Comedy, Tragedy, and Chainsaws…

I’ve often claimed two competing kinds of geekery – theater and horror. If I had to tell anyone which one started first or took a deeper hold, I really couldn’t. As long as I had a personality and will of my own to see and do things (which I will mark around age 12 or so), I’ve been drawn to both see and create entertainment projects in horror and theater. And on rare occasions, both at the same time. And I tend to yak about horror here, but right now (for reasons that will become obvious in a second) I have theater on the brain.

Keeping Busy

I’ve always bounced back and forth from film to theater even in my teens and twenties, and when I first moved to LA some 13 years ago I was told I’d be lucky to get to direct anything within 10 years. Six months later, I was directing at a small theater (if you want to call it that) called The Professional Actors’ Counsel (PAC). Run by a shady individual with no background in theater, charging “company” members a monthly fee for the privilege of auditioning for  his productions then repeatedly producing the same scripts that required no royalties (say what you will about the experience of those writers), using three dimmers purchased at Home Depot to fade the lights and a clunky-loud 5-CD changer for sound effects (and mind you this was before we could burn our own CD’s), it was a less-than-ideal way of doing things but it’s what I had to work with. So why do it?

Despite the quality attainable in this type of situation, I’ve always preferred to make a real extant thing to the best of my current abilities than to wait for the perfect moment to make the perfect theoretical thing. Because the perfect thing DOES NOT EXIST, but the PAC productions of “Golden Elliot” and “Cruel and Unusual” (plays which should be unfamiliar to you) which I directed in 1999-2000 actually did – and all the actors who appeared in both of them did everything in their power to raise the quality of the shows beyond what the theater itself promoted or encouraged.

Did I mention that the guy who ran the place was a total scumbag?

The Right Place at The Right Time

A few years later my friend Bob brought me to the Sacred Fools Theater in Hollywood, and immediately I was hooked. Firstly, it reminded me deeply of the “Black Box” theaters in which I’d cut my teeth back home. I’ve always loved theater when, as an audience member, I was close enough to see if the actors were sweating; close enough to feel their real emotion like I would while watching a movie as opposed to squinting to see their performance from the balcony of a large opera house. Live performance is always a direct conversation between the players and the audience, and knowing that the actors know I’m there amps that relationship up. For me anyway.

So I begged the producers of the late-night weekly comedy show “Crime Scene” to give me a shot and eventually they did. And since then, I’ve been lucky enough to call Sacred Fools my theatrical home. The company is ever-changing but many key artists and technicians have been there since its founding in 1997. And the company has a tendency to attract extremely talented writers, designers, and actors. Seriously, if you’re in the LA area at some point you should check out whatever they’re doing.

And now I’m getting ready to direct my second mainstage show there, “Richard III.”

Yes, that “Richard III.” “The winter of our discontent/my kingdom for a horse!” “Richard III.” And I’ve been hesitant to put my feeling about doing this show into words, lest any of my cast or crew read this and lose faith in me because I, like them (and like cruel/tragical Richard himself I suppose), am a creature wracked with insecurities and working as hard as I can to defeat them. And in this case, it’s by helming the most ambitious play I’ve ever directed.

Why?

Why Shakespeare in LA? Why theater in general?

I’ll answer in reverse:

LA is a film town, and most of the people I work with are film people. Weirdly, most film people have zero theater experience even if most theater people out here have done some film. But film people often have one of two reaction to talk of theater:

1. ARE YOU HIGH? YOU’RE DOING HOW MUCH WORK FOR FREE?!
2. Why not put all that effort into a film?

One film person once even asked me, incredulously, “How do all those actors think this will benefit their careers? They’re never going to get discovered in a theater…” Well, that’s a good-ish point if the aim of all creative endeavors is to be discovered and become the next whomeverthefuck. But for those of us for whom theater functions more as a creative laboratory than a pageant of our fully-formed genius, the practice and process of putting up a completed show is more important than a thousand high-stakes film meetings that might or might not lead to anything one day. So I believe in doing this work for free because its value is not financial but creative. If there were real money on the line, we’d be talking about it for months or years rather than doing it and that’s the real reward for those of us involved.

It’s a concept that a theater director first acquainted me with when I was his AD in 1995 – thinking in terms of PROCESS vs PRODUCT (something I also talked about here). In other words, in film, it’s generally all about creating a product. Money’s on the line – BIG money often. So we storyboard it, we talk about it A LOT, we get every little last thing approved, we show up, we know what we’re there to execute, we shoot it, we go home, we cry ourselves to sleep. Process thinking is more about letting the end product be the evolution of what happens to it while trying to make it happen. It’s about letting the end result to change, and allowing one’s self to change in the process. And in my opinion, learning to be a “process” thinker allows one to create better work under all circumstances, but “product” thinking often leads to creative rigidity and stale-feeling productions. And granted, there’s plenty of “product” thinking going into theater, but in this kind of theater exists the freedom for me to find my own balance.

What Do You Think? Take This Poll!

But why Shakespeare in LA?

The first thing I discovered in our auditions is that LA secretly houses a multitude of actors who can bring Shakespeare to life and make his heightened language sound both profound and natural at the same time… No easy feat.

I don’t know if Shakespeare is the single most challenging English-language material to master, but it certainly has been for me. In William Ball’s book (which I plugged here) “A Sense of Direction,” he identifies what he calls the five predominant elements of drama. They are: Plot, Theme, Character, Dialogue, and Spectacle. Ball says that most plays only have one predominant element, but the only writer who consistently got all five in a script was Shakespeare. And since I read that book in the early 1990′s, I’ve had that thought in my head and knew that one day I needed to direct Shakespeare.

But what I meant when I told myself that was really this: One day I want to have directed Shakespeare. Or more precisely - one day I want to be good enough to have directed Shakespeare. I figured at some point I’d go off to Yale Drama for a decade or two, immerse myself in the Bard’s writings, and break out of that cocoon a theater genius.

Unfortunately, I only have one life and therefore can’t dedicate myself to a pursuit that lofty. And producing this show was a tough decision for everyone on the production team to make – but once we were all onboard the fear turned into excitement and the “what have we gotten ourselves into?” crisis turned into an opportunity to jump into the deep end of process, to see how we make this happen.

I’ve been very open to everyone working on “Richard III” that this is the first time I’ve ever directed Shakespeare. And right now, we’re a little more than half-way through the rehearsal process and the show is in that point where it feels kind of bendable in any direction. But it’s there.

And it’s weird, but rather than feeling like I’m in hell, I’m finding that the discovery of the many layers of genius that Shakespeare wrote into his scripts is the reason why great actors are drawn to perform it and why audiences have been drawn to watch it. And as the director, at best I’m the midwife of that discovery or sometimes the guy-in-the-room who blurts out “holy shit, do you realize what this means?” But mostly it’s a privileged position where I (hopefully) help to figure out how to translate a 500-year-old text to a modern audience by simultaneously raising my awareness to the level of the script and actors while remembering what it felt like a few short months ago when I hadn’t meticulously dissected this script and hoping that I can make audiences meet in the middle.

So the short answer of why to mount a Shakespeare production is this – because it’s hard. Because, after Shakespeare, the rest of this stuff will look easy.

Playing Possum

Nothing helps me to shake of the shackles of procrastination like a live possum in my living room. There’s no way to say I’ll handle this later or I don’t feel inspired to the marsupial, which is lying on the floor – apparently dead yet VISIBLY BREATHING.

October 19, 2010 - Possum #1

As owners of a dog with – shall we say, a healthy prey drive – my wife and I have been the unwilling recipients of a handful of squirrels, rats, mice, and even birds over the years. And as one would expect, they’re delivered to us after Wiley’s already had his way with them – something I’d prefer not to think about although I acknowledge it’s one-hundred percent natural.

This is Wiley. Possums should fear him more. And run faster.

Last October 19, Alicia woke up before me and walked through the house (past the possum, which she clearly was not ready to see), and on the way back I heard her scream in a way that she’s never screamed before. “Ben, you have to come out here RIGHT NOW,” she said. So I did. And I screamed. And we both shuddered to see that this time Wiley had brought something through his dog door that was going to be more than a normal chore of simple disposal. You see, Wiley had fallen for the classic possum adaptation of thanatosis, or “playing possum” where it stops moving and “plays” dead (not really – it’s in an altered state not unlike narcolepsy, we learned), and even releases a stench like that of rotting flesh from… (gag) Its anal glands.

But it’s breathing. And occasionally moving. If it didn’t look like a giant housecat-sized rat, one might comment on its angelic demeanor in repose.

