Mona's feedback on version 77

Mona is a good person for feedback since she hasn't seen much of the film but has a good understanding of what I'm after + she's seen a lot of video and film, both traditional and experimental.

>Her main comment was that I don't need as much expository narration, it makes enough sense without a lot of it. Specifically, she mentioned that we don't need "a crow... a symbol of death..." In a sense, what she's doing is asking for a return to the film's roots—to create a wave of sensual and intellectual experience.

> She hated the temp music. She said it makes it sound like Titanic. Hopefully that will soon be taken care of.

> She liked the way the desert scenes were corrected. She thinks the early shots of the spinner in the workroom were too clean.

>She said the beginning didn't make sense to her. Apparently my attempt to crib together a sequence of left-over pieces didn't work. So I'll probably cut that down.

>Like a lot of other people, she thought the dark clouds stuck out, like a clip I purchased. I'll probably replace with blowing desert trees or something.

>She agreed with Ben that the desert tower should come out to make it look more isolated.

>She's the first person to notice the spot on the lens in one shot. She thinks that should be corrected.

>I asked her if she thought there were any bad acting moments. She said no.

>She thought the visuals were nice.

>She really liked the microfiche sequence.

>She couldn't see the stars in the master shot. I may need to make that more apparent.

>The way I did the burning scene didn't work for her. I'll try to put the white noise on top of it to make it match the existing cartoon footage better.

>She said it didn't make her sleepy and that it seemed shorter than its 16 minute running time.

I am Tarkovsky!

I was watching the film again last night and started falling asleep. This happens every time if I am just the slightest bit sleepy. Only Tarkovsky has a similar effect on me. I'm not sure what it is, but it's not simply boredom. Maria always used to get sleepy when I talked a lot. Now I know what she meant.

Gravitas

I rendered another version with the narrative connecting ex nihilo to the tape codex creation. It helps a lot. It's as if simply acknowledging that there needs to be something there and filling it up with something—anything—helps. When I rendered that version I realized I have another problem. I stripped so much out of the story that the final realization about creation ex nihilo doesn't have enough impact. It is without weight. In the case of our film, this is not a dramatic problem, it's an information problem. The impact lies in the reasoning about why modern physics was developed. So I have to put some voice over about that. I'll try it tonight.

Want to see a movie starring Ben Davis?

You can tell when you're old... those clipboard people in Old Town don't try and give you free movie preview passes because you're outside their target demographic.

Version 77 is ready for showing/testing. Anyone want to see it? I watched it today, for the first time with no holes, temp audio and full temp narration. I noticed one big hole. How do we get from 'blasphemy' to a paper-strewn red room? I think the fix is easy. I'll just add more voice over on top of the abstract section.

I've stripped this thing to the bone, making it almost too simple. Man makes device. Device breaks. Man gets in trouble. We'll see how it tests. I have two weeks before it has to go to Dan.

Manure

Manure, the film, is currently in production. This one fits into my 'theatrical production design' section so I thought I'd upload the photo. Most of the film takes place as exteriors shot on sets. Problem: director Polish's Astronaut Farmer was not one of my favorite films.

Ceilings and floors

Today the lead crew finished demolishing the old addition to our house. The house looks a hundred times better. From the inside I can now see the sky and the mountain. It makes a huge difference. I love it.

I realized that filmmaking is helping me think about the house. The other day I wrote about how I neglected to pay attention to the ceilings of the sets. As I look through our windows I now realize that a lot of what I'm seeing is the ground and the sky. So I have to be careful not to obstruct the sky view as well as choose outside tiles/flooring that, like a rug, will go with the rest of the house.

In the top picture, note that Photoshop stitched together the image wrong. The beam between the windows is not broken as it appears.

Image flashes and the inner me

During the 'dream sequence' there are sequences of images that flash by quickly. Here are a few stills from that sequence. I found that when color correcting, it's really easy to get one nice shot. The hard part is correcting so that entire sequences of shots go together. In this case, even though I liked the original bright colors (bottom), it worked much better to make the images darker and bluer (top). Yes, that is a picture of my colon, the true inner me.

Locked and loaded

Version 75 is essentially locked. It's 16 minutes including credits. I think it came out well. There are some nice parts and some rough parts. One rough section is the bird attack. It makes a huge difference that we weren't able to go back on location. I think the bird attack is legible, but not particularly well shot. The other rough section is the third act, the abstract codex section. I'm discovering, once again, that you can be ambiguous only in certain ways in film. Artists are used to working with two kinds of ambiguity—syntactic density and semantic density, using Nelson Goodman's terms. Syntactic density refers to images that can be read in a number of ways. For example, a syntactically dense image might be read as a mountain or a wave or a cloud. Semantic density refers to a richness of interpretation; the meaning is ambiguous. Syntactically dense imagery doesn't seem to work well in film. If I were shooting the codex segment again, I would make it clearer what's happening.

I think the film is best at engendering trust. You feel like it's taking you someplace, and that if you play along, you'll be rewarded in some way.

Logos!

