How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 8

In this post, I will talk about the most difficult part of making a film: the creative side. I had intended this to be the last post in this series, but I think I will need to revisit the issue in more detail later.

Constraints

The first step is to consider the constraints on what you can do. I talked about some of these in Part 7. Consider how much you can afford to spend, how much time do you have and whom can you rely on for help. Your film will need to be doable within those constraints.

To start, look at how long your film will be. You will likely have an upper limit of three to four minutes for the final film. While it is surprising how much you can get into such a short time period, there is a limit. If you have too many ideas, you will not get them all in.

Your film should have one central idea, with three or four ideas that support it. When you develop the film, it is best to come up with far more ideas. Try to get thirty or forty ideas. Before you start to make the film, you will need to trim those ideas down drastically. This approach worked well for me with Who Shot the President. See Part 3 for details.

Barriers

With the new technology available now it is much easier to make and distribute a film. Making a good film is still just as hard though.

One of the barriers that I’ve struggled with is self-doubt. Just the other day I came across a blog post with some good advice on how to deal with self-doubt.

What do you care about?

You need to care about the film in order to make a good film, so a good place to start to look for ideas is to think about what you care about. Some of my better ideas developed when I came up with examples to help me explain something that was important to me and not while I worked on a film.

Recognize good ideas

When I wrote the previous posts about the films I have done, what struck me was how so much of the “good stuff” was the result of chance. Accidents, adlibs and luck all generated ideas and opportunities. It is a little misleading to say that, because it was the recognition that these random results would help that was important. You can’t just hope for a lucky break. These random events will always come up, but you won’t always recognize them as opportunities.

Whenever something unexpected happens, pause before you reject it, consider if you can use it. Suppress the reaction to think it is wrong. I have tried to adopt the attitude that nothing is wrong until the editor decides they can’t use the shot. A quick, thoughtless, rejection can discourage creative input.

Bounce your ideas off other people

I know many people reject this approach, but I feel that it has been valuable in my own work. As a filmmaker, you are usually disconnected from your audience. The direct response you get will tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Take your time

Many of my films have developed over a long period of time. As you work on a film, new ideas always come along. You will come up with ways around problems.

In the end, you will need to find your own way to create. Everyone one works in different ways. Nevertheless, I hope my advice will get you started on your journey.

Links to other posts on How to Make a Hundred Dollar Film Festival Film

Part 1: Can You Still Make a Hundred Dollar Film Festival Film?

Part 2: How I Made Weekend in Calgary

Part 3: How I Made Who Shot the President

Part 4: How I Made The Fence

Part 5: How I Made My Next Film

Part 6: How I Made If I knew . . .

Part 7: The Technical Side of Making a Hundred Dollar Film Festival Film

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

How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 6

In this and previous posts, I looked at how I made some of my films for the festival. In later posts, I will summarise what I learnt from those experiences and suggest how you can make a film.

I made If I knew . . . for the fourth festival in 1995. Like My Next Film, If I Knew . . . was a reaction to my previous film, Who Shot the President. Who Shot the President, although in some sense a simple film, had taken me much longer than I expected. I wanted to do a simpler, easier film for my next project.

The original idea came from a comment a co-worker made. We worked in the forecasting section of Transportation Planning. One day, while we discussed the difficulties of forecasting, she said, “If I really knew what was going to happen, I’d be down at the race track.”

The concept I developed was to have a series of static shots combined with title cards that had a “If I Knew . . .” comment on them. I came up with four titles and then looked for images to fit them.

I ran into some technical problems that made the film more difficult. The most serious was that one of the cameras broke. I lost the shot I had done with it and had to reshoot. That also messed up another shot. I wanted to do a dissolve for one of the images, but the only camera I had access to that could do a dissolve was the one that broke. I used a fade out instead. When I transferred the film to video years later, I took the opportunity to put in a dissolve.

I over exposed the titles and didn’t have time to reshoot them for the festival. Several people asked how I got the “cool” effect on the titles. I was slow to admit that it was just a mistake.

Several people told me they liked the film, although they weren’t sure they really understood the film. I’m not sure I really understand it either.

When I transferred the film to video, I had James Reckseidler do a music track for it. I feel that really added a lot to the film.

I planned to talk about my film Contingency in my next blog, but since I already posted an article on that film, I decided that I would move on to my summary of how I would make a Hundred Dollar Film Festival Film.

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

How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 5

In this and the next post, I will look at how I made some of my films for the festival. In later posts, I will summarise what I learnt from those experiences and suggest how you can make a film.

