Filmmaking

[Erkki]

I guess you can edit it into your post, Ben, I'll reply here.

 

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Just read the short script. Firstly - yep, this would be a pretty complex shoot, definitely one to hold off on until you've got a few more under your belt!

Yeah, it's too difficult for a first narrative thing to shoot, I'm going to try to come up with simpler ideas. And my initial one was even several times more complex so that one is totally shelved for now.

 

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I thought it was interesting, got the impression it was auto-biographical - maybe a combination of stuff that's happened to you? It also felt intentionally disjointed, even before the dream sequence - it seems like the woman might be connected to the thugs, then that goes away, then the homeless guy doesn't go anywhere. So, assuming this is the feel you're going for, it's interesting to consider how you might reflect this in the direction, editing, cinematography etc, and especially how/whether you'd differentiate from the strange 'real life' section and the dream section. It's narratively rather light/abstract, so it would probably be a good script to try out various stylistic stuff.

 

Yeah, it's autobiographical, it's pretty close to something that happened to me and I thought about whether that woman really said "help me!" or not for days. I guess it feels disjointed because I just wrote down the experience as I remember it, but my memory is not perfect and a bit fragmented. If I wanted to actually start shooting, maybe I would change a few things.

 

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The one thing I wasn't quite clear on was the last bit about seeing the camera from the car - did Andy leave the camera on the ground before getting in the car? Is this like a sacrifice they made to save the girl, in their idealised dream?

I think the last bit about the camera was a blooper, it was meant to describe camera movement, but the rest of the script didn't so I don't know why I left it in.

 

 

[Erkki]

BTW Ben, did you shoot Body Swap and is it available to see somewhere? I only read the script on your site.

[Ben X]

On 2/24/2018 at 11:45 AM, Ben X said:

I wrote (and produced, but it's horrendously amateurish)

 

So yeah, I filmed it, then finally ended up hurriedly editing it years later and cursing young me for not even getting usable takes for all the dialogue.

 

I haven't put it up online anywhere, mainly because it's horrendous and also because it features me doing full frontal nudity, but I could probably put it up as a private video on YouTube or something like that if you're interested in seeing it!

[Erkki]

I guess if you've decided not to show it in general, don't need to make it available just for me.

[Erkki]

Had a really hard time coming up with new ideas for screenplays. I had some ideas based on dreams but didn’t really believe in them. Now I remembered a quasi-story a friend has been telling me, some old Russian lady is living below him and gets agitated over the slightest noises. Now we’ll try to turn this into a script and shoot it, with my friend possibly playing both roles. Getting excited again!

[Ben X]

Sounds good!

[Erkki]

I'm trying a screenwriting software called WriterDuet after struggling with OpenOffice Writer. WriterDuet seems pretty good, and makes me focus more on the right things, compared to a plain word processor.

 

I wanted to try a Fountain editor, but they are all for Mac OS X! Absolutely nothing for Windows, it seems. I've actually been thinking of getting some kind of cheapest MacBook, but I haven't really seen the justification yet. I've actually never had a personal laptop, but then again maybe I should not drag my work laptop to film shootings and I definitely see that a computer would be useful to bring...

[TychoCelchuuu]

Trelby definitely works on Windows.

[Erkki]

46 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Trelby definitely works on Windows.

Tried it for a second, but I immediately saw that I prefer WriterDuet, which is web-based, though.

[Erkki]

I'm starting to wonder if I should spend some effort on lighting. I have ordered a LED light and will do some experiments. Ideally I would like part of the film to have lighting like Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, Kill Baby Kill or The Whip and the Body. But I don't know if he got his lighting with expensive gear or if cheap LEDs with gel filters could achieve something similar. Maybe I should buy the digital version of the colors of the dark book. Anyway, I think there's no harm in trying to imitate him, even if it fails in my first film.

[Patrick R]

The differences in both lighting equipment and photochemical color photography means it almost certainly won't be the exact Bava look, but it's certainly worth exploring. Maybe upon trying (and failing) to capture Bava's look you'll stumble upon your own.

 

I can't claim intimate knowledge of Bava's process but I'd be shocked if most of those lighting effects were accomplished with anything other than color gels and an insanely exacting eye.

