Happy Festive Greetings, Everyone

Hello from Fog City!

On behalf of my colleague Mullet, I'd like to extend our belated holiday greetings to everyone, and wish you all the best in 2008, the Year of Miller & Mullet....

Ed & Red’s Night Party: Our Adventures in Multi-Camera

A couple of weekends ago, we shot an episode of Ed & Red’s Night Party, the great Canadian TV show hosted by a sarcastic sock. I won’t go into detail about the show’s history because the Wikipedia entry does that better than I could. Nevertheless, to see a homemade show from cable access channel become a Canadian late-night institution is encouraging to anyone who picks up a camera hoping to give up the day job.
I don’t know where I could verify this, but I suspect that Ed’s show is likely the longest running Canadian late-night talkshow. If it’s not the Canadian champ, it’s definitely the Toronto and Ontario champ. The national networks have both created and abandoned talk shows—CTV most notably with Open Mike with Mike Bullard, Global with subsequent The Mike Bullard Show, and CBC’s infamous Friday Night with Ralph Benmergui—but Ed the Sock has fended off all of them, probably by not trying to appeal to as broad an audience as the others did. He knows his audience and gives them exactly what they want: edgy late-night humour, a healthy dollop of pop culture’s highs and lows, and plenty of sex-related humour and features.
The current version of Ed’s show, partnering him with Liana “Red” K., doesn’t have the traditional guest interviews where the guest comes out and is interviewed, but in our two appearances, we’ve been interviewed while in the hot tub and lounging on a couch where we were watching the show. The interviews weren’t conventional by any means, but we managed to plug our stuff.
I’ve never taken a TV production course, so my exposure to multi-camera shooting has been limited to a couple of occasions where we happened to have 2 mini-DV cameras on shooting day, and we used both at the same time to speed things up. It wasn’t true multi-camera shooting—the 2nd camera usually shot the same angle but at a different focal length so that we could get the closeups done at the same times as the master shots.
When we appeared in the hot tub on Ed & Red’s, there was only one camera assigned to cover us, so it was a single-camera situation and we worked to just one camera.
For our second appearance, we had 3 segments during the show, with at least 3 cameras on us (one across the floor for a head-on angle, one beside the couch for a side view, and a third somewhere in the middle). We weren’t required to work towards any one camera, so it was similar to a stage appearance where you only have to be aware of a general zone to work to. Mullet, sitting on screen right, had a camera directly to his left with the others spread out in front of him, so he couldn’t really turn to face me without turning away from the audience. I, on screen left, was looking almost directly into a camera when I faced him, so I made sure I turned to my left (screen right) when we were seated during the 3 segments so that Mullet wouldn’t face away from the camera best positioned for his closeups (but, rest assured, I was also pointing my face at that camera, so I wasn’t doing him a favour—I was doing us both a favour).
We got progressively more physical through the 3 segments, so not having to worry about where the camera was definitely freed up how we worked.
For no-budget filmmaking, multi-camera likely isn’t an option. You need at least 2 cameras of the same quality, video format, etc., etc. Hollywood always drags out extra cameras for those thigns even they can’t afford to do more than once (I recall a making-of doc on the Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom DVD where Mr. Spielberg had 14 cameras rolling for the one-time-only destruction of a footbridge), but the same could apply on a no-budget scale. If I were shooting something where I had to get a lot of coverage done in a limited time (a well-known actor is giving you a break by doing a scene for you but can only give you an hour, for example), or you’re shooting something that can only be done in one take (like having your character jump into a parade), I would definitely budget for a 2nd camera and an extra person. Likewise, if I were shooting a scale model’s destruction, I’d have to weigh the costs of making multiple copies of said model for repeated takes or renting a 2nd camera to shoot it once.
Another aspect of multi-cam shooting is that the lighting has to be designed for multiple camera setups. This means a lot more work at the beginning of the day, but the lighting guys only had to make minor adjustments here and there during the shoot. This also means you can move the cameras, zoom in for a closeup, etc., on the fly. Our area was pretty well lit, and the crew defined our working areas for us, so your talent can be given an area to play in rather than being stuck on a mark. I think you could adapt this type of thinking for single-cam shooting on a set, and you’d be able to go from setup to setup without keeping warmed-up actors waiting for lights to change. It wouldn’t work in every situation, of course, but if you didn’t need special lighting, you could probably get away with it.
We won’t be using multi-camera for our DVD, but doing Ed & Red’s was still a good experience, and I’d recommend to any no-budget filmmaker that they check out a traditional 3-camera TV shoot if they ever get the chance—watch those cameras work!

To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade—that is the question.

…Whether 'tis nobler to stand pat with what I’ve got….

As next spring’s post on our DVD draws nearer, I’ve been contemplating the post-production aspect of it: do I have the tools to do a really good job by current standards?

I could produce a functioning DVD with basic tools, even freeware apps, but the goal with this project is to produce a demo reel to put into the hands of the mighty. If we sell a few of them, all the better, but I wouldn’t want to sell anyone something that wasn’t the result of Mullet and I playing at the top of our game. Mullet takes the same approach with the comic, as does our artist, Kameron Gates.

At the moment, I have a G5 (single 1.6 GHz processor, the original low-end G5 model) and Final Cut Studio 1 as my software. I have a pair of 250 GB external hard drives for video capture, and I listen to the whole thing via a 10-watt Radio Shack amp and $30 Radio Shack speakers. This is probably as no-budget as you can get! I won’t be replacing the G5, so my focus will be on the software.

I’m running OS X Tiger, and I haven’t decided whether I’ll upgrade to the new Mac OS, Leopard, yet. I usually wait some time before upgrading, but I’m happy with how fast and stable Tiger is—Leopard’s new features haven’t prompted me to run down to Riverdale Mac just yet. I’ll revisit the OS after the DVD’s done, but I don’t anticipate, at this point, upgrading based on some of the negative experiences people have had. If the consensus on the various forums that focus on all things Final Cut and Mac come back with reports of speed increases or can’t-work-without features, I might take the plunge.

I am, however, evaluating 4 options for upgrading my current apps:

• Stand pat with what I’ve got ($0)
• Upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2 ($545 CAD),
• Buy Magic Bullet Suite ($799 USD) or just one of the Magic Bullet apps
• Buy Adobe AfterEffects ($1149 CAD for CS3, $1969 CAD for the Production Premium version, which adds PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc.).
  
  Taking Magic Bullet for a ride is step one in my evaluation. Magic Bullet was created by Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage, and it’s been a well-known plug-in and stand-alone app for years. Last spring, I bought Stu’s book, The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap, which I’d recommend to anyone making no-budget movies (even if you’re not shooting action flicks, there’s plenty of good information there), and found his blog and forum there quite interesting.
  
  Magic Bullet Suite is priced at $799 USD, and you get Magic Bullet Looks (applies preset or user-created “looks” to video), Magic Bullet Frames (converts 60i to 24p, also deinterlaces video), Magic Bullet Colorista (3-way colour correction), and Instant HD (converts SD video to HD video). These programs are either stand-alone or plug-ins for FCP and Motion, but the demos seem to be plug-ins only. I’ve read a few reviews for Colorista, plus various forum comments, and all have been positive. I can’t recall any negative comments, actually. I downloaded the demos for Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista, and in a future post I’ll let you know how they’ve worked out.
  
