For The Love Of Post

My images and characters are just there, waiting for more direction. And they tell me something familiar, yet more real than I might have imagined when I first conjured them up in a coffeehouse a year ago.

I love post-production. I’m in love right now with my short film, “Street Language.”

When I get to post, it’s me, working alone in a studio. I have an array of materials and a blank canvas. It’s as I imagine painting to be, and different from writing, where everything is imagined. And there’s a bit of security in knowing that the canvas isn’t totally blank – I usually have a script of some sort – but it’s not paint-by-numbers. Today I’m polishing a rough cut of my film so my canvas has been prepped well by another editor who generously did lots of the grunt work.

And today, of course, I’m only dealing with bits of data that appear to be visuals and sounds, but it still feels real and concrete – even without reels of film and tape. (I think I heard that Walter Murch keeps little pieces of 35mm film around when he edits – he wants to feel that organic connection but is happy also to have the benefits of technology.)

I guess I love all of the stages of a film’s production because they all offer something different. I love to write and to see characters and drama appear – as if out of nothing – but out of my life and history and people I know.

Production is all about the joys and pains of collaboration. It’s where I get to blend my gifts with others’ gifts and we get to see what new things come from the creative synergy. But it’s the most fatiguing to me and I feel the most pressure as the Director. There is an appearance of control but it’s more like riding a runaway train over which you have some ability to steer, but not entirely.

So I come to editing with a sense of relief and anticipation. The film has grown and changed since it first entered my writer’s mind. It became something slightly different in the hands of actors, crew, and the vagaries of principal photography. Now, the results of that synergy are sitting on a hard drive in neat little folders, awaiting yet another transformation.

My images and characters are just there, waiting for more direction – a bit less on this line, so I grab a take that wasn’t circled – and they tell me something familiar, yet more real than I might have imagined when I first conjured them up in a coffeehouse a year ago.

Sweet candy.

Write Lots, Write Shorts

All the arguments aside about whether or not shorts can help you make it in Hollywood, I believe writing short film scripts can serve your craft in much the same way writing lots of bad (and a few good) songs helps a songwriter.

I just completed a short film script for a contest, one of these speed-writing deals where you get seven days to write a script no more than 12 pages long. I did it for fun and I’m not anxious whether or not my script gets picked as a finalist or anything like that. I did take it seriously, but it was more for my own benefit than any big dreams. I have made movies and I’m working on more, so it’s not my ‘ticket outta here’ win or lose.

[AND, I do really like my final script; that also makes it fun.]

What struck me today as I was e-mailing my entry off to the powers-that-be is that short film scripts could be more of a core creative outlet and emphasis for me. I have always envied people in other arts like songwriters, painters, sculptors, and poets. I have dabbled in some of these creative forms so I know the same discipline, drudgery, and pain are present in the creative process. However, in each of these you have at least two things going for you: typically a more compact end product, and you can usually complete something on your own. [I know there are epics in any medium, but I’m talking about more usual forms.] When I write a song or a poem I know that it will fit in perhaps a few pages at most. If I could paint, I could create full expressions in a corner of my room if I chose. I will certainly work and re-work the song but it is usually in a whole different category than a feature screenplay – which is more like an opera or symphony.

I recently found and shared a short video clip featuring some words of wisdom from Ira Glass, host of “This American Life” on NPR. He was speaking somewhere about storytelling.

Ira’s main point is that storytellers need to tell lots of stories, tell them often, make mistakes, and hopefully get better. I’m sure I’m not alone if I admit that I get bogged down and intimidated at the thought of cranking out many feature-length screenplays.

Obviously, there are things you can only learn by writing a feature. You can’t really master the many beats in a feature, full act structures, sub-plots, and many other things you must eventually master. However, writing a short film script can help you to master characters, scene construction, dialogue, economy in your writing, transformations, and many other principles that are essential to good writing. I had a lot of fun working within the arbitrary constraints of a 12-page screenplay. It’s like doing a tv commercial. People complain about the storytelling constraints until they learn that they can pack their seconds and frames with story, creativity, and characters; it just takes a different kind of discipline.

So, all the arguments aside about whether or not shorts can help you make it in Hollywood, I believe writing short film scripts can serve your craft in much the same way writing lots of bad (and a few good) songs helps a songwriter. Even better if you want to direct and produce as well because you can benefit in the same ways because you are actually working in your craft rather than bogged down in the epic. That will come with time.

The 99 Recommended Steps For Making Good Movies > Hope for Film

Great post from Ted Hope; inspiration to indie filmmakers everywhere. It may exhaust you to read this list, but read it anyway. Filmmaking is not for the half-interested or half-committed.

The 99 Recommended Steps For Making Good Movies > Hope for Film.

Worthwhile Reading – “The Writer’s Journey”

Christopher Vogler combines Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung to paint a picture of mythic structure in storytelling for film.

I’m reading “The Writer’s Journey”- one of the prominent screenwriting texts. In it, Christopher Vogler combines Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung (with Syd Field and Robert McKee looking on) to paint a picture of mythic structure in storytelling for film. It’s all Heroes and Archetypes and elixirs. If you want to understand popular film story structure, it’s an important read.

If I have any hesitation, it’s that Vogler presents an important point-of-view for film structure, but he often rhapsodizes about these mythic truths and ‘energies’ in a way that makes me feel like I’m in a new age self-help seminar. At least he’s enthusiastic!

Scenechronize: Plan Your Film in a Cloud

Here’s another option for planning – not free but pretty reasonably priced – for indie productions.

We’ve been using Celtx Studio as an experiment on our recent short film. I’ve been working on a comprehensive review of what I’ve learned about the pros and cons of that open source pre-production software.

It has been helpful, but part of the challenge is getting your team to adopt a new workflow. Celtx has been good for me in my multiple roles (Writer, Director, UPM,…) but people on my team (all volunteers, mostly young filmmakers) don’t have the experience with pre-production software and so have tended to revert to Excel and Word to keep track of things. Oh well.

Here’s another option – not free but pretty reasonably priced – for indie productions. I have not yet used it but it looks like it answers some of the weaknesses I have found in Celtx versus a ‘real’ package like MovieMagic. You still have to write your screenplay in some other program, but I have Celtx if I want and I also own FinalDraft, so no worries there.

Check out this link from “The Working Director”: Scenechronize: Plan Your Film in a Cloud : The Working Director : From Dreams To Deals.