I'm at the Edinburgh Film Festival, jetlagged bad, and I'm asked for emerging filmmaker advice by some kid. He says, in particular, he wants to know about making art films and being a writer/director. Oh boy. I try to find something to say, but it's disingenuous and the kid knows it. I go back to the hotel room and roll around in the bed, can't sleep. The only thing on the T.V. is Michael Jackson's body bag.

I go to the window and look at the ancient castle and the ancient fog and I think about what I would tell the kid if I really had the nerve — if my nerves weren't all shot. This is what I'd tell him: If you really wanna make movies, and make them your own — there's gonna be loneliness. And no one really talks about it, but it's true, I promise. For instance, did you know that even the people you work with — a lot of them won't like the final product. They'll think you screwed it up and not really dig what you're doing. And your producers will hate you. And your editor will quit you. And your dog will give you dirty looks in the morning.

There isn't too much time to feel sorry for yourself. The distributors just sent you the poster and it's fine, it's fine, it's fine — you know it's fine — but Goddamnit it ain't the movie you made and you gotta at least try to make it the movie you made. At least try. But it's fine. But it's not. You take a long walk at three in the morning. Kick bottle caps.

The project is your project, and it is your problem. It's not anyone else's problem. In the years that you spend on the project, it's very likely you will never have a conversation with anyone about the project that makes you feel less alone with the project. The project is a problem.

But you know! You know it's true. You know what you're saying and that the movie is true. You're there again, in the editing room, long after the sane and mature people have gone home. You watch the scene go down again. And even some of those actors who don't like the movie — you love their performances in this movie they don't like. And even the editor who has left the building — her cuts are just so choice. And the costumes, and the camera moves, and the production design… You know. You know it's true.

But did you see what Orson Welles looked like towards the end of his life? Do you know what happened to John Cassavetes? And those are the Superheroes. What about us mere mortals? What kind of toll does this thing take? This indie filmmaking thing.

Late night movie mumblings and complaints, but now your lover is like — enuff already. Enough, yes, exactly. It's been years now. You know, for your health's sake, enough is enough and you gotta get away from the project. And you do. You start to write new stuff again. You play some volleyball. You even get to bed on time. But then there's that email. That email with the link to the trailer. That's the trailer? That's the trailer for your movie? I don't think so. This isn't gonna stand. Oh, but it will. Shoot. You're out on the street again, playing soccer with the bottle caps. Strangers cross to the other side. You've become a menace, man.

You read a New York Times article about Kenneth Lonergan and feel less crazy. You start talking with the couple producers who will still talk to you about future projects. You get scared at the possibility that these future projects might actually happen.

You go to a festival and some kid asks you for advice. You say something about "only doing it if you have no choice." The kid kind of rolls his eyes. You probably sound like one of his gym teachers.

Outside the movie theater, you get in a van. The van drives you back to the hotel. The driver of the van is talking excitedly about all the popular movies at the festival this year. You know these films well by now — they were the popular films at all the other festivals too. You're looking out the window at the cloudy streets, and you wonder what it would be like to make one of those really popular films. Something crowd-friendly, agent-friendly. And you start thinking of different scenarios and formulas.

You get out of the van, go into the crowded lobby. Everyone is listening to "Thriller" and having a good time. The lady at the front desk stops you, asks you if you are staying there. You tell her you are, produce a room key. She smiles apologetically.

In the elevator up there's a real old lady. She tells you that she saw your film today. She tells you how much she appreciated the quietness of it. You nod your head, lower your eyes, try not to let her know she just saved your life.

Read our interview with Noah Buschel at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival about this latest film, The Missing Person. Strand Releasing opens the film this weekend.

# @ 11/17/2009 10:13:00 PM Comments (4)

When I attended the Future of Music Conference this year I heard a lot of talk about all of the opportunities that exist today for indie musicians to create and distribute their products via digital media on the web. Later, at the Flyway Film Festival I heard former Tribeca CEO Brian Newman speak on similar topics in relation to indie filmmakers. The central theme to all of it is that indie artists can be successful without a major label contract or major studio distribution.

In the end though talk is cheap and what looks good on paper doesn’t always translate easily into the real world. I wanted to test the waters firsthand so I created a video podcast featuring live performances by indie musicians. The show runs roughly a half hour and I have been shooting a new episode every week for the past three weeks. In that time I have arranged distribution of the show via all the major video sites on the web. It is also available on TV via iTunes and Roku as well as on mobile devices and game systems.

