Ramblings on How to Make a Movie #1

I believe strongly in the need to experiment. You learn something new from every project you do. 

With the end of My Most Difficult Case in sight, I need to consider the approach I’ll use with my next project.

One approach I want to go back to is what I did on Line of Taxis. While I had a script for that film, my intention from the start was to focus on the editing. The film shoot was to collect material to work with in the edit. The script was there to help me plan the material collection.

In my shooting script I had two different last scenes. I used the one my assistant director suggested, and then added another final scene later.

I also identified a bunch of “interesting” shots that I had no plan to use. I used some of those shots to create a new scene in editing. Several bits were improvised by the actors. Some of the best parts of the film were the improvisations. I did a number of neutral close ups, which I found very useful when it came time to edit.

I want my next film to be much longer, so I think I have to have a much more organized shoot. But I want to keep the same sense of collecting material. There is no such thing as a bad take. You can’t say what is “good” or “bad” until the editor decides he can’t use it.

Someone suggested that I make a film like Before Sunrise. I like the film, but it is a much harder film to make than it might seem. If I were to do a film like that, I would want to cast the main characters before I wrote the script and have them participate in creating it.

To be continued . . .

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

New Short Story Published: The Glencoe Project - A Transportation Planning Adventure Story

You can read my new short story at either of these two websites:

http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Glencoe_Project.php

http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-glencoe-project-a-transportation-planning-adventure-story/

This story draws on my experiences as a transportation planner. Experienced writers always tell new writers to “write what you know.”  That hasn’t been easy for me up until now. Several times I’ve set out to write a story with a transportation planning background, but I abandoned them all.

I took a different approach this time and it worked for me. If I get a good response to this story, I plan to write a series of them. Eventually I want to develop the ideas into a movie or maybe a novel.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

 

Publish Post

Productivity in the Arts

Just the other day, I came across a reference to the Baumol effect . In short it says that the productivity of some activities cannot be improved. It has been used to explain the growth of government, but that isn’t what caught my interest.

The prime example used to illustrate the concept is a string quartet. It takes just as many people and takes just as long to perform a piece of string quartet music now as it took in the 18^th century.

If the productivity of a symphony orchestra increased as much as computer speed has over the last 30 years, it would take 4 milliseconds to play Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony. Even if this were possible, why would you want to?

I wondered if this were true of filmmaking. Certainly the introduction of new technology has had and will continue to have a profound impact on how films are made. I know that the technological changes have made it much cheaper and easier to make films. Where once you needed a film crew to shoot a film, one person now can shoot on their own.

That isn’t the whole story though. There are parts of the creative process that new technology cannot improve. Writers need just as long to conceive and write. Actors need just as long to rehearse and perform.

What is productivity mean in an artistic work?

Today, you can get software that provides more power to create music than the Beatles could have dreamed of in 1967. Millions of people around the world can and have acquired these technologies.

If it were just a matter of technological improvement, then we would expect the world to produce a thousand musical works with the same impact as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I don’t pay as much attention to music as I used to, but I have had the feeling that this has happened.

I do believe that technology has opened doors to many more people to express their creativity. While I think this is a good thing for the world, creativity can still not be mass produced. Who knows if it ever can?

Watson, the Jeopardy playing computer has shown that many mental abilities we thought only humans could achieve can be done by computers. Maybe one day computers will be creative.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Why I Held My Breath Before I Screamed Copyright Infringement

I use Google Analytics to track how many people visit my web pages. Yesterday, when I checked, I saw there had been a big jump in views of my Bukisa pages.

When I dug deeper, I found that the increase was all from one article I posted back at the beginning of February: A Review of “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - And Why We Believe Them Anyway”. Almost all of the referrals came from one blog post: http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/15/foxes-hedgehogs-and-prediction/

While she did provide a link to my article, she also quoted almost two-thirds of it. That left me with mixed feelings. On one hand her post had generated more views of my post than I would have had otherwise. On the other hand, she deterred many people from clicking through to my article when she posted such a large chunk of what I wrote.

My initial gut reaction was to complain to her about copyright infringement and ask her to remove what I wrote from her post. I do make money when people read my articles; not much money but in principle I lost money. Her blog had more comments than I had visits, so the difference in my revenue might have been substantial.

Before I acted, I thought over how I should react. It was true that she had copied my material with out permission. However, how did it really affect me? By posting my material, she did send some people to my way. In the long run, success comes from the slow build up of followers and supporters. If I lashed out at her, or anyone else that quoted my work, it might just cut off the opportunity for potential supporters to find me.

I read several articles on the web that suggested that people help you when they quote your work. As long as they link to you, you will benefit from the post.

I decided not to complain. I did post a comment on her blog though, where I noted my authorship, added some thoughts related to earlier comments and promoted my short story The Parasol.

When I reference other people’s posts, I give a brief description of the article and its relevance, along with the link. Less often, I include a direct quote. It would be nice if everyone did it that way.

