The new Mozarts

I've been coming across more and more marketing references to this 1991 quote from Francis Ford Copolla in which he predicts that one day, "some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father's camcorder."

In the publicity materials for Able Edwards, writer/director Graham Robertson states—“Francis Ford Coppola once said there would come a day when some little fat girl from Ohio would borrow her dad’s camcorder and become the next Mozart of moviemaking. We like to think that we are that little fat girl.”

Here's another one from the website for Jason Tomaric's CL.ONE—"Francis Ford Coppola is rumored to have remarked: 'Some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camcorder.' It turns out the girl in question is actually Jason J. Tomaric (who purchased his own camcorder)."

It's curious that the quote is used to describe two extremely effects-heavy science fiction films. It's almost as if visual effects are seen as a fusion of "beautiful" and "camcorder"—an integration of art and technological progress. It's also surprising to me that it's OK to think of oneself as the next Mozart. I would guess that calling yourself the next Newton or Einstein would be seen as unforgivably egotistical, but not so in the case of Mr. Mozart. My only guess is that perhaps Mozart has been devalued and that today, "we're all Mozarts." Or maybe they're just being silly.

More Apple Color tests

Above you see the original color-corrected footage at top and some test footage on the bottom using Color's bleach bypass effect and other corrections. You can see that the bottom image has a broader range of colors. This comes from correcting out most of the orange cast in the original image. Just as an image I think it's nice. The final image will probably be somewhere between the two.


The top image is the original uncorrected footage. The bottom is corrected and also has Color's bleach bypass effect added. I used the scopes a lot on this one. Note that when compared, the more magenta version at top makes it look like Ben is swelling up in an April heatwave.

Apple Color

Once you spend money, you always have to spend more. I'm not sure why it works that way, but it just does. I bought Michael Wohl's (expensive) book on Apple color today and started working with the software. I learned a lot just by going through a couple of chapters. While reading the text I finally made a connection between the 3-way Color corrector and Photoshop's Levels command. At the basic level, they do the same thing and for some reason, it never occurred to me before.

Working with Color was baffling at first but it now makes sense following Wohl's well-written and informative tutorials. My test color grades of noise film look much better than my previous grades. This is strange considering that in FCP I was essentially doing the same thing with the 3-way color corrector. Maybe it's because I'm better at using the scopes now. One thing that surprised me was how much you can do with the scopes alone, even without looking at your image. It's almost like learning how to fly by instruments. Already, I can sense that going through this process is giving the project more consistency. It's kind of fun working in Color but there is a fatal flaw. Color wants to be last in the production pipeline because you have to render files before going back to FCP. It looks like there is no way to tweak color corrections. If you want to make changes you have to work on the sequence again from scratch.

I'm still finding all sorts of things in the footage now that I'm seeing it big. The grain's changing all the time. Some shots—little grain. Other shots—lots of grain. I'm also seeing little things like brushstrokes on the props which weren't visible at the smaller size. In one shot I found the Omni light in the background and you can sort of read "Omni."

This might work

The question: how can we shoot Ben ASAP when his hair doesn't match the preceding shots? Answer: He's in the desert. So maybe it's so hot that he's sweating and it causes his hair to droop. And in one shot we see him wipe his head. Alternately, maybe he ties a hankerchief on his head to protect himself in the sun. I think either of those might work. Seriously.

Size matters?

It's interesting using the 24" monitor. At times I feel like George Lucas sitting in front of his plasma screen while directing. At other times I feel like I'm in a studio of the future—a studio I couldn't have imagined when we used to edit at MetroPost in Austin for $250/hour. But most of the time, it just feels... normal.

What's weird is looking at the noise film footage. I'm seeing everything in much greater detail. One of my visual effects shots is terrible. You can see the ripply line where I erased things. No one will notice it unless they're looking for it but I didn't even see it on my old monitor. Grain is much more apparent on the new screen. On another shot I found I was able to see brush strokes on the shrine prop. The color is very consistent with the old screen, however. No surprises.

I've also been playing around with Apple's Soundtrack. The cinematic stuff is good—as good as or better than the royalty-free pieces I've been listening to on the web.

Now I have to decide whether I want to color correct in Color. Not the easiest thing to learn, partially because of the interface, but mostly because color-correcting is time-consuming and kind of hard.

Cloverfield: Blair Witch meets Poseidon Adventure

I saw a reasonable chunk of Cloverfield tonight, a Blair Witch for the 2000's that uses the iconography of low-tech video to create terror. It's interesting to see the disaster movie updated for the new millenium. But in the end it reminded me a lot of the Poseidon Adventure (my long-winded analysis) in its inability to reconcile the needs of Hollywood cinema with the circumstances of life-threatening reality.

First, I was unable to get past the idea that someone was supposed to be running around shooting this footage in a life-threatening situation. Me, I would drop the camera and run.

Second, the people didn't seem confused enough. Yes, the crowds did hysterics well and they sure ran a lot. But a lot of what happens in a disaster is confusion—people not knowing what to do and not even knowing enough to take cover. A good example was at Target last week. The fire alarm went off and people just stared at the ceiling, wandered around a bit and then nervously continued shopping. Hey you guys, this is a fire alarm! Me, I went toward a door just in case this was the real thing (it was a false alarm). Plus, it's only in movies where people run down the streets. It's a film image like Jurassic Park II where people run down the arroyo away from the T-Rex. Yes, it looks swell. But in my world, people don't run down streets. They disappear into buildings like rats.

