No rest for the wicked.

Over the break I took some books and reading material with me. I found them all incredibly helpful. They are as follows:

Magnolia Screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson

Digital Filmmaking by Mike Figgis

Three issues of American Cinematographer

I liked the AC magazine so much that I bought a subscription to it. Lots of good stuff in each issue. The Figgis' book was particularly informative. Should be required reading for students...

Back in the saddle again!

The first week of December brought us one night of lecture and then production starts on our first documentary. Our class was setting up and shooting B-Roll footage on our doc. The class was led by Stephen. We took a table and put a bunch of personal artifacts on it trying to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. We then lit the table, set up the camera, and then set up a monitor. The new piece of equipment we used for this lesson was the slider. The slider is essentially a 2-3 foot bar that you set the camera on and it acts like a dolly. This is what it looks like. Very cool little tool. Makes your shots a little more dynamic.

Before we jumped headfirst into production the school organized a Mixer/Lecture on Thursday the 4th. The speaker was James Savoca, filmmaker and instructor at school, and he discussed making indie films and financing. According to Christopher, SFSDF Marketing Director, the Mixer was a huge success. There was turnout of over 100 people and I think they were expecting between 30-50. The above pic was from the lecture. It was great to make some contacts which is incredibly vital to the industry. It was also cool to have some of my friends come out and see what I've been up to. I am in the process of creating a Film Society/lecture series out at school where we will bring in Bay Area Filmmakers, let them screen their project, and then have a Q & A where we discuss the specifics of their career and getting the movie made. The group is called the Friends of Alfred Film Society and I presented it at the Mixer. We are trying to have our first meeting in Jan. or Feb. '09!

With production underway I ran camera for Adi and Nitin and then did lighting for Ephantus. Docs are interesting and a lot of times you are at the mercy of the set or the subject. We filmed on location and that was a first for us. It actually all worked out well. My documentary subject is Sue Pemberton. She is a friend who does whale and seal rescue up and down the coast and then is involved in the animal's rehabat the Marine Mammal Center. The center is closed to the public but we were allowed to film there. We sat down with her and did a one hour interview and then got some great B-Roll of her working with the animals in their tanks. it was great being that close and filming the animals.

My other B-Roll I captured was animals in their natural environment and then pics that Sue gave me. The pics are "graduation" photos of the animals that are successfully rehabbed and then released in to the wild. My day filming the animals at the beach was one of my favorite days so far. Jen and I loaded up the car and drove down the coast. We captured most of our footage at Moss Beach during low tide. They have a lot of Harbor Seals there. I did most of the shooting using a Figg Rig and a tri-pod. Driving up and down the coast, stopping at beaches, filming, eating and drinking good food.... it was indeed a good day.

The last day before Winter Break was classroom work with William. We had a test! Crazy... It was actually a little weird being tested. i know this is school, but in the months since school started we have yet to have a test. Viva La Art School! haha. Our test was a one-on-one with William where he tried to stump us using Final Cut Pro commands... I did pretty well.

Now I am off for a few weeks! Happy Holidays!!

The bird is in the oven...

Ahhh the week of Thanksgiving. Due to the holiday we have an abbreviated school schedule. Just two nights of class and the first was a work-at-your-own-pace Pre-Production Lab. We pretty much just goofed off this night and talked about docs for a minor part of the class. 

The second night was a completely different story. The class was led by a past studio who now works in the "industry." Daniel lights professionally and that is what he taught us. How to light. This is actually a rather elusive skill set to master. What Daniel had us do tonight was light three different rooms or "scenes." It was great practice. Which is what lighting boils down to, for me at least. Both the practice of setting up lights and training your eye to what looks the best. It is an art form and you will people talk about "painting with light." Good class tonight. 

Truth on film.

With our first project in the can we moved on to our next assignment. Documentaries. While I love watching them, I am not overly interested in making one. I do have the desire to make a concert doc. That would be wicked cool. 

Monday night's class was unique in the fact that this was maybe the first lecture we had regarding film history. We covered the history of documentaries starting with the Lumiere Brothers in 1904. Other documentarians that we discussed were: Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, The Maysles Brothers, Fred Wiseman, Barbara Kopple, Ken Burns, Michale Moore, Ross McElwee, & Mark Kitchell. Along with specific filmmakers we also covered Direct Cinema vs Cinema Verite, Post Modern Docs, and Reality TV. Being a huge movie nerd I enjoyed this lecture quite a bit. I could easily sit and discuss film for hours. Post lecture we watched Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line and followed that with a discussion of the film. Another first for us. 

Intro to Doc. Filmmaking was covered on Tuesday of this week. We covered both audio and video and where to place your subject and should they look at camera or off camera etc. Also covered was B-Roll. B-roll is defined as supplemental or alternate footage inter cut with the main shot in an interview or a documentary. A-roll consists of your subject talking and B-roll is video or the subject that your interviewee is discussing, to put it simply. 

The Documentary Treatment was our next discussion on Tuesday night. This is similar to writing a screenplay for a fictional movie. It is your outline of what you wish to cover . Your treatment, style, and intended audience. We have to prepare and turn a treatment in for approval in this project. This is the guidelines for our documentary:

-Portrait or a family member or friend. 

-One 10-hour shooting day. 

-Interview one person and shoot no more than a 60-minute tape. 

-Include B-roll. 

-Can be on location or at school. 

-Length= 5-7 minutes. 