Anyway, I think I did the right thing.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Rethinking Participatory Cinema

A short while ago I did a post on participatory cinema . At the time, I felt fairly optimistic about the prospects of this approach. After some thought, I’m not so sure it is likely to be all that successful.

I thought back many years, to when I tried to make my first film through the CSIF. In retrospect, I wasn’t ready to take on a project of the scope I had in mind. But, there is another lesson I can learn from the experience that is relevant to participatory cinema.

I had an outline of the story with a list of scenes, but didn’t have a script. That didn’t stop me and I recruited about 8 or 10 people to work on the film. Everyone seemed enthusiastic and we had a couple of sessions to plan the movie. In my mind it would be a collaborative effort, with everyone making a contribution. That didn’t really work.

I realize now that everyone waited for me to take the lead, which I didn’t. After a short time, people started to drift away and the whole enterprise faded away. While I was disappointed, I did learn from the experience and move on to make several films.

How you recruit people to participate is critical to success. I think you need to start with a small core group who are committed to the project. As you develop the project it should start to take on a life of its own and will gain momentum. Once that happens, and the project starts to look like it will succeed, more people will be drawn to the project.

When I first developed the idea for the $100 Film Festival, the core goal was for people to see a clear benefit to themselves if they supported it. When I saw people’s eyes light up when I first explained the concept, I knew it would work. That is an approach that I think you need to take with participatory cinema. People will be less interested in “your” project, than in “our” project.

There is a delicate balance that we would need to strike if we want participatory cinema to work. If we provide no direction at all, nothing will happen. If we provide too much direction, then others will not contribute. Exactly how we would achieve that isn’t clear to me.

While I don’t plan to make a participatory cinema project any time soon, some of the same methods would be valuable in a more traditional approach to filmmaking. I’ll continue to look for examples of successful participatory cinema projects to emulate.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

My Transportation Planning Adventure and the Lessons Learned

I completed the first draft of my transportation planning adventure yesterday. I got 2,500 words written, which brought the final story to about 7,600 words. That is much longer than the 6,000 word story I had planned. I’ll need to edit it down quite a lot.

My brother suggested I read Kathy Reichs’ book Déjà Dead. I’m about a third of the way through.

She has much more description in her writing than I have in my story. I realized was that her descriptions are there to create mood. In the past I have concentrated on film scripts. In film, the mood cues are not needed in the script, since they are added in production or post production.

This causes a problem for my rewrite. If try to edit the story down to 6,000 words, I won’t be able to add any description. I’m not sure I want to expand the story to allow more room for description.

Like my story, The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure, I created an outline inspired by the Lester Dent master fiction plot. I replaced the physical confrontations with verbal ones, but otherwise I used the same structure.

The outline is broken down into four sections, which are broken down into five “chapters” which are broken down into three “actions”. That gives me 60 actions for the story. While the idea is for each action to be about 100 words, in practice they vary from about 13 to 250. This creates a problem for pacing.

Maybe I shouldn’t get too concerned about this. As long as the final story turns out OK, I don’t think it needs to accurately reflect the original outline. It does tell me that I have more to learn about what is needed in the outline. I’m sure that will come as I write more. Even in this second story, I found that I didn’t need to rework the outline while I wrote, like I did with the first story.

I am still worried that the stories won’t engage readers. Hopefully that will come with more experience.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A Move Forward on My Transportation Planning Story

Some of the people I used to work with have encouraged me to do a story about transportation planning, so I have tried several times to do that. Nothing has come together yet.

I started to write a movie set in a transportation planning office, but got bogged down in the details. That experience made me realize that I need to focus on plot before I get into any transportation specific details. After 30 years focussed on those details, it is easy to get caught up in them.

More recently, I decided that I should write a series of short stories as a way to develop my ideas, which I would later incorporate into a film. I need more practice telling stories too. Back in January I developed an outline for a story set in a transportation planning office. This week I started to write it. I set a goal of a 6,000 word story. I got just under 3,500 done and I’m less than half way through. At that rate it will end up at 9,000 words. I’ll need to do some severe edits to get it down to size. That can be a good thing for the quality of the story.

I started with the Lester Dent master fiction plot that I used for The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure. In the master fiction plot, the hero gets in to actual physical fights. I was tempted to do the same thing in my transportation planning story, but decided that would be silly. Instead I had verbal arguments rather than fist fights. Maybe if/when I do another story I can have some real knock down melees. Another approach would be to make it a comedy.

In the master plot, the heroes and villains are black and white (or rather white and black), but I’m much more inclined to make them more of a dark grey/ light grey. The story is about a fight over a development proposal. My heroes are the City’s transportation planners, while the villain is a developer. A consultant is caught in the middle. That isn’t the only situation where transportation planners run into conflict, but it was an obvious place to start.

I’ll need to avoid the temptation to preach about how transportation planning should be done. That can be a bore, and I’m bad enough at that as it is.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog