bunch of pieces of gear delivered this week from many different sources and was feeling good as on the weekend I plan to do some screen tests and photos based on the storyboard. Mood totally ruined by a stupid ND filter step-up ring getting stuck to a lens hood adapter ring - the most dumb pieces of gear ever where you'd least expect failure. Yet this now means I can't use my lens hood with the lens. Not that it's totally ruining everything, but I never work without lens hoods normally - they protect the glass from potential bumps into things more than anything, and also I will have differences of light coming into the lens for the photos I'm using to plan the shoots, compared to when I'm going to actually shoot (by which time I hope to have replacement lens hood because I tried ply these rings apart again, but now they are totally ruined by pressure from the pliers). Fuck technology, I'm going to stick to writing and write a hundred screenplays into my drawer.
[edit] I can now see, though, why one might prefer big matte boxes with non-screwed rectangular filters, to scewed-on round filters and lens hoods.
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Thanks for sharing that!
I went to a one-day film course a few days ago where the teacher said that a scene is sometimes filmed so that first they film the whole scene as long shots, and then they do the close-ups separately - this also gives actors time to get into character for close ups.
I am thinking that this might work for me for the office scenes. I'll only have one camera, and maybe this way I also avoid switching lenses a lot (I'll mostly use 3 fixed lenses from 35 to 85 mm). But I'll probably need to use a dolly a lot if I want to get several montage shots for from one physical shot. And the lighting for long shots could also be done once per scene then.
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I just did the first draft storyboard based on my screenplay and it's about a 100 shots. I was expecting 60 or so. Damn. I'm kind of scared now - how do I light all that etc. If anyone wants to check it out I shot a video with my phone where I show the frames and talk about what's shown or said, at roughly the same speed the movie should be at.
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I would mention two Estonian women who have directed some pretty good films lately - Moonika Siimets and Sandra Jõgeva. But it's probably very hard to find their movies outside of Estonia.
Paz Fábrega is a Costa Rican director who has made some pretty good low-key movies about relationships: Viaje (2015) and The Cold Water of the Sea (2010).
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I totally get that the characters in Love are not as likeable as usual and it makes it less watchable to many. But I also think it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
Usually anti-heroes or just horrible main characters in TV are so horrible that they’re actual drug dealers, serial killers. People are not used to rooting for just slightly flawed people. Traditionally it either has to be someone actually evil or someone good you could look up to. And I guess characters who fall somewhere in between can seem boring in comparison - they are not super likeable and also their stories are not as interesting as those of the cop serial killer or teacher become drug dealer, or a mob boss. Or at least someone who is in prison.
I kind of like that some shows are also exploring how to tell stories of normal flawed people who don’t necessarily fall under “<flaw> with a heart of gold”. I think You’re the Worst is the best of these, but Love is not bad either.
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I also didn't get a Woody Allen vibe.
QuoteFurther to that, they were both horrible people and it only seemed to properly acknowledge that she was terrible. Then the rest seemed to be trying to extract comedy out of events that made me want to see everyone involved buried.
I don't think they were that horrible people. They had flaws. Maybe even really off-putting flaws. Maybe the early first season focused too much on their flaws, in fact. I know I found Mickey to be really annoying the first two episodes.
I think it was acknowledged that Gus was also very flawed. I mean, I don't even know how you would write him to be that flawed without acknowledging it. How would you even go about being more explicit about it? Whatever it is, it's not what I'm looking for in movies and TV.
(side note: I may have brought out some similar criticism to not acknowledging the rottenness of characters towards Three Billboards, but I think there's a difference of nuance. My argument there was that first they let bigotry be seen as the normal and then they made the bigots get away with things and the victims pay. And then they washed clean the biggest bigot, making him turn into a semi-hero. It's not about not acknowledging)
I think a better show with flawed people trying to have a relationship is You're the Worst, though.
[edit] That Carlito's Way title song though - awful shite.
Filmmaking
in Movies & Television
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I think the new version of the scene you saw is somewhat better in the new footage (and slightly worse in a few minor ways, plus I screwed up the focus in one shot, but it might not matter that much).
Do you mean that one scene from the test shoot or the whole movie? I think I'll definitely post the movie eventually, but I think if I send it to festivals I might not have the right to share it publicly before that? At least I can send it password protected like Patrick did. I might also make a trailer if I have time.