$100 Film Festival Film Update – 2011 October 30

I got the film I shot for my $100 Film Festival Film back this week. It looks good to me. I still have some more shots to get. Then I can move on to the edit.

I’ve started to think about what kind of sound track to do. I can’t do sync sound, but some kind of voice over or music would work OK. The first idea I had was to have a cacophony of voices and have individual phrases and lines popup into the foreground.

I’ve had a good idea about the images I want for a while now, but now I have to give more thought about the point I want to make. For a long time now, I’ve wanted to do a film about contingency: what happened didn’t necessarily have to happen. Just by chance, I got a shot that conveys that idea quite well. That makes me think this could be the film where I do it.

The original suggestion I got from Howard Horwitz was to do a film about the $100 Film Festival. My idea of contingency works well with how the festival came about. If you read the article (http://www.bukisa.com/articles/137107_the-history-of-the-100-film-festival ) I wrote about the festival you can see that there were several times where I might have dropped the idea before I proposed it.

I wanted to use a quote about contingency from Stephen Jay Gould. I was sure I had recorded it, but I can’t find it now. I’m tempted to record it with someone else, but I feel that would be cheating. Maybe I need to come up with my own line to convey the same point.

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Website Upgrades in the Works

I want to improve my website and have started to experiment with some changes.

My first improvement was to add an e-mail notification to my blog. Google’s Feedburner allows you to sign up for notifications every time there is an update to the blog. I tried it out myself and it works just fine. Now I need to get people to sign up for it. I already have an e-mail list to send out notifications, but I promised to send out notices no more than once a month. The notices from this will be more frequent.

Up until now, I have created my website with html and php files that I coded myself. I did add WordPress when I added my blog. More recently, I looked into content management systems, which would make it easier for me to maintain the website. I could add features, like comments, which I can’t do very well now.

I hadn’t found any systems I felt comfortable with, and then someone suggested I could use WordPress. Since I use it for my blog, I have a reasonably good idea how it works. I set up a test website a couple weeks back to experiment with. (http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/testsite/ )

In order to match the look of my current website I need to create my own theme. That has been a challenge. I’ve run into and solved several problems so far. I got a WordPress for Dummies book, and while I found it useful, it doesn’t have a whole lot on how to create new themes, especially with the features I want to include.

I still need to fix a few bugs yet and I want to add in all of the pages before I take the new site live.

I sometimes wonder if I put too much time into improving my website. Maybe I should put that time into my stories or films instead. On the other hand, I think that a professional looking website does help. So far, I don’t have huge numbers of people who visit my site, so I feel I have the time to experiment with the site itself and with what I put on it.

Besides, I enjoy setting up ad improving the website.

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

Transportation Planning Humour

I wanted to put together a collection of transportation planning jokes, but I haven’t come across many. In fact, the only one I know of was one I wrote about 20 to 25 years ago.

Back then, our department faced some very difficult problems, which had resulted in the replacement of the manager. The new manager asked me to prepare a report about how new models might help to fix the problems. As I wrote my report, I came up with a way to explain what I wanted to say in a humorous manner, so after I finished the report, I wrote a short memo based on those ideas.

The memo is long gone, but this is what I remember of it:

We need to have three new models.

First, we needed a model that would help us address operational problems with our transit system. We would call this the Transit Operations Model, or TOM.

Second, we needed a model that would help us evaluate development applications faster. We would call this the Development Impact Calculation Kit, or DICK.

Third, we needed a model that would help us review the roadway plans on an annual basis. We would call this the Highway And Road Review Yearly, or HARRY.

In summary, with the help of every TOM, DICK and HARRY we can overcome our problems.

I was a little unsure if I should actually give it to the manager. The humour is a little lame, but I thought he would like it. I felt relieved that when I gave it to him, he liked it. He liked it so much that he showed it to several other people.

Unfortunately for me, some of the others were not so amused. I don’t regret that I did it though.

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“My Most Difficult Case” Update 2011 October 9

My progress on My Most Difficult Case has been slow. A while back, I started to think of it as My Most Difficult Film, and it has certainly earned that moniker.