Third, I was annoyed by the way the filmmakers slowly reveal the monster. Of course it makes sense dramatically... you don't want to give away the whole thing at once. Yet, the slow reveal is antithetical to the way our culture handles anomalies. We are a technological culture, a culture of examination and vivisection. The very first thing we would do is turn the monster into a subject and in doing so give ourselves a feeling of control. So we would get nice big clear images (night vision, spotlight, etc.) of what we are fighting. Of course the filmmakers don't do this because this makes the mood of the film less scary. But that is exactly why we handle emergencies in this way.

Fourth, this might just be me, but in my view of disasters, you get some collective screams when something careens at you but there is also a lot of silence. People are too busy thinking to be talking. Cloverfield felt like people constantly talking which is part of the reason I was hoping everyone in the movie would die and soon. Am I just getting old? I hated all these twenty-something characters.

So my version of Cloverfield would be like this. People are at a party. Some news special comes on the TV. Some people would ignore it. Other people would try to see what's going on. There would be lots of confusion for awhile. Some people ignore the situation not wanting to look stupid. Others trying to slowly inch their way to the door. People are generally confused and not sure whether to respond.

Then some pandemonium. The camera gets dropped and you don't see anything except an occasional glimpse. For 15 minutes we hear intermittent voices and sounds and sirens. Then maybe the camera gets kicked so that now we see a TV. And we see exactly what the monster looks like and all sorts of attempted visual analysis. And what's frightening isn't the impotence of the military or the sight of the creature but the way we use technology to try to create a sense of control that we do not have.

Anticipation strategies

1) presenting a puzzle, something unconventional or non-canonical
2 suspenseful music
3) slowly revealing (e.g., dollying in or out)
4) "But then..."
5) dramatic irony (bomb under table)
6) Just explain what's going to happen (e.g., Star Wars briefing room sequence)

Painting yourself into a corner

Even though I'm always complaining about shooting "second unit," I'm actually really happy with the overall strategy. I think second unit is usually seen as a way to save time or money. But for us, second unit is a way to delay certain decisions until the very end. It's actually a time where certain important, but not vital artistic decisions are made.

When Ben gets out of his car in the desert, the first thing he does is look at something in his hand (see the video in an earlier post). In the desert he was looking at a tiny compass. But as the clues changed, it became necessary to change this to a map so we picked up the shot in Ben's backyard. I now need to shoot this insert once again with the new map (At Turning's End). Not a big deal. Likewise, I just finished shooting the shrine interior (yet again) in the garage. Those are my hands touching the shrine interior. But even though Ben's and my hands look nothing alike, it's so shadowy in there that it cuts fine. And I was able to adjust the action and prop to match the bird scene that is to come. The major plot points and function of the story elements haven't changed. But the minor elements, the way we get from point A to point B remains in flux.

That's always been part of the strategy. This isn't the Da Vinci Code where the story is built around the specific clues. In our film, the clues are just ways to get from one point to another using specific props. The small details only matter insofar as they relate to the overall structure of certain sequences. For example, it was important to get Ben out to the desert. But it didn't matter whether it was via the Destination Infinity poster or the At Turning's End poster. I made the change because I wanted to deemphasize the "perpetual motion" angle of the film to streamline it. Ben still gets out to the desert, but in a cleaner, less distracting way.

Help me solve two problems!

If there's anything filmmaking is about, it's solving problems. Here are two that are stumping me. Anyone have solutions? First, it's the Ben hair problem. Ben cut his hair and now I want to shoot a pickup scene with the dead bird. How can we do this without waiting several months for his hair to grow back? His face appears only in two shots. There's a reaction shot, a close up, and one long lens shot where he walks toward the camera. I told Ben that his hair doesn't have to match exactly, that this scene comes right after seeing the shrine in the desert so he should be like Moses coming down from Sinai. Remember Charlton Heston? He comes down from the mountain and now he looks older and has a white beard (at least that's how I remember it). Hair, it is a real problem.

My other problem is the very last shot. In the previous sequence Ben has been typing about his dilemma and I want to find a way to visualize it. The idea is to show how Ben's ideas are being ignored. I've had a lot of previous ideas for this shot—paper blowing down a street, people walking past Ben's flyer ignoring it, Ben talking to someone on a phone and the camera dollies along the wires and then to smoke rising from the top of a building, camera tilts up to a starry sky. None of these ideas seems quite right. Ideally I want a shot of individual letters scattering and floating away but I can't find a way to rationalize a shot like that. My most recent ideas have bordered on the ridiculous—Ben eating alphabet soup and then he stirs the soup. A little help please.

Time clock, computer, slide viewer, royalty-free music

So much for the time clock idea. I ran the time clock for a few hours and it moved ahead only a little. So I'm going to have to open it up to get it to read the right time.

I picked up a computer today. I realized that in the past 7 or so years when I've exclusively used laptops the world has changed. At one time, interfaces were modular so you put windows where you needed them. But starting with After Effects 7 and with Apple's Color, you pretty much need a big monitor because everything appears contextually in one giant window. Good way to sell hardware Apple.

Got the slide viewer today. It works even better than I had hoped. You can drag film strips through it and they slide sort of like microfilm. It looks great. Plus I already have a lot of old filmstrips that I can use for filler. Now I have to find a place that turns computer files into sequential shots on 35mm film.

I've been checking through royalty-free music sites in case Dan can't come through with music. The ones I like best are stockmusic.net and premiumbeat.com. My idea was to find stuff and modify it a bit. I also need to check through Apple's Soundtrack and see if there's anythign usable.

stockmusic.net
magic box
deranged innocence
allure of night
chamber of echoes
american beautyish
REFLECTIVE
film beauty
lost
film EDGE SUSPENSE

premium beat
spirit of meditation
requiem for a waterfall

Ben don't cut your hair & cooling down shots

Just a note to Ben—DON'T CUT YOUR HAIR! I really want to get those shots ASAP.

Another in a long series of entries that I should label "oh no, more color correction blathering." I've been trying to find the best way to cool down shots. All the procedures that I used so far weren't working well. I think the problem is that these approaches were "canned"—that is, you apply the same recipe regardless of what the footage looks like. The results haven't been very satisfactory so I tried another approach which is to desaturate the appropriate channels or colors. I know this is a common way to go about it, but I've never done before. In the image on the bottom, I desaturated the yellows and then crushed the blacks. It came out pretty well I thought. So this is one of those (many) times where how you describe an effect looks different from how you create it. In my mind I was thinking that the image needs to look more "blue." But in reality, it needed to look "less yellow."

No pain no gain

Today I shot more second unit. First I had to get the At Turning's End poster printed. Last time I had it done at Winkflash. It looked beautiful, but I wanted to shoot today and I didn't want to wait a week so I had it done at Kinko's. Curiously, going to Kinko's was the least painful part of the process. I guess it's been a long time since I've been there. I handed them a USB drive, they opened up Photoshop and printed out the document. People nowadays don't realize that at one time, you would never get the colors you saw on your monitor. It was also a lot cheaper than Winkflash. The printout was great... except for a design problem. I realized that the important information should be in white, plus you can't really see black ink on brown. So I redid the poster and then printed again. You would think it would be easy to shoot a poster taped to a box but I had to root around the house searching for my Xacto to cut the poster out. Then I had to find a backing board (I ended up using the back of our $12 camera dolly). Then when I was framing I kept seeing this red thing reflected in the tape. It was a warning sign taped to the garage door. So I had to cover that with cardboard. Next—what genius at Sony decided that it would be a good idea to put the cassette mechanism under the tripod plate? Anyway, I finally got the shots done.

Next, the time clock. Of course it never occurred to me that time clocks are built so that you can't easily change the time. Duh! And of course I didn't have the key. And of course, even though you unscrew the back, the shell doesn't come off. So I now have it plugged in waiting for the time to change to 8 o' clock.

Then I had to shoot the typewriter typing. I forgot what it was like working with manual typewriters. The handle kept hitting the case because I closed it wrong. It took awhile to figure out how to set the margins. Then I had to type! It had to sit in an awkward position with one arm going through the legs of the tripod in order to get the shot I wanted. Fortunately I'm a pretty good typist (I used to be a secretary).

So my aversion for shooting second unit continues. Second unit directors may not have to deal with temperamental actors but they do have to deal with temperamental things which may be almost, but not quite as annoying.

Tak Fujimoto

Over the weekend I caught a glimpse of Caged Heat—an old Roger Corman-produced women-in-prison flick. Shot by Tak Fujimoto, this was the directorial debut of Jonathon Demme (both of them have collaborated on a number of films including Silence of the Lambs). Caged Heat's really odd, like an exploitation art film. You could see the enormous amount of care that went into it. Here and there some shots really stick out, like the iconic image of caged heat—a blazing electric bulb behind bars, or the beautifully lit claustrophobic solitary prison cell. It's almost like a trademark of Fujimoto's—an image will pop out at you and grab your attention. There was a shot like that in Silence of the Lambs—the smoky, backlit shot during Hannibal's escape scene. I always thought it was a bit too much, too arty for its own good. Interestingly, Demme has said that he never looks in the camera when Fujimoto shoots. He enjoys being surprised watching dailies. I also caught a bit of Beloved (Danny Glover) tonight to see how they handled some of the flashbacks. Interesting projection-on-the-wall spatial montage approach in one sequence done via CGI. Fujimoto's career spans a number of iconic films, everything from Deathrace 2000 and 2nd unit on Star Wars to Pretty in Pink, Gladiator and The Sixth Sense.

hubba hubba

Check the specs out on the newly announced Red Scarlet camera, a real category killer. 3K resolution for $3000. Multiple frame rates of 1fps to 120 fps for real slow motion. Tapeless recording. Lens is fixed, not changeable (expected at this price point). This is the indy filmmaker's dream... if the 3k files don't choke your computer. Scheduled for release 2009. The main question is if they can meet the specs on release and how much $ will you have to spend on peripherals. If everything checks out I'll definitely pick one up but I'm sure there will be a waiting list.

Second unit is for the birds

Today I reshot the microscope focusing shot. Originally I just shot some stars under plexiglass and planned to fake them coming into focus using a blur but it didn't look good. So I had to rig a contraption that held a lens eyepiece on a tripod over a star while I focused the camera. It looks fine. You can see the focus change from the glass to the star but it took so long. First I had to make the lens rig (with masking tape of course). Then I had to get the Omni light out of the garage. Then I had to bring out the black cushions that I use for a background, arrange the stars and change the miniDV tape which on the Sony means taking the camera off the tripod base because the tape loads from the bottom! Then in post I realized that I lit the stars from the wrong side so I had to flip the image. All this for one stupid 4 second shot. No wonder it's taking so long to finish this thing.

Exotic decadence (story idea)

When Maria and I used to talk about our backyard all of my ideas were intuitively aesthetic while hers were productive. I always wanted to cut down the big Eucalyptus, for example. It was horribly topped, way too overgrown and unruly. Maria wanted to keep it because she thought it made a good climbing tree, provided some shade and had leaves that she thought she could sell. Once she asked the tree if it was OK to cut it. The next day she found a bird nesting in the main fork of its branches. That was the answer, she thought. A few days later we checked again and the bird was gone, only feathers remaining. We figured Binky, the neighbor's cat got it. Now that Maria's gone, the Eucalyptus has been replaced by a small white crepe myrtle and a dwarf plum. The dwarf plum is ornamental and doesn't bear fruit. Maria always wanted a persimmon tree.

