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

Update on Three Science Fiction Stories

Pete’s Plan

I got some comments back from some people on this story. I rewrote it based on their comments. I incorporated some new ideas I had as I read it over. It is a bit longer at over 1,000 words now. I think it is better too.

I’ll read it over again next week, and submit it to another magazine. One magazine I came across wouldn’t consider a story under 1,000 words, so I can submit to them now.

Felix

Felix is a reimagining of a H. P. Lovecraft story set on Mars. I made some good progress and still have ideas popping up in my mind. It looks like it will turn out shorter than I thought it would though.

The final story won’t be anything like the story I based it on. I’m not 100 per cent sure if that is a good thing or not.

Heat Wave

I am about half way through the first draft. I haven’t worked on it for a while now. I’d like to blame it on the other projects I worked on, but there is another reason. I started with the ending and worked backward, and now the ending looks a little lame compared to the rest of the story. Maybe I’m overly concerned about that. I should finish it and get some one else’s opinion.

I do still have ideas for this story pop up periodically. Mostly it’s because I see parallels between the character’s situation and some of the experiences I had. Like many other people, I always think of good responses to what people say to me after it is too late. I think I can use those “I wish I’d said” moments to say what I wanted to. That would give me a quantum of solace.

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