  Upgrading to Final Cut Studio 2 would give me the latest versions of that bundle: Final Cut Pro 6, DVD Studio Pro 4, Motion 3, Compressor 3, and Soundtrack Pro 2, plus the new app, Color. At the moment, this would be a $545 CAD investment. The learning curve is the lowest here given that I’m familiar with the previous versions of all these apps, with the exception of Color. There are no demos available for FCS 2, so I’ll have to rely upon reviews and the Apple website for evaluation. The reviews of FCS 2 have been positive overall, although some people don’t like Color.
  
  Whether I upgrade or not, I’ll be using FCP, Soundtrack Pro, Compressor, and DVD SP for the DVD. These are good, stable programs that meet most of my needs for no-budget post-production. The only needs I find wanting are in the areas of mastering and onlining.
  
  Stu’s book goes into onlining quite a bit—getting the video from your non-linear editing program to the final version enjoyed by millions. Colour correction and mastering are the two main areas. In the book, Stu has reservations about using FCP for onlining and recommends using AfterEffects since FCP renders at 8-bits and AE can render 8-, 16-, or 24-bits. The higher the bit rate, the better the filters and transitions look. With Stu’s workflow, you don’t do any rendering at all in FCP—you export everything sans transitions and filters, and apply them inside AfterEffects instead.
  
  In FCP 5, you’re limited to 8-bit rendering, but Apple promises that FCP 6 does 16- and 24-bit rendering, as does Color, but I haven’t seen anyone come out with a clear statement on whether it works as well as AE does, even on Stu’s blog and forum.
  
  I’ll download the AfterEffects CS3 demo and try it out once I’ve played with Magic Bullet. I had AfterEffects 3 way back when OS9 ruled the Mac world, so I’m somewhat familiar with the program, but I suspect that CS3 is probably a lot more sophisticated than 3 is!
  
  To evaluate the 2 demos, I’ll take the same sequence from a Final Cut project, export it as a DV QuickTime file, and import it into each program (bearing in mind that the Magic Bullet demo is plug-in only, I’ll presumably be using FCP’s rendering engine when I test Magic Bullet, so I’m testing the interface more than I am the output).
  
  I’ll come up with 3 or 4 different things I want to test, and use Magic Bullet, AfterEffects, and Final Cut Studio 1 to independently come up with 3 different versions. Once I’ve done all 9 or 12 tests, I’ll export them as QuickTime files and bring them into Compressor to convert into H.264 and DVD files. I’ll run the DVD files through DVD Studio Pro to create DVDs to look at on various TVs, and I’ll test the H.264 files on a mix of computers, mostly Windows.
  
  I’ll post results for these evaluations in the coming weeks.

Blade Runner the final cut?

There’s a new Blade Runner DVD coming out in December, so they’ve released a print in limited runs to stir up interest. Blade Runner the Final Cut started a run at the Regent Theatre on Mt. Pleasant a couple of weeks ago. I ended up seeing it three times so far, the most recent on a dark and rainy Sunday night with a nearly deserted streetscape echoing the movie’s vision of a city.

If you haven’t seen Blade Runner before (any of the 6 versions of it floating out there), stop reading as I’ll probably give things away that are better witnessed first-hand. The Final Cut represents version #7, if you’re keeping score at home.

The Regent is a great little indie movie house. Originally built for live theatre, it’s a post-production facility by day and movie house by night, so the projection system and the sound system are amazing. The room is also acoustically fixed up.

I own the Director’s Cut (version #6) on VHS and on DVD, but I’ve seen Blade Runner onscreen a few times—there was a scratched print floating around, and I got to see a genuine 76-mm print at the late great Eglinton Theatre once, even if it was also the “happy ending” version with voiceover.

So, to see a fresh print, digitally restored and remastered the way Ridley Scott had intended (he didn’t have control until version #6), in a great theatre, was too much to pass up on 3 separate occasions.

Blade Runner is quite a bleak view of the future (CITY-TV used to run it right after its New Year’s Eve show as a subtle but powerful statement), with perpetual night and constant heavy rain dominating the formerly sun-baked climate of Los Angeles. Enormous refineries spout fireballs of gas into the air during the opening flight over the dark cityscape as drums hammer the audience into their seats.

There’s a great book written about the making of the movie called Future Noir—I’d recommend it to any fans who haven’t read it—which will keep this entry short.

The big debate amongst the fans for the longest time was whether or not Deckard, Harrison Ford’s protagonist, was a replicant or not. Ridley Scott ahs more or less confirmed that the character is a replicant, but Ford has been quoted as saying that Scott told him that Deckard wasn’t a replicant when they were shooting the movie. In version #7, Deckard is clearly a replicant: the unicorn daydream and the origami unicorn are proof, glowing red eyes aside.

In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether Deckard is a fake or authentic human. The final scene is powerful regardless.

After meeting and facing down the last of the replicants, Deckard returns home to pick up Rachael, the femme fatale, so that they can flee together. As he gets her to the elevator, he spots an origami unicorn on the ground—a sign that fellow blade runner Gaff was there. He picks it up and holds it in front of his face as a series of emotions play across his face, and Gaff’s last line, “It's too bad she won't live; but then again, who does?” is heard.

That closeup of Harrison Ford’s face is one of Ford’s finest moments as an actor. And it gives Ridley Scott a great, low-key climactic moment. Because Deckard’s feelings are not explained with dialogue, it’s ambiguous. And it’s absolutely brilliant on all parties’ counts.

Here’s how I interpret that last shot:

For devotees of the Deckard-is-a-replicant school, Deckard realizes that he is a replicant at that moment: the unicorn daydream could only be known to Gaff if the daydream was an implant (either Deckard’s or Gaff’s, or both). He realizes that he and Rachael are both hunted—by Gaff and the other blade runners, by their built-in limited life-spans, or by both. But Deckard still turns and joins Rachael in the elevator. In the “happy ending” version, this is followed by the closing credits over aerial footage as though from one of the spinners (flying cars) fleeing the city. In the other versions, like #7, it goes to black and credits.

For Deckard as authentic human, that moment is still awful: he realizes they’re being hunted, either by Rachael’s best-before date, Gaff, or both.

In turning to join Rachael, he’s not giving up, he’s seizing the day, he’s alive, dammit. That’s the faint light at the end of the Blade Runner tunnel. How anyone felt it necessary to throw in the aerial footage that cheaply represented the POV of a fleeing spinner….

Regardless of how you see Deckard, this shot, to me, is great filmmaking: a powerful climactic beat, with enough ambiguity to leave the viewer debating with himself what the character is thinking and feeling, and wondering what happens next.

It’s also an instructive lesson in acting with the eyes and face for film, and how to capture that acting in order to give that beat its proper expression.

Ford is completely in the moment during that beat. He’s not telling us his emotions—he lets them come from within and they take him and us through the beat. The beat feels honest because Ford is honest in that closeup.

Ridley Scott held that shot to let the beat pass uninterrupted. Here’s what I remember of that last scene: Rachael steps on the origami unicorn—cut—Deckard comes out of his apartment—cut—closeup as Deckard notices the unicorn—cut—Deckard’s hand picks up the unicorn—cut—closeup on the unicorn—cut—Deckard holds the unicorn in front of his face and the great moment happens.

I don’t remember what shot is next—Deckard turning around? Shot of Rachael in the elevator?—because those shots follow the climax of the film. The few seconds of Deckard following Rachael are the epilogue, to make sure we know he’s going with her, regardless of what’s chasing them.

Watch Blade Runner the Final Cut and you’ll be transported to a dark world with a faint glimmer of hope, a powerful and disturbing story that resonates so much with what we face in 2007. There are some great moments of writing and acting in it—the Roy Batty speech before he dies is another great moment in acting—but the whole movie builds up to that final 10 seconds of greatness.

