"Some Days . . ." posted on YouTube

The Hundred Dollar Film Festival screened my film "Some Days ..."  March 7, 2013.

I wasn't able to attend, but I have had no death threats since then, so I guess it went over OK.

I have now posted the video on YouTube for all to see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH4ZY4dmOo

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

“Some Days . . .” in the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - 2013 March 7

The Hundred Dollar Film Festival will screen my film “Some Days . . .” on 2013 March 7.

The Globe Cinema (617 8th Ave SW) in Calgary will host at the festival this year. The films start at 7:00 pm. Please visit their website for more information about times and tickets. http://100dollarfilmfestival.org

The film is 38 seconds long, so don’t blink.

I’ll post the film on-line after it screens at the festival.

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 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 7

In the previous posts, I’ve looked at how I made some of my films for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival. In this post and subsequent posts, I will use those experiences to give advice on how to make a film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival. I will begin with the limitations that technical side of filmmaking impose. This will be important to keep in mind when it comes to the creative side of filmmaking.

Experience

Now that digital video is so much part of the culture, many people do not understand the technology of film as much as people used to. If you don’t have experience with film technology, I encourage you to experiment with film and cameras before you start your film. You may be able to use some of your experimental footage in your film, but don’t count on that.

Most cities have groups like the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers that can provide the support you will need to make your film. This can include access to equipment, training, and advice.

If you can find a more experience filmmaker to help you, that can make the process easier for you.

Film Length

I would plan on a film between three and four minutes long. The original rule limited filmmakers to four rolls of colour film, or five rolls of black and white film. This gives you about twelve to fifteen minutes of film.

I know some filmmakers were able to use almost all of the film they shot. More often though, you use only a fraction of what you shot in the final film. It’s common for a feature film to use just one per cent of the film shot. For a three to four minutes long Hundred Dollar Film Festival Film, you will need to have between 20% and 25% of what you shoot in the final film.

That goal can be difficult to meet, so you need to avoid complicated and tricky shots that may not work. Some may see this as stifling creativity, but it can also be a spur to be more creative.

Type of Film

Super 8 film is available in reversal and negative, but as far as I know, you can’t get prints from the negatives. For Super 8, reversal film is the only real option if you want a final version you can project.

In 16mm you can use reversal as well, but I prefer negative. I used negative film for Contingency and then I edited the print for the final film. You can go back to a negative cut and answer print, but that is more expensive. One reason I prefer negative is that I still have that to fall back on if something happens to my print.

Post Production

The approach I have used for the last few films I made was to transfer the images to video and edit them on the computer. Then I used information from the video cut to cut the actual film. That can be tricky to do, and I have used different approaches with each of the films I have done.

On My Next Film, I wrote some of the edge numbers on the print so I could match the video to the film print. This wouldn’t work as well if you want to use the print for your final film.

When I did Contingency, I planned the shots so that the exact cuts were not critical. I only needed to get the length right. The final shot of the film was an exception, but I could identify the correct frames visually.

Sound

Super 8 sound film is no longer available, and 16mm sound requires a much more sophisticated, and expensive, approach. That pretty much limits your options for sound to non-sync sound. If sync is critical, you may be able to achieve that will live sound at the screening.

For Contingency, I created the sound track in my video editing software (Premiere Pro), and then output the sound on a CD. I had a beep on the CD that corresponded to the “2” frame, that allowed the projectionist to do a rough sync. Projects all vary slightly in their run speed, so the sound could be a second or two out of sync. It can vary through out the film.

If you work with non-sync sound, it is best to stay with either music or voice over on the sound track. Sound effects that don’t need to be in sync work as well.

Another option is to have no sound at all. Sound can add a lot to the impact of a film, so a silent film can be more of a creative challenge to make.

In the next post, I will move on to the creative side of filmmaking. Creativity is difficult to explain, but I feel some aspects of the creative process are easier to convey.

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

How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 3

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.

Who Shot the President started out as an idea for a feature film. The idea came to me after I had seen one too many documentaries on the Kennedy assassination. After I played around with the idea for a while, I realized I wasn’t ready to make a feature.

Rather than abandon the idea though, I asked myself what was the point I wanted to make. What I wanted to say was that most conspiracy theories base their argument on a logical fallacy. I reviewed all of the scenes I’d come up with and picked one that would make that point.

It took me longer than I expected to make this film. Although I shot it twice before I was happy with it, the hard part came in developing the idea. I did a fair bit of research to find appropriate images to use. I used a series of still images for most of the film. I did have one short “live action” segment in the film. Years later, I learnt that Chris Marker used a similar approach for La jetée.

I use regular tripod, and put my images on the floor. At first, this worked well, but as I moved to shorter and shorter clips, I realized that it required about 2,000 deep knee bends. I wasn’t a fan of deep knee bends to start with. But, I got it done. Later when I redid the film on 16mm, I used projected slides to make it easier on my knees.

The sound track was an interesting challenge. I had two actors to play the parts, but couldn’t arrange them to be in the same place at the same time. I used an old two track reel to reel tape recorder, which allowed me to record one track at a time.

First I had Michele L record her lines, with gaps for the other actor’s lines. Then I had Steve Hanon record his lines while he listened to Michele L’s recording. We ran into a problem when some of the gaps were not long enough for Steve’s lines. When we played back the recording, it sounded like she interrupted him several times. Steve could have talked faster to fix that, but we decided that the interruptions worked well, so we kept it as it was.

The final touch was to add an echo. The recorder’s playback head was after the record head, so I could feed the recorded sound back into the recording. The sound turned out rather muddy, but years later when I redid the sound for a 16mm version of the film, the better quality sound equipment produce a sound that was too clean, so I used some of the original sound.

