15. Final Reflections

In an earlier post, I outlined a few of the technical elements I picked up over the course of this semester. I’ll use this opportunity to put this newfound knowledge into perspective, to explain what unexpected lessons I learned along the way, and to discuss what I learned about myself (as cheesy as that sounds, it is worth discussing).

I came into this course armed only with the knowledge of simplistic high school projects and the basics of TCF 201. Naturally, I thought I knew more than I did. As soon as we moved into new equipment, new techniques, and new types of projects, I was quickly rectified.

One of the most valuable aspects of this course was the feedback and group discussion. Oftentimes I would sit, staring at the monitor in the editing room, wondering why this shot just didn’t work or why this sequence seemed like such a glaringly obvious practice piece. After being exposed to your own images for so long, I feel that you become so used to it that you lose sight of what makes it effective or ineffective. However, when we discussed our work in class, my classmates were able to identify and articulate problems in my pieces and possible bad habits that I had. One instance stood out: while reviewing my Garfield scene assignment project, I knew that the opening sequence of Jon Arbuckle getting ready didn’t feel timed properly and that there was a very jarring, ugly cut between shots later in the piece. During review, the class told me how I lingered just a second too long after little flurries of action in the opener, and how cutting from a white background of a wall to a brown background of cabinets made the cut look rough. Immediately, my eyes were opened, no longer blind to the repetition of viewing and editing. Of course the shots stayed on the screen just a hair too long, granting an overly awkward and non-fluid pacing to the introduction. Of course the mismatched background color made the shots look disjointed, despite the fact that the action was matched well and the color temperature of the footage was identical.

I came to appreciate the value of frustrating mistakes. In my quest to close the gap between vision and reality, I messed up. A lot. I lost audio for projects, forgot how to adjust important camera settings, tried to operate a glidetrack and separate audio with only two people… the list goes on and on. But I find that the more anger-inducing the mistake, the less likely I am to repeat it. I can say with quick assuredness that I will never lose another SD card. Likewise, after 6 hours of shooting with no usable footage to show for it, I will never again shoot an extensive project understaffed. I am glad for these mistakes, because they are happening now, when I have the support and resources to turn them around.

Another important lesson that I garnered from the class was that I needed –and still need – more. I need to edit more to become comfortable with Final Cut. I need to increase coverage on set. I need to entice more people to come and help crew projects, since a hand is always helpful, from the simplest to most complicated setups. I need to set aside more time for each shooting day. First and foremost, I need to shoot more. I can only truly get a handle on what I’m doing with hours of practice. Unfortunately, I missed much shooting due to a family emergency. But in the future I must shoot everything I can: scripts that I write, projects that my friends are working on, bands playing shows, documentary pieces, you name it. As our TA Xavier put it, if I really do want to do this, I need to shoot everything I can get my hands on. I don’t have the reason nor right to turn something down at this point if I can make the time for it.

Finally, this class granted me an exciting and very significant realization: that I want to do this. I’m still double majoring in media production and business, but I want to follow this train of film as far as I can take it. For all the mistakes and missteps I’ve made – and of those there were plenty – I remain excited about film. And that in itself is an exciting prospect.

14. Demo Reel and Artist's Statement

            Ever since people have had stories to tell, they have been developing and discovering new ways to translate the stories from their minds and into reality. From painting, to spoken word, to literature, and to any of the creative mediums throughout history, we’ve grasped and struggled to effectively show others what only we can truly see in our mind’s eye. For me, film is the pinnacle of that struggle. Consider how we think of our memories: not in letters or characters, not strictly in voices, but in a difficult to define mixture of images and sounds. Film mirrors this natural storytelling – and that is why it is so compelling.

            No other method has such a powerful grip on our feelings. No other method can elicit such a visceral emotional response. No other method can convey a story quite like film. Film has the power to instill disgust, euphoria, confusion, and anything and everything in between. Why else would audiences feel so compelled to look away from a screen during intense scenes of revulsion or horror? Why else would moviegoers flock to theatres in order to see stories that they already know a hundred times over come to life?

            I drone on and on about this power because this power is the basis of why I have pursued film. When my imagination becomes the genesis of a story, I picture it in film. When I read a book, I picture it in film. When I listen to a song, I wonder where that’s on would fit into a film, and when I gaze upon visual art I contemplate the ways its inspiration could be translated to the screen.

            I love to accomplish this by breaking down a scene into small pieces with my shots, focusing my camera with care to give a greater sense of the scene as a whole. I would rather present a subject in a way that mirrors that subject’s meaning than simply film a subject. I want to use light to aid in that presentation, rather than merely make the scene physically visible.