I need to start the film with a slate for our "production company." I went to yeslogo.com to try out their 'make your own logo' web software. I didn't want to do something too literal so I tried the more abstract options and ended up with something that looks like it's from a resort hotel on Maui.

Acting with a capital O

I was talking to Ben about my 'what's the big deal about acting' post. His conjecture is that this kind of actor worship finds its roots in "The Method" and its mystification of the acting process. We then talked about the method vs. British technical acting. I told him the following anecdote from Don Richardson's Acting without Agony. It's a good one and should be right up there with the famous Olivier/Dustin Hoffman "why don't you try acting it my boy?" story.

"During my studies with the Group Theater, I shared a room with Lee J. Cobb, who was then a fellow apprentice. We became friends and later when he was starring as Willy Lohman in Death of a Salesman I went backstage to congratulate him. When I entered his dressing room, he was collapsed on a cot, totally spent. The blood had drained from his face, the hand I shook was icy, and he barely had enough voice to respond to my praise. At the end of the play, Willy is destroyed. He seemed to have taken Cobb with him. Lee J. Cobb is remembered as a good actor; now let's look at a great one.

In my youth an actress invited me to a matinee to see Laurence Olivier play Oedipus. She had studied at the Royal Academy in London, knew Olivier, and promised to take me backstage to meet him. His performance in this Greek tragedy was one of his greatest triumphs.

At the end of the play when, as King Oedipus, he learned that he was married to his own mother and had children with her, Olivier reached the summit of classic acting. At the moment of hearing the terrible truth, he shook the theater with an animal howl of pain. The entire audience was overcome; it brought tears to my eyes and my scalp felt charged with electricity. Then, when it seemed no greater horror was possible, he ripped off the buckles from his toga and used them to gouge out his eyes. Blood poured down his cheeks as he crumpled to the ground. His daughter helped him to his feet and started leading the broken man off the stage.

At that moment, my friend pulled me from my seat and out of the theater toward the stage door. She was running to get there before the crush of well-wishers and, in fact, we arrived just as Olivier was taking his final tottering steps into the wings. He was still in character, blind, utterly destroyed. Then, as he lifted his blood-stained face and saw my friend, Barbara, his face burst into a happy smile of recognition.

"Cocktails, Babs?" asked Olivier. The king had vanished. The lesson learned is 'Control.' "

What's with all this actor love?

I don't get the big deal about actors. Whenever you read some book about acting, there's always a paragraph about how acting is so difficult because you have to have immediate, on-call access to your emotions. The last time I saw this sentiment in print was when I read through Frank Miller's The Spirit blog in which he talks about how Eva Mendez was able to stay in character after waiting for 10 hours. What is the big deal? It's not that acting shouldn't be respected. But I can't see how this kind of performing is any more difficult than other kinds of performing. You could say the same thing about directors. As a director you're performing on set making decisions that will ripple through your entire project. And when you're shooting with expensive sets and actors you have the make the calls right—now. And if you're doing a good job, I'm sure you're using your emotions as much as an actor. And what about instructors? Imagine going into a class and then improvising the ideas, words and emotions for a discussion. I think performances are built into many of the activities we do. It's not the act of acting that is so remarkable, but the lively quality of a spirited performance.

How can I...?

One thing that I think makes an interesting storyline is a good, unexpected, ironic thematic question. For example, what I like about the Sixth Sense is that it answered the question, "how can you make a movie about the supernatural that does not deny the supernatural, but still leaves us feeling safe and happy?" There have been a couple of "how can you make a serial killer who is lovable?" films and TV series. One thematic storyline question I like is this: "how can you make a heroic character out of someone who always appears to be compromising?"

He knows what he wants

I've been thinking about this for probably three years now and I still can't figure out what it means when someone compliments a director by saying "he knows what he wants." I came across this recently in the extras on Factotum. Matt Dillon said a lot of his ideas got nixed because the director knew what he wanted (and that was a good thing). In Roger Corman's autobiography, there's an excerpt from Shelley Winters saying Corman always knew what he wanted. A recent interview with the Strause brothers on AVP 2 say that working with James Cameron was highly influential since he knows exactly what he wants.

First of all, this probably means different things depending on the person. But I can't help but feeling that it means that the director has something very specific in mind. Isn't that bad? Wouldn't you rather have a director who knew how the scene was supposed to work but was open to various ways of getting there? I still have no idea.

Viewpoint

There is no bigger hurdle for the visual artist approaching film than understanding viewpoint. Because of our modernist training visual artists tend to think of themselves as fixed outside of the subject. Another analogy would be Schlemmer's understanding of the artist as an "engineer behind the scenes." As I've mentioned, this background causes artists to view film from the "outside in." They want to shape meaning from the look in, rather than from character out, something deadly to the cinema medium. I think it's more correct to say that in film, the artist must embody herself within the principal character. The film then extends out from this performance and point of view.