This was one of the more successful of my films and I got a lot of good feedback on it. I also got a lot of very negative feedback. I talk about that in an article I wrote: Why Do People Hate my Film?

In my next post, I will look at The Fence, the film I made for the fifth festival in 1996.

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 2

In 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 Weekend in Calgary for the first Hundred Dollar Film Festival in 1992. This was a film that kind of just happened. I wanted to have a film in the first festival, but I was stuck for an idea.

One of the Super 8 cameras the CSIF had an Intervalometer. That is, it could be set to take a picture at intervals of 5 or 10 seconds. Out of curiosity, I wanted to try it out. At the time, I did not intend that this would become a finished film.

One Sunday, I set up the camera in my car and drove out to Lake Louise and back. Because of the length of the trip, I used up a bit more than half of a roll on the way out, so I switched to another roll for the trip back. I had to finish off both rolls later before I could get them processed.

At noon the next Monday, I went for a walk during my lunch break and ended up at Olympic Plaza where a local band was playing. For one of their original tunes, they had lifted a guitar riff from Pipeline by the Chantays. Pipeline was one of my favourite tunes from my childhood days. As I listened to the music I thought that Pipeline could work well with the film I’d just shot.

At the time, I knew many people in Calgary who, after a hard week at work, would rush out to Banff to “relax”, then rush back to work. I thought it was an odd thing to do, but it reflected the “go go” attitude that many people had at the time. That led to the title of the film. Now, with a point to make and music to go with it, I thought I had a film.

There were a few more hurtles before I was done. First, I would need sound and I had shot on silent film. My solution was primitive. I cut the two sections of the film together. Then, I used a sound camera to shoot the projected image. That proved to be a little trickier to do that I thought, but eventually I was happy with what I had.

I dubbed Pipeline onto the magnetic stripe. The film went on to win the award for consistent vision in the festival. Although we only screened the film a few times, years later people would still talk to me about it.

Years later, after I found out what it would cost to get the rights to use the music, I asked James Reckseidler to do a new tune for me. If I had to pay money for music, I’d rather pay a local filmmaker than a faceless corporation. I used his music for the version of the film I posted on YouTube.

In my next post, I will look at Who Shot the President, the film I made for the third festival in 1994.

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 1

When the Hundred Dollar Film Festival first began, the idea was that you could make a film for under $100. Now, twenty-one years later, is that still possible? In this and later posts, I will to talk about how to make a film for the festival. As I wrote this post, it began to get very long, so I decided to break it up into several separate posts. In this post, I will look at what kind of film I will discuss.

As the deadline for the twenty-first festival looms, this may seem a bit late to talk about how to make a film. But, there is always the twenty-second festival.

What qualifies me to talk about this subject?

I’ve had eight films in the festival over the years, with films in both the first festival in 1992 and the twentieth in 2012. I also started the festival.

The Festival Rules

The festival rules have changed over the years and it doesn’t need to be constrained by the original intentions, but I hope that films made to the original limits will always be welcome at the festival.

When I first came up with the idea for the festival, the kind of filmmaker I aimed it at was someone who had just begun to make films. That was what I was back in 1991. Maybe they were someone who had never made a film, or who had only made a few small films. Their interest would be to learn and develop their skills, and, of course, to have an audience for their films.

I became aware of a different group of filmmakers who were interested in the festival. These were experienced people looking for a challenge, or a chance to have some fun when they made a film. I know that some looked at these films as a way to reinvigorate themselves after a frustrating project.

The challenge came in the constraints on how they could make the film. In the first festival, the cost was not the limitation, as implied by the name. Instead, we set a limit on how much film the filmmakers could use to make the film. The limits were five rolls of black and white, four rolls of colour, or three rolls of sound. With a shooting ratio of 3 to 5, the final films would be 2 ¼ to 5 minutes long.

Can It Still Be Done?

A lot has changed since 1992. Can you still make a film the way it was back then? I believe so, although not as cheaply. Super 8 is still available, and you can make films on 16mm in the same spirit as Super 8. I did that for my film Contingency for the 2012 festival.

I estimate that films made to the original rules would cost $300 to $550. You can still make a film for under $100, if you shot only one roll of film. Shipping the film to the lab and back can cost more than the film and developing!

There are some further limitations on the films now. Super 8 sound film isn’t available any more. If you want sound, you need to put it on a CD, or have live sound. With pre-recorded sound, you can’t guarantee sync. It is not as easy to get a 16mm film negative cut and printed these days, so you can’t do effects like dissolves or title overlays, unless you can do them in-camera.

In the next post, I will review how I made each of my films. In later posts, I will use my experience to provide advice on how to make a film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival.

I know that I don’t know everything there is to know about how to make a film, so I would appreciate any comments that build on my suggestions.

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

“Some Days . . .” Update - 2012 November 4

I worked on my film “Some Days . . .” this week. I want to submit it for the 2013 Hundred Dollar Film Festival. http://100dollarfilmfestival.org/fest2013/

I originally did the film for last year’s festival, but I wasn’t happy with the image quality, so I withdrew it. I hope I get it right this time.

I took out a camera Tuesday, shot on Wednesday, returned the camera Thursday, and sent the film to the lab Friday. It usually takes about 2 weeks to get back.

I didn’t use up all of the film in my shoot, so I finished off the roll with some experimental shots. Maybe I can use them as a starting point for a new film for the 2014 festival.

The camera I used, a Canon 16mm Scoopic, came with a manual. I’ve used Scoopics for about 16 years and never saw a manual before. I picked up a few useful tidbits from it.

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