So far the show has answered all my questions. It is indeed possible to create content of reasonable quality and achieve worldwide distribution using commonly available digital means. In addition it is possible, using these same resources, to cross the divide between computers and other systems such as cell phones, PDA’s, game systems and even TV via Roku and TiVo or AppleTV/X-Box/PS3. It is also possible to do it on a shoestring budget. The experiment, called The Indie Music Show has, to date, cost me around 2.5k.



This week, when I saw Jamin and Kiowa Winans of Double Edge Films sending out excited messages on Twitter to the effect that their movie Ink had been ripped and uploaded to Pirate Bay I was intrigued. I guess I was just sort of programmed by negative publicity to see sites like Pirate Bay as a bad thing. On the other hand, once I thought about it, I could certainly see the exposure potential of putting a project in front of the 140 million users of bittorrent sites worldwide. So I put my show up on Pirate Bay to see what would happen. In two days views of the show on its home page tripled.

It is more tricky for a movie though, since a movie is much more of a one shot deal than a weekly TV show. Most people will see a film once, maybe twice if they really like it and maybe buy the DVD if they really, really like it whereas a TV show needs to attract and hold repeat viewers. From that perspective the major studios and probably most indie filmmakers see a pirated film as lost revenue and so bittorrent remains pretty much unexplored territory in relation to positive outcomes.

Kiowa and Jamin on the other hand seem to be approaching the issue from a different perspective. I wanted to get their views on what is happening with their film and spoke to Jamin about it.

Filmmaker: Why are you guys having such a positive reaction to your film being pirated?

Winans: The last eight months have been a brutal struggle for Ink. We premiered the film at Santa Barbara Int'l Film Festival, signed with the agency UTA, and opened in Denver for a very successful eight-week run. However, indie film distribution in general has imploded. All the indie branches of the big studios have shut down and no one is buying films. So we took Ink out one theater at a time for the last several months ourselves trying to gain some momentum. The little money we made on each screen we used to push to the next screen. Theater after theater we had amazing crowds, reactions, and new fans, yet every decent distributor wouldn't touch the film. We knew we had an audience, but no way to get the film out wider to them. We were getting hundreds of emails, Facebook, and Twitter notes from people wanting to see Ink all over the world, but all we could tell them was "we're trying".

We finally decided to walk away from theatrical and make the film available on DVD, Blu-ray, and download as soon as possible. We figured the only way Ink was going to find it's way was to hand it over to the fans and hope they would run with it. Our hope was that Ink would slowly travel by word-of-mouth over the next year and ideally find it's way.

We knew Ink would likely get bit torrented eventually and accepted that it was unavoidable. However we never imagined it would happen immediately, blow up overnight, and spread all over the world. We were shocked by what was happening and spent the next several hours thinking there was some sort of mistake. But as it turns out, our one-year strategy of word-of-mouth was instead moving instantaneously. I've never seen a Hollywood campaign so effective and so instant as this has been.

Sure we could be upset that the film is getting downloaded for free, but that would make us jackasses wouldn't it? Ink was a $250,000 film with previously unknown actors. Hollywood distributors made it more than clear they saw no future for it. It was too bizarre, a mixed genre, unknown actors, low-budget. They wanted nothing to do with it. To pretend that we're really upset about the torrent would be acting as if we had all kinds of other options. No, we're thrilled Ink is exploding so much faster than we ever hoped.

FilmmakerWhat is the actual number of downloads that Ink has seen since being made available on the bittorrent channels?

Winans: It's hard for us to equate, but last I heard from the experts Ink's been downloaded over a half million times in about five days.

Filmmaker: I remember hearing you talk about making Ink at the Flyway Film Festival and you were saying that you raised the $250,000 budget for the film in part by mortgaging your house. So you obviously have a huge personal stake in the financial success of the film. On the one hand every download on Pirate Bay can be viewed as lost revenue which could be used to offset the cost of producing the film. On the other hand such a large number of downloads can be seen as a form of advertising that exposes the film to a much wider audience. I realize that it is much too soon to calculate the actual impact from having the film made available via pirate channels but what are the best and worst case scenarios from your viewpoint?