Size, geography, anticipation, moments

My list of important things to keep in mind as a director—

Size of the gesture
You have to know whether your animation, set or performance is going to read. This doesn't have to do only with performances, but with everything. If you're tight, only a small gesture is sufficient. If you're wide, you're going to have to get bigger. Examples: the green room set design should have been "bigger" to read in the wide shots. The dead bird tableau should have been "bigger" to read in the wide shot. Detail—small gestures— didn't seem to be as much of a problem.

Geography
Film inherently scrambles geography which is both an advantage and a caution. It's advantageous because you can cheat shots—shoot close ups later, do reverses on the same wall. It's a caution because you have to sign post a lot when you don't want audiences to get lost. Geography is less about memory. It's not so much about showing a wide map view and then showing the details although in simple scenes, it does work that way. Rather, it's about showing relationships, like where is Ben in relation to the car right now?

Anticipation
What makes film different from a novel is the way anticipations are set up. There is no bigger job. You show the blood leaking from the car to anticipate the dead bird, the horrified expression on a face before the reveal of the shrine, the narration that says "and then...." In a short film I think you can concentrate on the micro level anticipations and the macro-level. What makes a feature different is that you also have mid-level anticipations and reversals. If there are only micro-level anticipations, you have interest without substance or theme. Macro-level without micro is tedious to watch.

Moments
Film isn't a chronology of events. It's more fruitful to think of it as a series of emotional arcs driven by the lead's point of view that lead to the creation and fulfillment of anticipated moments.

Color correcting, neo noir and swinging bulbs

In order to get some ideas for neo noir color grading, I watched a bit of The Matrix and Dark City, both significant influences on our film (though ours doesn't look anything like those). I noticed that noise film's small sets contribute to its appearance. I often used shadows to obscure the empty or uninteresting areas. The Matrix and Dark City don't shoot around these limitations and consequently, don't use as much black. I also noticed that all three of these films have swinging light bulb scenes (or did).

When the bird scene was still in the church, Ben was going to recoil in terror and cause the chandelier to swing creating eerie moving shadows. In The Matrix (top), Trinity leaps into a building through the window causing the hanging light to swing back and forth. In Dark City (middle), John Murdock awakens naked in a tub with a light swinging above him. Notice the interesting tile floor. One thing I neglected to do in noise film was pay attention to ceilings and floors. The red room doesn't look quite as full as it ought to because the ceiling details (the hanging tapes and room deodorizers) are too small.

I read a book on Psycho that went into quite a bit of detail on the scene in which mother is revealed. The author suggested that it was Saul Bass who came up with the idea of using a swinging light bulb to create a sense of movement (bottom). I've been thinking that the swinging bulb fits into my scheme of animation falling under the category of physics-based animation.

As I try out options, my ideas about the color grade have changed quite a bit. At first, I was trying to use my "Ben's emotional POV" idea. That is, the beginning would look warm and wonderful, the next sequence would look mysterious and blue, etc., changing according to how Ben is feeling at the moment. I realized that not only is this too much to do in a short film, it doesn't really look good. When I color the footage too much, it looks forced. So I've been coming up with a simpler scheme that stays truer to the way I shot the film. The palettes are more subdued and more monochromatic.

Biting the bullet part II

I got sick of Color's limitations so I ended up getting Magic Bullet Looks to do color correction/adjustment. I hate throwing money at problems, but I have an expression—functionality is a feature. It just makes it so much easier to color correct right in the Timeline (as opposed to render out into Color once you've locked). Uncorrected footage above. Corrected footage below with Look's bleach bypass effect and a sky filter.

When the last shot is the last shot... almost

Yesterday David and I shot the last scene at the storefront. It went well and cuts OK. Except for an optional pickup or two, I'm done shooting. Version 68 is so much clearer than it was before. Doing those other pick up shots was worthwhile. We found out that when David put his beanie on he looked like a street person. So we nixed that for the walk by.

There's an expression that goes "you don't finish a picture as much as have it taken away from you." In our case, however, the completed portions feel pretty complete. I'm not very good at locking the edit, but some portions that have stayed exactly the same for months. So I might be able to lock the entire film soon.

I've been experimenting with the production pipeline. Today I tried an export with Frames. It took longer than I remembered. Maybe I should down rez before exporting? Amazingly, though, the resulting footage was very clear. It looked like I had cleaned the screen. The deartifacting works well apparently.

The sucktastic Be Kind Rewind [spoilers]

Jack Black and Mos Def fight over the colonization of culture.

Be Kind Rewind is less of a film and more of a series of visual inventions strung together in sequence. As such, its characters are arbitrary and its story is tacked on; everything exists to give Michel Gondry an opportunity to showcase his fertile visual ingenuity. But by the time Mos Def hides from the police using an urban camouflage suit and Jack Black uses a "video negative" button on his camcorder to playfully shoot night scenes, I had lost any desire to play along. The arbitrariness of these contrivances jarred me out of the narrative. Similarly, the exposition scenes written simply to justify the time needed to create the Sweded films become exhausting after awhile.