[Ben X]

I found celtx pretty easy to use for screenwriting. Iirc, it's cloud-based and lets you share documents etc.

[Erkki]

I realized something about what I do and don't like in movies and now I'm completely rewriting what I had so far. I hope it will be much better, but I also feel like I'm getting farther from the original simpler idea and into a territory where I'm trying to make it resemble real movies more and I'm not sure if I can do it well enough.

 

I rewatched Mario Bava's Black Sabbath yesterday and now I feel like I'm a bit under it's influence...

[Erkki]

Ok, bear with me... it turned out this idea is now also too complicated since I wanted to turn it into something like a real (short) movie. I am now planning to do that as my second movie.

 

For my first, there's a story where a character living in our modern world is feeling down, sees an advert for a guru, gets advice from guru, the the advice appears to not work and finally works in an unexpected way.

 

The idea originally came from the lead's story about meeting an Indian guru (the oriental India). As I'm developing it, I am getting concerns that the portrayal of the meeting with the guru could become slightly racist. It's a very brief part of the movie, and the guru will have maybe one or two lines.

 

I initially thought I would decorate it like I imagine it would be, slightly exotic and oriental. However, if I put a white actor in that role, it's like cultural appropriation, if I put an actual Indian person, then the only Indian is put into an exotic role... Maybe I should make the guru into a modern person, not someone who is exotic or oriental?

 

Any advice?

[Patrick R]

12 minutes ago, Erkki said:

Maybe I should make the guru into a modern person, not someone who is exotic or oriental?

 

 

This seems like a good bet to me. There are all kinds of spiritual guides who seem like they'd fit this role. Also doesn't mean it can't still be a person of color in that role. 

[Patrick R]

So we've uploaded a very rough work in progress of my short to Vimeo so I can watch it and make some editing notes. If anyone wants to see it, it's about 3/4 edited abruptly ending about 3 minutes before the actual end. Interested in feedback, especially since I've been hearing my dialogue for so long it's all kind of beginning to lose it's meaning. Send me a private message if you're interested and I'll send you the link and password.

[Erkki]

Saw Patrick's WIP and I think it's quite promising.

 

My guru story has dropped the guru, but I've finished the first draft of the screenplay after working on multiple outline versions. If anyone wants to read it, PM me.

 

I think it again became a bit more complex than I wanted, but it's definitely shootable. Looks like a 10 minute movie as the screenplay is 10 pages. There are two main locations where I already have tentative permission to shoot and a few extra locations that are not completely essential. However, there are a few complications like a drag performance as the finale. I worry how to find an actor who meets certain requirements and can also do that. And how to shoot it. I don't have any contacts with people who do drag, it was mainly my co-writer's idea (and I don't actually know if she does either).

 

I think I have to stop with my progress of writing more and more shootable screenplays and decide that this is the one I want to shoot soon. But I will probably try to do some micro-films before. I've been watching D4Darious on YouTube and I find him really inspiring, he really pushes the idea of doing many micro-films.

 

[Patrick R]

I now have a start to finish rough cut of my short up on Vimeo and I'm looking for feedback. It's still got a lot of work to do (particularly with the sound, as you may notice from the silent first three minutes) but it's complete enough.

 

 

[Erkki]

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.

[Patrick R]

It is a montage-heavy script, but on the plus side a lot of it takes place in an office and you can probably get away with mostly natural lighting there. And inserts always go much quicker than stuff with dialogue. 

 

I didn't storyboard but here's the shot list for my first day of shooting for Number 12:

 

 

This was the night we shot without Olivia, the actor who plays Beth, and basically covered the first 4 or so minutes of the finished film. It took about 4 hours (9 PM to 1 AM) and had no dialogue. Some things took longer than they should (we spent about an hour sneaking up on wild rabbits trying to film them) and it also included us walking about 3 miles around the neighborhood getting to the different locations. It was just a two person crew (me and my friend) with very little sound recording so that made things go quicker. Most of the outdoor stuff I tried to get a couple takes of each shot to increase chances that there wouldn't be too many cars and pedestrians in the background because I wanted it to seem like 3AM even though we were shooting at 11PM. 