Last March I arranged with someone to do the sound postproduction. Unfortunately, they didn’t deliver, so I’ve had to cancel that agreement. That was a big disappointment for me.

I turned to Pat Aull for help. He helped me earlier with My Next Film. He came over one day and in an hour he taught me enough to do the sound myself. Obviously, you don’t learn to be an expert sound technician so fast, but I only need a competent sound track.

A major problem I had with the sound was that the sync sound recording had a lot of noise. My attempts to clean it up were not very promising. I used Audacity for my sound work. With it, I could remove the sound, but it also changed the voices in ways I didn’t like.

Pat suggested I retransfer the sound from the original tape. I didn’t think that would help, especially since the original recorder, a Sony Walkman modified with Chrystal Sync, was no longer available.

Nevertheless, I went ahead and redid the transfer. Much to my surprise the sound turned out much better. I really should have more faith in Pat. There was still a problem with noise, but I found that in my tests I could remove the sound without adversely affecting the voices.

The only problem with the new transfer was that the speed drifted a bit. Over the length of the 44-minute recording, it shifted about 15 seconds. I did a speed adjustment in Audacity. I found that the drift varied and in some places, it was still up to two frames off. I adjusted that after I replaced the sound in Premiere Pro.

I see what I’ve done so far as an experiment. I will go back and redo the noise removal and time adjustment before I move on to the rest of the sound work.

I see three more steps I want to do before I feel I’m done with the sound.

First, I want to do some adjustments to the voices. I think that if I add some room ambience and adjust the tone a bit, they will sound much better.

Second, I want to add in some background noises. For example, Bryson closes some books, but there is silence. The screech when a chair moves as people stand would add some realism. I could use some noises, like a coughs to emphasize the dialog at appropriate places. I could do the same with bits of music.

Finally, I need to balance out the sounds, so the voices are all the same level. The background noises should be in the Background.

I had hoped to have this film all wrapped in 2011, and I still might do that. However, with two other movies on the go for next years $100 Film Festival, that may be too optimistic.

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$100 Film Festival Film Update 2011 October 2

The weather was good this week, and I didn’t expect that to keep up, so I decided I’d better get the outdoor shots I wanted. Wednesday I signed out a Scoopic from Yvonne Abusow at the CSIF and then I was committed. I had a hectic couple of days. I wanted shots of the various locations associated with the festival over the years. Thursday afternoon I hopped into my car and headed out.

I started at The Garry Theatre, where we held the festival from 1997 to 1999. That didn’t take long, but I was shooting into the sun, so I decided that if I could, I’d reshoot it later.

My second stop was Fort Calgary, where we held the festival from 1993 to 1995. That was another easy shot. I had thought I’d take about a half hour at each location, but I had the first two done in less than a half hour.

Stop three was the 4^th Street office of the CSIF from 1997 to 2002. Parking was a bit of a challenge, but it only took a couple minutes to get the shot.

Stop four was the Uptown Theatre. We held the festival there in 1996 and then again from 2000 to 2003. Again, parking was a challenge. It took me less time to do the shoot than it took me to take care of parking.

Next stop was the Unitarian church on 16^th Avenue NW. It was the CSIF’s office when I joined in 1990 and we stayed there until 1997. We also held the first $100 Film Festival there in 1992.

I drove by the Alberta College of Art and Design and the Plaza Theatre but couldn’t find a place to park, so I left them for Friday.

Friday morning I packed the Scoopic into a back pack and took the bus to SAIT, where I got my shot of ACAD. We held the festival there in the Stanford Perrott Theatre from 2004 to 2006.

I took the LRT to Sunnyside and walked over to the Plaza Theatre. We’ve held the festival there since 2007. We also screened Donna Brunsdale’s film Cheerful Tearful there in 1998. Some guy walked into shot, so I kept shooting until he got out of the way. I was a little annoyed, but then I came up with a way to use that shot of him in the movie.

On every film I’ve done I’ve discovered that filmmaking is a physical challenge. I did a lot of walking around with a heavy camera. Well, the camera wasn’t that heavy, but after I carried it around for a couple of hours it started to feel heavy.

