November 04, 2007
Guerrilla Filmmaking with Jon Moritsugu
This past weekend I took the Guerrilla Filmmaking class at the Northwest Film Forum with Jon Moritsugu (Scumrock, Fame Whore, Mod F*ck Explosion). This was a quick 2 day thing intending to cover ways in which to shoot low/no-budget "punk rock" style. I was only able to attend the Saturday session due to an emergency, but I think I got what I really wanted to out of those quick 6 hours: inspiration, and the sense that if I just get off my butt I can actually do this.
The Saturday session covered primarily pre-production, but floated in and out of various other topics with Moritsugu's energy and enthusiasm. One thing I found really interesting about his perspective on no-budget filmmaking was his advice to always think big -- that despite how you may view your lack of budget now, you should always aim high and then cut back creatively, because there is always a chance the high estimate might actually turn up.
I'm currently in a bad state of affairs as far as ideas, so when Moritsugu talked about Jim Jarmusch's "50 details" my ears perked up. Apparently when Jarmusch was working on "Stranger Than Paradise" he had originally started with a general list of 50 things he really loves. Little items, certain shots, snippets of dialogue, anything. From there, he constructed scenes, and then put scenes together into a story. I love this idea because I always think in very fine details about how I would like a certain scene to be filmed. Writing a story and then working on the details afterwards makes me fear them getting lost in the fray. I realize this is backwards from what the professionals would recommend in how to construct a good, engaging story.
During class time, we viewed a film by a former high school student in a shady part of San Francisco, called "AKA Don Bonus." The movie was a documentary on his life in the projects and was shot entirely handheld by him. It's a very jolting video, and apparently played at various film fests and won an Emmy. The point in watching this was an exercise in how low budget you can be and still be very moving. Keeping crew size down, shooting on location, etc, are all things that can help. We briefly covered the rules for a Dogme certified film and a few on the list reiterated points that can be transfered very easily over to a no-budget style.
Other portions of the pre-production step that were covered were tips on obtaining grant funds, gathering crew, release forms and copyrights, and other general prep work that needs to happen prior to the shoot. Much of this was review for me from having taken the UW's film class, but it was a welcome review and Moritsugu added quite a bit about his own personal experiences to make it worthwhile information. I especially liked his very up front attitude as far as revealing details on his budget, the way he works with his cast, and his own grant application processes. In my so far brief experience talking to other directors, this information seems very tightly under wrap and most seem very secretive or shy about giving out these details. I think it's great to hear from someone who is so open and honest about their style. Not only is it educational, but it also reinforces the DIY ideology that anyone can do this given the information and drive to make it happen.
I think I'm going to start a list.
July 04, 2007
The Seattle Freeze - further publicity
Seattle Metroblogging has mentioned our movie with praise on their blog. Their post also includes more interesting comments from Seattle locals on the phenomenon.
Also via that, a mention on Seattlest as well.
edit - further publicity:
- King5 blog
- a user LJ
July 03, 2007
More on The Seattle Freeze
It looks like someone discovered our little documentary over in the Seattle LiveJournal community, which has garnered it a little bit of publicity and a good chunk of YouTube hits.
The LJ post is sort of an amusing tie-in to a prior blog post I made a while back during pre-production:
"In an effort to recruit personal stories for the movie, I wrote up a very simple post for a local LiveJournal community, knowing full well the mere mention of the term "Seattle Freeze" there would get peoples' pants in a jumble, simply because it has been posted about several times in the past. Although I did not quite realize how much of a jumble it would cause, as I thought I'd made my needs pretty clear. 101 responses later, and still 0 people for the movie. Even after mailing a few to followup, thinking perhaps by commenting they were somehow interested, no response. A little icy, perhaps."
We actually in fact did not end up using anyone from the community, however the number of responses to the original LJ post and this latest one clearly show it is a subject everyone has an opinion on which I think is pretty great in and of itself.
I notice there are a lot of Favorites and five-star ratings on the YouTube video link which seems a bit inflated (likely due to our friends) but I suppose it's better than a single 1-star rating glaring back at you from across the internet.
I really do hope it continues to get more publicity. Not just because I think the whole idea is kind of fun to monitor, but because the subject does deserve to be out there on the table. People may or may not agree with its premise, but the fact is that it has been observed and commented upon by a fair number here and that's something at least worth talking about.
July 01, 2007
The Seattle Freeze on YouTube
As promised, here's a link to the movie. Enjoy!