What’s Going on Today (or, Meanwhile back in 2007)

Now that I’ve updated what went on in 2001-2002, here’s an update on what we’re doing right now in 2007.

Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.

Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.

Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.

When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).

I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.

So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 7: Afterwords

When we finished our feature, I asked myself 2 questions: what did I learn from Babysitters? And would I do it again?

I learned a lot, things that I wouldn’t have learned by taking a class. I also didn’t learn things I would have learned in class, but, overall, I think I came out ahead with practical experience in no-budget preproduction, production, and post-production.

I learned 3 key lessons overall. There might be more, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

First: you need a strong script before anything else. Your entire project is at the mercy of the first telling, the script, and any weaknesses in that first telling will multiply in the second telling (production) and the third telling (post-production) unless you are fortunate enough to spot those mistakes and correct them while you can. Otherwise, you run the risk of having a plot or characters that doesn’t engage your audience.

Our shooting script was an unedited first draft because we did no story editing at all. This was a mistake—the script wasn’t ready, despite having some good scenes and gags in it, and the story was overly complicated and self-indulgent. We didn’t kill our babies, those bits we loved that didn’t move the story forward. I don’t think we were alone in making this mistake—I’ve seen other rookies do the same, and even the pros crank out crap based on bad scripts (Phantom Menace is probably the best example I can think of right now. It had some interesting ideas and new characters, but a good story editor could have cleaned up a lot of the babies that should have been killed in that movie—and still pleased both the kiddie audience and the hardcore fans).

We now spend a lot of time working on scripts—most of the time, actually. In the last 12 months, we’ve had 4 shooting days, but we’ve spent 5-6 months working on story ideas and writing scripts and story editing and rewriting and all that other fun stuff.

With Mullet working on the comic books, I’ve become the principle writer on our shorts, so he comes in only when I think the script is ready for him to see. He approaches the scripts as a story editor does, looking at the story first and giving notes on his reactions to it beat by beat. Sometimes, I have something he likes and we shoot it unchanged. Sometimes, I end up rewriting several times before we shoot it. But, most of the time, he doesn’t like it and I throw the script out.

Second, every hour you spend on preproduction will save you a great deal of trouble later on. We managed to shoot 120 pages of script with 2 dozen actors, countless shots and takes, on dozens of locations, on weekends spread out over 8 months. We did this equipped only with a handful of Excel and Word documents. Every hour I spent preparing shot lists, call sheets, and all the other logistical stuff saved us hours on shooting days, and saved us hours again in post-production. On later projects, I’ve started drawing crude storyboards (complete with my stick figures) to make sure I’ve got the visual stuff worked out. I’ve even done rough animatics with scanned storyboards and dubbed audio, just to make sure it works on screen. You can leave things to chance, but the odds are usually against you. It’s not easy putting a story onto film or video, so why make it harder to do so if you’re forcing yourself to make it up as you go along?

Third: learn from your mistakes and practice what you’ve learned in the next project. I’ve made a few shorts to learn specific things that I knew I hadn’t grasped or tried in Babysitters, and I’ve read more books, taken a producing class and a directing class, and watched a lot of videos to further what I knew or didn’t know when we made Babysitters. We’ve completed two shorts and started on 3 others since that time, and the lessons we learned from Babysitters have paid off with these latter efforts. Each time I do a project now, I decide in advance what I want to learn from it, and I’d recommend that approach as I think it forces you to give yourself hands-on experience with a new skill. Why do something if you’re not learning from the experience?

With so many hours of production under our belts, Mullet and I have learned to work quite well as a team. We tend to approach comedy from a feel rather than anything mechanical, so we shoot until it feels right. We usually shoot our rehearsals as takes, but I think we’re much faster at finding the beats now. We’re much better at writing scripts and story-editing them.

Would I do it again? Yes. Without hesitation, I would do it again.

I should clarify that if I could go back to the year 2000, I would. Back then, YouTube didn’t exist and online video wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most video projects were more-or-less demo reels on VHS tape, with very few seen outside of filmmakers’ friends, video nights at comedy clubs or, even rarer, on a specialty cable TV channel. The means of getting video out to large numbers of people was there, but it was slow and cumbersome despite whatever format (QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real Player) you used. VHS was king! Streaming video was still in its infancy, and video files were too large even for downloads for the average user. DVD-R burners were just starting to appear on new computers (by the time we finished post in late 2002, however, the DVD-R had begun to replace the VHS tape as the preferred format).

For anyone reading this today, unless you have a time machine, forget trying to make a feature on videotape—stick to shorts until someone pays you to make a feature.

If we were starting out from scratch today, instead of a 74-minute feature, I think we’d make 15-20 shorts (5 minutes and less) instead, committing to a similar schedule. We would make mistakes early on, but the repetition of doing 15 shorts over a long schedule would help us find our feet just as Babysitters did. At the end, we’d have a selection of 15 shorts to choose to put online, on DVD, enter into festivals and competitions, or whatever future channels of opportunity emerge.

That’s the end of my look back to our “boot-camp” project. Thanks for reading, and watch for a taste of Babysitters on the Miller & Mullet DVD.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 6: Revisiting the Past

We sat down and watched Babysitters recently. I hadn’t watched it since some time in 2003 or 2004, so I’d forgotten a lot of things about it. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten about most of it.

I have to admit I didn’t look forward to seeing it again. I’d been grateful that we’d left it alone for so long. When you’ve advanced ahead in terms of experience and knowledge, it’s not easy to go back and see earlier efforts and not cringe at the mistakes.

So, as we started the movie, I waited for the cringing to begin.

The first part of the movie ran surprisingly well. From the beginning to the opening credits, the pacing helps to hide the flaws. So far, so good….

The first scene after the credits, featuring a well-known ACTRA and SAG performer who donated his time, is quite slow, but after the buildup to the credits, it felt right to slow down before starting to build up again.

The middle of the movie had a sequence that no longer made sense to be in the movie (Mullet had to remind me why it was there, actually: to fit one of the plot points in Gulliver’s Travels), so we decided to cut it out. The rest of the movie builds up a bit and comes to an abrupt end.

So, we’ll be recutting it again, from 74 minutes to something much shorter, likely still over the Academy’s 40-minute limit to qualify as a feature, but under an hour and with most of the leaden pacing removed. There are some things we won’t be able to take out or speed up, so there will still be some loooooong moments in there.

The audio is out of sync in a few places, so I’ll have to spend some time playing with that to fix it. Fortunately, with Final Cut Studio, you get a marvelous audio workstation program, Soundtrack Pro, which allows this type of finessing.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to not hate it as much as I had feared before the screening. For a first project for a couple of guys who hadn’t been near film classes before, it’s not that bad. So, for once, I realized that the effort we had put into it, all the work our cast and crew had put into it, was worth it.

I think we should be able to put the opening sequence on the DVD, just to show the world what you can do with two clown, a baby, and a camcorder.

A lesson from the Newcastle schoolteacher

Last night, I attended The Police concert here in Toronto. Sting and the boys powered through their greatest hits, most of them rearranged with jazzier melodies and a grungier guitar sound.

Why am I writing about this in a filmmaking blog? It was a great example of showmanship (not a gender-neutral term, but I’ll use it here given that the 3 performers who inspired this entry are all male; if you have a better term, please add a comment).