So we called up a pest control company, they said it would be $80 to remove the possum. I would have paid $500. They said it could spring back to life, so we should close every door and block furniture under which it might scamper. Alicia and I armed ourselves with brooms, opened the front door, and waited. Eventually the pest control dude arrived with a cardboard banker’s box and a plastic dustbin, shoveled the critter into the box, looked me in the eye and said “will that be cash or check?”

I sheepishly wrote him a check.

Knock Knock. Who’s there? Possum #2. Possum #2 who…. Oh dammit!

Flash forward to a little more than a month ago. Alicia was shooting “House Hunters” on the road and I was home working on a documentary shoot for my friend Ben. More importantly I was working on the first project I was to cut in Adobe Premiere Pro, and finding myself personally resistant to learning a new thing. And it was weighing on me – I had another project, a very big one, that was coming up and I’d be using Premiere for that as well. But every time I’d go into the Premiere project, I’d hit a wall. Something wouldn’t make sense and I’d scour through manuals, books, online forums, etc. until I figured out how to do whatever. I wanted Premiere Pro to be Final Cut Pro 7 in every way except where it was better, but I wanted no learning curve. I was procrastinating.

And then the possum arrived.

I came home from the documentary shoot, feel asleep watching TV as I am wont to do, and woke up with Wiley licking my face. Out of the corner of my eye and by the light of the television, I saw what appeared to be a coil of extension cords on the floor. But there was no logical reason for an extension cord to be there and suddenly I knew what it was. This possum was small and apparently dead like the other, in a small pile, with its rubbery tail wrapped around its body. After loudly wishing I could explain to Wiley why this was displeasing, realizing that he had licked my face with a possum-juice-laced-tongue, and cursing my situation I gave up. It was late on a Sunday night, there was no pest control to be called, so I did basically what I’d seen the pest control guy do. I threw a box over the creature, slid the lid underneath it, and took it outside to the curb. By morning it was gone.

Two Days Later…

I was still slogging through Premiere Pro, as well as some other projects. And my new gig (which I can’t really talk about here) was about to kick in. I was stressing about work, didn’t know what to do, and that’s when possum #3 showed up.

Possum #3 - he's immune to my possum-ridding arsenal of one tactic.

My best guess is that possum #3 had spent the night in the house, or at least a good portion of it. I was getting ready for a checkup with my doctor (something I’d been putting off for some time), and I saw him sitting on top of Wiley’s crate out of my peripheral vision. And he was clearly waking up from his thanatotic stupor. My first thought was “I have to go get my blood pressure taken!” I pleaded with Wiley. I stared blankly at the critter who I’m sure was just as miserable to be in my house as I was to have him there.

I called the pest control company and they informed me that California had changed the licensing for trapping live animals, so I needed to call Animal Control. After fifteen minutes in the labyrinth of Animal Control’s automated phone system, staring at the groggy creature on top of the crate, unable to use my box trick (because it would harm the possum since he wasn’t on a flat surface), I decided to improvise. I grabbed a broomstick to drag the whole crate to the back door – and the broomstick snapped in half immediately. So I found another suitable jib-like-pole and dragged it to the door and successfully dumped the poor guy in the back yard and closed the dog door so Wiley couldn’t just bring him right back in.

And like Keyser Söze, possum #3 was gone.

The Allegory of the Possum

And I realized that if I was the subject of a short story or a horror film, the manifestation of possums was operating a lot like my tragic flaw on four  stubby legs. Like procrastination, the possum-in-my-house is disgusting, unwanted, and somehow both fearful and fearsome at the same time. And it smells like death (thanks, anal glands!). It’s been brought right into my space where I live and work and has stopped me from doing everything else all at once and will not go away on its own. I must take care of it before I can proceed to the next thing.

But like Adobe Premiere, the possum situation was getting easier and easier to deal with each time. After possum #3, I really sat down and had it out with Premiere Pro, and that weekend I finished my first cut of my friend’s short film. I’m not a spiritual person, but I’d learned a powerful lesson from a plethora of possums.

Image via Wikipedia

But after each great lesson there is always an even greater test…

Epilogue: Possum #4

What did Arnold say when he first saw the face of The Predator?

After finishing up the cut of the short film, we brought the project to his house and worked on tweaks at night after I’d worked on the unnamable project all day. So a little less than a week ago, I came home at about 12:30am after an edit session only to find possum #4. Simply the largest, fiercest-looking, ugliest possum we’d had our of all of them. Although I know that possums don’t really attack people except as a last resort, tell that to his mawful of razor-sharp teeth which lined its open mouth.

Door opens. I shriek, waking Alicia up (which nicely book-ends this story if you ask me). She runs out, I go into the storage room and grab a banker’s box and a lid, scoop the varmint up carefully, take it out to the porch, turn off the porch light. We both take many photos. I’m disgusted and sick of dealing with this problem, and have vowed to keep the dogs in at night at least until our fig trees are no longer bearing fruit, but I handled it. No reason to blame the dog, no reason to curse the situation.

I wish I could feel as sure about my creative pursuits, the things which truly inspire me as I do about something like this which only serves to gross me out. I think it’s pathetic that it’s harder for me to carve out as much time in my life to push my own agenda as there is to take care of a live possum when there’s no other choice. Beyond procrastination, it’s important to know that there’s always time when we don’t have a choice of whether to deal with something anymore, but until then we’re choosing to not do the thing which we most want/need to do with our lives… And then the possum shows up and suddenly our mission is more clear than it’s ever been before. You box it, you drag it outside. You let it go.

And after wondering if this one was REALLY dead (Alicia pointed out that it was breathing too), possum #4 scurried off into the night about ten minutes later. I hope it’s alive and well.

Image via Wikipedia

After over a decade as a happy Final Cut Pro user, proponent, and propagandist, it’s been a terrible two weeks for me. When George Rizkallah and I went in on our first FCP v.2 system from Promax back in 2000, little did I know how accessible editing would grow to change my life. As a director, I could cut my own work. When I could afford to hire another editor, I would do so – but on a system I understood. And as I grew with Final Cut Pro, editing actually became a revenue stream for me between directing gigs and my knowledge of a professional-level tool made that possible.

Accessible pro-level editing has also changed the landscape of all editing. Avid, the industry leader in Nonlinear Editing (NLE) was prohibitively expensive before FCP barnstormed onto the scene and forced Avid to lower their prices for their customer base. And the low price created an exponentially-larger market than anyone would have guessed in the early 1990′s when this stuff first showed up.

It has filled me with dread to watch the Windows Vista-like release of Apple’s latest Final Cut Pro offering, and the subsequent backlash, and Apple’s tone-deaf, tin-eared, mealy-mouthed, “Think Different” response to that backlash. Editors have made videos, and even put together a petition, to reinstate FCP 7 as the standard and to relegate the edit-abortion that is FCPX to the trash heap of time. First, David Pogue of the New York Times posted a blog where someone deep inside Fortress FCP explained to us pleebs why FCPX’s bullshit was actually Jello pudding. Consultant and blogger Richard Harrington reposted Pogue’s blog with his rational responses point-by-point here.

Falling Fairly Far from the Tree

Image via CrunchBase

And what of Apple directly? Have we heard anything from them? Barely. They released a FAQ paper explaining how their loyal supporters can spend $500 on the utility “Automatic Duck,” for something the program has always done for free as well as a litany of other things mostly which lead me to believe that, as a professional tool, Final Cut Pro X has a long road ahead. Will it get there? Maybe. Will I be there if/when it does? Well, I won’t be asking for a refund, but that doesn’t mean I’m counting on FCPX to turn the ship around.

But the real question anyone who edits is this: What are we going to do right now? I mean what are we actually going to do? As professionals, we don’t have the time to play around with multiple new programs until this dust settles as it could be months, and it might take Apple over a year to put FCP back on track.

To their corporate credit, both Avid and Adobe have jumped on Apples misstep by offering huge discounts on their products. Yes, it’s obviously the dealer’s first hit of crack for most of us, and as always I ask myself which of these two media-making monoliths will actually net the most new professional customers by the time this is all over. Which brings me to the here and now…

In the here and now, I actually have a project I’m cutting for my friend and frequent collaborator, Kays Alatrakchi. Entitled “APPNTMNT,” it’s Kays’ first film as director. Shot on the RED camera (with some Canon 5D in there for B-camera), we want to stress-test whatever software we used to see how well it handled all the professional-level demands we could throw at it. He and I waited until FCPX was released to begin the editing process (which is why I downloaded FCPX on day one). And now we’re switching horses.

To Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5.

Watch This Space

Image via Wikipedia

So I took Adobe up on their offer and upgraded my Production Suite, and I’m going to chronicle here what that’s like, the ups and downs. Any Premiere users, I’d love to hear how I can make this smoother. I’m going to post screencaps, complain about missing functions, and hopefully sing the praises of the software that (from my perspective) could be the one to fill the gap that Apple is leaving for filmmakers and post professionals – both of which I consider myself.