            I draw inspiration from many different mediums and time periods. I love watching movies that I can get my grubby paws on, and my favorites are typically starkly, brutally real or whimsical and separated from reality.  These include The Life Aquatic, Up in the Air, Band of Brothers (not technically a singular movie, but produced better than most), Alien, The Triplets of Belleville… the list goes on and on. These movies serve to give me examples of how a compelling story is told through my medium of choice. Books are also a huge deal for me. Ever since I could purchase paperbacks and flip through the pages of novels, I have almost always had a book to read. I love imagining these disparate stories – Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Game of Thrones by George Martin, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, to name a few – as portrayed in film, whether or not they have been adapted in truth. This mental workout is a huge source of inspiration for me, and the inner storyboarding can grant me fresh ideas for both new stories and new ways to shoot them. Music can give me the moods of a story, half-forgotten memories the emotions… I like to think of inspiration as being the end of the equation formed through my senses. Unfiltered, and in any form from the highest art to the most mundane.

            As an artist dealing in film, I stand at the very beginning of my journey. I am always surrounded in the hallways and offices of school with a quote from Ira Glass that resonates with me. In it, he outlines how difficult it is to bridge the gap in one’s work between what they see in their mind’s eye and what they can produce. Right now, I can see as clearly as ever, yet I cannot recreate it for others – yet. Not as I hope, at least. So, if you were to ask me: are you disappointed in your reel? Are you disappointed in your work so far? I would answer yes. Absolutely. And if that answer was different, then something must be wrong, because I’ve only truly started a year ago. The gap is still wide open. And that thought, while daunting, is exciting. As I spoke of in the opening of my statement, film is so powerful because it mirrors our minds. One day, I hope to have the expertise and capability to translate these thoughts to that mirror. Until then, I must keep my head down and my camera up.

13. What I've Learned thus Far

I have gained an enormous deal of technical knowledge pertaining to beginning filmmaking in this class over the past few months. A large portion of that knowledge was garnered from exposure to new and exciting equipment: I learned how to use a glidetrack, and, perhaps more importantly, when to use a glidetrack. I (brimming with excitement, I must admit) learned how to use Zeiss Prime lenses on DSLR cameras. Hell, I learned how to set up and execute basic DSLR shots to begin with. The vast storehouse of information about color temperatures, apertures, lenses and sensors has finally started to cement itself in my mind. Overall, this technical knowledge has given me some more confidence to create works that feel cinematic and eschew the constraints that always dog a student film project.

12. Inspiration through Robert Richardson

Robert Richardson, perhaps best known for his work as cinematographer for the Kill Bill movies, is a source of inspiration to me. I am motivated by the way his shots constantly add and contribute to the films that are comprised of them, rather than merely being a vehicle for a plot line.

In this scene from Kill Bill, Richardson does an interesting form of a tracking shot, smoothly gliding in icy cold villain Elle Driver's wake. He focuses on small portions of her body, compelling the audience to fully realize her character from a series of intricate details instead of just tracing her whole frame through the hallway. I find that these non-traditional close-ups add to character building immensely - and character building is something I aspire to do. Richardson has the power to grant waves of tension to a scene with nothing more than shot choice. In addition, we see the focus on small details with tight, close-up camera framing in the following shot that splits the screen in two. The contrast between the unstoppable, cruel Driver striding down the hallway and the unmoving, unconscious "Bride" is enough to make any sane viewer have their heart pounding in their chest for want of the Bride to wake and defend herself. All in all, Richardson departs from the traditional style in which Hollywood shows action and breaks down an entire scene into small, meticulously planned bits. And those bits add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This next scene comes from Kill Bill Volume II, and showcases Richardson's talent in an extremely different scene. Here, I focused on how the lighting enhanced the emotion of the scene. Here, the Bride is trapped, bruied alive in a coffin with nothing but a flashlight - honestly, one of my worst nightmares. Richardson expertly lets the camera and the shaking, singular light of the flashlight explore the confines of the coffin, bestowing the crushing sense of claustrophobia to the space. The shots in which the flickering light of the flashlight is a tiny, waving point of yellow light amongst a field of absolute black representing the dirt outside her coffin makes the scene almost suffocating. Yet he keeps enough light on the Bride in key moments to capture her utmost determination and hatred in the heat of her personal battle with her fatal jail cell. All in all, Richardson was able to match lighting and shot choice to the vision of the story, and the result was certainly a visceral, emotional experience.

11. Focus on Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman

Robert D. Yeoman is an accomplished cinematographer best known for his work in every live action film directed by Wes Anderson so far. He has an interesting style that we can consistently see in his shots. I'd like to focus on a couple pieces of his work from Wes Anderson films:

Yeoman's style complements the whimsical tone of "heightened reality" in Wes Anderson's films. The movies typically have anachronistic settings, with unsurprised and unfazed characters going through surreal, insane adventures. In this clip from The Life Aquatic, we see Yeoman use a muted color palette coupled with fairly even, high key lighting. This creates a sense of realism - from the ambient, full light - but with an undertone of the fantastic, or at least very different, with the muted pastel colors. Yeoman also seems to be fond of camera movement that is very artificial, such as character dollies and sudden zooms. These movements increase the sense of strangeness and nostalgia that is associated with the world Yeoman and Anderson's films deal in.