Webster’s defines the term as follows (bundled in with the showman entry):

showman

Main Entry: show·man
Pronunciation: \shō-mən\
Function: noun
Date: circa 1734
1 : the producer of a play or theatrical show
2 : a notably spectacular, dramatic, or effective performer
— show·man·ship \-ship\ noun

The current Wikipedia entry for “showmanship (performing)” is a lot more fleshed out and I think applicable to my argument:

Showmanship, concerning artistic performing such as in Theatre, is the skill of performing in such a manner that will either appeal to an audience or aid in conveying the performance's essential theme or message.
For instance, the Canadian stage magician Doug Henning used many classic illusions in his magic show. However, he made the old material seem new by both by rejecting the old stylistic clichés of the art such as wearing formal wear, and by presenting them with a childlike exuberance that respected the audience's intelligence.

Within the annals of rock music, The Police story is about 3 guys getting together during the punk movement in London, becoming the biggest New Wave band in the world, and then breaking up from internal pressures, primarily from Sting’s desire to do his own thing, when they reached the top and dominated rock and pop music.

With this backstory, the press coverage of this reunion tour has focussed on the possibility of the band imploding again due to clashes of ego, particularly between front man Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland.

Before the show began, I’m sure this aspect of the band was on most of the audience’s minds as I heard people talk about it as I entered the building and found my seat.

So, on top of re-jigging the hits here and there, there were also moments where the musicians played up the anticipation and expectations. Sting at one point hopped up o the edge of the drum riser (nearly falling into the drums, which cracked both him and Copeland up). With the onstage cameras beaming the closeups to the overhead video screens, Sting playfully nodded at two cymbals at the front of the kit, provoking Copeland to smash them. On the third (comic) beat, Copeland playfully lunged forward to hit Sting, but Sting jumped off the riser. Copeland’s demeanor while drumming is quite serious, so there weren’t any cues from him that he was joking (Sting, meanwhile, wore a smirk).

At the end of their set, as they headed off to await their encore (a funny tradition in rock), Copeland met Sting at the back of the stage with arms wide open. Sting playfully darted past Copeland and offstage.

So… was this a display of subdued tensions or two guys messing with the band’s public image? The trio arrived onstage and left onstage as a group (not scattering different directions like my buddy Bob had seen the Eagles the moment one of their reunion tour shows ended).

It doesn’t really matter, when it comes down to it. Regardless of whether the tensions are real or not, they brought them into the show. So, you can see it cynically, as guys faking their long-past feuds like wrestlers do, or you can see it as people being honest with how they feel about each other (and including it in their act). Or two guys playing with everyone’s head by toying with what the audience is expecting? Or elements of all 3? I don’t think anyone but the band would know for sure.

The Police could never be accused of being cynically-manufactured given that they didn’t produce crap, tripe, or filler—in my opinion, and I own the box set….

So, amidst the songs about loneliness, obsession, pain, suffering, and love, they had 20,000 ticket holders wondering whether they’d be pulling razors on each other backstage or be bundled off into separate rooms by nervous management types.

Again—what the heck does this have to do with filmmaking? I think putting yourself fully and completely into your projects creates honest, exciting, and compelling entertainment. I hope to apply to my own work the lesson that the Newcastle schoolteacher and his mates taught last night.

Rock music has a tradition of onstage feuds, ranging from The Kinks actually throwing punches at each other to Aerosmith using the position of wings in their stage logo to indicate if Stephen and Joe were fighting or getting along that night. I’m glad I witnessed another fabled chapter of that tradition!

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 5: No-Budget Finances

Compared to most student features, Babysitters was an inexpensive project, but for two people putting up all the money themselves, it wasn’t cheap!

With the purchase of computer software and hardware, video equipment, supplies, props, and the mandatory on-set food and drink, I put around $5500 CAD into it (equivalent of about $3600 US in 2002). Mullet put in $2000 CAD, so our budget for Babysitters for 2001-2002 was $7500 CAD, or about $4900 USD in 2002 dollars (all dollar numbers below are in Canadian funds).

So… what did $7500 buy us besides 74-minutes of hilarity?

Most of that money went into fixed assets like computers, software, extra hard drives, a tripod, shotgun microphone, etc., so the money we spent on Babysitters has saved considerable money on subsequent projects. We can now make a short for the costs of blank tapes, food, beverages, gas, parking, office supplies, and the occasional new prop.

For Babysitters, as a general strategy, we decided to buy inexpensive gear rather than rent better stuff since we had a lot of single shooting days spread out over 9 months. If we’d scheduled the shoot to take place within a single block of time or two, the rental option would have made more sense, so your schedule will dictate your finances a great deal.

We never prepared a budget beforehand, which is something we should have done, in hindsight. If we had done a budget, though, we would have revised it constantly as we came across new expenses that we hadn’t anticipated—every rookie mistake will cost you money.

We averaged about $100 each day for food, beverages, props, gas, parking, and supplies like mini-DV tapes, and that has been our typical budget ever since. We’ve always been able to borrow cameras, so we’ve never had to rent one (about $200/day for a DVX100 or similar camera in Toronto these days).

We also don’t pay our actors or crew anything. This means we don’t use people who belong to the acting guild in Canada, ACTRA, as we can’t afford the minimums that the guild has in place for its members. If we did use guild people without following procedure, we would never be able to sell the project to anyone, so it’s not worth it. ACTRA does have a low-budget program, but they’re still pretty big bucks for anyone at the no-budget level. The guilds in your area will have similar rules and policies that you should know before starting a project.

Any decent film school has an introductory producing class, so I’d recommend taking one before plunging into shooting. If I didn’t live near a dozen film schools like there are in Toronto, the internet has leveled the playing field—you can get just about any book on film and video producing, and there are a lot of good websites, lists, and blogs on the topic as well. I’ll post an entry with some links at some point.

You also want to budget your time. For longer projects, you should anticipate the demands on your time during all phases of production. A good production management book or course can give you an idea of how much time you’ll need to do things (and it will always take longer to do something than you’d think it would…).

We saved money where we could with gear. Instead of buying a microphone boom pole, I modified a $15 window-washing extension arm with a PVC collar and mini-bungee cords to create a shock mount (this guy had a similar idea). We used a $5 desktop mike stand for most of the shoots—putting the mike at the feet of our performers just out of frame with the mike aimed up. I bought 3 sets of halogen work lights for our interiors, using gels to convert them whenever needed to sunlight-balanced light. I built camera stabilizers (to make handheld shots easier) with raw materials from Canadian Tire (after seeing how much a pro stabilizer cost). All of this stuff may look cheap and crappy, but with a little work, it does the same job as the pro gear at a fraction of the cost.

We only had to pay for locations three times, when we shot scenes in rehearsal spaces. We used both our apartments, interior and exterior, for as many distinct locations as we could squeeze out of them, and we used someone’s apartment for another location. We found and used a deserted lot downtown, and we used public property elsewhere. We didn’t build sets, which is another big expense even for something small.

We were fortunate in that we avoided the debt like a lot of filmmakers get into with features, so I don’t have any advice to others on how to manage it. Just avoid it if you can. After all, no-budget means no-money….

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 4: Post-Production

When we wrapped, of course, we had an enormous job in post-production ahead of us. We had over 30 hours of footage to on a large collection of mini-DV tapes. By then, I’d traded in the Powermac 8600 for a brand-new G4. I captured footage each week, once we’d watched our “rushes,” and I’d logged all the takes, but I did nothing more at that point until we were wrapped.