I have a vague idea for a film. I have the theme and some images, but no narrative. The theme: the replacement of productivity with aestheticized violence and sterility couched within imagery of an exotic Asia. Everything would be full of beautiful touches and rich meanings and yet be (literally) sterile. Some ideas for sets... turn the patio into a Chinese square with lanterns, fake Chinese writing, and exotic storefronts. Turn the garage into some kind of showroom for the entertainment of wealthy, jaded patrons. Then later, create a springtime wonderland set with delicate trees and hyperreal foliage. Images: in one scene we see a couple picking flowers off a tree. The flowers turn out to be small birds which the couple promptly eat. In another, we see a cactus that bleeds blood and cries. Courtship is conducted via an extension of Victorian flower language—only more difficult and more arcane and fraught with social consequences. In this world emotions lie buried beneath layers and layers of games, rules and traditions. In another scene we see astronomical devices to amuse and entertain guests, along with various fights to the death. The story might be the typical one about the Western male courting the Asian female, the colonialist dream. But this one ends differently— the female lead discovers that the West, in a very different way, is exactly the same. What a mournful aria she sings upon this sad revelation.

Animation is slow and that's all there is to it

I'm working on the end of the video where everything gets abstract. Tonight I did about two seconds, the same as last night. I started working in After Effects but I was chopping shots into such tiny pieces that it ended up being easier to work with individual still frames in Photoshop first. I made a droplet to de-interlace the images since I'm concerned that Frames won't be able to get rid of the interlacing after all the stuff I'm doing.

One thing I learned about animation is that it's inherently time-consuming and you can't use technology to take short cuts. In the nineties, like a lot of other people (notably The Residents), I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create successful interpolated animations in Premiere or After Effects. For example, I'd put a ripple filter on a picture of a fire to create flames, that kind of stuff. It looks OK, but it doesn't have the energy of working frame by frame. At a certain point you just have to accept the fact that animation takes forever.

Filmstrip viewer + the last third

I think I need to add one more thing to the desert sequence. There are two problems with it. First, Ben goes directly to the shrine as if he knows where it is. He needs to do some searching first. Second, all that walking drags a bit. I might put the bit back in where Ben finds something on the ground and it's just a photo so he lets it blow away into the sky. The idea didn't work originally because Ben found the photo IN the shrine. If I make him find it on the ground before the shrine, it will be clearer.

Then it's on to the bridge sequence. That's where things go all crazy and the film gets hard to understand. If you recall, a long time ago I was talking about using a Memex or microfiche-like device. I still want to get a shot of something like that where information is flying by on a screen. But most of the microfiche services help you get material out of microfiche format, not into it. I should try putting a computer transparency into a microfiche reader. I wonder if the resolution would be sufficient? I also bought the above filmstrip reader on Ebay. It should be relatively easy to make a filmstrip because it's just a 35 mm film positive (I think). If it doesn't work, I can always use the reader for something else.

I've been thinking about how to cut the bridge sequence and I think I'll do it all with some video distortion. So there'll be some ambiguity about the sequence giving it a feeling of mediated unreality.

Automatons

I loved this film. Writer/director James Felix McKenney based this b/w Super-8 project on a faulty childhood memory and it screens like a dreamy low budget Pi channeled through the Twilight Zone by way of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Filled with mid-century gadgets, men-in-suit robots and robot puppets, Automatons is a parable about a lonely, heavily-mediated future. Going the standard low-budget route (mostly one set, a few actors, shot silent), McKenney turns his budget into an asset. The slightly-off but trying-hard lip sync and cheap but earnestly designed sets and costumes make the film come off like a dream of a B-movie yesterday that never was. There's not enough material to fill a feature and by minute 24 I was aching to get out of that one set. But that's OK, you can just fast forward to the end. Great music and sound design too. There's a dry sense of humor at work but it may be too dry for some tastes. Favorite image: the evil leader with a wrist communicator the size of a brick.

Does she get attacked by birds later?

I've been reading Josh Becker's book again and have become quite fascinated by him and his work. His book on low-budget filmmaking reminds me so much of Richard Bare's book The Film Director which I also enjoyed. I now discover that Becker lists Bare's book as one of his influences! I think the similarity is that both directors are very serious about their work and yet they are known primarily for low-brow TV shows. Becker directed episodes of Xena and Hercules. Bare directed some obscure features and every episode of Green Acres.

The reason I like these books is that they are immensely practical. They remind me of the times when I was directing live-action industrial video in the late 80's. You're not worrying so much about aesthetics. You're thinking "did I get the shots?" and "is this going to cut?" Bare's book is filled with tips like how to make a non-moving train look like it's leaving the station. Becker's book emphasizes one thing: if your goal is to shoot 24 setups in a 12-hour day, you have 30 minutes a setup. How do you do that?

I find Becker's career really interesting. I was reading a thread on the Xena bulletin board called "Josh Becker fallen on hard times." There was a lot of back-and-forth about his most recent writing/directorial effort Alien Apocalypse and how good (or bad) it was.

[side note: I find this clip from Alien Apocalypse really funny.*

Alien: "Who am I? I am the Leader."
Astronaut: "Leader? You're not even human!"

Astronaut: "Where are you from?"
Alien: "Oregon."]

In my thinking, every movie of Becker's that I've seen really does have a B-movie sensibility: bad acting moments, an unwieldy sense of proportion and an all-around clumsiness. A lot of his self-financed films are also severely undershot. If I Had a Hammer (available on youtube) looks like it was shot primarily as masters. As Becker himself writes, if you shoot 24 setups a day, you can't finesse much. Considering all of this, I think Becker has done great. It's as if he's created a career through sheer force of will.