 

I don't have the shot list for the 2nd night of shooting because I hand-wrote that one but it was about 16 set-ups, all in the apartment, mostly with the actors staying put on a couch, and it took 7.5 hours. Things slowed down for the actual bits with the actors talking to each other because you had to do coverage (which mostly boiled down to two close-ups and a two-shot), multiple takes, give the actors the breathing room to get in character, etc. Onscreen it ended up being about 9 straight minutes of dialogue and massive speeches and the only reason we got through it in that time at all is because the lighting was extremely simple (one light plus the flicker of a TV with the brightness all the way up*) and the actors had their lines down very well**. Also, again, having a really small crew helped with speed, even if it hindered in other ways***.

 

Your script is very ambitious in a lot of ways but there's less talking and that will make things go a little quicker. If you can figure out the shots you don't need an actor at all you can do all those in a row with less crew. But also it's a very ambitious script especially for your start so again, I'd say maybe consider cranking out an easier simpler short over a weekend so you get a feel for it and how long everything takes.

 

 

*There are flicker boxes that simulate TV light but I'm told they're very intense and often can feel a little too strobey and David Lynch for naturalistic scenes. The A-B looping feature on your DVD player and futzing around with the TV settings can achieve a more natural and random TV flicker. And my actors told me having something on TV for them to actually watch was helpful.

 

**Stage actors have good endurance and can memorize a shitload of dialogue! My friend, who likes to cast non-actors, was impressed and said you generally can't trust non-actors to deliver more than a couple sentences per take. The downside is that stage actors don't really think about continuity and don't match their actions from take to take. Once I picked out the takes I thought had the best acting a lot of the editing process has become trying to edit around the ways they don't match-up at all. On that note I wish we had shot a couple of inserts of objects around the room, a sort of emergency way of linking two disparate shots. That's how we ended up using cutaways to what's playing on TV.

 

***There's a couple shots in Number 12 that drive me crazy because I think I put the camera in the absolute wrong spot (actors should not deliver long impassioned speeches in profile!) but because there were only two of us we spent all our energy worrying about boom shadow and focus and usable audio and other technical stuff that I didn't have the wherewithal as a director to notice my actors were turning their heads too far to the side.

[Erkki]

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.

[Patrick R]

That seems rational. It's also worth noting that, as you can see from the rough cut, we didn't move the camera that much and not having to coordinate many complicated dollies or pans sped up the shooting process as well, especially when it came to lighting.

 

I had read somewhere (or maybe heard on a commentary track) from a director who talked about working with two actors and one of them tended to give the best performance in their first take while the other actor tended to give their best performance in later takes, so when we did rehearsals I looked out for that. Sure enough, the actor who played Beth was freshest and most natural on her first run-through (and then started to flatten out, doing the same thing in later takes) while the actor who played Laura tended to get more relaxed and focused as they did it more and more. So when it came time to shoot I usually ended up starting with Beth's close-up, then the two-shot, then Laura's close-up.

[Ben X]

On 4/22/2018 at 7:48 PM, Patrick R said:

The downside is that stage actors don't really think about continuity and don't match their actions from take to take. Once I picked out the takes I thought had the best acting a lot of the editing process has become trying to edit around the ways they don't match-up at all. On that note I wish we had shot a couple of inserts of objects around the room, a sort of emergency way of linking two disparate shots. That's how we ended up using cutaways to what's playing on TV.

 

This reminds me of an anecdote Robert Rodriguez tells on the Dusk Til Dawn commentary (or making of doc, perhaps) - when he was shooting a conversation scene for El Mariachi, he got a ton of shots of a dog watching the actors, knowing that he might have to use it to paper over continuity cracks in the edit. While shooting a similar scene on DTD, he shot a ton of George Clooney reactions, but not before telling him about the El Mariachi trick and that in this scene, George was "the dog".  (To Clooney's credit, his reactions are great.)

[Erkki]

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.

[Patrick R]

The temp titles we have in right now bug me in ways I can't explain because I know nothing about graphic design. I also can't afford to pay anyone who does know graphic design, but all our titles are on hard cuts rather than superimposed, so I figured I could do the titles by hand and scan them.

 

 

This is not the final title by any means, but the chalk + black construction paper is a look I like a lot.