Mullet and I spent one memorable week sitting in front of that G4 trying to put together our first cut. It was sheer hell, so in a blaze of inspiration, we called it Hell Week.

Our self-taught shooting style came home to roost that week.

Our coverage was thin, so we didn’t have a lot of alternatives or any way of speeding scenes up—there was nothing to cut to. So… things had to stay as they were, usually as master shots. To match shots, we had to let things go on too long, and, to further complicate matters, very few shots matched perfectly (no continuity person to notice these things). We ended up using takes because they matched rather than using the best takes. That was the hell part of Hell Week.

There are a lot of first-time filmmakers who have made and who will make the same mistakes, but the silver lining is that we all learn more about putting moving images together when trying to solve problems than when something together easily (an equally important lesson is, of course, to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them the next time).

Today, we edit as we go, so as soon as we’ve shot something I start to put it together to see what we have. Otherwise, you’re blind to what you’ve missed, and your mistakes will likely not be fixable, unless your cast and locations are still available.

Another frustration appeared during Hell Week, something we couldn’t avoid that late in the project.

We’d started working on the project on with Adobe Premiere 6, which proved to be crash-prone and completely unreliable for anything other than crashing the computer at random moments. We had each scene in a separate project file to keep things manageable, but it didn’t matter how long or short the scene was—the software would crash regularly, and whatever work we’d done since the previous save was gone.

To be fair, we were probably demanding too much of Premiere. If we’d been working on a short, it probably would have worked just fine, but even keeping scenes in their own project files was probably too much at times.

Nonetheless, after the rough cut was done, I switched over to the first version of Final Cut Pro, which proved to be much more stable. I ended up using FCP to recreate the editing of a few scenes, and the rest I exported from Premiere as QuickTime movies. I stuck to the separate project files for each scene, but the crashing stopped and we were able to get through the rest of the process much easier.

Despite the obstacles, we had a 124-minute rough cut assembled by December, 2002. Technical errors, the lack of coverage, and the convoluted plot—for a first, student effort, I don’t think we did that badly. If you were to set a classroom full of first-year film students off and running for 8 months of Saturday shoots and the same budget, I think we would have held our own.

Some of the jokes were really good—a DVD gag played really well in particular, and we were complimented by a few people about specific gags that worked well. Some of it doesn’t work, and the story isn’t clear enough at times to make sense—we more or less walked away from the plot during Act 2.

The ending didn’t work very well, but it was because we made a classic rookie mistake when we reshoot parts of it to try to make it work. We didn’t reshoot the entire scene—just the specific shot needed. The retakes, naturally, didn’t match the original shots.

Lesson learned: any time you have to reshoot something, always look at the footage for the entire scene or sequence, print screen caps, and take them with you to the location. Or you can save yourself headaches by getting yourself a really good continuity person!

The project taught us things that we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

The team itself was well-balanced. Mullet has a lot more performing experience than I do, so in our live performances he did better than I did because I wasn’t as experienced in improv—and we improvised almost everything on stage. With a script, I could hold up my end of the stick better, and the team was much more balanced, something that has carried on in our following projects and live performances.

We both learned a lot about storytelling with video, and the old saying about telling a story three times (on the page, in the camera, in the editing) is very true.

It was time to show our project to an audience to start working on pacing and structure. We had a Christmas Party at the now-defunct Tim Sims Playhouse for the cast, crew, and some invited guests, and we showed them the 124-minute version with temp audio tracks and placeholders for some of the graphics.

I remember not wanting to be in the room while it was playing. Surprisingly, the cast and crew were still in the room when the lights came up.

It was useful to see it with a real audience, though. Audience reaction showed us where we had to make cuts, and so, a few months later, we had a second cut running 74 minutes.

I moved onto the audio. All of our onscreen dialogue was recorded with a shotgun mike directly into the camcorder so the audio was, in theory, synched with the video, although the software occasionally disagreed and shifted things. Otherwise, all I had to do to was adjust volumes for individual clips until they were consistent.

On a dare from me, Mullet composed a crazy patchwork of a score, ranging from solo piano to a wall of indescribable noise. Dave Pearce recorded some songs that Mullet had written. Scott McClelland, a recording engineer/musician/music teacher, mixed and mastered the songs for us, and I used Final Cut Pro 1 to mix the final audio together. I exported everything as QuickTime movies.

We showed the car theft scene at Second Ciné, a show hosted by Andrew Currie, at the Tim Sims. Each month, AC screened a number of short comedies, having the director and/or performers come up after the short for an interview.

The Second Ciné audience wasn’t moved to violence, and I even got asked about what camera we’d used, likely because of the clarity of the image when we were shooting through the windshield (a Cokin circular polarizer and an ND filter, which made my one-chip Ultura look a lot better than it should have).

AC nominated us for newcomer of the year for the season-ending awards, but we lost out. Still, it was nice to be nominated, and, no, we didn’t prepare a speech in case we won. We would like to thank the academy….

Next time, the financial aspects of a no-budget feature….

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 3: Life in Production

So, what’s it like shooting a feature movie on a no-budget project? It’s a lot of work, but with enough preparation, you can get an enormous amount of work done.

I was working full-time at my day job, so I did all my prep on weeknights. There were weeks where we didn’t shoot anything (we didn’t shoot on long weekends or for most of December and early January, for example), but for the most part the process took up the bulk of my free time once we’d started production. Every hour and minute spent on preproduction is worth it—don’t scrimp here or you’ll pay for it on shooting day.

Before we started shooting, I created a master shot list during my script breakdown process, plus the schedule itself. Each week, I updated the rough plans for each shooting day to prepare a call sheet to e-mail to our cast and crew, rechecked the shot list, made sure we had the locations lined up, props ready, cast contacted, and all the little details, like “Do I have enough makeup for next week?” or “where can we get a ceramic dog?”

For exteriors, I’d also track weather forecasts. Probability of precipitation [POP] was the key as we would go ahead whenever it was 60% or less. I used several local sources, just to build concensus on how the weather was going to turn out.

I spend my Friday nights pulling together everything together to make the day go as smoothly. I’d gather my bags of gear, charge or change batteries, made sure I had enough mini-DV tapes, went out and bought food and beverages.

I can’t stress the importance of checklists. Any time I forget something important, like camera batteries or blank tapes, it’s always because I haven’t opened up the bags and cross-checked with my checklist. When you’re tired and your head is filled with details of what you’re shooting, you will miss something crucial, like your battery pack or tapes.

For all shoots I’d bring a bag containing the camcorder, battery pack, microphone cables, daylight gels, clothespins, clamps, extra battery for the mike, desktop mike stand, duct tape, clapper, markers, chalk, camcorder shoe accessory adapter, screwdrivers, and pliers. For interiors, I’d add work lights, three 25’ extension cords, spare bulbs, and work gloves. In a padded 3-ring binder, I’d have copies of the script, pens, markers, shot lists, and continuity forms. I’d also have props and a cooler for food.

The day of the shoot, Mullet would get up around 6 a.m. and start getting ready. I’d get up at 7 to check the weather to make sure it was still a go. It was a very dry year and I think we only had one or two rain-outs, and one fog-out where I couldn’t see across the street.

Once we’d decided to go ahead, I’d check the mountain of gear in the living room to make sure I had everyhing. Mullet would arrive in his car by 8:30 or 9 a.m., and we’d head out to pick up the cast and crew.

We were usually at our first location by 9:30 with the first setup started by 10. Once we’d warmed up with some rehearsal takes, we’d get right into it, and our mornings were always productive—our best work was usually during that time. Our afternoons were usually productive, but once it started getting hot in that May-July period, our pace from mid-afternoon onwards wasn’t always as peppy.