The overall theme of Be Kind is an apologetic for the film itself. At the end, the protagonists go all Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland on us and decide to put on a show creating a mockumentary based on creatively falsified information. The idea is a Romantic one; creativity is freedom from a literal adherence to the truth. The problem with this idea is the same one that plagues the film. In Be Kind, black culture is stripped of its history and its suffering, and serves primarily as a source for Gondry's cinematic riffing. In Gondry's world, we needn't understand anything; we simply use it to stimulate our own creativity. For Gondry, African American culture serves as a quick signifier for community and soul, an image that in this movie, exists without weight or bearing. Be Kind's cinematic cleverness is a form of talking without listening. The film brings community together but only to laud Gondry's genius.

Souvenirs

Souvenirs of my brush with mayhem! Top: burned glove and marker. Bottom: shot taken with the flammable lighting set up. This is the kind of thing I didn't know how to do before—create a hard shadow and yet make the letters legible and the inside of the shrine softly visible. The blur is just an effect.

To do list

ONLINE
>fix blinks
>fx shot-delete paper from Ben's hand on stairs
>insert garbage removal shot
>insert truck shot

RESHOOT/SHOOT
>desert clue

Life imitates art—a fire!

Since I got the C-stand I've been using it to hold a scrim (really a sheet) to create soft light. It works great and accounts for the fact that the shots I've been taking lately look a lot better. I finally realized that the reason you need high wattage is to shine through diffusion material because you lose so much light. So I was shooting a shrine interior pick up using the 250 watt Pro Light direct to create shadows and the 1000 watt Tota through the sheet for fill. Just as I was about to start shooting I smelled smoke and turned around to see the top of the sheet engulfed by orange flames about a foot high. Apparently it touched the Tota which set it on fire. Thankfully, after losing it all morning, I had clipped the garage door opener onto my pocket so I was able to open the garage door, throw the sheet, the C-stand and a plastic lighting box, also on fire, onto the driveway and put the fire out with the rest of the sheet. The blaze was really going. Even after I thought I put it out, I found tiny orange flames licking the the inside of the plastic box. I didn't know plastic burned so well. I hosed everything down and now I'm sitting outside the garage, watching it while the burning smell dissipates. I'll probably hose down the inside of the garage too.

The meaning of the story probably changes depending on who you ask. Erik might say that it's the curse of the movie, a case of life imitating art (noise film ends with Ben's house catching on fire). He's already afraid to lend me the truck because whenever we shoot it, it breaks down. Ben would say this is a story of poor work habits and two-dimensional thinking. In spite of cleaning it over the weekend, the garage was a mess and I was tripping over cords. Earlier in the day, the Pro Light tipped over and fell into a wall when I closed the garage door (I didn't realize I had extended it so high).

I see it as a matter of mindfulness. I've been trying to get Sean to be more aware of himself. He walks around totally unconscious of what he's doing. It seems like when I tell him not to do something, he goes ahead and does it anyway (like the time I told him not to play in the kitchen when I'm cooking). It's not that he's disobedient. He just has no idea sometimes of what his body is doing. No doubt he gets it from me. This morning while setting up the shoot I had to hunt around for the garage door opener every single time I went out there. I kept putting it in various places without remembering where. Strangely, when I was running for the hose, I put the star prop in my hand on a cement pier and remembered exactly where I left it—the mindfulness of a heightened awareness to danger. Ironically, I had to remake the star prop because Ben mindlessly lost it during our shoot at the equestrian area.

Magic!

This morning I did the pickup shot where the spinner spins and we can see the stars falling down in the same shot. We needed this shot because there was nothing establishing the relationship between the spinner and the stars. In the current version, we just see them falling on the table.

It took awhile to set up the shot. I put the 1000 watt Tota outside the window—our sunlight. Then I projected the 250 watt Pro light through a sheet to provide soft back lighting. I set up the crane to get a really high angle. Then I had to mount the camera upside down to fit the crane. I therefore had to run the camera controls upside down and shoot upside down. I did catch one break. The spinner was still on the threads from the last pickup shot a couple of weeks ago.

It came out so nicely. I slowed down the footage and you can see the salt as streaks raining down magically. It looks beautiful like snow, and not like drandruf which it did at regular speed. It almost looks like a visual effect using a particle system, it's so hyperreal. And it cuts well too. I was very pleased that I was able to figure out how to do the back lighting to make the salt show up.

Anyway, I was really happy with the shot and the scene now makes a lot more sense. I didn't post anything here because you can only see the salt when it moves.

Theatrical production design

Examples for your viewing pleasure... on the noisefilm channel!

The Singing Ringing Tree


Kwaidan


One from the Heart


Dogville


Mishima


Forbidden Zone


Tears of the Black Tiger

Dante's Inferno in puppets

The all-puppet (no CGI) Dante's Inferno DVD is being released on August 26.

Adventures in robots

This is a bit off topic but I found it really interesting. Sean started drawing a really cool robot (a). It's his attempt to copy a robot out of a book he has. I gave him some sharpened color pencils, told him to color a robot in and ended up with (b). I wanted to see what would happened if he copied one of my drawings so I made a simple, not-very-good robot (c). His version has the robot blasting something (d). I tried another robot (e). His version can be seen at the bottom (f).

