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.