We see the same brushstrokes of Yeoman's cinematic painting in The Royal Tenenbaums. The scene opens up with his consistent artificial-feeling camera movement, with the camera filming from a track moving with the characters laterally. Again, the colors and lighting seem consistent with the first scene, showing how Yeoman's style shines through various different pieces of art and remains clear to us on the other side.

10. Defining a "Money Shot"

In my earlier blog posts, I occasionally spoke of “pulling the audience out of the story”. I usually said this in a disparaging light: pulling the audience out of the story was achieved through clumsy camera movement, obvious lighting, or perhaps low quality audio. However, I want to go back to this notion of taking the viewer out of the story – and back into the context of watching a film – to define my interpretation of a “money shot”.

To me, a money shot does not possess any specific properties of light or composition. It merely has to be so striking in any facet of a shot that its beauty in the context of the piece “pulls the audience out of the story” to appreciate it. Keep in mind that beauty does not have to mean looking perfectly balanced and pretty – in a film trying to convey horror a money shot could be absolutely grotesque. A true money shot intertwines the form of a shot with the meaning of the piece it’s a part of so well that it earns distinction. Essentially, when I’m watching a film and I see a money shot, I know – because I am pulled out of the storyline’s grasp and cannot help but appreciate… or ponder… or stare at the individual shot.

A fantastic example of a money shot is from the miniseries Band of Brothers (incidentally the best thing I have ever seen broadcast on television). In the episode Crossroads, we follow Captain Winters as he types up a battle report and struggles with the memory of killing a young German soldier in his recollections. The shot in question is at 0:28 in the video. After a staccato sequence of Winters running, we see the killing that so plagues his thoughts. The shot is short, brutal, and to the point. Winters suddenly becomes a small silhouette in the background of the shot boy, reflecting how he has distanced his identity from himself and questions who he even is anymore. The stark simplicity of the shot, with distinct framing of the two characters on the left and on the right, with minimal color and a washed out sky serves to further impress the fact that this is realm there is no gray area for Winters, no maybes. He killed someone and feels guilty, and this is reflected in the sudden still moment of the shot. It is not an action sequence but a portrait. When we speak of form and meaning becoming one, this shot is a quintessential example.

The moment I saw the shot, it distinguished itself as a money shot because I immediately, involuntarily took a mental step back and saw how perfectly it fit the story. I believe finding money shots is not about analysis, and it is not a science. Simply put, you know them as soon as you see them – which is why, after all, they are money shots.

9. Garfield Scene Assignment: Camera Selection

My scene assignment is an adaptation of a Garfield comic strip. However, my vision of the world of Garfield is a far cry from the bright, inoffensive (some might say bland) cartoons produced by Jim Davis. Instead, I envision Jon Arbuckle not as the often-trod-upon owner of a sassy fat cat, but as the very height of loneliness, paranoia, and insanity. Why, in hundreds of panels, do we almost never see another human being in Garfield? Why does the strip deal with the same jokes over and over again, as if they are part of some strange ritual? Why is Jon interacting with a talking cat? As explored in several different ways by internet parodies and projects such as Garfield Minus Garfield, Jon could easily be construed as a psychotic man and Garfield as his hallucinatory personal demon. I wanted to explore this theme further in my project. Now, with this in mind, I knew I wanted the world to be utterly stark and serious, with hard lighting and tones of blue. I wanted the shots to reek of unease and barely hidden insanity. So: what to shoot this on?

I first had to ask myself what was required of the camera that was to shoot Garfield, based on both my vision of its tone and the shot list I created for the script. Essentially, I needed:

-       -The ability to crush the depth of field to produce a cinematic look

-        The ability to shoot in 60 fps for slow motion

-        The ability to capture a clean and crisp image

-        The ability to be mounted on a glidetrack, tripod, and even fig rig for handheld use

-        The ability to capture an image in relatively low light settings

These traits would help make my project both filmable and contribute to the tone. A crushed depth of field would produce a cinematic look associated with serious subject matter that contrasts with the Garfield comic strips. Slow motion was required for a shot where Jon Arbuckle first loses his temper and then recognizes his moment of anger. I wanted the highest quality of image resolution I could get, because I wanted his world to be fully realized and alarmingly close to home. I needed shots on a glidetrack for character dollies that highlighted the grotesque rituals of Jon’s life, and to capture the motivated movement of his footsteps. In addition, I needed still shots on a tripod and a following, tracking shot on the fig rig. Finally, I wanted control over the colors in low light to produce a cool-toned image in the darkness of an early morning room with a single window.

With these necessities in front of me, the choice was clear: DSLR. Furthermore, a 7D was my choice since it had the highest quality construction short of a 5D while retaining the capability to shoot in 60 fps. With Zeiss Prime lenses, all of the above requirements could be fulfilled adequately. And, besides – I had never shot with a DSLR before. Why not get my hands dirty with some equipment I was unfamiliar with? That prospect is always exciting, particularly when it coincides with the needs of a particular shoot.