Observations:

>His drawings are a lot better than mine.

>Sean's robots d and f look like an adult trying to imitate children's drawing. I think it's because there's a use of certain stereotypes like the articulated arms which I think come from men-in-suit robot costumes.

>Sean's robot f came out better than his robot d. I think it's because the source drawing is stranger. It's not a very good drawing and I had no idea what I was after. But curiously, this seemed to allow Sean to create a more interesting result.

Why we believe in the Great Moon Hoax

Won't someone please pay attention to the lonely flyer? Processed with the 'blockbuster movie' setting in Looks.

Yesterday, David and I checked out the location for the final shot. We took some footage with his HV20 and I cut it into the final sequence. I think it should work well. He said he's going to try to shoot it next week, as early as Monday.

Tonight, my mind's more on bad reasoning, however. Now that I think I have some idea of how film works, it makes sense why students reason the way they do. I've speculated that film works by focusing on a central character that provides an emotional entry point into a narrative defined by a series of long term and short term anticipations. Films don't reason. They create emotional identification. They function via tone and voice. And it's difficult to maintain forward plot movement so anomalies and questions frequently get left by the wayside. This is how reasoning occurs in the media age.

No doubt this is part of the reason why I love films like Starship Troopers and Harakiri. They both jerk around with viewpoint. They force you to identify with a certain character and his/her views. Then they flip to another mode and ask you to identify with a conflicting view.

Mood cutting

I shot the bottom two tonight.

Last night I was shooting the tape recorder close up and one of the Omnis blew out. So I stopped by Samys this afternoon to pick up another bulb. While there I noticed they had C-stands for $129 which is fairly cheap. I've always been annoyed by C-stands. They seem needlessly overbuilt and expensive—why isn't there anything smaller and cheaper (a B-stand?). But I've always wanted one so I bought it. Tonight I reshot the close ups I did last night. Last night's stuff was so ugly it just annoyed me. So I took my time, used the C-stand to hold a bounce card, and tried several options. The C-stand worked great. I wish I had another. The shot came out nicely. It was the first time I successfully used a gel for an effect. After trying red and blue, it was yellow that gave me what I wanted. Plus, for whatever reason, putting a shadow over half of the recorder made it look better. Why is that? I then cut the footage into the final exposition sequence and it worked well. It was so nice and the music was dreamy and it made me happy and emotional. And I started making everything slower. I had done a lot of speed-up/strobe type effects in After Effects for this sequence and had kept them fast in Final Cut. But I slowed those down giving those shots an odd simultaneously fast and slow appearance. So a nice evening shooting and editing. Maybe it was the ice cream.

Duh

I spent most of the day adding chunks of noise to the video. The idea is to make it look like there is information straining to get out. Or as Ben would say (mocking me), "you have to perform through the obstruction." This is what it's like to direct Ben, by the way. I ask Ben to walk from the cactus to the car. Ben replies "Oh, you want me to walk through the desert?" Ben, now open the door to the car in one motion. "Oh, you want me to perform through the door?"

I used noise source that I collected years ago when I saw some weird analog noise on one of the VCRs at school. I also heavily distorted some footage in both After Effects and Motion. Motion has some really great filters in it. Plus, it tends to render much faster than AE. Try After Effects' light rays, for example. They take forever. Motion's are almost real time. Anyway, it occurred to me that I was adding noise to a film called noise. I guess I had always thought of the title 'noise' in terms of obfuscating information. But I guess there is literal noise as well. duh.

The secret of incredible power!

Here's the flyer for the final shot. I finally finished writing it today and sent it to David. It's pretty much a summary of the entire film. You know that I'm a stickler for the way publications look. I actually printed galleys for this and then did a manual paste up. I then grundged up the type a bit. To me, the difference is subtle but it helps the flyer to come across as something created by hand, rather than something printed from a computer. If I had any kind of marketing sense, I'd try to do something with this. You know, post it somewhere and try to drum up interest in the film.

A funny fellow

Here's another old image I found. This was originally going to be used for the sequence in which Ben finds references to the spinner in medieval literature. But after I thought about it, I wanted to make the references more ambiguous, as if Ben were making the connections within his own mind. I think it might make a nice post card, though.

I lost all sense of time

I've been backing up and cleaning up files and came across these images. I have the barest recollection of shooting these previz shots for the bird sequence we just finished. The date on the files reads 3/07. Ben's wearing a jacket so maybe the date is correct. Can I really have been thinking about this sequence for over a year?

The dum dum club

The film is now like a kernel of a film, super dense, like a blackhole. So now I'm expanding it here and there to give it more breathing room. The 'dream sequence' still needs to be longer so that Ben's descent into madness is more gradual. I need to stretch out the time before the broken spinner, so it's not too abrupt, and is more dramatic. Finally, I need to extend the scene where Ben thinks about the At Turning's End clue. At that point, there needs to be a stronger moment, a stronger sense of why Ben is going to the desert. If this were a Hollywood film, he would see At Turning's End. Then Ben would walk around seeing clues all around him. Go to the desert. Go to the desert. It would end up being like The Number 23. Or that Simpson's episode where Homer is reminded over and over about the stupidity of people—The Dum Dumb club, Lunkheadz, The Disney Store. I think I'm just going to expand the clue assembly, to give more weight to the moment.

Stats

Size of captures online and current edit: about 150 MB
Actually in use by project: 43 MB

Plant for the edit

Yesterday I took a break and worked in the yard a bit. My approach to gardening is the same as my approach to filmmaking or art—it all comes out of editing. I just plant things and if they grow, fine. If they don't, I move them or let them die. Then, if I discover a plant is getting too big I move it. A sprinkler expert came over the house a couple of months ago and said, "this bush is going to get big, and the lantana is going to sprawl" implying that I had planted them in the wrong places. So I replanted the bush, using it to replace the plumbago that I didn't like. If the lantana gets too big, I'll move it too. The yard is in a state of flux. The goal is to get everything in place before the plants get too big.

Cinema style

I keep waiting for the moment when I look at the film and think "I've done it all wrong! It just doesn't work!" That moment hasn't come yet. Maybe it will. I just keep moving things around, reshaping the edit. We shot so much footage that it's like having a huge source library. I can usually find a shot that I can use or repurpose. This gives the film a particular look. It lacks an overall seamlessness. There aren't swooping shots that gracefully transition from one shot to the next. It's the anti-Citizen Kane. The film is more like a series of fragments stitched together. It reminds me a bit of Moulin Rouge which has that same collaged-together feel. But apparently, that's the type of look I'm going for at an intuitive level. I edited out all the crane shots except the one at the end. I have only one traditional establishing shot. No exteriors. Only one place where there is A roll with B roll cutaways (the thinking sequence). In the desert sequence, Ben drives up in his car. He gets out of the car. Close up as he looks at a map in his hands. Then we see a tighter shot of Ben and he walks out of frame. Even then I didn't want to cut back to the wide shot. It had to go tighter. I'm not sure why I have such an aversion to that B roll cutaway look. I also discovered that I have an aversion to opening with establishing shots. I've been thinking about the sequence where Ben discovers stars coming out of the spinner. Right now, the geography is ambiguous. It's not clear that the stars are actually coming out of the spinner box because I shot so tight. I think traditionally you'd want to start wide and then go close. But I dislike that look so I might do a pickup shot where we see a high angle view of the spinner and then go tighter and see the stars coming out. That would make the geography clearer without going wide.

No wonder that this film looks odd. A large part of art is discovering your sensibility, your unverbalized likes and prejudices. Sometimes they make sense. Sometimes they don't. When I first started writing songs, I assiduously avoided going from I to V. I eventually realized that you can't be afraid of that, it's just a part of songwriting. Maybe I'll get over some of my film grammar prejudices. Here's what seems to comprise my cinematic style—

1. Locked down camera. People move in and out of frame.
2. Love of symmetry as long as there's sufficient visual depth.
3. Interesting angles.
4. Shot tight with wide angle lenses
5. Avoidance of traditional establishing shots. Instead, establish by using tight shots from various angles.
6. Avoidance of B-roll cutaway style editing
7. Unafraid to use post to do pushes and other post production camera moves as long as there's no foreground/midground.
9. Use of 'matte paintings' to augment compositions.
10. Dependence on using close ups of objects, etc., shot after-the-fact to fill in information.

Rated M for mature

I've been speculating about how the ratings system has changed movies. When I was a kid I saw all sorts of now R-rated films including Midnight Cowboy (hint: not a Western) and The Godfather (at the drive-in with my parents). I think what happened is that with the advent of the R-rating, no reasonable parent would take their kids to an R-rated movie. However, with M-rated movies (which later ended up being rated PG, PG-13 and R) there was a great deal of ambiguity and in that way, more freedom about what kids might see and more freedom about what filmmakers might produce. I think that today, R-rated films are seen as restricting marketability which means that summer blockbusters are now PG or PG-13—essentially kid's movies. But if we still had the M-rating, maybe we'd see more blockbusters like The Godfather. We loved that film in elementary school. I don't know, maybe my memory is totally wrong. Midnight Cowboy was originally rated X but got changed to an R but I somehow can't imagine my friend's mom taking us to either an X or R rated movie. I'm pretty sure that The Sterile Cuckoo that she also took us to (obscure Liza Minelli film) was rated M (and B for boring if you're a kid). And The Godfather may have always been rated R. Well, what do I know? As I say, a bad memory is the beginning of creativity.

Watched on Netflix Instant

Saw Ben yesterday. Good comments, a good person to provide perspective.

Dropped off version 65 with Dan today.

Comic Book Diaries: incredible that this film got distribution. Random script and direction. Nothing makes sense and runs into the chronological structure/no POV problem I wrote about earlier. Filmed on DV.

The Rambler: David Lynch inspired film that reminds me of noise film. Oddly shot with what looks like super 8 and DV. A guy hitchhikes, ends up in a weird guy's house and then goes back on the road.