Wednesday the 18th was a writing/development lab devoted to preparation of our doc. treatment. 

Thursday brought us some fresh blood! A new instructor was introduced to us. His name is Darcell Walker and he spent a few hours with us covering audio. This was only our second in-depth audio lecture and it was incredibly informative and helpful. Darcel has a ton of experience in sound and is still currently working in the field. We spent a lot of time with learning lavaliers and portable sound mixers. Post lecture we took the camera and sound kits and recorded three scenes in three different locations while using both boom mics and lavs and adjusted for room sounds. It was a great exercise and showed us that we could capture great audio. 

The last lecture of the week was the Documentary Camera on Saturday. This was a rather intense day where we covered an array of items including: lenses (wide-angle, polarizing filters, promist filters), jib-arms, fig-rigs, and the slider. It's always a blast to get your hands on new "toys" that we will have at our disposal. I especially liked the fig-rig. This is is steering wheel-shaped camera mount which is named after it creator, director Mike Figgis. It is a handheld camera stabilizer that allows the operator a lot more freedom in moving the camera around the set. Stephen led this lecture and once again ran us through some much needed 3-point lighting exercises. 

Lots of ground covered this week...

Rough & Final

We got together as a class, both day and night classes, and watched our rough cuts on Saturday November 8th. It was great to see what the day class had been working on as we hadn't read their scripts or helped on their shoots. It wasn't just watching the rough cuts, we also held a group critique. After each film was screened 12 people gave their opinions on it. I was still at the point where I wasn't happy with my cut. It is a horror movie with some action in it. I had only been working on editing and had not done any work on soundtrack or sound effects. This had a completely negative effect on my film. The "hits" just weren't believable without sounds. 

With our final cut due on the following Saturday I spent a huge amount of time in the editing labs. First I finished off the video editing completely then I moved into adding sound effects. This was a lengthy process as you had to look through a"Sound Library" on the school's shared hard drive. Once you found sound which you think might work, you import it to Final Cut Pro, lay it into your short and then play it back. Of course there are a ton of different impact sounds and you can't really tell what will work best until you see/hear it. Having gotten my sounds in (hammer hits, kicks, glass breaking, door hits, etc.) I moved onto the soundtrack . William Davenport helped me with this as we really aren't learning this program yet. Same with the sound effects, you look through the library, pick a song, and lay it in. Another lengthy process, but essential to a film like mine. I was out at school every day this week spending hours and hours working on three minutes of film. Three minutes of a film that I have seen every frame countless times... Three minutes of film that I am tired of looking at. 

The final draft critique was once again a group effort. Where last week we spent our time critiquing coverage, this week we covered story, acting, and production value. It was a long day and rather brutal. Everyone picked apart everyone else's film. Some of the critiques regarding my short was that there wasn't enough character development with my main character and that it felt like a scene from a movie and not necessarily a complete short. These were completely valid and I felt the same. We discussed the lack of character development when I first started working on this project as it would be tough to add to a three minute short. Overall, I was really happy with my finished product. For a while every time I told myself that I wouldn't show it to anyone. haha. Now I am proud of it. Would I change anything? Of course I would. I would like to have the entire shooting day to do over... 

A few of us walked over to the Dogpatch Saloon for a post game analysis (read: drinking session). It was both cathartic and incredibly necessary to drink a beer! No rest for the weekend as we start our first Documentary Class in two days...

Music to murder to...

Spending endless amounts of hours in front of the computer while editing I've come to realize I really like to edit the non-dialog scenes while listening to music. What have you been listening to Bucky? The world wants to know! Well I will tell you. I've been listening to the same band that I listened to quite a bit while I was writing Death Rattle. That band would be Clinic. Specifically their album Walking With Thee. They have a very dark, atmospheric, and cinematic sound to them. This is a great indication of what they sound like: Harmony. After Walking With Thee I would recommend Winchester Cathedral. 

Not a whole lot else to report besides editing, editing, editing....

Final Cut Pro & Me.

Week seven of film school brings our journey to the editing/computer lab where I will be spending copious amounts of time over the next three weeks. At the beginning of the week we spent the first night going over three modules with Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro or FCP is a digital non-linear editing system. Modules are training exercises for FCP. These modules take quite a bit of time and can be a little on the dry side. FCP is relatively easy to get started on but the program is just amazingly massive, overwhelmingly so actually, and will take years to master.

After learning some basics the first night, our second night we had a capturing lab where we took our raw footage and converted it to digital then uploaded it to our hard-drives and then imported it to FCP. Speaking of hard drives, we are required to have both a flash drive (at least 256 MB) and a hard drive (at least 250 GB with a 800 & 400 FireWire interface). I went with a LaCie hard drive. Capturing lab was great as this was my first opportunity to really look at my footage. I went through it all and made notes on each scene and labeled each scene in FCP then grouped them in bins for easy access. That alone took quite a long time.

The rest of the week was modules and editing. I spent a lot of time reviewing the footage before I put the first piece of footage in the timeline.

We did have a lecture on the last class of the week that I found both helpful and invigorating. The lecture was titled "Editing:Cinematic Language" and was taught by Stephen. We watched some great clips and dissected them. My favorite of the batch was a chase scene from Road Warrior, one of the Mad Max movies. It was just a badass scene and it was put together beautifully. The use of audio was impressive... it all tied into the lecture. At the end of the class he talked to us about having patience and staying motivated during the editing process. This was great to hear... as it is tough to keep working on the same footage for hours and hours.