Meet the new boss. This is my actual workspace in Premiere Pro 5.5 - I've really tried to make it feel like the FCP of old.

Honestly, I’m not excited about moving to a new platform. This will be my third (Media 100, Final Cut Pro, now this – go ahead and laugh, Avid users). But the integration of AfterEffects (which is becoming a must-have item for filmmakers, see www.videocopilot.net to understand my zeal) and Photoshop make it an attractive one-two knockout punch.

So here goes nothing. I will let you know what I think as I go.

Meet the happy, colorful new look of FCPX.

At 5:30 am this past Tuesday, Apple blew the minds of editors around the world. And not in a good way.

Final Cut Pro, the professional nonlinear editing (NLE) suite released by Apple over a decade ago, never had it easy. When it first appeared on the scene, it had to compete with industry leader Avid (still its main competition), the also-ran editing system Media 100 – of which I counted myself a happy user at the time, and fringe-ey weird programs like Adobe Premiere or the Video Cube. When I hopped onboard the FCP-train, it was already on version 2, and like Media 100 (and unlike Avid, for me anyway) I found it to be an amazing, intuitive system that opened up creative possibilities I’d never had before.

And I was one step closer to that wish for all indie filmmakers – autonomy.

In the days before ubiquitous nonlinear desktop editing, it wasn’t unusual to pay upwards of $500/day for an editing system plus the cost of the operator. In 2000, I’d produced a project where we’d spent $2,000/week on an editing system (and again, the operator was not included in that price) and felt like we’d gotten away with art theft in The Louvre. If I wanted to cut something simple like my own directing reel, I could expect to pay handsomely or beg a friend for a HUGE favor. At the time this made sense; the cheapest Avid systems at the time ran about $30,000 and required a great deal of hardware acceleration just to do things like rotate an image or apply simple color correction. And when we were done editing, we had to take the project to a DIFFERENT Avid, the Symphony, to online at $500/hour plus the cost of the operator.

If it sounds like madness, it’s because it was. And mind you, we were finishing in DigiBeta. Standard Definition.

When “Good Enough” is Really Good Enough

In 2000 when George Rizkallah and I were considering going in on a FCP system so we could cut our own projects, a friend of mine who was an old hat at Avid mocked the potential decision, comparing it to Premiere, Adobe’s then-easily-mocked software-based NLE (more on Premiere later). I really thought FCP was onto something though – for $1,000.00 George and I were able to have access to our own editing suite which, although flawed, emboldened us to shoot on inexpensive DV camcorders, edit, and even record back to VHS tape with the help of a hardware breakout box. A year or so later, DVD Studio Pro v.1 came out and, although flawed, allowed us to burn then-$10-apiece DVD media that could be played in most DVD players at the time.

And it grew from there.

Version 3 of FCP gave us color correction and version 4.5 allowed us to work in HD. Apple released apps like Motion to compete (unsuccessfully) with Adobe AfterEffects, updated DVD Studio Pro to actually be able to author amazing DVD’s, and Compressor allowed us to output to a variety of formats. Even programs which Apple bought and repackaged – like Color (which began life as Final Touch HD) or CinemaTools (which began life as Film Logic) showed us loyal users that Apple meant business and even when their tools didn’t connect properly with our needs (I’m looking at you, Soundtrack Pro), we could see that Apple was trying to give us tools that were good enough to create professional results.

If it sounds exciting, it’s because it was. By version 5, FCP had significantly penetrated the market and those who knew how to use it were in demand. After keyboard customization, shared workstations, and data-based workflows were added, Avid users were left to sneer at FCP’s less-than-robust media management. But who cared? The Coen Brothers were using FCP. Walter Murch was using FCP. The shame of using “Wedding Cut Pro” was gone.

Vive La Video Toaster

But there was always a specter hanging over us. The Sword of Damacles of cheese as it were – the idea of pre-built templates which might look cool the first time we see them, but after a while we begin to notice them in late-night commercials and infomercials, high school sporting events compilations, and softcore pornography.

In the early 1990′s, another hardware/software combo gave filmmakers an in-home solution filled with prebuilt templates and relatively-useless flashiness. The Video Toaster – a software package that ran on the Commodore Amiga computer, which blasted out fancy “Star Wipe” style edits with blazing slowness. Watch this video and you’ll get the idea:

So at the time it was revolutionary to have these tools in one’s house. But most of the tools consisted of goofy titling and cheesy transitions, all pre-built for the wedding video industry.

What’s the connection? Over the years, as Apple has given filmmakers a robust toolkit, but they’ve also given us things – which I’m sure took a great deal of R&D to create – that nobody needed. Like LiveType and Live Fonts. I’m sure there was somebody out there who proclaimed, “finally I can have my words made out of particle system smoke!” But for the rest of us and I do mean most of us, these prebuilt templates which infested DVD Studio Pro and Motion sat bloated and unused like Tom Sizemore because to do more than play with them was to admit that as a creative person you were out of ideas and willing to let your projects have a great deal in common with the cheapest work that was done. And that’s not meant as a slight against the people who make videos for summer camps, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, and Elementary School plays (and Tom Sizemore). There’s a place for them, and they don’t have the money to hire graphics departments.

It’s just that now, with Apple’s release of FCPX (the “X” is pronounced “ten” even though there were only seven versions of FCP before now), the editing monolith is using its decade-old industry capital to buy some Video-Toster-cheese, and a lot of it.

Introducing WTF Pro

Meet the new interface; completely different from the old interface.

It’s been much reported this week by disgruntled editors everywhere – FCPX is making filmmakers who depend on it walk the plank. The new FCP has some good (64-bit processing, background rendering), a lot of bad (no viewer, no support for external monitoring, no import or export, no support for tape ingest or export), and a pantsful of ugly (star wipe! Silly templates, CGI-water-dripping-on-the-lens effect, etc.). Support for plugins that I’ve purchased over the years – gone. Ability to bring a FCP 7 project into FCPX – nonexistent. Multicam editing – left out. David Pogue’s blog in the New York Times doesn’t exactly quiet my fears. To replace what was already in FCP until now, I only have to go spend $500 for Automatic Duck. The $300 price tag on FCPX is now $800, and I still can’t use multicam or output to tape like I did last week.

But you can bring in iMovie projects, there is that.

So what are filmmakers to do? We have three choices, really:

• Upgrade to FCPX. It’s the future, right? Background rendering, 64-bit processing, and an interface that’s easier on the eyes.
• Continue using FCP 7. It may be three years old and unable to do a lot of fancy things that Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid can do, and it may never change, but we all get it.
• Jump ship! Adobe has developed Premiere Pro so that it seamlessly integrates into its flagship apps Photoshop and AfterEffects. Avid has been developing its software all this time to compete with FCP while lowering their prices. It’s still more expensive than FCP, but Avid is also still the industry standard-bearer.

As I emerge from my NDA-driven rathole and rediscover the things I did before work consumed me, I’ve been catching up on some reading. Specifically blog reading (and a book or two as well).

My friend Jenelle likes to make fun of me for being late to the Blog party. She is right, blogging had been going on for a long time (in internet years) before I started writing here about a year-and-change ago so I’d have something live for the “blog” link on my new webpage – and an obsession was born. One that even overrode my hatred of the word “Blog.”

Also, I felt (perhaps arrogantly… Okay, probably arrogantly) that maybe I could have something to add to the glut of online chatter here at WordPress (or at Blogger, if you will) that somebody would find of some value. Directing is a cool job when there’s a job to be had, and perhaps some of the weirdness that I’ve gone through can be helpful to someone starting out.

Hey directors, why no blogs?

No, I’m not counting blogs that are a marketing move for your films, yet get abandoned the day after the film opens.

Truth is, I haven’t found a lot of blogs by working directors out there, which (if you believe the myth) is because most of them are too busy pumping the world full of a mysterious substance called “vision” to scribble this stuff out – but I secretly think it’s because many of them would prefer not to expose their underbelly to scrutiny, admitting in public that directing is often the act of professionally not-knowing, frequently digging one’s self out of a creative hole in front of 200 or more people.

Or maybe that’s just me. Probably just me. Everyone else clearly has everything figured out.

I wanted, really really wanted to recommend Kevin Smith’s blog, Silent Bob Speaks (AKA “My Boring-Ass Life”). Despite my misgivings about him as a filmmaker – misgivings which he apparently shares – but there’s just not enough content on his blog. Ever. Perhaps he just wants people to listen to his Smodcast podcast.