I made My Next Film for the tenth festival in 2001. I came up with the idea for this film as a reaction to my experiences with my film Line of Taxis. Line of Taxis was my most ambitious film to date and took much more effort than any of my other films, until My Most Difficult Case. 

I wanted to make a smaller, less challenging film. It developed over a period of two years. Initially, I used events from my own projects, but when Patrick Aull agreed to appear in the film, I began to add fictionalized versions of his experiences with his film “All of a Sudden”.

I developed each bit of the script on its own, and bounced the ideas off other people. I dropped the ones that didn’t work and kept the ones that did. Eventually I compiled them into a script.

In many ways, this was one of the easiest of my films to make, but it was not without its challenges. As the film itself describes, I kept the production as simple as I could. I shot in a single location (my garage), used black and white film, and used a voice over for the sound.

My original intent was to have the film as a single static shot of Pat, but this approach didn’t work so well. While it was easy from the point of view of the camera operator, it is more difficult for the actor. Instead, I edited together shots from a variety of takes I did for the film. I incorporated many of Patrick’s suggestions that into the film.

For the shoot, I recorded my own reading of the script, which I then played back to Patrick as we shot the film. After the shoot, I rerecorded the voice over with Patrick. Again, I did several different versions and cut them together.

I shot the film on 16mm film and transferred the film to video where I did a preliminary edit. I used the video edit as a guide to do a cut of the film. I wrote some of the edge numbers on the print itself to help me go back to the cut of the film. If you watch my film Contingency closely, you can see one of the numbers in the shot from My Next Film. I completed the film with a negative cut and an optical track for the sound.

Although I completed the film with a 16mm optical sound print, I believe I could do a similar film today without that final step. As I did with my film Contingency, I could have projected the cutting copy, and played a CD of the voice over, or have the voice over done live.

In my next post, I will look at If I knew . . . , the film I made for the fourth festival in 1995.

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

How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 4

In this and the next few posts, I will look at how I made some of my films for the festival. In later posts, I will summarise what I learnt from those experiences and suggest how you can make a film.

I made The Fence for the fifth festival in 1996. It developed over a period of nearly 10 years. It began when I noticed the fence one day as I rode by in a bus. It caught my interest, so one day I went out and took some stills of it. I thought about it from time to time, but never thought of anything more I could do with it.

When I decided to make my first 16mm film, I was stuck for an idea again. I thought about the fence again. I still wasn’t sure what I could do with it, but decided to take some film of it. Fortunately, for me, the fence was still there and I got some images of it. A few months later I went back and got some more.

By then, I had begun to see how I could use the images in a film. Over the next few months, I collected more images, at different times of the year and different weather. I also shot some of my old stills to get a greater variety of images.

The one thing I feared was that someone would tear down the fence before I finished my film. It just so happened that I couldn’t see the fence until I got to where I shot it. Until I got there, I didn’t know if it was still there. It was still there several years later, but eventually they removed it to build a condominium.

I did a time-lapse shot for the film, but this time I didn’t have an Intervalometer. Instead, I sat there and every few seconds I pressed the cable release. It wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon on a warm sunny day.

For the most part, the monologue is a description of how I felt. I did fictionalize the comments somewhat. I didn’t know how to end the monologue and wrote some words as a place keeper. I planned to write the actual ending later. As so often happens with my work, the positive feedback I received about it convinced me to use it, rather than develop a new ending.

When I developed the monologue for the film, in my mind the voice was female. That didn’t seem right to me, so I used Steve Hanon. He had access to recording equipment at his work, so we recorded the sound there.

I finished the film on 16mm with a negative cut and synchronized sound. The negative cut allowed me to do some nice dissolves. The original rules wouldn’t allow this. You can achieve a similar effect with an optical printer, which the rules would allow.

You could make a similar film today without the fancy dissolves and synchronized sound. It would depend on the nature of the film though. If you accept the limitations at the outset, you can develop your idea so that you don’t need them.

The Fence was another successful film for me, with screenings in Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Los Angeles, and Adelaide. More important to me though, was the comments that I got from individual people who saw it.

I noticed an odd pattern. It seemed that most women who watched it liked it, while most men didn’t. As I mentioned earlier, when I developed the monologue, the voice I heard was female. I often wonder how the film would be different if I had used a female voice. Maybe I should try that sometime and see.

In my next post, I will look at My Next Film, the film I made for the tenth annual festival in 2001.

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