On set, I set up the shots and gear with the help of whoever was our crew that day. Meanwhile, Mullet briefed the actors, ran the lines, and brought them in to do the blocking, giving notes as needed.

Since then, we’ve changed the way we work. It’s still collaborative, to be sure, but I direct the actors now, and with using filmmaking buddies on our projects, I don’t have to worry about setting up the gear as much (or even picking where to put the camera).

We’d shoot a couple of rehearsal takes just to find the beats and figure out the blocking. We’d then shoot a few takes as rehearsed, repeating until we got at least 2 good takes on tape (always have a safety take just in case…). If there was time, we’d start improvising a bit, just to see what else we could find. If a scene or shot wasn’t working, we’d rewrite on the spot, sometimes using improv but mostly huddling together with the script and a pen. Most of the time, we shortened things or adapted to take better advantage of the location.

For scheduling, we’d always try to have the cast wrapped by mid-afternoon, leaving any Miller & Mullet-only shots to the end of the day if needed. Most of the cast didn’t have to give us a full day, but those who played the more important characters, like Marcel St. Pierre, generously gave us a full day’s work. Marcel volunteered for 4 shooting days, with one of them being cancelled due to dense fog. One way to pay back for your cast’s generosity is to not waste their time and get them done as early as possible.

We’d normally wrap by 4 o’clock, but sometimes we went to 5, and I think we had a couple of 6 p.m. finishes. We also had a couple 2-hour shoots where we wrapped in time for lunch. Your schedule will vary, mostly depending upon cast and location availability.

Usually that same night, Mullet would come over and we’d watch our rushes. I’d take notes on what we liked or disliked to add to the spreadsheet I’d set up to use during editing. This saved a lot of time when we sat down to edit, and for anything with more than a few shots, I still do it today.

I also made notes on the bad takes, indicating what went wrong, just in case we could use part of a bad take and edit around the mistake with another take. Otherwise, we would have had to watch all the takes for a particular shot when we were editing (we did do that a number of times, of course, but not as frequently as it would have been otherwise).

Our Saturdays were long, usually 12-15 hours by the time we watched the rushes. But we only did we two shooting days back to back once—the last scheduled weekend we shot both the Saturday and Sunday, all exteriors, during the hottest weekend of the year. I don’t even remember what we shot on the last day.

Sunday mornings, I’d log the tapes in Adobe Premiere and let the computer batch capture all the footage to my hard drives. Because I’d made my notes the night before, I didn’t need a lot of time to do the logging, and I’d leave the computer to do the capture itself.

On Monday nights, I’d start the process over again. Even if you're shooting a 5-minute short, you should expect to have a similar workload. Being a producer is the unsung role of no-budget filmmaking--no executive mansions or fat paycheques....

Next time, post-production.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 2: Preproduction

(Continues from Part 1)
Mullet moved back to Toronto that fall, when the script was nearly done. He lived in my living room for a month, until he found a job and new home, which definitely made it easier to lock the script and start pre-production. I did breakdowns of the script, figuring out shot numbering, preparing shot lists, figuring out what had to be shot on specific days for specific locations and specific actors, and then roughing out a schedule.

While I took care of the scheduling and planning, Mullet did the casting, putting a lot of TheatreSports improvisers in most of the roles. We held an audition for the remaining roles, where we managed to fill all the remaining roles with a cold read of a scene from Taxi Driver. In total, we had two dozen actors in the movie. Unfortunately, some of those actors were members of ACTRA, the screen actor’s union in Canada. By doing so, we’d unknowingly made our project largely unusable for self-distribution. This is a classic rookie mistake—always check out guild and union rules before using their members on your projects!

Crew, of course, is usually harder to find than cast. There are not a lot of people outside of film students interested in working behind the camera for free on someone else’s movies, so you end up working on your buddies’ projects as a trade of labour. Amazingly, we ended up with 3 people who donated a lot of time over the next year, none of them film students: Kasia Czarnota, Jeff Orchard, and Nic Pearson.

Nic brought along his Canon GL-1 and shot our interiors in glorious 3-chip colour, although he did insist on using his camera light, which made white makeup glow hot enough to blow out any detail (another rookie mistake). Nic dropped out during the winter due to cancer and stopped returning my calls (he actually died of cancer the following summer, something we didn’t find out until months after the fact, when I Googled his name and discovered he’d dropped us to direct a Fringe play and, presumably, didn’t have the time left to help us out.). Jeff gave us the most time, starting off as our boom operator, and then doing everything from setup to being our DOP, to driving actors home at the end of the day. Kasia helped out a lot, too, starting with script supervision and eventually becoming our 3rd DOP as she had the most interest in visual arts of any of us. All three gave us a lot of long Saturdays for nothing more than tomato sandwiches and abuse from Mullet (he was a hard-ass on set).

Our first shoot was on a cool autumn day in October of 2001, and we wrapped in July, 2002 on the hottest day in the history of humankind. We shot on Saturdays, using Sundays our rain days (I think we only missed 2 or 3 Saturdays in total). We also chose one of the hottest summers in Toronto history in which to shoot exteriors, giving myself and 2 of our cast sunstroke during our last weekend of shooting, a grueling Saturday-and-Sunday-super-shoot weekend, which took place during a month-long heat wave. I remember we wanted to get a shot of one actor on a hill looking down on the city, but the smog was so thick the cityscape wasn’t visible in the shot….

Next time, how a typical shooting day unfolded.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet 1: Writing the script

Quick: the summer of 2001—how did you spend your time? How about those dark days after September 11? And that hot summer of 2002? Know what I did? I spent a lot of that time writing and producing and directing and performing in and editing a feature called Babysitters. It was our first video project. And it was a feature-length video project.

Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.

We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.

Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.

First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.

Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).

In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.

Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.

The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.

The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.

Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.

Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.

September Roundup, Part II

If you made it through Part I, congratulations! This part will deal with the non-writing stuff I’m doing right now.

I have started work on a few video projects in the last month or so. Andrew Currie delivered the first cut of Can last month through the magic of a portable hard drive. I have AC’s project file as well as all the clips as he had logged and captured them—I haven’t had to go near my camcorder on this project!

AC’s cut was a first cut, so a lot of the clips are not trimmed completely so it plays really, really slow. In the second edit, I’ll trim everything up to pick up the pacing. I’m not changing any of the shots AC chose or the order he placed them, so the only differences will be the trims and any slow-mo and, er, fast-mo shots. There’s also a bit of CGI in it, a gag that AC came up with that wasn’t in the original shooting script. I’m using Motion to create it, and I’ll probably end up doing 10 different variations. I’ve tried 3 different ways so far, without coming up with what I want, but that’s how I’ve always worked with pixel-pushing software like Motion or After Effects: hack away at it until you get something.

After the CGI is done, I’ll start the audio work and get some sound effects in there, adjust the dialogue tracks, and prep it for whoever ends up scoring it. I will likely put in a temp score courtesy of my iTunes library to give us and our future composer an idea of what the music should do in different places. A couple of shots will need “stunt music,” specific genres to help set up or payoff a gag.

So that’s where Can stands this month. Next, the other short we worked on this summer, Bags.

Mullet has to come over and watch the rushes from the 3 shoots we did. We still need to shoot the exteriors for it, but all the interiors are done. Once we watch the footage from the 3 shooting days, I’ll start putting the takes we liked into a first cut.