Winans: Kiowa and I don't see it as lost revenue, but fans gained. In fact, our revenue on the film has quadrupled in the last few days as a result of the exposure. It's still a fraction of what we need to be making to make it work, but it's a big step in the right direction. People are coming back to our website and buying disks, the soundtrack, posters, shirts, and making small donations. If that continues we'll be in good shape. However most downloaders are not spending money and it's certainly a possibility that they never will if that's the case, we could be hurting.

Here's the irony. We got completely screwed by the people distributing our first feature film, 11:59. We didn't get paid at all from one distributor, and barely from another. In the last five days, we've made more money from donations from "pirates" than we've ever made from a distributor. You tell me who the crooks are. Everyone is concerned piracy is going to destroy the indie film world, but I can say unequivocally that the distribution world is already destroyed because it's primarily made up of scam artists and thieves. If someone's going to rip off our film, I'd rather it be our fans than some sleaze bag feeding on struggling indie artists.

Filmmaker: I have been thinking about why major label bands or big studio films have the success they do. I mean, as often as not, products by the majors are no better than products by unknown artists in many respects and yet the majors totally control the traditional market. The obvious answer is the star power of the people in the film and the enormous amount of money that is spent on marketing. This seems to be why, even with two products of essentially equal quality (one indie, one major studio) side by side on the same "shelf" whether in a store or on the web, the studio film is always the one which makes money.

This is true even if consumers have not yet seen either film.

I wanted a term that would express this advantage in simple terms. I came up with "implied value" as a distillation of all of the ingredients that make an unseen film attractive enough to consumers so that they will invest their money in a movie ticket or DVD. Word of mouth from consumer peers is an important example of how a media project can gain this type of value and one which indie artists can best capitalize on since it doesn’t necessarily require a huge advertising budget to achieve.

From this perspective do you think that having Ink pirated and exposed to the huge audience represented by bittorrent users will increase the Implied Value of your film with the world audience? What is the biggest benefit you see — increasing general awareness of the film or sparking a larger base of word of mouth recommendations? I know from reading your tweets this week that this exposure has already caused Ink to rise to the level of a top 20 movie on the IMDb (Independent Movie Database) chart, which is certainly encouraging but do you see this translating into actual income via theater placement/attendance or DVD sales?

Winans: I don't think word-of-mouth has ever been as powerful as it is right now. Social networks and online communities have changed everything. From the beginning our principal has always been to establish fans and care for them. We're far more interested in creating a family-like fan base than we are in making general films that the studios can distribute. Rising the ranks on IMDB is cool because it's quantifiable in some way and it's nice to see Ink and the actors getting exposure, but we're much more interested in the individual notes that we get from fans telling us how much they love the film. These people are all we really care about because they'll likely be with us for a very long time. When all the hype dies down, they're still going to be our fans. And if we have our fans we don't need anyone else. I think your Implied Value theory is exactly right. Yes, I do think the recent explosion of the film has created new value for Ink. Paranormal Activity's implied value obviously sky rocketed even though it was made for $11k. In the end value really is perception. Each of us want to see the thing the rest of the world is seeing.

As far as translation into sales, the growing implicit value is certainly helping. Because Ink is blowing up a lot of people see it as a bigger film, more of a brand, and thus they're more willing to pay for it.

All this said, it's a scary time. We look at the file sharing of Ink as a great thing, however it works for us because we're a small film. The fact is, most people downloading it are not supporting it financially in any way. From everything I can tell this is not a sustainable model for bigger films. By bigger, I mean anything above $1 million which isn't much. If fans aren't paying for the films, who is? Hopefully it will all work out, but the concern is that the illegal downloading will destroy movies simply because producers have no way to fund them anymore. The only other tested and working alternative that I'm aware of is advertising and product placement and an enormous amount of it. So in the near future our film could be entitled Ink: Brought to you by McDonalds.

# @ 11/13/2009 06:11:00 PM Comments (4)

Aw man, I am thinking. Last Thursday’s New York Times is up on my computer screen and I’m looking at the virtual front page, just below what would be the fold. The headline: INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTE ON THEIR OWN. It’s turf I’ve become increasingly familiar with in the last couple of months since I started plotting a DIY course for my documentary Strongman and I dig in to the article. I don’t get too far before I realize I have a serious problem—Sacha Gervasi took out a second mortgage on his house to pay for the distribution on Anvil. I don’t have a house.