Anyway, writing this blog really got me reading other peoples’ blogs, trying to find the best information out there to help me understand the creative process, the film business, writing, directing, or the future of media. I mean, obviously, someone is blogging about everything, right now even. And SOME of those people are at the top of their fields and have chosen this direct way to interface with their fans, followers, or anyone else who might find their information useful. So I compiled ten of them whom I plug right into my RSS feed and read away every time they post.

Truly Free Film - Ted Hope

I list this blog first, because it best delves into the issues facing indie filmmakers the most. And make no mistake – those issues will inevitably bleed into studio filmmaking one day, if they haven’t already. Hope (whom I saw speak last July and then blogged about here) is an actual, real-world, for-realsies working producer with a giant list of credits. Hope speaks openly about how to build a better mousetrap for indie filmmakers, how to actually make money, and what things producers need to be considering. For a sample of his unique insight, check this out.

And speaking of Ted Hope, one of his more recent films was James Gunn’s “Super.” Gunn himself has a blog very much worth checking out. And he’s a director. So there goes my point from earlier I suppose.

Prolost – Stu Maschwitz

Many of us first became aware of Stu about ten years ago when his then-company, The Orphanage, created a process called Magic Bullet to make crappy interlaced DV footage look sorta-kinda like film. A few years later, 24P mini-DV and then HD rendered the fake-film-from-video market obsolete, but thanks to Stu’s innovation his Magic Bullet Looks Suite became immensely popular among indie filmmakers and has continued with things like Colorista, Mojo, Grinder, and LUT Buddy but his DV Rebel’s Guide book introduced many of us to the filmmaker behind the code – someone with an accessible, empowering message and the balls to tell filmmakers that technique is a master-able thing. He often swings back and forth from high-tech to boots-on-the-ground art-making, which is how it should be.

Confessions of an Aca-Fan – Henry Jenkins

With his book Convergence Culture, MIT’s Henry Jenkins blew a lot of minds with his radical ideas of “Transmedia” (a word he’s often given credit for coining). Now “transmedia” is the thing you’re soaking in about 100% of your day whether you want to or not. I personally can’t wait to read his follow-up book, “Spreadable Culture” whenever it comes out. Jenkins is one of the premiere smartypantses thinking about how we ingest story into our lives and how we can be a part of the stories we love. Now that Jenkins has moved from MIT to USC, I hope to see the Hollywood studios learn how to ape his message and figure out how to tell more immersive stories.

johnaugust.com - Screenwriter John August

Through his frequent, short, and very informative blogs, screenwriter John August (writer of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Big Fish,” and… I’ll just say it… “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle”) brings some phenomenal advice and candidly answers questions. His blogging style (unlike mine…) is short and to-the-point and extremely useful to anyone at any stage in their writing career.

Cinema 5D

If you’re a gearhead like me, Cinema5D.com is a must-read daily. They post video of the most recent gear to be found for indie, low-budget, and DIY filmmakers alike (often all three at the same time). When I wasn’t able to attend the NAB show this year (due to my gig – the one with the NDA), I was able to vicariously live the NAB experience through the daily updates posted by Cinema5D.

Deadline Hollywood – Nikki Finke

As the trades have seemingly followed all print down its spiraling dark night of the soul, blogger Nikki Finke and her Deadline Hollywood website have almost replaced Daily Variety for many film professionals. Or at least supplemented it. Often getting the story before it even is a story, Deadline is a great way to keep abreast of trends and movements in the business without having to read all of those pun-and-alliteration-filled Variety headlines.

Vincent Laforet

With his touchstone short film “Reverie,” Laforet kicked off the modern DSLR filmmaking movement which is now regularly used in features, TV, music videos, and commercials. And since that short film, Laforet has kept his eye on the cutting edge of image-making with small cameras.

Sutter Ink – Kurt Sutter

“Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter writes the most completely unvarnished blog. Read his inspired love-hate letter to agents and managers, called “Tenpersensual” here. God help him if his career ever begins to slide, but I can’t thank him enough for his candor and straight-shooting in the meantime. As I read his blog, all I can think about over and over again is the amazing 1966 quote from PJ Proby: “I am an artist and should be exempt from shit.”

The Hurlblog – Shane Hurlbut

ASC Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut is probably best known for having been Christian Bale’s personal anger-sponge on the “Terminator Salvation” set some years back. But that’s not how we should remember him, not at all. An accomplished DP for a few decades, Hurlbut is the Tony Robbins of HDSLR shooting and to hear him talk for five minutes will convince pretty much everyone that they should go make movies. Along with people like Gale Tattersall, Hurlbut will go down as one of the first really-real professional-working-cinematographers to legitimize the small-camera shooting style, and to do it with amazing panache. It’s a little off-topic, but if you want to see how awesome Hurlbut is, check out this educational series he made on HDSLR filmmaking. Seriously, do it!

Cheesycam

DIY filmmaking has never been DIY-ier than it is as presented by the fine folks at Cheesycam. Many times per day, they post articles, videos, and even ebay auctions and great deals on things from Amazon.com. I’ve bought a few things they’ve talked about with sometimes mixed results, but it’s inspiring on a daily basis – how little one needs to create an amazing image and how common things – like legos and a bicycle can be retrofitted into usable (if not quite “professional”) camera gear. And that’s not to say that many of the DIY projects on this site might not turn up on your next professional shoot either.

Yes, yes. I know. It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working more than usual, and I haven’t had the blogging time I would prefer. I take that back – I’d rather be working. But I could take more time to do this as well. I promise to have some new stuff forthwith, but for the time being I wanted to share one of the more subversive pleasures to be found in the unusual kind of marketing onto which I’m often brought onboard to work.

Case in point: My production company was tapped to produce several videos for an online campaign for THQ‘s video game, “Homefront,” a shoot-em-up created by “Apocalypse Now” scribe John Milius. All of the pieces were some kind of futuristic/bleak home video, generally featuring someone being shot or other egregious violence. Fun stuff.

We’ve done similar work for projects like “Hellboy,” Audi’s “Art of the Heist” alternate-reality game (ARG), USA Network‘s “The 4400,” Discovery Channel’s “The Colony,” and HBO’s “True Blood.” The agency we did most of these for, Campfire, balks at the idea of calling this stuff “viral video,” perhaps because that term tends to refer to spontaneous video capture of adorable-or-atrocious real-world events (kittens-on-a-Roomba or whatever extreme videos that Daniel Tosh deems worthy for broadcast on Comedy Central – and I seriously never miss an episode). I’ve heard it called “social media,” a term which seems to seek to sterilize whatever is “viral.” I think the idea about not calling what we produce “viral video” is that you can’tmake something go viral. It’s either a meme or it isn’t, it either catches on or it doesn’t. And when it does, as the creator, it’s out of your hands and spreading as if by its own life force. So we want everything to go viral, but only an elite few of us get to be Rebecca Black.

This should probably be the subject for a blog in and of itself.

Anyhoo – one of our “Homefront” pieces featured the beautiful and talented Salt Lake City being bombed to smithereens. We shot the piece on a hillside in SLC, and then our VFX guru Eric Hayden added the destruction. Here’s the video, as picked up by machinima.com:

Obviously, destroying a major city without anyone getting hurt is always lots of fun. But as Orson Welles would have told you, having one’s fictions make a splash in the real, actual, flesh-and-blood world is an unparalleled rush. What happened? Our little production (which consisted of a crew of 3, plus the kids, plus two people from the ad agency) ended up being featured on an actual local SLC newscast. Yes, it’s a puff piece about the video game. No, there was no panic in the streets. The video clearly says that this is 2026, so these kids featured in the video won’t even be born for a year or two. Still, this is that elusive beast known as “transmedia” showing its versatility – the media can become the story, a tale which simultaneously promotes the story-world of the commercial property, the world beyond that specific game or movie or whatever, and propagates both into popular consciousness. Sound esoteric? it’s not. With a little luck, it’s downright comprehensible.

So without further ado, here’s the video of the ACTUAL newscast featuring our little video:

Sure, we managed to not spark a riot or anything, but it’s great to know that our work was used to pad the SLC broadcast, and that nobody watching that broadcast would ever forget that their town was so charming that it needed a “Homefront”-style facelift.

It’s completely arbitrary, but we really think of movies in terms of the decades in which they were released. I bring up the 1970′s, and immediately a group of movies which typified that decade pops into any cinephile’s head. I bring up the 1990′s, and horror fans recall… Um… The “Scream” films? “Man’s Best Friend?” “The Lawnmower Man?”… Okay, bad example.

But I do think the last decade bears mentioning. I believe that it will go down in horror history as the triumphant return of horror to the mainstream. We’ll recall the rise and fall of Lions Gate as the primo provider of scary cinema, we’ll look back at the peak and the valley of home video as both incubator and crutch for an overall industry that has increasingly lost its foothold in the culture.