Now, to the screen shot above from Becker's If I Had a Hammer. Notice that the female lead is using the exact same mimeograph machine that Ben uses in our film. I discovered to my horror that in use, you actually see the mimeograph master spinning around and around on the drum. In our film, you don't. Of course, mimeography is such an obscure technology no one seems to notice. Also notice that she's standing on the side of the machine. That seems really awkward to me but that's probably how it was done. I don't know who the female lead is. She reminds me of Ellen Degeneres. See the clip here—



*Is Alien Apocalypse intentionally funny or not? This is what writer/director Josh Becker says in response to this question on his website—

Dear Robert:

It's a silly movie and was meant to be a silly movie. However, unlike most of the SciFi films which are severely humorless, this film doesn't take itself quite so seriously. I truly think we're in a world of hyperbole, and movies are either "a masterpiece" or "the worst film ever," whereas almost everything falls into the gray area in between. I don't accept you or anyone else calling the film Ed Woodian because it's just patently not true. If fake beards are the criteria for being Ed Woodian, then "Gettysburg" would win that award. And if it's using foreign actors and dubbing them, then all of Sergio Leone's films are Ed Woodian. I cruised those message boards, too, and there are some really stupid comments, which people are certainly allowed to make, and the internet now allows for that. But considering that, and I quote a letter from the head of SciFi Network,"'Alien Apocalypse' is Sci Fi's number ONE stand-alone movie ever," I guess I had the right elements to at least get people to tune in, then stay tuned in.

Josh

What I've learned so far about structure

Plot

The plot refers to the events of the story. There should be some sort of internal logic framed by a natural progression.I guess at one point I naively thought that having a plot was enough. Wow, I was totally wrong.

Visualization & space

Film is visual. Ideas are not. So in my sort of film, I have to figure out how to visualize ideas. For me, I guess that's what the props are for. I found that situating and arranging the props in space was a good idea. Ben didn't HAVE to go to the desert to find a clue. But putting the shrine in the desert helped provide narrative clarity (something different is happening now), visual variety (look, we're outdoors!) and new narrative opportunities (oh no, birds!)

Time

Dealing with time has been the most difficult part of the project. The first question was how do I show something spinning for a "long time?" Mackendrick said that in film, there is only one tense—the present. My first attempt at working with time was literal, starting at day one then moving to day two and so on. If an event was important I expanded it, if it was unimportant I contracted it. But that's where I started running into problems. How do we define "important?" For the plot? For the characters? Also, exactly how much expansion or compression is necessary?

That's where the emotional consequences idea helped. In a film, it seems that time is generally subject to the lead character(s). In other words, there's really no such thing as "days and days went by" or "the spinner spun unwaveringly, hauntingly forever." You have to structure events that create anticipation from the emotional (literal or implied) perspective of the lead. If something gets in the way of an emotional arc in progress, you probably have to deemphasize it. For example, in the current cut, Ben says something like "the device remains unfixable." That bit of narration enabled me to get rid of a number of shots of Ben unsuccessfully trying to fix the device. Those shots needed to be excised because they were interrupting the emotional arc of the sequence.

Anticipation

I think I initially felt negative about anticipation because of the use of cliches that aim to create tension (scary strings, the cat leaps from the shadows, going back for the dog, etc.). But Mackendrick convinced me that film-drama IS anticipation. I had intuitively tried to create anticipation in certain places. In the end, for example, there's a fire and then a little later we creep closer and closer to Ben who is hidden behind a doorway. Why can't we see his face? Is he hideously disfigured? The narration, too contained a lot of phrases aimed at creating anticipation. It seemed like every other sentence ended with "but then...." At first it struck me that this was a cheap trick. Then I heard it used in the movie The Bad and the Beautiful, and it was invisible. I think in practice, there are a grab bag of techniques you can use to create anticipation—the narrative "but then...," the "bomb under the table" (dramatic irony), suspenseful music, slowly revealing something bit by bit. I'm sure that writers want the "but then's" embedded in the actual structure of the film. Can you imagine a script that reads, "and here, scary music tells us that something is about to happen...." But sometimes, you have no choice.

Emotion

In earlier posts I was always saying things like "I want to avoid emotion," and "we don't need to see Ben acting emotional." In the last few posts, everything has been about Ben's "emotional consequences!" I find that what I'm really against is the idea of film as an emotional roller coaster that "makes you laugh and makes you cry." Life already has enough emotion and drama. But a film does need emotional content. As I've discovered, without an emotional point of view, a film becomes difficult to grasp and comprehend.

Owww, my nose!

Every Brady Bunch episode featured stories with negligible events but strong emotional consequences. So instead of stories like "Marcia's baby" or "Jan's bout with cancer" you'd see Marcia worrying about her prom date or Jan dealing with sibling rivalry. I think that was part of the show's charm. There was always something important at stake, but it was never a life-or-death matter. The Brady Bunch was all about potential emotional consequences.

It's an old adage that a film has to have something important at stake. So every summer movie has a plot in which the hero has to save the world. But after awhile, saving the world doesn't seem all that interesting. And what the Brady Bunch proves is that it's the emotional, not the life-and-death consequences that matter.

Noise film has always been about life and death but I hadn't fully thought through the peaks and valleys of Ben's emotions. Structuring the edit by asking "how does Ben feel" is causing me to shape the film so that the emotional consequences to Ben are always apparent. I'm hoping that this will help me to structure the film in a dramatic (e.g., anticipatory) way.