Maybe it’s just as well, of course. If I had a house, I probably would have mortgaged it long ago. The truth is a lot of us would. We are filmmakers who operate on a certain amount of faith. We make films because we believe — we believe we have something to say, we believe that we can say it in a way that’s unique and we know, we absolutely know, that people will care about it once it is done. And the cost of that kind of faith, whether measured in credit card balances or our personal lives, has never been small. But as the unspoken corollary of The Times piece suggests, those costs may increasingly go up for filmmakers.

For The Times is absolutely right that there has been a sea-change in certain segments of the traditional distribution landscape. Sure, the big players may still go to Toronto with their checkbooks, but for most of us that was never really an option anyhow. They were buying the kind of indie films where they already know the players involved, where the people are known quantities. For our kind of indie — the scrapping from the street up kind of indie, the Craigslist and duct-tape kind of indie — the big players and Toronto require visa stamps most of us just don’t have.

It’s what’s happening at the next level down in the industry that matters more to us. And the stories we hear trickling back through the grapevine don’t seem particularly encouraging: woefully small advances from established companies, smaller and smaller amounts being put towards advertising and marketing. At a time when the big players, no matter what they say, seem to be operating with at least a couple of small glances over their shoulders — furtive peeks at “what happened to the music business” or tightened breaths at the mention of the digital bogeyman ‚ it seems that timidity has crept into all levels of the establishment. People just seem a little unsure right now.

I think I understand what’s happening when I see more and more people with traditional distribution experience on their resumes hand me their business cards having reinvented themselves as as indie-film consultants, as DIY specialists. I get it when I hear the initials repeated more and more like some kind of post-DV-modern mantra. It’s like those earliest whispers about the internet — there’s this hot new thing massing out there, and if we can just get a hold of it quick enough, jump on board in the right way, find someone to explain it to us, it just may be the answer to the industry’s sense of temporary impermanence, the thing that is going to save us all from oblivion.

The truth is, of course, that for us filmmakers, there is nothing particularly “new” about DIY. There has been a slow creep towards DIY for a long time now: we now make websites, we make trailers, we design and make posters, all in the hope that an established distributor will notice. We have already done at least the first pass on work that a distributor would have traditionally done. And yet, even in those statistically rare cases where a traditional distributor does buy the film, it hasn’t raised the purchase prices. We already are doing DIY stuff without any of the benefits.

For more and more of us then, having already taken the lion’s share of the risk during production and now doing the basic distribution groundwork anyhow, taking that step towards full DIY begins to look exactly like a logical step forward and not some crazy blind leap off a cliff. Yes, we have reached a potential tipping point between traditional distribution and the DIY models, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For too long (from my vantage point at least), getting traditional “distribution” has been the metric by which too much of our business AND our art has been measured. Whether it’s critics who won’t pay attention to a film unless a name-brand distributor is attached (thus getting week-long runs) or film festivals who measure their importance by the number of acquisitions that happen at their festival, consciously or unconsciously, too many places have positioned themselves as feeder circuits for relatively narrowly-defined commercial success. Making traditional distribution the yardstick across so many levels of the food chain has really limited the kinds of films that get through each successive gate. At least from my vantage point, I think it has encouraged programming, writing about, and even making versions of films that we have increasingly already seen before.

A model where chasing traditional distribution is the gold standard makes it harder for all of us to take the risks necessary to make films that are different either in content (God help a politically conservative documentary get seen even on the festival circuit these days) or in form.

So what if there is less traditional distribution to chase?

Practically speaking, the DIY route is not easy. I say that from the front lines. I say that from the dozens of phones calls I make to get one call back. I say it from the emails I send out that float off into the ether of our virtual age.

Even with all the recent attention given to DIY, it’s still a path that will cause even the bravest of us some level of self-doubt. I measure my progress like some sort of Neanderthal ground fight. Both glacially slow and brutally rough, but you keep moving, hoping that critical moment in evolution is just around the corner. Ultimately, I think it is worth it, as too many of us have allowed the unspoken mandates of current traditional distribution to become a poor trade for artistic stagnation.

There will be a lot of talk in pages like these about what tools we should use to Do It Yourself. I can imagine it becoming a debate that plays itself out over the next couple of years within varying camps — the DIYdays crowd vs. the folks who have enough capital to do a service deal and buy themselves a more traditional distribution approach. But whatever the mechanics end up being, that in itself is not really the most exciting part. It is like getting caught up in the details of a new computer plug-in. It’s fun, it’s exciting, but ultimately they are just tools. The real revolution is not which tools we use — it’s what we do with them.