Death to the Tin Man: Fake documentary done Guy Maddin style.

Chronicles of Vidocq

I skimmed through The Chronicles of Vidocq the other day. It was the first directorial effort of former French vfx designer Pitof who is better known for helming the not-all-that-terrible Catwoman. It was one of the first movies to be shot digitally, using a Sony F900, the same camera used for Episode II. The picture quality is beautiful. I would have sworn it was film. They must have grained it up a bit. The color was nice and rich too. It shows that what we might think of as a 'digital look' is probably an aesthetic choice, not a technical limitation. The whole thing was shot with a really wide angle lens, almost a fish eye. Everything is framed very tight. Interesting look. Nice, very French visual effects. Nice production design too. For a second I thought it looked a lot like Delicatessen. Then I thought, no, I just made the connection because Jeunet is French. Then I found that Pitof did the fx for Delicatessen. The story itself is a like a generic TV detective show with a typical 90's suprise ending.

If there's anything this film reminds me of is Mirror Mask. They're beautiful films with a rich, European sensibility. But somehow, the reliance on visual effects makes the films come across as cheap. I'm not sure why. For me, Noise film looks inexpensive rather than cheap and somehow, that's preferable.

Watching the movie

Today is the first day I went through almost the entire video with narration and audio. I had to rewrite a lot of the voice over to create more narrative clarity. Of all the films I've seen, it's most similar to Primer—cool-to-the-touch and brainy. But it also has a sensual quality that Primer lacks. I also don't think it's as exhausting. I made sure to leave enough 'thinking space,'—white space—to give people a chance to think after each segment. It's an odd viewing experience. Not much happens. Ben looking, thinking. I guess the whole film is a lot like me. A bit cryptic. Most of it 'internalized.' Definitely seems to mean something.

I think what makes the film odd and a little hard to "get into" is that most of the drama is not personified. But that was always the core of the film—how would something like this really play out? How would a film turn out if the main character was neither heroic nor cowardly?

Matte painting mania!

I don't even remember making the storyboard above. I guess I was thinking that Erik's truck is small so the bird would look big. In reality, the interior dwarfs the bird. At the bottom is the matte painting that adds more glass and blood to the shot. Lighting note: direct sun + 1 Omni coming through the same window.

High angle matte painting

I worked on that other matte painting some more. The other one looked too spare. The new one has some wide angle scenery at the edges. It's a bit more dramatic. The original shot is below.

The Face of Another (1966)

I found that symmetry tends to work best if there's sufficient depth in a shot. If not, it just looks flat. Note the Japanese-Mod decor.

This stylish Japanese film has some beautiful visuals but it's not something you'd want to watch while depressed. The story is about a man who is disfigured in an accident and then sets about to build an identity with a life-like mask. The man is bitter and vindictive and there's lots of dialogue about the soul, appearance and the nature of identity. The vibe is similar to Franju's Eyes Without a Face. The design of the doctor's office is wonderfully surrealistic. There are a lot of clear panels that are used to create richly layered images, like real-life Photoshop composites.

From shoddy to spectacular... sort of

The low angle shot of Ben opening the door looks really terrible (top). At the size you see it here, it doesn't look bad but at full size it's buzzy and ringing because of the overexposure. Plus, I shot it wrong! I was supposed to shoot it with Ben entering from the left, but I did it with Ben entering from the top. So I tried fixing it today with my new found strategy—matte painting. I think I got the idea from Citizen Kane. I was reading about Kane and found that it has even more fx than I knew. That one shot of Joseph Cotton in the old people's home, for example... that was shot against a white wall and the background was put in later. What I like about Kane is that the effects tend to exaggerate and extend scenes, rather than visualize the impossible.

You can see my matte painting in the bottom shot. I flipped the shot so that Ben is facing the correct way. Then I had to cover the edge of the frame with something that looked like the bottom of a car and repaint the sun rays. I also stuck in a lens flare (!) to extend the shot to the right, so it didn't look too artificial. The shot came out well, I think. What I learned from watching the extras in Episode I is that a lot of effects depend on misdirection to work. In the waterfall shot they show, they use a cheap multiplane in the background but you don't notice it because the shot is short and you're looking at the foreground. Same with my shot. It only works because you're looking at Ben.

The look of tragedy

One of the weird things about 9/11 was how movie-like the event looked, a fact that has probably contributed to many conspiracy theories. Here's a photo of a car running into the midst of a bicycle race in Mexico recently. It, too has that fake, movie-like look with people flying into the air. The driver was allegedly drunk and sadly one person died. Question: would this make a good reference for a visual effect? If we believe in the "ragged edge" idea, the answer might be no. Films need to look realer than real and therefore, less like our 'mind's eye' view of a crash.

Japanese ghost story

Here's an idea for a J-horror ghost story. I was reading about long GOP compression, the type of compression used by HDV format. This type of compression works by taking one keyframe and basing the subsequent frames on that frame, filling in and interpolating the rest. If the source I was reading was right (I think it was in Barry Braverman's book), software is making intelligent guesses about what will come up in the next frame, predictive interpolation. In a sense, it's making up what's not there. That's where the ghost would appear, in the predictive frame. Then there would be puppets.