When I say "emotional consequences" it's important to clarify what this means. There's this idea that a film has to have characters that you "care about." I always thought this was dumb because fictional characters are not real! What I mean is that understanding emotional consequences is important because it helps us to comprehend a film. In other words, emotional identification with a character is less important than the fact that we use a lead character's emotions as an entry point into the story.

Anticipation

I feel like I'm hacking through a thicket of words. I've heard that drama involves characters solving problems, characters overcoming obstacles, that it involves above all else, conflict. But I've always felt uneasy with these definitions. Who said life is about overcoming obstacles? But now that I've thought about this, I realize that what the authors are trying to describe is anticipation. What a character needs is unresolved dissonance. That I can understand. I can't relate much to the notion of tenaciously persevering through obstacles. That's why I found the film Men of Honor so strange. It comes across less as a drama of the human spirit and more like a tale of unthinkable obsession in the face in unthinkable obstacles.

But dissonance makes sense to me—the dissonance between one's world view and what actually happens in life, the dissonance between theory and practice. The reason anticipation—or dissonance—is so important is because without it there is nothing to watch in film. Mackendrick said that drama is anticipation. It's about fulfilling anticipations that become threaded into new anticipations. In order for anticipation to exist, there needs to be something to anticipate.

What's weird about film-drama is that anticipation is not necessarily built into the plot. The plot is a sequence of events that cause more things that in turn cause even more things. But there appears to be a difference between anticipation and causation. Causation just happens. Anticipation is the way causation is structured. I wonder if that's the difference between Episode III and Episode IV? In Episode IV there is clear anticipation. We anticipate that someone—Luke, probably—wil the death star. Episode III, on the other hand, seems to be more about causation. Things happen and they are all related. There is a lot of movement. But there isn't a lot of anticipation.

The complexity of viewpoint

I think I now understand one of the biggest hurdles that confronts an artist doing a narrative film— viewpoint. What makes film so strange is that the viewpoint is always changing. Sometimes you're showing a story from the perspective of one character. Then another. Then you're showing something objectively (like a bomb under the table). It's really weird—not something that artists are typically trained to do.

An artist learns to paints a portrait from her own point of view. You don't usually collage three separate paintings together—one from the sitter's view, one from the sitter's mom's view, and one showing all the things that the sitter cannot possibly know but might still affect her (e.g., the bomb under the table). But that's exactly what film is like with the added complexity of using fictitious characters. Alexander Mackendrick describes how film involves removing a certain kind of authorship—

In effect, when translating into dramatic form a story that has been written only for reading, the first character to be removed is often the author himself. The screenwriter will work through the original text and ruthlessly eliminate all editorial comment, every phrase, adjective or adverb added by the author as a clue to how he himself wishes the action to be interpreted by the reader. He will retain only those adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors that are of immediate practical value to the actor, cameraman, editor or any of the other craftsmen whose media of expression are images, gestures and sounds—those things that can be represented on screen. (pg. 16, On Filmmaking).

It is this removal of this kind of authorship that is baffling for many artists including me. When artists can't remove themselves from a film, they are often tempted to visually impose meaning, crushing the life out of characters. This is what happened with Heaven's Gate and Mirror Mask (see earlier post). What doesn't work in film is to stand back as an omniscient creator and manipulate and color-correct significance into existence. Instead, you have to inhabit the space of the film and work in and through the characters. In narrative film, viewpoint is not something literal, but something that emerges in a multiplicity of fragments. Just thinking about it is dizzying.

It now makes sense why musical theater would be a productive metaphor for the artist interested in narrative film. Musical theater is like a bridge between the two disciplines. In film, an audience infers a lot through performance, characterization and story. In musical theater, there is less inference. You have a chorus singing the interpretation—"I hope I get it... I hope I get it..." (in the video at top). The author's voice is much clearer. It makes sense that a score would be of particular interest to an artist if it does indeed carry significant authorial intent.

Still, the issue goes beyond music and extends to the way drama is structured. The initial cut of noise film made sense technically but did not have a clear point of view. Point of view, in this case, means something far different from camera angles or color or other factors that artists grasp immediately. Instead, film point of view seems to refer to the way characters, information and elements perform in relationship to a protagonist. In the primitive way I think about it in noise film, I just ask myself the question, "how does Ben feel about this?" and that's how I make a decision about where a segment ends or what the music sounds like. The linear logic is still there. But now, Ben's emotions dictate the structure. Edit #45, a primitive strategy indeed.

Noise film & musical theater

Last night I finished a cut of the first section of the film, a version in which the basic plot points seemed clear and made sense. But something was missing. The cut reminded me of Ed Harris's Pollock or Terry Gilliam's Tideland. Both of those films were like long sequences of events stitched together without any unifying idea or emotional progression. In my case, it was difficult to connect emotionally to the logical cut. There was no entry point. It was like watching objective events flicker by.

So I spent most of the day trying to figure out how fix the edit. I refused to believe it was a matter of developing the character. If there's one thing I feel strongly about it's not having a "character you care about." I then spent some time thinking about emotional content. There seems to be something about emotions that makes artists wary. I was thinking of Dave McKean's Mirror Mask, for example. You hire all these actors and then hide them behind masks! But in a sense, that's what I asked Ben to do since I directed him to act in such an emotionally restrained manner. Maybe it's a mistrust of actors, or the belief that you can convey emotion in other ways.

As an exercise, I started to think about how musicals work and how you sing out your thoughts and your feelings. I then started imagining noise film as musical theater. We'd start with an opening number in which Ben describes his hopes for the spinner. Then, a big moment: the spinner works! The chorus cheers. It works! It works! Next, there's the mystery sequence in which something happens... and then the spinner breaks. And Ben does his wistful solo about a broken device, a requiem for a broken dream. You get the idea.