And for a brief moment, it seems like we have a chance to change that. As DIY distribution becomes increasingly viable, we can get to place where current commercial distribution becomes less and less of a shaping influence on our work. For if this revolution is to have real permanence, it can’t just be about our business — it has to also be about our art.

As I go down this DIY path, there have been a lot of times recently when a moment from my days as college DJ have come flashing back into my head. At the time I did a country music radio show, and I remember once probing Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings about the origins of their '70s Outlaw revolution against Nashville’s traditional infrastructure. “Well, you see,” Waylon began in his slow, deep drawl, “it was that age-old conflict between management and labor,” pausing to let the David vs. Goliath simplicity of the struggle sink in. “So we decided to become both.”

Then of course Willie piped in — “Yeah, we really screwed up.”

Sometimes total A-to-Z control is the last thing we really need as artists of course. We fight to knock down every wall we see and then wake up the next morning and don’t recognize the rubble-strewn landscape in front of us. “Man, what the heck do we do now?” we ask. Have we just added 10 more things to our to-do lists?

Perhaps. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making a mistake by doing it. For as in Waylon and Willie’s case, or in the case of so many other business and creative revolutions, whatever trail that gets cut on the business side can quickly become over-grown again. The industry is very good at seizing on tools that seem to work and making them their own. What has the potential to remain unique and long lasting is the artistic work that comes from these tools.

Of course, this is not a battle between management and labor. Everything from the studio collapse of the 1970s to last decade’s DV revolution has e already changed the politics of factory floor production. This one is about post production. It is about the conveyer belt at the very end of the line — the one that can only handle certain size boxes, the one that can only move at a limited number of speeds, the one that can connect only to certain size trucks to take the product to the customers. So either off-sized boxes pile up at the loading dock, or we don’t make them at all, or we start building methods to get them into trucks, no matter what size.

So what does this mean for us as filmmakers? We can increasingly become our own distributors, or perhaps soon even viable mini-exhibitors streaming our films from our own websites. We can tailor distribution models to individually fit our films rather than the other way around. We can Twitter and friend our way to brand-name recognition, but at the end of the day... we still want to be filmmakers first. DIY can’t become just an excuse to have filmmakers do more of the work. If we take the risk, we should not only reap the financial rewards for that, but we should do it in a way that allows for the filmmakers that follow to be in a better position creatively.

That means we might collectively have to do more work now. Too many non-profit art houses — the kind of places that should be most likely to take artistic risks — have retreated to becoming essentially second-run houses for more established distributors. Rather than building loyal local audiences, they worry about what happens in New York or LA. We will have to hold their hands. We will have to reassure them that there is a community of filmmakers that will support films without the shrinking advertising dollars of a brand-name distributor. We have to help build stronger local exhibition scenes. We will have to work harder to get the mainstream press to pay attention to our films, whether they play a week or a night. And we should do better at promoting each other’s work.

It won’t be long before the industry becomes calcified again around whatever develops from this, but at least for the moment, I think we as filmmakers have the kind of chance that comes along only every once in a while. It is a chance to remake not only how we get paid or what tools we use to get our films seen, but really the kind of films that the public sees. That ultimately is the most exciting part of this whole thing.

The conveyer belt at the very end of the line has been causing us to re-size and shape our films for too long. By building our conveyer belts, our own networks, it seems we have a chance to re-shape not only our financial future, but also, if we play our cards well, a new creative future as well.

In a lot of ways, the choice is ours. As we do DIY, we can choose to make the same kinds of films we have always been making and get them seen. We can simply replicate what the established distributors are doing anyhow. But we can also use this moment to push ourselves to make new kinds of films and get them seen. That is what I hope we choose to do.

# @ 10/27/2009 10:06:00 PM Comments (3)

Here's Part 2 of Jamie Stuart's look at Apple's new Final Cut Studio, which he used to make his short film, Isn't She?.... Read Part 1 of Stuart's review in the Fall issue.



A week before I was set to resume shooting Isn't She?..., I installed Apple's new OS Snow Leopard. I proceeded to spend the entire week flipping out, losing hair, sending dozens of freaked out e-mails to Apple.

The cause of my China Syndrome? QuickTime X. And ColorSync.