The Good

As a genre, Horror saw its largest resurgence in popularity since the 1970′s. The plummeting cost of film production coupled with the ubiquity of desktop-based editing resulted in a groundswell of homespun horror. New voices like Neil Marshall, Ti West, and Zack Snyder used theatrical horror as an incubation chamber to reinvent a genre after its ten-year hiatus from popularity.

As an industry, horror allowed itself to be influenced by international flavors from “Ringu” to “Haute Tension.” Audiences once again learned what it felt like to be frightened (or maddened or grossed out or whatever).

Also, Vampires came back in a big way (did they ever really leave?), followed by Zombies. Every time I hear that either of those two venerable creatures has lost its appeal to audiences, something like “The Walking Dead” or “Let the Right One In” comes out and proves prognosticators wrong.

Also, as the Sundance-style film festival begun to sprout gray hair, genre festivals like Fantastic Fest, Fantasia, Sitges, UK Frightfest, Screamfest and Shriekfest picked up the slack and reached directly to the audiences for whom the genre films were made. None of these festivals has become the place where films are bought and sold, but I think/hope that day is coming.

The Bad

It’s difficult to look back at the decade that was without acknowledging the expensive mistakes and misfires in the genre, ones that may have filled their distributors’ coffers, but failed to leave lasting impressions. I’m not just talking about bad movies, which are inevitable. I’m talking mostly about cynical movies, where the profit motive overrode everything else.

The company leading this race-to-the-bottom this decade was Michael Bay‘s horror label Platinum Dunes, remaking “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Amityville Horror,” “The Hitcher,” “Friday the 13th,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” with decreasing degrees of artistic success each time. I have to ask myself why none of these films have become beloved classics of the genre – obviously someone making these decisions had some degree of affection for these properties, and if John Carpenter’s “The Thing” or Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” proved anything it’s that a remake can be done effectively and with respect for the audience but somehow the Platinum Dunes experiment, in my opinion, missed that crucial aspect.

Some would lump Rob Zombie’s remake of “Halloween” in with that group but I would not, chalking Zombie’s Michael Meyers retread in with a lot of the other remakes that came out over the last decade, but I would disagree. Although I’m personally mixed on Zombie’s approach to the genre (more below), it’s obvious that the man loves him some horror.

The Ugly

In two words: Torture Porn. The term, coined by New York Magazine critic David Edelstein, sends us back to a certain kind of movie that flourished in the late 1960′s and 1970′s, but Herschell Gordon Lewis never did it quite like this. Eli Roth’s “Hostel” films, James Wan’s “Saw” franchise, and pretty much everything Rob Zombie ever made get lumped into this category.

Without defending or condemning this subgenre, it’s certainly had its ups and downs. For my money, the most fully-realized film to come out of this genre was the original “Saw” (more below), and by the time people stopped seeing these films most of us were already pretty-well over prolonged shots of people screaming in pain.

My Top 15 Horror Films of the ‘Aughts

I really tried to nail down a “top 10″ list, but this decade packed in 50% more awesomeness than that would allow. So here, for what it’s worth, are my picks.

Let the Right One In (2008)

This gem from Sweden encapsulates everything that’s right with genre storytelling. Telling the story of a brutal kid being raised in a broken home, befriended by a girl who appears to be his age but is actually a much older vampire. I saw this at Fantastic Fest in 2008, with no idea of what I was about to see. It’s fairly impossible to do that today, what with the heightened profile of this film as well as the mainstream release of the pretty-good English-language remake, “Let Me In,” but there’s no replacing the surprises this film offers, or the deep and real-feeling characters that form the center of this heartbreaking story.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) (2006)

I’ve always been a big fan of Guillermo del Toro‘s Spanish-language films (“Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone”), but “Pan’s Labyrinth” placed del Toro in the pantheon of great horror directors and great fantasy directors at the same time. Although this film isn’t a horror movie per se, it has some of the scariest moments and best monsters of the decade (pale man, anybody?). Del Toro’s imaginative fantasy-driven design set against the backdrop of fascist WWII-era Spain made for one of the most involving, inventive, and truly frightening movies of the decade.

The Descent (2005)

After creating the most inventive (and least CGI-driven) werewolf movie  in 2002′s “Dog Soldiers,” director Neil Marshall made pound-for-pound the most riveting nail-biter of monster movie of the decade. With an almost all-female cast, Marshall drops the audience into emotional and physical danger as our heroines are trapped in an underground cave system. Scares come early in the film, long before the Lovecraftian white creatures make their first appearance.

Session 9 (2001)

Plenty of movies like to compare themselves to Kubrick’s “The Shining,” specifically latching onto its “slow burn” aesthetic. What Brad Anderson’s “Session 9″ gets closest to that goal is that it begins with the same idea – we don’t know the exact details of Gordon Fleming’s (Peter Mullan’s) unwinding, but from the first frame we know it’s going to get ugly. And the setting – a closed mental hospital filled with all-too-real caverns and secrets works too perfectly as the central metaphor for Fleming’s undoing.

The Revenant (2009)

No, you probably haven’t seen it. It’s not been released. But last year at Fantastic Fest it brought down the house. Director D. Kerry Prior does the impossible – he makes a horror comedy that’s both horrific and funny, and he does it by grounding the characters in some kind of believable reality, pitch-perfect casting, and by not insulting the intelligence of the audience. I don’t think this movie has distribution yet, but if anyone reading this ever gets a chance to see the movie, by all means do.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Rest assured that I was one of the loudest people screaming “WHY?!” when I first heard that George Romero’s best film was being remade. I mean, it would only beg comparison to a film as thematically alive and darkly comedic as the 1978 classic which fully modernized the zombie and upped the gross-out ante for several generations of fans. But on opening night at the Cinerama Dome, Zack Snyder’s first feature re-re-invented the genre. It may not make Romero happy, but “running zombies” created more mayhem and packed more scares than the lumbering dead of years past (yes, I know “The Return of the Living Dead” had running zombies back in 1985), and this movie did what a remake should do – it took the basic conceit of the original and reframed it in a different world and let it play out.

The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

Beyond being the best thing to happen to Clive Barker’s filmography since his own original 1987 horror “Hellraiser,” this dark slice of Manhattan horror marked Lions Gate‘s about-face from the genre it had done so much to build over the decade. A changing of the guard at the top of the studio led them away from the movies that had been filling theaters as well as their bank account to more esoteric fare, and it’s unfortunate. Ryûhei Kitamura‘s dark telling is vintage Barker, ripped straight out of The Books of Blood, and truly deserved a shot at being seen by a wider audience.

28 Days Later (2002)

Genre-hopper Danny Boyle’s eclectic zombie-like pandemic flick introduced mainstream audiences to Cillian Murphy, groundbreaking mini-DV cinematography that really worked, and equal parts of strong character development and genuine suspense and scares. And, yes, more running zombies (only they weren’t zombies, but whatever).

[REC] (2007)

Serving as the basis for the also-quite-good “Quarantine,” “[REC]” once again reframed zombies. Running ones. And put them in one of the best horror mock-documentaries made to date. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza directed the movie that begins as a fluff news pieces/ridealong with a fire department and ends in a lockdown in a labyrinthine apartment building infected with a virus that turns ordinary people into a bloodthirsty horde. It manages to feel fully spontaneous while being perfectly structured, and carries an anarchic feeling of anything-can-happen-at-any-moment.

Martyrs (2008)

Nothing, and I mean nothing can prepare any audience for this most-extreme answer to the torture-porn movement. Director Pascal Laugier goes to places that nobody else would dare, bringing the audience who would risk going down the most extreme rabbit hole to a conclusion so jarring and mind-blowing it’s hard to believe that anyone had the balls to release it. Or make it. Or see it. For a time, Laugier was rumored to be directing a reboot of the aforementioned “Hellraiser” series, and he would have been the perfect match to reinvent pain on that level.

Saw (2004)

It’s hard to believe now, looking back, at what a phenomenon this modestly-budgeted claustrophobic thriller managed to spawn – and although it regularly gets lumped in with the “torture porn” movement, the original “Saw” was more of a horror version of “The Usual Suspects” than a precursor to “Hostel.” In fact, when my non-horror fans ask for movies to watch, I generally recommend this movie – it’s not as gory as anyone remembers or thinks (I don’t think they had the money for lots of the red stuff), but it has a great hook. Literally.