June 30, 2007
Premiere Night - The Seattle Freeze
Tonight was the world premiere of the documentary short I co-directed, The Seattle Freeze, produced by the UW Extension Independent Filmmaking class that I've been involved with over the past year. 6 documentaries in total were directed by members of the class, ranging from such subjects as deafness to mental illness to wind power.
Our documentary doesn't cover quite so much political ground -- instead it focuses on an observed social phenomenon that may or may not exist in the Seattle region. It's quirky and actually managed to provide a bit of comic relief, garnering a good handful of hearty laughs from the audience.
The whole experience of watching the film with an audience of about 100 people was really interesting. Seeing that they were humored in spots I never expected was completely fascinating and also very thrilling at the same time. I totally did not expect much reaction at all, having watched the movie in its entirety some 50 billion times over the past several months. The fact that people seemed to enjoy it made a lot of the little issues and sticking points over the months seem very trivial in the end.
After the movie we had a good Q&A with a lot of questions that really showed the audience got into it. For being the first of the series of documentary shorts it did pretty well, and overall I'm satisfied how things turned out.
I suppose this means I'm officially a "filmmaker," though as Robert Rodriguez says in his 10 Minute Film School, "The moment you think that you want to be a filmmaker you're that."
The Seattle Freeze will be available on YouTube soon.
June 26, 2007
Yasujiro Ozu, observations
Continuing the book review from yesterday, I thought I would list out some of the more surprising tidbits that I learned about Ozu through Donald Richie's observations. There are other studies of Ozu's works available by other people, so these are definitely going to be partially skewed toward the author's remarks, however as mentioned before he does provide many convincing examples and explanations to back things up.
Observations and Interesting notes on Ozu
- Ozu chose his actors not by their skill but by their character, meeting with them and asking about their lives and interests rather than their experience. He found that their character came through their faces better than any amount of professional acting. It is also for this reason he used the same actors over and over again -- he wrote characters with these particular actors in mind.
- He found non-actors to be more malleable and was extremely obsessive about coaching them, often repeating scenes numerous times until the actor had completed it correctly in the way Ozu had prescribed. He would choreograph words with actions of the hands (scratching one's face) or body movement and facial expression. His actors were often fed up with this, but were very grateful for his coaching at the same time and felt they had learned a lot.
- Ozu loved Citizen Kane, a completely radically different style from his own, but he found it very technically interesting.
- Ozu was very fond of drinking, and much of the writing happened while he was drinking in collaboration with his main screenwriting partner Kogo Noda.
- He wrote for characters, working them out first then working out scenes on notecards. The notecards would be shuffled around until a movie was entirely laid out.
- Certain types of scenes were generally specific to certain types of locations, with the main locations being inside the tatami room of a house, the local bar, work, and school.
- Ozu's favorite part of the filmmaking process was shooting, his least favorite was editing
- His shooting priority was for composition, and frequently he would shuffle room items around after a take in order to get the most optimal photographic shot. There are numerous continuity issues because of this. He was very sloppy about it and did not think people would notice (and most people haven't).
- His shooting style projects that of the passive Japanese individual, sitting attentively in the tatami room watching and listening. It forces one to sit still at the table and observe, and in doing so this style as it evolved eventually became to be known as one that is quintessentially Japanese. In editing, rather than the traditionally modern concept of cutting on action, Ozu forces us not only to listen until the sentence has ended, but several seconds afterwards so that we may digest and at the same time appreciate the words of this stranger who has invited us into their tatami room.
- Ozu used unimportant objects in his shooting as transition points, but in doing so assigned weight to their meaning and held these shots in the editing room for a long time, sometimes as much as 10 seconds. He was very intrigued by the clock scene from High Noon. The concept that most closely illustrates this practice is that of mu, which simply means nothingness, but within nothing there can be everything.
- His films, according to Richie, follow a very defined pattern which is true for each shot, each sequence, and the entirety of each story itself. Generally it involves a wide perspective, a middle perspective, a close-up, and then back to a wide perspective.
- Chishu Ryu has appeared in all but a couple of his movies, and is said to play the part most closest to Ozu himself.
- The Japanese expression mono no aware describes a philosophy that can be summed up as c'est la vie or "life is like that" -- a phrase that appears in a good handful of Ozu films to show the simple acceptance of his characters of what comes to pass. This phrase exemplifies his body of work as concentrating on slices of Japanese life that move on in the present timeline right along with the viewer, rather than focusing on the past or future.