For Snow Leopard, Apple decided to realign the OS's color mechanics to work with ColorSync. Furthermore, the new version of QuickTime, QuickTime X, was not just designed to upgrade the program from 32-bit to 64-bit, but they also sexed up the standard interface to make it more palatable to casual users.

Simply put. In no uncertain terms. QuickTime X is a fucking abomination.

And Apple knew it wouldn't fly for professional users. So they've maintained a new version of QuickTime 7 that works with all pro applications. In fact, they even confirmed to me that QuickTime X, with its over-saturated, over-bright picture that bizarrely features the controls over the image, is specifically for common users — while they recommend QuickTime 7 for pros.

Thing is, though, QuickTime 7 doesn't even look exactly how it used to — because the OS is now synched to ColorSync. The blacks aren't as rich. The color is a little less saturated and milky.

What this means is that, let's say I create and upload a Quicktime for people to see online. I'll be mastering it using the new Quicktime 7. However, once it's online, because QuickTime X is the OS default, it'll be viewed in QuickTime X if you're on Snow Leopard. If you're on a previous OS, you'll view it using the old QuickTime 7. Or, if you download the video and you're on Snow Leopard, you can watch it with either X or the new 7. Point is: Whereas in the past I was mastering for a one-format-fits-all-sensibility, now my work, while mastered with one program, might actually be viewed by any one of three programs. And that kinda sucks.

Eventually, I adjusted to the properties of the new QuickTime 7, and, putting that mess behind me, the first day of shooting arrived. Four days later I was in post-production and putting Final Cut Studio through its paces.

This short film, which was originally supposed to be a light dramedy in the Hughes/Crowe mold had morphed into a technically complex monster with dozens upon dozens of VFX composites: Everything from simple cover-ups to 3-D cartoons to 3-D photorealistic animations (I even created masks to blur background areas that picked up lens adapter grain because the focus was too close). I found myself becoming a sort of DIY Fincher.



One spirit-crushing composite was the brilliant result of trying to be creative during the shoot to save time. In order to simplify a montage, I concocted the idea that the main character would walk along in a wide shot as the background changed to show both a passage of time and location. Shot it in a few minutes. Great. Onto the next scene.

In post-production, however, the reality hit that I was going to need to rotoscope her walking with a 40-point mask for 250 frames! Furthermore, due to street traffic, most of the backgrounds were composites as well. Then, I was also going to have to deal with objects like trees and fire hydrants that she passes behind while moving. These are not the types of shots that are supposed to be found in DIY productions. And it was one of dozens.

The bulk of the compositing consisted of manufacturing — and often animating with a 3-D camera — computer screens, Blackberry screens and web pages. Each screen needed to be built from scratch, each web page required graphic design.

At a certain point in the haze of doing all this, just getting to switch up by flopping one shot 180˚ because I accidentally shot the character's wrong hand (and also adding digital steam to the contents of her cup), felt like a delight.

I shouldn't complain, because I truly enjoy doing all that stuff. That's what it's all about if, like me, you get off on using the medium to its fullest. This is why I'll never understand and respect filmmakers who simply pick up a digital camera, handhold it and improvise with their friends. So what? Just plain lazy.

If anything, expectations are so low for DIY work that it's incumbent upon the filmmaker, in my opinion, to work even harder to prove himself. DIY is a method not an aesthetic. There's no excuse, no matter what your budget is, for a lack of creativity or lazy technique. None. Whatsoever. Good filmmaking is good filmmaking.

Anyhow, aside from the initial freakout over Quicktime X, both Snow Leopard and Final Cut Studio have been mostly hassle-free. Snow Leopard even cleared up about 10 GB on my hard drive.

One strange defect I've noticed, however, is in the relationship between Final Cut Pro and Color — though I'm not sure whether this is a FCS issue or a possible QuickTime X issue.

Basically, Color is supposed to import Final Cut's 3-wheel color corrector if it's been applied to a shot and treat it as if it's a primary adjustment. There were about 50 shots that I sent to Color to create corner vignettes to replicate the look of the lens adapter (either because they were composites from scratch or close-ups I shot without the lens adapter). Most of the shots returned to Final Cut without any irregularities. However, a handful of shots that I'd adjusted the color on using the 3-wheel color corrector (I'm not talking about mids or blacks, actual color shifts) came back looking putrid. It was as if Color imported the color correction, then added the same color correction on top of it again. The results were over-saturated in the direction I'd previously shifted the color.