My birthday

In the late morning I went over to Ben's house to do two pickup shots. Like a good producer, I cajoled him into it telling him that it would be offensive to my tradition, age and culture not to do what I want on my birthday. He ignored me but we shot anyway. In his driveway we did one green screen shot in which he reaches for the car handle. I used two 25 cent pieces of green cardboard from Aaron Brothers and the key pulled surprisingly well. But the sequence looks better without it, though, so I'll probably drop it. Then I needed to get a low angle of him opening the car door so we went to the nearby supermarket parking lot and shot there so we could get open blue sky. It was near noon so I was shooting directly into the sun. It made the shot look a little rough and out of focus. It was good enough so it stays. Hopefully, a CMOS won't burn out if you point it into the sun. Ben was surprised to find out that with analog cameras, they always told you not to point at the sun because it will burn out the element.

I then went home, cut the shots together and took a nap. I got my Legend of the Sacred Stone in the mail. Then I went to pick up Sean. While there I ran into David C. That was a shock. In LA, you just don't run into people. It's too much of a sprawl. But this is the second time I've run into him—the first time at Pet Smart. I found that we've both been taking our kids to the same daycare for awhile now and didn't even know it. That's the kind of daycare this is—huge and a bit faceless. David just got his Canon HV-20 that he's going to use for the final shot. I need to send him the flyer prop.

After that I took Sean to Houstons for dinner to celebrate my birthday. Houstons is a coffee shop with delusions of grandeur, the kind of place that expresses the idea of "nice restaurant" by being as dark as possible. I think it's funny the way the food servers are all dressed in black, as if they are bunraku puppeteers trying to remain invisible as they perform their duties. I actually used to go to the Houstons in Austin, Texas when I lived there. That one really was like a coffee shop, very Marie Callendar's-like.

Anyway, at Houston's I saw the waitress, my nemesis. The first time she served us was when Sean was a baby. She was friendly and very nice. At the time I guessed she was an actress since she has that generically attractive, malleable look I've seen in so many performers. Then the other year when I was there I told her she got my order wrong and she went off on a short rant. That's when I figured that her acting career never took off so she was stuck at Houstons which caused her to slide into an emotional morass, eventual weight gain and the bitterness of dreams lost. A long time ago I wrote how narratives help us structure and understand the world. I guess thinking about that waitress is an example of me writing a narrative back story, albeit a cliched one.

I had the Hawaiian ribeye which is like nothing I've had in Hawaii but apparently does appeal to Hawaiian tastes since I order it every time I go there. I then went home and finished painting the stucco wall that Jeff, Ben's brother fixed. I was thinking about color-correcting—why can I spend hours noodling around with Apple Color when I find painting the house such an unrewarding task? It occurred to me that it has to do with meaning. In Color, you're making changes that affect the interpretation of an image. Maybe using the bleach bypass filter will make this image look icier. Or maybe it will look grittier. It all depends on the context. When you're painting the house, the point is not to create something that you can interpret. It's to do a good job. It's a job a machine could do better. If houses were cars, we'd have robots spray-painting them in booths and the only thing to judge would be if it was painted well or poorly.

Shot list + storyboard comparison

For my records... part of the shot list I took to the equestrian area shoot. Top: my car standing in for the truck at actual location. Note drawn-in blood. Middle: Photoshop drawing. Bottom: test done at my house.

Below... I'm not sure why DVD producers think that storyboard comparisons are interesting. I never watch them. But they ARE fun to look at when it's your project. BTW, the middle shot is the source video for the matte painting described two posts ago. The truck on the left was always intended to be matted out. Fortunately, Ben's shadow never overlapped that area.

Born professionals

The audio on our raw footage typically sounds like this—

Ron: OK, go.

Ben: What do you want me to do?

Ron: Start from here.

Ben: Here?

Ron: OK, go. You're wasting tape.

Ben: You're shooting? Aren't you supposed to say action?

Ron: OK, Action.

Editing & digital matte painting

Been working on the bird segment edit. It feels very unnatural for me so I keep running versions by Ben. I think I need to add two more shots—one fish eye of Ben reaching toward the car door and one low angle shot of Ben opening the car door. There needs to be more suspense in the sequence. I might have to shoot one of the shots green screen to get the right background. I think about 80% of my effort is going toward getting the equestrian area to look like the desert.

I spent a lot of time working on a digital matte painting to extend one of the shots (see above). I integrated two images to cover up the truck we were shooting from and the equestrian railing. I was obsessed with the matte painting for a few hours. If I could, I would extend the shot so that Ben was more of a tiny blip and you could see the sky and the curvature of the lens distortion. But it's too hard and I'm not really enjoying the process. I'm just not much of a painter. Interestingly, one of the TAs I had as a painting instructor at UCLA ended up becoming a well-known matte painter and worked on everything from Star Wars to ET to Jurassic Park.