I went back to The Garry Theatre and got a better shot this time. It was the same time of day, but the clouds softened the light.

My last stop was the CSIF offices at Currie Barracks. I got a shot of that too. I returned the camera as well.

I think I see where I will go with this film. Up to now it as just a bunch of shot ideas, now I see a structure to it.

Now I just hope the film turns out OK.

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Obsession: The Key to Movie Making

I’ve often read that you need to be very committed to a movie project if you want to finish it. In the last few days I’ve come across a couple of examples that drove it home for me.

The first was a piece on TV about the movie Loose Change. The movie puts forth a 9-11 conspiracy theory. After the work I did on Who Shot the President, I’m pretty sceptical of conspiracy theories.

They made the initial version for $8,000 and posted it on the internet. Despite being free to watch on the internet, they have gone on to sell more than a million DVDs.

What caught my interest in the TV report was how obsessive the movie makers were. They didn’t set out to just make a movie, they wanted to expose what they believed was a real threat to freedom and peace. They made it free so more people would find out. As it turned out, there was an audience that was just as obsessive about 9-11 conspiracy theories as they were.

Loose Change was not the only conspiracy movie made, but it has been one of the more successful. I think the lesson here is that the movie makers’ obsession not only made the movie happen, but also imbued it with a sense of honesty that helped it capture an audience.

My second example isn’t a movie. Stephen King’s book On Writing is a combination autobiography and writing manual. I’m only about half way through, but I’ve gotten a sense of just how obsessive a writer he was. From the age of six he wanted to be a writer and from then on he began to write stories. By the time he became an overnight sensation with Carrie, he had been writing for 20 years.

In the book, he talks about how he persevered in the face of financial difficulties, family responsibilities and a huge pile of rejections. Before his success he had a very hard life. It wasn’t just his obsession that kept him going. His wife pulled the first version of Carrie out of the garbage where he’d thrown it, in the belief that it was no good.

No one starts out as a good writer. Writing is a skill that you need to learn and practice before you get good at it. Stephen King’s story shows the obsession a writer needs to persist until they develop those skills. Movie making is also a skill. You will make many bad movies before you make a good one.

For myself, I feel that I need to find a story that I want to tell even if I can’t make it into a movie. When I came up with the idea for Who Shot the President I thought of it as a feature. When I realized I wasn’t ready to make a feature, I took the idea and condensed it down into a short. It is that kind of idea that I want to find.
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Where Do My Story Ideas Come From?

I did an article a while ago about how I developed my film Line of Taxis. That film grew out of plan to develop my skills as a filmmaker in combination with a desire to express some feelings I struggled with at the time. The article was a useful exercise for me since it helped me understand how I created a story.

However, on other projects I used different approaches. One approach I found useful was to build stories from things that captivated my imagination. In some cases these were other stories and in others they were events in the real world.

Normally when I read a story, watch a TV show or watch a movie, I don’t question the decisions the creator made. From time to time, I did find myself thinking: “If they had done … it would have been better.” I couldn’t change what they had done, so it was just idle speculation. Later I took some of these ideas and used them in my own stories.

An example of this is my story A Homicide Detective's Rude Awakening. I got the inspiration for that story from an episode of Law and Order. In the final scene of the episode, Lenny Briscoe arrives at his daughter’s murder scene. He arrives at the scene already knowing that his daughter was the victim. I thought it would be more powerful if he didn’t know. The emotional distance from the victim that he had careful constructed would be destroyed when he recognized his daughter.

Sometimes I draw ideas from real events. An example of this is my story A Woman Alone in a Cruel World. I saw a documentary about a woman who became a rebel leader in China. When she was a young girl, her family had given to a troupe of performers. I wondered if, when she became famous, her mother knew she was her daughter. Did they ever reunite? How would they feel if they did?

In a biography of John Lennon I read that his mother had three children, all girls, after John was born. She put the first girl up for adoption because she wasn’t married at the time. I find it intriguing that out there somewhere is a woman who is John Lennon’s sister, but doesn’t know she is. She would have been of an age where she would likely have been a Beatles fan, so she would know a great deal about him. How would she feel if she found out? I haven’t developed this idea into a story yet.

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