We’ve always watched “the rushes” together after a shoot, just to pick out what works and what doesn’t work. Of course, sometimes in the editing you can’t use the best take because it either doesn’t match the preceding or following clip, or the best take is way too long/short and kills the pacing, or it steps outside of the story for too long or at the wrong time in the story. Most of the time, though, the best take ends up in the final edit. Sometimes, watching the rushes reveals that the takes we liked on the day aren’t the best takes on tape. We judge the takes by feel as much as by story logic, visual and aural clarity, etc., so it’s all about listening to your gut. The best takes tend to make you laugh out loud, even if you are watching a few hours after doing whatever it is that is making you laugh.

I make my notes, noting takes and timecode (we don’t usually keep continuity records while we’re shooting—we’ve evolved into a looser system where I number the takes on the clapper and don’t bother making notes about no-goods and goods until we watch the rushes.

Afterwards, I rewind the tapes, fire up the Mac, and start logging everything to batch capture. I capture all takes, even the false starts, because you never know when you’ll need something unexpected, and you can quite often find good stuff in bad takes, between takes, etc., especially with closeups. Most of it, of course, will never see the light of day, but during editing it’s invaluable to have all your crap handy, just in case.

Also on the go is a blast from the past, Babysitters. This was our first project, a 74-minute epic that took nearly 2 years to write, shoot, and edit. More about it in a later post….

Finally, I’ve been working on a teaser to post on our website and elsewhere to promote the DVD. I’ve done a couple of versions of one that I think we’ll likely put up when Mullet revamps the website in the New Year. I’ll have to come up with followup videos, of course, so that’ll be an ongoing process until we head to San Diego next July.

And, of course, we need opening credits for the shorts.

I did some quick ‘n’ dirty credits last July to loop on DVD at our table at the 2006 San Diego con, but it was basically Miller & Mullet running around. Someone recently gave us advice about the comic book, suggesting that their lack of knowledge of the characters made the story harder to understand, and I think this applies to the DVD as well.

We’ve been performing the act for 7 years, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that the rest of the world doesn’t know who we are.

So, our opening credits will likely be a Gilligan’s Island type with the lyrics carrying exposition as to what’s going on. Another, more recent model is the House of Cosbys from Channel 101. An animated series of shorts, House of Cosbys has a great, funny theme song that, with animation over it, explains the backstory to the series so that you know instantly what’s going on. We need the same thing, so as I work on these other things on my Mac, I’ll earmark footage that we can use. Of course, we’ll have to come up with a theme song, or at least lyrics that someone can compose a song for, but that’s an entry for another day….

September Roundup, Part 1

If you’re checking out my rambling diatribes via the link that Andrew Currie graciously put on his blog’s links page, welcome to the drollhouse…. Sorry. Been saving that one for years, and this felt like the right time!

This entry appears near the end of our first month of our shooting hiatus and I am exhausted. No, not really. I’m writing this on a Monday, so it feels worse than it looks.

Mullet is recovering from his dental work and writing issue #2 of the comic book as our artist, Kam Gates, sharpens his pencils and stirs his inks. But what am I doing, dear reader, while we wait for January and our planned return to shooting video?

I’ve been reading that bestselling screenwriting book, Story, by Robert McKee. I’m doing this as part of my plans to write more scripts this autumn by edumacating myself gooder. This book has been the 800-pound gorilla on my bookcase for about a year, and I figured it was time to reduce my yet-to-be-read books by one.

I was expecting something different, based on comments I’d seen about the book, and the author’s portrayal in Adaptation a few years back. I was expecting something that was geared towards cranking out mindless action-based fun as that is what happens to the Kaufman brothers’ script after they attend a McKee seminar. But the book is, happily, a detailed examination of how we tell stories, and how to tell stories. McKee is in the neo-Aristotelian school of writing, and The Poetics is referred to regularly, especially at the beginning.

I’ve never read anything formal about this, but I’ve noticed that screenwriting authors tend to be either pro-Aristotle or anti-Aristotle, with a few straddling the fence or avoiding the argument altogether. I read The Poetics long enough ago to have forgotten anything I read (other than remembering the section on comedy has been lost to the ages), but in examining how I write and have written in the past, I can see that I’m probably closer to the pro philosophy than the anti-Aristotle philosophy. But I’m not a purist or espousing one school of thought over another—I’m a pragmatic writer. Still, any tool in the wrong hands can be dangerous, and like all those books that become the new Hollywood bible (Syd Field, McKee, John Truby and Christopher Vogler being the ones I’m aware of becoming must-read script gurus ), I can see how someone could take this book and either write crap or greenlight it, if their grasp of the concepts laid out in the book isn’t a good grasp or is beyond their reach.

(Side note inspired by that last sentence: Bob Odenkirk has a hilarious short about a pitch meeting online, and he plays both himself and the exec to which he’s pitching. Has bad words, so NSFW.)

My first screenwriting book was Syd Fields’s first book, Screenplay, about his 3-act paradigm, and I also read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. I haven’t read Vogler’s Writer’s Journey, which is basically a rehash of Campbell, but I have read a few things Truby has posted to the Raindance website. I have an ancient version of Dramatica Pro (running in OS 9), just to round out the screenwriting materials out there.

One of the key anti-Aristotelians I’ve read is Lajos Egri, whose Art of Dramatic Writing was really difficult to find in the 1990’s as it had gone out of print, but I managed to get a 2nd-hand copy, and I’ve seen new editions out there since then. I was urged to read Egri’s book by the 2nd screenwriting book I ever bought, whose title and author have vanished in the mists of my brain—all I remember is a white cover with purple detail—you remember the one, right?

I have a copy of Elements of Screenwriting by Irwin R. Blacker that is composed of photocopied pages of the library’s copy. I couldn’t find a new or used copy at the time, but it’s now back in print. I’ll buy the book itself one of these days….

I’ve read all of these books with an open mind, Story being the only one I had any preconceived notions about—when something becomes a must-read or must-see, I usually wait until the hoopla dies down before checking it out for myself. This approach has saved me from watching reality TV shows, for example. I’ll try to rent Season 1 of The Sopranos to see it for the first time. Yes, I’m that out of date….

Back to my point! I’ve used all of these screenwriting gurus in my efforts to try to become a better writer, and all of these books have the stench of truth about them despite their differences in philosophies and practical approaches to writing screenplays. I don’t think there’s any ultimate truths about writing anything, so each approach has things I can use.

On the creative front, I’m starting to brainstorm ideas for some more scripts. Ideally, I’d like to have a dozen ready in December to give us plenty to either reject or shoot in January. Some of the past scripts will be in that pile, but I’d like to have at least 5-6 new ones worth showing to Mullet (he’s my best critic). Our plan is to shoot some interior stuff this winter, thus taking the pressure off our schedule in the spring. At this point, I have no idea of what I’ll write, but I’ll try to keep most of them indoors. I’m following Robert Rodriguez’s recommended method for writing no-budget scripts: start with a list of things you have. His famous El Mariachi list included a bus and a tortoise. My list will be radically different.

By the way, even if you’re not a fan of Robert Rodriguez’s films, his DVDs always include his famous “10-Minute Film School” segments and are well worth checking out. He has included these on all the DVDs of his I have owned or rented, and the earlier ones are much more applicable (El Mariachi and Desperado, for instance). The Once Upon a Time in Mexico edition shows how he did a couple of shots with CGI in a surprisingly low-tech way (not the CGI itself, but rather how he shot the 2 shots with Salma Hayek and Antonio Bandaras that the CGI was drawn into later on).