So I transposed these sequences back into the video edit. I also added some new film music including stuff from my favorite temp composer George Fenton. So far, this edit works a lot better. The problem I think wasn't the character or a lack of emotion. In fact, I experimented by putting shots of Ben from another scene into the beginning and it looked totally wrong because of his expression. I think the problem was that I wasn't communicating clearly enough how an audience is supposed to interpret the scenes. Using real film music instead of the temp pads really helps because it essentially tells you "this is a scary part," "this is a wondrous part." For something as abstract and emotionally understated as noise film, this helps a lot. In a mainstream film, music is often just one more redudancy. Noise film, on the other hand, may really need these cues to make sense and provide an entry point for an audience.

VIDEO: New bird scene previs... comments?

Here's the latest version of the bird scene for you for your viewing and commenting pleasure. About 75% the footage is actual footage. The color corrections are over-contrasty experiments.

The main things I'm trying to do with this revision is make the scene less cerebral and more active. By less cerebral, I mean less thinking, more immediate. Before, I had Ben's hand getting scratched and then you had to infer through montage that there was an infection coursing through his veins. Too much inferring. Plus, as I wrote earlier, the second attack needs to be stronger and more malevolent.

Things of interest

The clue that Ben looks at when he first gets out of the truck will change to the AT TURNING'S END clue. I'm glad that I shot this to make the clue changeable. As it is, the close up you see was shot in Ben's backyard.

The sky filter in the desert shots is just a Photoshop gradient. Real DP's use real sky filters to be able to change exposure. I'm using the gradients because I like the look and they help keep the eye in the frame.

The shot where Ben stops walking and looks at the green shrine is totally recomposed. That's the one where I used the sky as a blue screen, pulled out his image and then stuck a blue Photoshop file behind him. To me it's undetectable, mostly because there's no reason to expect any funny business. I had to recompose the shot because Ben missed his mark and didn't stop in the center of the frame. The takes where he hit his mark weren't as good.

I tweaked the shrine interior sequence. I'm not sure whether Ben should actually touch the interior star as I have it now or whether the star should just fall because of the wind. I changed this sequence so that it would more closely parallel what happens in the other two "attacks" on Ben; a star drops to the ground which triggers an invisible warning which leads to the attack.

The bird-in-the-car scene test went well I thought. I'm still working on the crow model. Before you see the crow shots we'll hear sounds of flocking birds. So we'll recognize the object as a bird even though it's mostly in shadow and all you can really see is its claw which is a dried rooster foot I bought off Ebay. I'd like to get a wing in there too but I have to dye a wing from the old white dove first. I know having the medium shot followed by the close up is SO Hitchcock. But you sort of need it. If .you cut directly from Ben to the close up, it's too abrupt. If you cut only to the medium shot, you can't see anything.

More cute stuff

Print cute pinhole cameras for free. Download from Corbis.

Any volunteers to make me one of these?

I've been looking at 35mm lens adapters for video cameras. They make beautiful images but they're expensive. The one from Red Rock Micro costs $550 for the adapter alone and to make it truly functional you need to add another $1k in rods and accessories. Mediachance has instructions for making your own guerilla adapter out of an old CD player. Any volunteers to make one for me? Anyone? Hello?

You died too pretty

"You died too pretty. At the finish, you arranged your body to make a good camera shot; it would remind the audience that you're an actor and not a robber. I warned you that 'acting is the one art you can't be caught doing.'

So begins Don Richardson's segment on 'the ragged edge' in Acting Without Agony. He goes on...

"I tell the class not to try to make pretty pictures; that's the cameraman's job. Truth isn't always nice to look at, and truth is what good modern art is about. Artists have moved from the slick externals, to searching deeper for meaning. The surface is less and less important. Modern sculptors intentionally rough-up their work to find a texture that conveys feelings. The new painters learned from the impressionists; they use paint in a much freer way than the classicists, and don't run for a rag every time it dribbles. The key to modern art is what I call 'the ragged edge'....

I explain that 'making pretty pictures' comes from an actor's vanity and vanity can destroy your work. The bank robber was honest in the scene until the end, when he put himself on an imaginary cross and posed for a Pieta. You can't play the result: that's telling the audience how to react. Get them to react by planning how to accomplish it, but don't let them in on it."

I think Richardson's chapter is a good answer to the questions I posed here and here. The desire to prettify things in visual effects often leads to a poor performance robbed of its believability. Believability is not accuracy, fidelity or randomness but requires knowledge of how to perform appropriately in the various modalities made possible by cinema technology (color correction, fx, virtual camera work, crowd simulation, etc.). What makes a post-production performance interesting is is not its beauty, accuracy or algorithmic complexity, but the way a medium is used to express observation tempered by understanding.

This is very cute

It's always surprising to me when things like this don't appear on my radar until late in the game. Martin Scorcese directs a "lost" Hitchcock short in this advertisement for Freixenet wine. An amusing take off/simulation of Hitchcock but in the long run it really doesn't make sense

Pink the series

The Canon XH-A1 doesn't seem particularly popular but you get a lot of bang for the buck. It's about the cheapest prosumer 24f HD camera you can get (a little over $3k). If you want to see what it looks like (with a 35mm lens adaptor) take a look at pink the series.

How digital negative actually works

I was reading about The Other Boleyn Girl (Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johnasson) which was shot on a Panavision Genesis. They shot using the "digital negative" technique, but used a lookup table to preview the shots on set. In other words, an ugly RAW version was captured digitally, but the on-set playback video was treated to look normal. So that would address the concerns I had earlier about shooting digital negative. Of course, this still remains hypothetical for us no-budgeters who can't even afford an on-set monitor.