What else? What else? Soundtrack Pro. I used Soundtrack Pro as I always have — to both record all the foley sounds (the only live audio I ever use is dialogue), and to also manipulate tracks that require effects like reverb, distortion and so on.

For this short, even though I had great music from Edie Sedgwick (Justin Moyer), there were a handful of diegetic pieces that needed to be character specific. For two of the characters, I simply used loops from Garage Band. But for another character, I wanted a very specific pseudo-indie rock sound, so I quickly wrote and recorded a handful of riffs combining drum loops with my acoustic guitar distorted to sound like a lo-fi electric guitar garage recording.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm five days away from premiering the short at this point. My brain is flattened, fetid roadkill. I can barely make enough sense of language to make words cohesive. Hopefully, it shows in the finished short.

Nothing else to say. Splat.

Below is a teaser of Isn't She?.... See the short here.

# @ 10/26/2009 08:02:00 AM Comments (0)

For the past three years, we’ve been pursuing a noble goal: to try to talk about movies and meaning in a way that might interest someone other than ourselves. We do this over at The Film Talk, and want our work to be an ongoing conversation about the movies and how they intersect with our lives. You’re welcome to join the conversation. Sometimes it’s difficult enough for us to interest each other, so that can be a pretty tall order. But thankfully there is sometimes also serendipity in talking about cinema – one of us has insights into the human experience that switches on a light for the other; as when Jett saw Tarantino’s coruscating satirisation of our culture’s addiction to violence (repelled one minute, compelled the next) in Inglourious Basterds, or when Gareth found so much to like about The Hurt Locker that it made Jett like it even more. We still can’t agree about Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, though.

After three years of this ongoing conversation, we’re in a position to consider some of the themes under which cinema, at least of the kind that gets released in the US, sails.

The first theme we want to discuss is how to make films that will last...

OK — so you’ve come up with your concept: Boy meets Girl. Or Boy meets Boy. Or Boy meets Rampaging T-Rex. Or Taxi Driver meets Himself. Or Girl meets Archaeologist. Or Boy meets Multinational Corporation CEO. Or Boy meets Antichrist played by Sam Neill. Or Big Boat hits iceberg with lots of well-dressed Boys and Girls on board.

You’ve got your set-pieces: Boy runs away from Huge Rolling Boulder in South American cave. Girl goes to the Opera with Richard Gere. Boys and Girls find pirate ship and get the gold to stop their houses being turned into a golf course. Boy observes a giant bell being crafted in medieval Russia and decides to paint religious icons again. Boy tries to avoid crossing ghost-killing laser streams with other boys. Taxi driver shoots Harvey Keitel’s hand off. Boy and other Boy talk to each other at a dinner table. Boy defuses Bomb in Iraq. Boat sinks.

You’ve got your philosophical intention: Peace on earth. Love conquers all. Life is difficult (the trick is not minding). Love hurts. Serial killers sometimes eat the right people. War is hell. Life is beautiful.

And you’ve got your open-ended ambition: An Oscar. A Palme D’Or. An honorable mention by FIPRESCI. A Sundance screening. A Toronto screening. A screening, anywhere. Please. A DVD release. Or the hope that someone may one day care enough to want to download a pirate copy of your film. Or maybe your mom will watch it. Or maybe you really will get that Oscar.

Concept + set-pieces + philosophy + ambition may be stirred together to produce the early stages of a treatment. It is at this stage that your friends in film criticism must urge you to STOP. Take a look around. We want to suggest five things you might want to think about before going anywhere else. They may not be the most important five things, but they are nonetheless important, because they constitute some of the most frequently missed opportunities in movies.

1: Psychological motivation

The terrain of the human soul is not easily navigable; anyone who has ever tried to be a person or even just watched ‘Oprah’ knows this. There is, surely, a relationship between the wounds we have all suffered, and the behavior we manifest toward others and ourselves, but, let’s face it, much of the time we have no idea why we do what we do.

So, here is our arbitrary rule number 1: Don’t use childhood or other trauma in the background of a character as shorthand for explaining their behavior unless you’re willing to earn it.