- Ozu was shy with women and never married. He died of cancer late in life. His tombstone bears the symbol for mu.
June 22, 2007
Documentary, complete! Job, complete!
Finally after 9 months of classes that seemed endless and countless extra hours with production and shooting, the short documentary I have been co-working on is complete. My class partner and I just finished post-production on it the other day, which I think pretty much amounted to me throwing my hands up in the air and him doing the final touches. I'm not saying I'm displeased, but I'm also not entirely thrilled with the end result either. It's not the kind of film I wanted to do and it's especially hard for me to work in tandem creatively with someone without either being exactly on the same page as them, or having some kind of defined roles and definition of who has final authority. The end product in my experience with something like that is that the message ends up getting confused somewhere and the presentation seems very haphazard and unfocused.
I will say that our short film is far better produced than a good handful of the SIFF documentaries I saw this year, which is really saying something. The biggest surprise for me in all of this was really the people in my class. For some crazy reason I assumed people who wanted to go into filmmaking would be really nuts about movies! The majority of my classmates were in fact very poorly versed in anything beyond the standard multiplex fare, and I think maybe one of them had actually even attended SIFF once in their life. It was quite a surprise and I had wondered if maybe this was the result of taking the class through the UW and not through, say, Seattle Film Institute which was my second choice. The other surprise for me was how slowly the class moved, but I think again this is the result of the people attending and the teachers being excessively accommodating. I actually overheard one person in the class say that they were very glad they took the Documentary track rather than the Narrative track because "making a documentary is so much less work." That statement just boggled me. After seeing something like Out of Time at this year's SIFF, it's really tough to imagine the idea of a documentary being "easy."
Anyway, so I'm a little grumpy about some of the things from the class, but I'm also happy to have taken it and gotten the experience. There is something to be said for a class pushing you along and continually making you revisit certain topics. During the past year I have also been reading up as much as I can about the filmmaking process, and will continue to do so until I feel comfortable enough to assemble a crew and begin work.
It might be a little difficult to keep up with reading and blogging and seeing movies in the next few months though, because I'm about to start a new job! I have accepted a position at Wizards of the Coast and will be starting fairly soon. I'm very excited about this and can't wait, but it's going to suck up a lot of time and I want to keep log+capture alive and well, so we'll see how things pan out. As a farewell to my current employer, the University of Washington, I have checked out seven Ozu films from the UW library to be viewed hopefully within the next couple of weeks before the new job starts. This is to coincide with a book I am almost done with called Ozu: His Life and Films by Donald Richie, which I highly recommend.
May 13, 2007
The 3-legged search
A few weeks ago I spotted a super find at a local neighborhood garage sale. It was a Davidson Star D tripod for $4. It's an old tripod, but the head on it has a smooth movement that is perfect for film and rivals a good several hundred dollar purchase. Okay maybe not several hundred, but it's no cheapy. Unfortunately one of the legs is broken. Also the other problem was that my Canon HV20 needed a special screw to be mounted on it, so off to Kenmore Camera I went.
I love Kenmore Camera! They're just awesome people. I like Glazers and all, but there's a different vibe that's more at-home and down to earth in Kenmore. I mean, they're not going to bake me a pie or anything, but they seem to actively enjoy photography and it really shows by how helpful, knowledgeable and laid back their staff is.
So it's all the more amusing that when I went in to ask about my Davidson the other day, I found a really helpful guy....who didn't even work there!
A bunch of company reps from Canon were showing off the latest digital camera equipment and I just happened to have asked one of them a question not realizing he was with Canon. He proceeded to go out of his way to help me find the proper screw I needed. I had brought my HV20 in and tested it on the Davidson, but the whole thing just seemed wobbly. I wanted to spend as little as possible on my gear and I love the idea of using something completely modern and new (HV20) with an older solid piece like the Davidson, but it just wasn't happening.
So.. I ended up walking out with a somewhat reasonably priced Bogen-Manfrotto head and tripod.
The Davidson is now up for grabs to anyone who wants it. The one broken leg is fine, it just only extends to the half height point, not full height, but maybe it could be repaired.
May 01, 2007
28 Seconds
There are still 10 days left to come up with 28 seconds...of interesting film, for The Stranger's fourth annual 28 Seconds Film Contest. Take a look at some past entries from its second year.
While the winning title of that year doesn't inspire much confidence, there's some little gems like Something a Little Stranger with it's super slick panel editing to advance the story and Great Guy & Good Boy with its excessively poor production saved entirely by its dorky humor value.