Heroic yuckiness

I think what I like about the ending image of the current version of Star Wars redux (astronaut being connected to tubes) is its heroic yuckiness. It's something I don't recall seeing in film before before—the feeling of something that's both heroic and repulsive. I think the idea comes from having been to the March air museum in Riverside a few weeks ago. What struck me was how small and fragile the vintage fighter jets looked. Somehow I imagined that being in a small plane would be like being in a car where you feel snug and secure. But when you see those old jets you can sense the vulnerability of the pilot. All that separates you from the wind outside is a thin piece of glass, sheet metal and cables. Part of it is the primitiveness of the device—rivets, hydraulics, pounded sheet metal. What I expected was something that looked like today's aircraft—design first, then metal. But these planes looked as if they were designed around how metal could be shaped; cones, tubes and sheets pounded together by hammers—and not that well.

In film, warcraft are either romanticized—or made literal, in which case there is no way to turn the machine into metaphor. Even The Right Stuff, which tried its hardest to show what it's like to be "spam in a can," was unable to adequately and phenomenally convey vulnerability and claustrophobia. The emotions were acted and described, but never made present.

Star Wars redux—a better version

This is based pretty closely on an earlier post

We hear the rumble of what sound like B-17s in the distance. A boy runs up to the camera craning his neck toward the sky. We look overhead and can barely make out a formation of hazy planes slowly flying into the distance. Fade to black.

In a scrubby desert, children run from a Quonset hut school house. School's over. Only one boy seems to notice the thin wisp of smoke in the distance. The boy walks toward the smoke. An old man with a metal contraption on his head watches from the distance. The boy finds a small sputnik-like satellite that has plunged into the ground.

It's night. The boy is looking at the satellite which sits on a table partially disassembled. It looks like some kind of strange receiver that picks up noisy sounds and images. He spends some time looking at a poster of an aircraft with five wings and ten engines. We look more closely at the device.

Images flash by. We see more strange aircraft. Then more schematics. Gradually, we see images of organs and other medical images that meld with technological schematics. Then we see the boy again, but now he's grown up. He looks at the poster on his wall. This time, it's a valentines-style heart mounted in a port hole on a rocket ship. The text reads, "A wary eye discloses pious travail."

Now we're in a warm romantic scene in the desert. The young man and his mother stand there with a sleek rocket in the background. They bid each other goodbye then he walks off into the distance. We now see him being prepped for his flight. His head is shaved. Hundreds of tubes are stuck in him. Tubes come out of his mouth. His eyes are covered with a strange mechanical device. Everything shakes as he blasts off into space. His lips curl into a smile.

THE END

Backstory

This really short film is about technological change. The extrapolated technologies are baroque. The financially strapped military tries to take advantage of an overage of jet engines by putting more of them on their old plane bodies. But it gets worse and soon, there isn't enough money for even that. So they start creating feints. They test fly fearsome aircraft in order to strike fear into their enemy's spies. But many of these aircraft feature hollow bombs and non-functional weapons like those fake car panels used by car companies when they road test new car models. Then their technologies became aestheticized. I think Benjamin said that in capitalism, violence becomes aestheticized whereas in Marcism, aesthetics becomes violent. In the film we're seeing the end of an era of baroque, aestheticized violent war machines. Then someone comes along with the idea of using cyborg technologies. And gradually, live humans are used to guide and regulate the functioning of space craft. The ending is supposed to evoke surgery, medical technology and one-man Japanese suicide subs. Unlike noise film, I'm not exactly sure what this one means. It's simply supposed to be a poetic meditation about how technology changes.

There are also new things to learn to shoot. A bunch of kids. An opportunity to shoot an emotional scene with two people. Maybe some hanging miniatures. A couple of small set pieces. It's do-able, but yet it can look big.

(above: WWII one-man Japanese suicide sub)

Katherine Rose Davis

Congratulations to Ben and Krissy on the birth of Katherine Rose Davis on Thursday, March 27. My goal is to finish the film before our leads have more babies. But at the rate Ben's family breeds that may be difficult.

A Witty, Urbane Comedy —Stage Scene

I'm thinking that maybe At Turning's End is a biting satire about an aristocratic household of the 20's that remains stuck in the Victorian age. Explanation for newcomers—this is a theater poster prop of a fake play for noise film and has nothing to do with my work in actual theater nor does it have anything to do with Star Wars like the last post.

Star Wars redux—today's version

The main idea I had today was that the battle would be between extrapolated technologies and the cyborg technologies. The extrapolated, Ekranoplan-esque technologies are baroque puffery. The engines and war machinery are all visible, but some of them are only cosmetic. The cyborg technologies are bloody and meaty. They make our heroes queasy.

The story's question is whether our young child hero will go to war or not. There would be mundane dialogue like (as they eat):

Are you going to fight?

I don't know

My dad said he would if they'd let him

In the end he decides to go and he kisses his mom goodbye. We see wounded war veterans at the beginning and the end. At the beginning the veteran is wearing a fancy cage-like contraption like the image from Chariots of Fire. At the end, the veteran is wearing a contraption that looks pieced together from wire and cardboard. Economically, the war is not going well for them.

There are three things I hate about this version. 1) It seems like a parable about sending children to war (bad Iraq war commentary). 2) It seems like a parable about the Iraq war's debilitating effect on our economy. 3) It seems like a parable about the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans.

Above: I found the very kit-bashable Walrus MK at the hobby store over the weekend so I picked one up.