The Host (Gwoemul) (2006)

Firstly, it’s a minor miracle that this movie hasn’t been forced down the remake highway behind Asian classics like “Ringu,” “The Grudge,” and “A Tale of Two Sisters,” or the on-again-off-again rumors of an “Oldboy” remake (please, just don’t). Maybe it’s because it’s so culturally specific to its Korean cast, or maybe Americans just don’t have much of a taste for slime monsters these days. In a time when audiences are awash with CGI critters of all types, “The Host” proved that it could be done well, on a lower budget but with a superior creature and good storytelling and characters. Again, it didn’t insult the intelligence of its audience which is the divining rod between great low-budget genre work like this and forgettable straight-to-video garbage.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

I may be the only person on earth who loves this movie as much as I do, and I accept that. Richard Gere stars as the real-life journalist John Klein (no, I don’t buy into any of the “true” story), as a widower who stumbles across the “Mothman,” a wraithlike figure with glowing-red eyes who presages calamity and human suffering. While trying to unravel the mystery creature, Klein becomes too deeply entrenched in it to be objective about how insane he appears. The phone conversations he has with the never-seen “Indrid Cold” raise the hairs on the back of my neck every time. Yes, it’s a cinematic pricktease, but it really works and the solid cast nails this ethereal slice of weirdness to a human reality.

The Orphanage (2007)

Juan Antonio Bayona directs and Guillermo del Toro produces the most frightening ghost story of the decade. Phantom little kids are always scary, but throw a mask on that tyke and he’s terrifying. Like all good spirit yarns, this film deals with the unwinding of a troubled past, this time based at an orphanage for “special” children. The film hits all the buttons in the right order that all good ghost films do, as well as brining in a team of parapsychologists ripped right out of “Poltergeist” or “The House on Haunted Hill” to up the fear ante.

Paranormal Activity (2009)

With a few pennies and a San Diego tract house, Oren Peli proved that less can be more with a mock-doc that will glue almost anyone into their seats. It’s been pointed out that the phenomenon of the ultra-low-budget horror breakout/blockbuster seems to happen once every ten years, but the bad-pattern-recognizers who point that out seem to forget about 2003′s “Open Water,” or, of course, the rash of lowish-budget mock-docs that have trickled down through the decade. The real story here is that Peli, who was a Hollywood outsider, managed to make a solid film with unknown actors and that a major studio like Paramount decided to give the horror audience some credit in the brain department to everybody’s benefit. Of course that only works if the film is actually good (which it was), and now “Paranormal Activity” already has a (really good) sequel and another on the way as the studio tries to find and milk the formula that made the first one work.

When I attended film school, the indie-film craze was ramping up. Filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Stephen Soderbergh were making huge waves in both indie and studio models, DIY filmmakers like Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Robert Rodriguez were burning up movie screens around the world with their independent visions. We didn’t know it but we were living in the boom time for indie film, a cultural explosion that really changed the visual language as it shaped the national conversation.

Why didn’t we all go out and do the same thing? The biggest reason was always money. Even Kevin Smith’s measly $27,000 budget for “Clerks” was steep to a college kid mired in student loans. Film stock costs money, processing and video transfer cost BIG money. Editing systems weren’t being handed out for free either. Plus, there existed a pervasive myth out there that when one is really successful, that somebody else will do all the “grunt work,” the seemingly-menial tasks that actually shape the overall creative vision for the film. I will repeat that as it bears being heard – the heavy lifting, “skilled craft” part of filmmaking is where the film gets made, not from a bedheaded auteur who doesn’t understand a lick of the technology. A good cast, DP, and editor can make a bad director look good, just by knowing what the hell they’re doing. I have seen it happen with my own eyes.

Image via Wikipedia

So now while indie film is (by and large) on a hiatus from being the maker of high culture, filmmakers have some time to get to know themselves and redefine their jobs a little better. When the big jobs with deadlines show up, chances are we’ll still have to hire a bigger crew but now’s the time to sharpen the saw and really learn the craft again, and this time on our own terms.

Get Your Hands on a DSLR and Learn to Shoot

The Canon 5D Mark II

Want to demystify cinematography? Get a camera and shoot. No, you won’t likely be positioning yourself as competition for Roger Deakins or Anthony Dod Mantle, but you will learn what it takes to construct a shot from a lighting and lensing point of view and when you’re lucky enough to have the budget to hire a crew, you’ll know if your ideas will work before you bring them up.

Since 1995, digital filmmaking has been slowly creeping toward the qualities previously attributed only to celluloid, and after the cinematography Oscar nominations for “Slumdog Millionaire” (shot on the SI2K) and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Shot on the Thompson/Grass Valley Viper) a few years back, it’s hard to argue that there’s an industry-wide bias toward either film or digital – whatever it takes to get the job done. Case in point, subway scenes for “Black Swan” were shot on the Canon 7D, a camera pretty much anyone can own for $1,500. “127 Hours,” Danny Boyle‘s new film also used DSLR’s extensively and to great effect. The truth about these cameras is that they aren’t optimized for film shooting, but the form factor of the sensor-block-as-camera is here to stay. RED’s new camera, the EPIC is barely larger than a Canon 5D Mark II when stripped all the way down, and filmmakers can expect a new visual language to grow out of these cameras.

They can be as small as they need to be, they work in far less light than even most film cameras, and their limited depth-of-field offers filmmakers the option of a kind of visual intimacy offered only by the most expensive cameras from just a few years ago.

Learn to Edit

Apple's Final Cut Pro Software, $1,200

This is ten-year-old advice, almost to the day. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when having an editing app on a laptop was pure science-fiction, and filmmakers only had a few horrible and expensive choices when it came to stringing their footage together. In the early 1990′s when I began film school, filmmakers could either cut on a cuts-only deck-to-deck video system or chop up physical film workprint with a splicer and physical tape. The Avid (and Media 100, et al) had just arrived on the scene, and they were low-res and impossibly expensive to rent; impossible to buy. As recently as a decade ago, it was routine to pay $2,400 per week to rent an AVID system, and that price did not cover the operator.

So back then, filmmakers had a good excuse for not learning how to edit. No matter how you approached it, editing sucked.

Now, to own some kind of professional-level editing software on any computer runs anywhere from $1,200 to free, depending on what is needed. Does that mean editors are obsolete? Absolutely not. Like cinematography, editing is a craft that can only be mastered over years of hard work and experimentation. But now each filmmaker can choose how to handle the editing of his or her film, no longer tethered to the expense of the edit box itself.

Personally, I’d prefer to work with an editor who isn’t me, especially on larger projects. But knowing how to edit and having done it numerous times really does improve my communication with an editor or let me know when they need to be left to their own devices. And if I’m working on a lower-budget project (as we all are these days), I’d rather own my own system and hire one person than pay a third party for the same computer I can pick up at Best Buy.

Learn Visual Effects

Image by macdavidpro via Flickr

About fifteen years ago, I did a tutorial in Adobe AfterEffects v.3. I found the interface to be clunky and the utility of the program to be questionable. The way I (falsely) saw it at the time, it was a glorified title generator that allowed the user to move letters or images around the screen in a cheesy fashion. I finished the tutorial and walked away from the program, one of the bigger mistakes I’ve ever made as a filmmaker. But at the time, as with editing, there was this deep-seated belief that “someone” was going to do all that messy VFX work for me down the line, that a serious director needed to be watching Elia Kazan or Terrance Malick movies or doing Meisner exercises with the cast, and the nerd squad in the basement would handle all of these menial, non-directing tasks.

Then, all of those tasks became what we think of when we think of filmmaking. Seriously, technology is quickly making movies more akin to live-action cartoons than it is to Italian Neorealism, and at a fast clip. Did you see “Beowulf” or “Tron: Legacy” or “Avatar?” It doesn’t matter that visual effects have yet to crest the uncanny valley – they’re making their way up the hill, getting closer all the time. One day, sooner or later (or even now), a filmmakers’ understanding of VFX will be the difference between getting the movie made and doing nothing. Think your movie doesn’t need VFX? Well, maybe not every movie needs a flock of killer-hovering-hawks, but if you have scenes where anyone drives, or your film involves any stunts, guns, exterior scenes that take place during the day or night, very attractive or extremely ugly people, special makeup effects, anything is broken or explodes or burns or freezes, any sets that could be larger or different, or any signs need to be replaced – chances are VFX can save you time, money, and up the ante while making everything faster and safer on set. So, although you work hard to get it right on set, VFX are becoming easier, cheaper, and worth considering.

And not to scare would-be filmmakers who assumed that life was too short to learn VFX (I used to consider myself one of those people) – but you’re now competing with a new breed of filmmaker, and that’s someone like Gareth Edwards, Toby Wilkins, or the Brothers Strause, all of whom came up in the VFX world and are now making their own films.The writing on the wall for me was this: the last VFX supervisor I worked with, Eric Hayden, is currently putting the finishing touches on his own feature (I’ll tell you more about it when he’s ready to show it) which extensively uses his VFX background to tell a compelling story. Remember “Midnight Son,” that ultra-low-budget horror flick I was plugging a month or so ago? Guess where that director came from.