And I will probably watch Lloyd Kaufman’s DVD, Make Your Own Damn Movie, again, as I’ve found myself staring at the gaudy yellow spine the last few times I’ve browsed my out-of-order DVD collection. It’s a funny look at no-budget, B-movie filmmaking, made cheap but with tons of interviews and that Troma craziness.

I like to review these low- and no-budget filmmaking sources before I start prepping for shoots, just to shake things up and maybe come up with a brilliant idea that either makes something in front of the camera better or make the behind the camera stuff better. When you’re in a comedy duo that spends a combined 2 hours per day putting on and taking off the makeup, anything that makes the actual shooting easier is much appreciated on the day.

This post is probably long enough to wade through for now. Next post, likely minutes after this one, I’ll go through the list of post-production projects I’ve got on the go.

End of Summer (almost) Roundup

OK, my biweekly promise has gone the way of Paris Hilton's dignity. I can't even remember what I wrote the last time, so I'm probably going to repeat myself from earlier posts here.

So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:

1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).

2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.

3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.

4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.

So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.

The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.

Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.

So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....

Third Shoot in the Can

My plan to do this biweekly blog hasn't worked out very well....

On Saturday, we did our third shoot for the DVD project, doing a few scenes with Alastair Forbes, an up-and-coming improviser who graciously let us use his bedroom as the location. We didn't have anyone to crew it for us (it sort of happened last minute), but we were able to get the shots done. Just one shot actually had me, Mullet, and Alastair in it, so it wasn't really difficult to manage; the camera was locked down for all the shots, so we didn't need someone to pan or zoom.

This was the second shoot for Bags (working title was Dressing Room). We'd shot most of the dressing room scenes despite my laryngitis in the first shoot, and this weekend, we did the scenes outside the dressing room. Alastair plays the stage manager (probably the assistant to the assistant of the stage manager) who brings us to the dressing room for the unseen variety show. We changed the script quite a bit during the first shoot, but we stuck to what was written in the revised script to come up with some fun stuff. Alastair and I go nose to nose at one point, and we found the beats pretty quickly. Alastair came up with some gems, both verbal and physical, that built on and improved the scenes as written. We've certainly gotten adept at cutting out the non-essential and for allowing the room to come up with new and better things.

Our shooting style, in terms of film grammar, has really evolved since we worked with Andrew Currie. We always had what I'd call a theatrical preference for wide shots over closeups, probably from our stage origins. A singular failure we've had in our older projects was a lack of closeups, and a really limited film grammar in terms of framing action and composing shots. AC's shooting style opened our eyes to a new (and better) approach, and I think the lessons we learned were enhanced by our long delay between projects and my involvement in NeutrinoPlex this summer. I should explain.

We haven't shot much since we did fragments of a short called Temptation almost 2 years ago. We were trying to shoot 22 minutes (a broadcast half-hour) with 4-5 shorts, but with the rise of YouTube, we scrapped that idea and focused on 2-5 minute shorts, which we've completed shooting for 2 scripts (Can and Bags), with 4-6 more to go. Coming back after a long break makes it easier to incorporate new ideas, I think, so we've changed how we shoot more easily than if we'd continued to shoot.

With Neutrinoplex, I've been exposed to hand-held improvised filmmaking shot with a hard deadline of minutes. The shooters and their teams of improvisers rely upon quick shots, closeups, and existing light sources to do their thing. In less than 30 minutes, they produce 3 scenes on 3 tapes using the area around the Bad Dog as their locations. My role is "technical director," which means I run the tapes for the audience, using 2 camcorders and a portable DVD player linked to a video projector via a Radio Shack switcher --very low-tech, but it's worked (the only glitches are human ones, mine or the shooters). The show starts at 10 p.m., so the shooters use the light from streetlamps, store windows, the marquee from the Music Hall across the street, etc. Even with 3-chip cameras, the images aren't very bright, so closeups are necessary in most situations.

So, the closeup is our friend now.

This coming Saturday, we are doing my half of the dressing room scenes now that I've regained my voice. I'll try to get another post up next week....

Second shoot is in the can!

I've been really tardy in getting posts up. I wrote one in April after our first shoot but didn't realize I hadn't posted it until I finally logged in to write this post. Yup. Been one of those months....

After having an all-star director the last time, this time we went back to me directing, and my fellow Ryerson film certificate student, Jeff Brown, helping out (basically by setting up the shots, shooting the scenes, and throwing bags at us --more about that later). Jeff is in the middle of post-production for his Production 3 project.

Ryerson's Continuing Ed program is really good. The film certificate is geared towards getting you some core courses (the 3 Production classes being the centrepiece of the program) plus a long list of electives to customize your training. I've taken 2 electives thus far, the introductory producing class (with Jim Murphy, a long-time Canadian film veteran), and Directing Screen Performance (with Robin X, who teaches the Meisner technique over 8 months in a demanding but rewarding class). The program runs in a specific order of prerequisites, so if I were to aim to do Production 3, I'd have to start with Film Technology 1 and then do Production 1. I haven't done so, nor am I thinking about doing so. Making these homemade shorts instead of doing the certificate certainly saves me a lot of money, gives me hands-on experience, but I'm probably missing out on things I should know. I might take another elective, the Film Theory course, or maybe Image Theory over in the Image Arts program. I'm trying to compensate for not having a great visual arts education, which I think affects how I choose and set up shots, as well as in planning and editing.

So, Jeff, fresh from work, came over to my apartment, where he joined Mullet and I as we shot a scene from a short with the working title Dressing Room. I picked up a cold this week, and by the time Saturday noon rolled around, I had full-blown laringytis. So, we dropped my closeups (I'm not skilled or experienced enough to sync looped voicetracks in post) and shot a sequence that takes place in a small space.

On paper, I broke the sequence into 3 scenes, but when we were setting up the shots, Mullet was aggressive in trimming a lot of stuff, and it's really merged into one scene. The space was smaller than what I'd had in mind when I wrote it, so there wasn't the room or, in hindsight, the need for a lot of the gags I'd put in (including Mullet in a Santa suit --it wouldn't have been visible given the narrowness of the doorway and the position we were forced to put the camera in. As I type this, I haven't seen the rushes yet, but I'm sure it'll end up a much tighter and funnier sequence as a result.

Like with Can, what was on paper didn't automatically make it to tape. There was judicious cutting, based on location, lighting, etc. Am I comfortable with this? Sure. We've come up with better stuff than what was written. It's a collaborative process, and the accidents caused by different people, surroundings, and random events of the universe can create magic.

Clown training, like that of improv, prepares you for just about anything to come your way in performance. With creating these projects, I've had the same approach. There are times where this has created crap on tape that seemed better in the room at the time (and those are, guaranteed, the moments where you wish you'd shot alternative footage without the gag to make the editing easier), so there is danger as well as reward in dropping the script and finding something else. So, as we were cutting the 3 scenes down, I kept thinking about how I would cut from one shot to the next. Once I capture the footage and watch the rushes, I'll have a better idea of anything we missed.

Given that the location is in my apartment and we're going to shoot my closeups later on, anything that's missing when viewing the rushes will be quite clear. I'll put together a rough assembly of what we shot just to see how the scene plays.

With other locations, we don't always have the option of revisiting and reshooting, especially if it's a rented space, so in those situations, I need a lot more time to think about changes to the script, just for safety's sake.

I've gotten so far way from my biweekly updates that I'm going to start posting whenever I come up with something to say. Hopefully that's every two weeks....