Examples? Hitchcock’s Spellbound probably looked pretty innovative on its 1945 release – evoking the then new science of psychoanalysis; but the absurd notion that a man responsible for the death of his brother could get over it just by remembering that it happened makes the film look like a Zucker Brothers comedy today. On the other hand, if you want to see how psychological depth can exist in a film that, at first glance seems to pay no attention to it, have another look at Unforgiven; hardly anything explicit is said about Clint’s motivation for killing, but the shading of maternal loss – his wife, presumably his mother, and the innocence of the prostitute whose scarring he aims to avenge – would give an analyst more than enough to work with in trying to replace outward violence with psychological integration.

2: Film as conversation

Two statements that seem true: Art is always in conversation with the real world. Many of us have forgotten this. Last year’s box office hit Wanted seemed to forget that its mockery of bland automaton economic activity was sneered at by, among others, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, whom, we can presume, do not often have to suffer the vagaries of working in a call center cubicle. More than that, it ignored the fact that there really are people in the audience who get turned on by the fetishisation of firepower, and that the notion that dehumanization for entertainment’s sake taught us a few lessons about life-imitating-art during the era of Victorian circuses.

On the other hand, Inglourious Basterds knows from the very beginning that it’s in a conversation with the real world; and not just because of its ostensible basis in history. The violence isn’t played for laughs, because Tarantino knows the world already laughs at human misfortune enough to regularly forget its own humanity. Wanted was accused of misogyny; it doesn’t warrant that moniker, because its characters are so dehumanized that their gender doesn’t get a look in.

3: Less is More

It's not the early days of cinema anymore when folks were shocked and stunned by an approaching train, a stop-motion giant gorilla or a big sphere in space being blown up, (I exclude the audience for Transformers of course — that's not the kind of movie-making, and we use that term loosely here, we're talking about).

The point is that people now know movies - they've internalized narrative structure, they're familiar with the cliches, they get who's the hero and who's the villain - you don't need to spell it out for them. To make your movie stand out now you don't need more - you need less.

The masters knew this. Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey — Stanley Kubrick removed the film's exposition as much as possible in the editing stage - interviews and voice-overs that might give some hint as to what the hell was going on were cut. As Kubrick said at the time "How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.'"

Andrei Tarkovsky knew this — watch Andrei Rublev, perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the movies. It's a series of chapters with no exposition, nobody holding your hand — telling you what's going on — hell, the protagonist of the movie isn't even in every chapter. And it works.

It's not just past artists who knew this 'less is more' secret. Kathryn Bigelow gets it implicitly - The Hurt Locker is a series of short stories, with all the fat cut away. It's up to you, the viewer, to make what you will of the story - and in that sense films like The Hurt Locker, 2001 and 'Rublev' are the real interactive cinema — not movies with 3D glasses or based on video games.

So do less with more - by having the audience have to work out what's going, (meaning they actually have to participate in the movie), your pic will become a real, tangible thing to people, and therefore last a lot, lot longer.

4: Auteur theory is dead - Collaboration is the Key

Mike Leigh makes consistently thoughtful, reflective, and just plain good movies; and he is usually considered to be one of the most distinctive directors working today. His scripts are famously shaped in concert with a long rehearsal process; and perhaps most challenging to the notion that films belong to the director along, for 20 years until his untimely death this year, he was intimately supported by producer Simon Channing Williams. Since High Hopes and up to Happy Go Lucky Leigh made films that worked, and he has spoken of the importance of collaboration in making this happen.

Recently on our podcast, Ramin Bahrani, the brilliant director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo made it clear how important cinematographer Michael Simmonds is in the process of making his films. They collaborate together during the script stage, while shooting of course, and even during post. We're so often fixated on directors that it doesn't occur to critics to list Ramin's three films as the work of Bahrani/Simmonds, or even to mention Simmonds much in reviews. But they should. The writer of The Wrestler, Robert Siegal, has just directed his first film, Big Fan, and Michael Simmonds shot it. Watching that pic it's hard to imagine it would be anywhere near as powerful without Simmond's careful placement of camera and gritty yet blanched out images - he's a huge asset. So don't be shy or intimidated, work with the most talented people you can find. If it works for Mike Leigh and Ramin Bahrani it can work for you.

As for number 5., well, we were commissioned to write a 1000 word piece, and, like all passionate film critics, are already talking far too much. Tune into the next episode at The Film Talk for the exciting conclusion to our humble contribution to answering the question: "What Should You Do If You Want Your Film To Last?"

# @ 10/18/2009 12:45:00 AM Comments (3)