Luckily, there are numerous ways to learn inexpensively (or even for free) about how to do VFX. The starting point for a lot of people is Video Copilot, a company that makes plugins, stock elements, and upper-level tutorials for VFX Juggernaut Adobe AfterEffects. Andrew Kramer fills his website with amazing FREE tutorials, presets, and even a Basic Training series designed to help kickstart one’s VFX knowledge. I am currently working my way through their free tutorials, and although I’m far from proficient at AfterEffects now as I should have been in 1997, I will get there.

And if you’ve never been to Video Copilot, you should go there now and just watch a few tutorials. If you find it useful, buy some of their products – you won’t be disappointed (and I don’t even know these people)!

Find Your Audience Before They Find You

This may be the single hardest challenge facing all filmmakers today, on both indie and studio levels. Luckily, filmmakers have some amazing tools at their disposal, and I’m not just talking film festivals. Facebook, Twitter, blogs (you’re reading mine right now, aren’t you?), Topspin, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, RSS, Podcasts and the like have empowered filmmakers to get their message out there more than ever before. Nobody knows what the Sasquatch-like “new business model for indies” will look like, but we all know that it will involve a heavy time investment online. Right now, mega-indie-producer Ted Hope is using his blog to brainstorm solutions to this very conundrum, and he will get there.

The thing that nobody can refute is this: Whatever film is being made, there is already an online community hungry for that kind of movie. So it’s not as much about billboards and print ads, which indies can’t afford anyway, it’s more of a soft-sell or a long-con to get that audience interested in a project that would appeal to them, followed by a way for them to see the film involving a cash transaction of some kind that ultimately pays for the work. Third-party advertising? “Event” public screenings, traditional theatrical, or just convincing a hardcore audience not to download off of a BitTorrent site – any of these things and a bunch of stuff nobody’s ever thought of will become the new normal for indies in years to come.

Stop Thinking and Start Doing

I’m writing this for my own benefit as much as for that of anyone who might read this. I personally think great filmmakers are made, not born, and the only way to make one’s self into that elusive creature is to do the heavy-lifting work one’s self. Many times. Age-old excuses like “I don’t know how to work with film stock,” or “sound mixing must be expensive,” etc. just don’t fly anymore. With a big investment of time and a relatively small investment of money, any aspiring filmmaker can be doing the job very quickly. Does this mean that if you don’t like shooting, don’t have the patience to edit, or don’t know a specular highlight from an ambient occlusion that there’s no hope for you? Of course not. I’m only arguing that a filmmaker who remains aloof from these crafts is putting themselves at a disadvantage, and at the mercy of others. They aren’t always particularly merciful.

And when dealing with that VFX person, editor, or cinematographer, it goes a long way to have any understanding how to use a motion tracker, ripple-edit tool, or follow focus. It’s good to mess with those things from time to time.

The Flip Camera - A Pocketful of A'ight-Looking Memories Awaits...

Yesterday, an actress friend of mine told me that her boyfriend is a writer and aspiring director, so she was thinking about getting him a Flip Camera for practice and did I think that was a good idea?

I told her that there’s nothing wrong with the flip if you are using it to “record” an image or event, rather than to “capture” it, and there’s a difference between those two approaches. So what’s the difference? Really, it has to do with the role of the camera in in a given situation or the footprint we’re going to allow the camera to have.

Recording the Event

To me, “recording” creates a goal to reduce the camera’s footprint to almost nothing. The filmmaker brings the camera along into the real world, a live event, a vacation, or location of a news story. It’s a mental note, a record of what actually happened, a reference. In preproduction for a larger filmed project, recording is great for location scouting, prop and wardrobe shopping, and auditions. In some professional filming situations such as the creation of “found footage,” recording is actually the desired effect because of its raw, unvarnished feel and it is exceptionally hard to create with professional tools. Although the audio of a recording is often self-contained, technology allows it to be decent if proximate.  A recording is functional, it’s not beautiful. It’s point-and-shoot, and it’s a mistake to work too hard trying to force aestheticism upon it. It has its limits.

Here, for instance, is some “man on the street” video (shot by Alicia Conway) we used to promote a play I directed last year. This is actual Flip footage:

The bottom line about recording is that the least amount of care should be spent on how it looks and sounds, as the most important aspect of the recording is that it brings the viewer to the place, the moment, the visceral reality of where the camera operator was when they hit “record.” Nothing wrong with that. So where are its limits?

Capturing the Feeling

I wish there was a better word than “capture,” but the parlance of filmmaking has moved from “filmming,” (i.e. “shot on that emulsion-covered-plastic stuff) to “image capture.” But what’s the distinction? I would argue that it’s about capturing an emotion, something a recording can only accomplish accidentally. A filmmaker (capture-ologist?) who is using the medium to tell an actual story will use any tool he or she is given to create emotions. Those tools consist of things like lighting, lens selection, sound design, music, composition, and editing. Things that don’t happen accidentally for them to record, but rather things that are meticulously set up.

The RED One, king of the image-capturers. Image by Wheelson via Flickr

This is only my opinion, but to me the difference is this – a “recording” tells you how a camera would see something  whereas “capturing” tells you how you might have remembered the event if you’d been there. The lighting, colors, and feeling are designed to be more the stuff of memory than camera circuitry.

Here, for comparison, is a trailer I shot for the same play, on the Canon 5D Mark II:

But as of late, the lines have blurred as extremely small and affordable cameras like this one have begun to offer functions previously only afforded the “capture” set.

You Don’t Have to Choose

Image via CrunchBase

One of these is not better than the other. They both have earned a place in our lives. Someone once said that “the best camera is the one you have with you.” That’s true and I’ve taken many pictures over the years with my cell phone. I’ve seen amazing pictures taken on the iPhone 4, and apps like “Plastic Bullet” make it fun to use the small iPhone sensor to create evocatively-abstract pictures. If I was climbing a mountain, I would vastly prefer to stick a flip camera in my pocket than to schlep even a spartan DSLR package up with me. Unless the point of the climb was to take beautiful pictures.

A creepy picture taken of my dog Wiley, processed with Plastic Bullet on the iPhone

But if you Have to Choose…

Even the most Cinéma vérité-style documentarian works to find the best compositions and editing to tell their story. Even if it could be argued that they were “recording” an event on the day, they later work endless hours assembling that footage in order to evoke a desired emotion. If the only footage available to a documentarian was taken on a flip or a cell phone, I’m sure they’d use it. But when they go after a story, I guarantee most documentarians bring the bigger guns even if they have the small one in their bag somewhere.

But when it comes to filmmaking – telling stories with the camera with all the tools we have these days – I feel like cameras like the Flip are really only recording devices, a small step up from security cameras. Could you make a great film on them? Why not? If that’s the best tool in your filmmaking arsenal, I’m sure its disadvantages could all be turned on their ear. But price-wise, a camera better-suited for narrative would increase the cost only a little while exponentially increasing the camera’s ability to capture the moment.

My friends make fun of me for being such a hardass about this, but it’s one of those scourges which refuses to go away. If I learn that the main character in a movie is a struggling actor, director, screenwriter, etc. – I just tune out. I don’t get it, the fascination with telling this story over and over. In a world with bajillions of untold stories out there waiting to find a good home, why make movies and TV shows about people who make movies and TV shows? Are we that fascinating?

No, we are not.

My Pet Peeve: The Snake Eats Its Tale

Some may ask if I’m talking about things like HBO’s hit “Entourage” or NBC’s exercise in programming-a-show-until-people-like-it known as “30 Rock.” Yes I am. I understand the fascination with the highest echelons of Hollywoodland, but I cannot bring myself to watch a fictionalized TV show about it. I don’t care how great Jeremy Piven or Alec Baldwin are, this work results from intellectual laziness and then that laziness spawns all kinds of labor intensive hours for writers, directors, actors, etc. Once it’s all over and people have watched it and walked away with a set of (perhaps reasonable) prejudices about the way it works in spoiled-ass Hollywood, then what? Who cares? What’s the takeaway?

Big-budget movie naval-gazing surprises me less than when it happens on an indie level, when these overdone projects are the  freshman efforts of struggling artists. I just want to shake them and say, “you got your chance to make a movie and you chose to make it about YOURSELF? YOURSELF?!I mean, not metaphorically, not allegorically, but just YOURSELF?”

Anyone who’s ever tried to make a movie has learned how much struggle, drama, perseverance, and pluck it takes to get from the initial idea to the final product, but here’s the problem – these are inevitably straw-man movies where the filmmaker is the noble hero and everyone else is a giant jackass trying to cockblock their perfect vision. And what is that vision? Well, it’s about a young screenwriter/actor/director who…

Stop. Just stop.

The Exceptions

There are, of course, some movies about movies about movies about movies that work. Why? Because they’re not, in any way, about making movies. Also, they’re often period pieces.

• Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

It’s interesting to note that this classic movie musical, one of the most enduring of its time, was in fact a period piece dealing with the transition from silent to sound films. And it’s more of a comment on being stuck in one’s ways as the world has moved on than a comment about movies – although that commentary is in there too.

(Suggested in his response, below, by Mike Monello)

• Ed Wood (1994)

“Ed Wood” may chronicle the life of an infamous filmmaker (played to perfection by Johnny Depp), but it’s not really a movie about making movies. It’s a movie about self-delusion. It’s a movie about how we all have some pursuit that we are truly excited about, and we’re fooling ourselves to think we’re any good at it. After all it’s a biopic about the man considered to be the worst filmmaker of all time. Some deference must be paid. But mostly, it’s about a misfit trying to fit in and find his way through life as he collects weirdos along the way and self-actualizes by making the movie considered by some to be THE WORST EVER MADE. In fairness, the remake of “The Wicker Man” wasn’t out yet.

• Barton Fink (1991)

The Coen Brothers‘ fourth feature “Barton Fink” is not a movie about movies, or if it is, it’s one of the more surreal takes on this concpet. The movie concerns a pretentious New York playwright (John Tuturro)  in the 1940′s who sells out to Hollywood only to find himself caught between an inscrutably authoritarian studio boss, a washed-up famous novelist, and a door-to-door salesman (a creeptastic John Goodman) who plays the man of humble means but has more power than anyone else Fink knows. The movie is about the lies we tell ourselves about who we are, and how deadly clinging to that myth ultimately can be.

• The Player (1992)

Simply put, Robert Altman‘s bilious hate letter to Hollywood is not a movie about movies. It’s a movie about politics, power, and how wielding power can rob someone of their soul. It happens to take place in Hollywood and lots of stars show up here and there, and industry veteran Altman manages to dispense with a lot of his thoughts about the business in which he spent his life toiling – but it’s reductive to say that it’s a movie about making movies. If anything, it’s a movie about someone (in this case, Tim Robbins as studio exec Griffin Mill) literally getting away with murder in plain sight.

• Boogie Nights (1997)

PT Anderson‘s second feature is whip smart, brilliant in its writing, acting, and directing, and it’s not really about the film industry as such. It’s about the porn industry, specifically the porn industry in LA’s San Fernando Valley in the 1970′s and 1980′s. It can be said to be allegorically about the “real” film industry (in the same way that Spielberg‘s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” could be said to be about the Darwinian nature of creative struggle and realizing one’s vision), but the actual filmmaking portions of this movie don’t dress the process up one bit.

The Major Violaters

Before I even get into this, let me say that all the people who’ve made the following films (and TV show) have my sincere admiration for having gotten something made at all. Pretty much everyone on this list has real writing/directing/acting talent and my only point is that it would have been better had someone deep inside their creative circle vetoed the basic concept before it got out the door. I’m not trying to offend or say I’m a better filmmaker than anyone on this list – I’m trying to discourage this behavior in the future.

Note: There is no physical way for this list to be complete, and it’s utterly subjective. These films typify my personal bias against this genre. You probably don’t agree with me, but if I can convince just one would-be filmmaker to not make another one of these films, I’ve done my job.

• The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988)

Mike “The Wizard” Jittlov plays himself – a visionary visual effects wizard and stop-motion maestro who comes to LA to spread his genius around the town, only to have his dreams crushed repeatedly by the evil machine that was the studio system in the late 1980′s. With pure imagination and lots of forced whimsy he makes his perfect film, against the odds, and really shows ‘em.

• The Big Picture (1989)

Before he specialized in mock-docs that crapped on those with creative aspirations, Christopher Guest‘s first movie chronicles a visionary filmmaker (Kevin Bacon) who graduates from a prominent film school in LA, only to be cast into a maelstrom of executives, agents, wannabe starlets, etc. He learns that the only way to “make it” is to step on everything he stands for and to hurt all his friends. Then he regains his humanity which allows him to makes his perfect film, against the odds, and really show ‘em.

• Living in Oblivion (1995)

Dream cast Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, and Peter Dinklidge all star in this total inside-baseball account of making a pretentious indie film, a command performance for only the nerdiest fans of “Anatomy of a Scene.” Tom DeCillo has made a career of making films about the film industry, but this is by far his most egregious excursion up his own “oblivion” if you will. We don’t know if Buscemi’s character gets to make his great film and really show ‘em, but perhaps DeCillo is saving that for the sequel.

• Action (1999)

Ever since his entrancing impression of Christopher Walken on SNL put him on the map, Jay Mohr has been trying to find the perfect niche for his acting talents. In 1999, he presaged Jeremy Piven‘s small-screen Ari Gold portraying a dirtbag producer Peter Dragon. His sidekick, ex-child star turned prostitute Wendy Ward (Illeana Douglas), helps him wend his way through the sewers of the Hollywood cliché machine. Wait a minute… “Peter” and “Wendy?” Oh, I get it now.

• Star Maps (1997)

Director Miguel Arteta‘s humble first feature tries to show us the “dark side of Hollywood” through the eyes of a struggling Mexican would-be actor –  but comes across as a prurient exercise in exposing exploitation while also being exploitation. As it wends its way toward the inevitable scene on a film set, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was how Arteta’s own film set was run, and if the fictional set reflected what he saw as how the “big boys” ran things. Arteta went on to make many far-better films (“Chuck and Buck,” “The Good Girl“) as well as being a phenomenal TV director, but I can’t help but scratch my head knowing that his freshman effort played Sundance and tore up the festival circuit. And played in movie theaters for paying customers.

• Hollywood Ending

Woody Allen has made a career out of putting his head up his own ass in the most amusing ways (or by defending Roman Polanski… But I digress), but this plodding, unfunny story of a film director suffering from psychosomatic blindness feels, again, like another indictment of the way people in the movie business are coddled. Who cares? It joins other Allen would-be-memoir dreck like “Stardust Memories” and “Celebrity” (not to be confused with his better inside-showbiz period pieces “Bullets over Broadway,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo, and “Radio Days“) on my permanent “do-not-watch” list.

(Also suggested in his response, below, by Mike Monello)

• Entropy (1999)

A filmmaker is pitted against the evil studio system in Phil Joanou‘s most masturbatory effort to date. This saddened me, as I’ve always been a booster of Joanou’s – but perhaps this film typified what I meant in a previous blog. Supposedly “Entropy” fictionalizes the making of Joanou’s earlier film, “Heaven’s Prisoners.” His dreams are crushed by greedy studio jerkoffs, he falls in love with a supermodel, jetsets around the world, gets advice from Bono, and basically makes it impossible for me to care about anything he does.

• The Muse (1999)

Albert Brooks writes, directs, and stars in this namedropping starfuck-a-thon about a schlubby aging screenwriter with a waning career who’s slick friend (Jeff Bridges) suggests he get an actual Greek “Muse” (Sharon Stone) to inspire him back onto the A-list. In order for a movie with this basic concept to really work, one would think that its writing would be snappy and brilliant – as if the muse herself had inspired the once-brilliant Brooks. But no dice here, as lugubrious pacing and forced old-guy humor sink faster than Brooks’ Tomatometer.

• Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

I love me some Wes Craven, I really do. But his triumphant return to the already over-harvested “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise starred himself, original “Nightmare” heroine Heather Langenkamp, and the original “Freddy” himself Robert Englund as themselves, dealing with a demon who had chosen Freddy as his avatar in our world. I can fully understand the attraction to this approach which I would call a “noble failure,” after all Freddy does move between worlds, does he not?

(suggested via Instant Message by Andrew Bargeron. Buy his designs!)

Money People: Stop Wasting Your Money

When I first moved to LA in 1999, I had a short film called “The Meeting” which I’d just directed under my arm and I was ready to take the town by storm. As luck would have it, the film got into the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival (LAIFF), now the LAFF. Playing that festival gave me a free pass to see as many films as I wanted to, for free, at the festival – so I did. And it was there that I saw “Entropy” (above), which kicked off a festival of films about people who want to make films. I felt like I was being punked. There was even one movie that was about the dark underbelly of Los Angeles but not about the movie business, but it still had to have an obligatory scene in it about one of the characters writing a screenplay about her experiences and a bald, fat, cigar-chomping Hollywood agent/manager/lawyer/exec pissing all over it. Yes, we understand. It’s hard, and people don’t get you.

Enough!

I don’t remember the names of any of these films, and with good reason. Nobody remembers any of these films. They’re all completely forgettable and forgotten. They’re vanity projects of the lowest order. So we get it, we really do. Your life is hard. Now stop it.

Note: two weeks after publishing this post, the movie below was released in theaters.