Shooting a promotional video for Aryma Contemporary Marquetry. Photo: Lisa Sansome
When I give talks to film students, they sometimes turn their noses up at the corporate and participatory video work I do around my own creative projects. They like to think they can come straight out of university and make only their dramatic masterpieces. Now, clearly corporates pay the rent whereas the more creative projects sadly don’t for most of us, but there are many other excellent reasons to do them:
Transferable skills. By making corporates day in, day out, you’re keeping your camera, lighting, sound, editing and directing skills honed.
Flexibility. It’s much easier to fit your creative projects around a freelance corporate video schedule than a nine-to-five day job. Even having to go to the job centre to sign on the dole every week can get in the way of your own films.
Favours. To give just one example, a sound recordist is far more likely to work for free on your short film if you’ve hired him for several fully paid corporates jobs in the past.
Equipment. Your wife can’t complain about you buying a shiny new camera if you need it to earn money. And if you just happen to use it for your own projects too, well – everyone’s happy, aren’t they?
Credits. Every corporate adds to your track record. An actor auditioning for your short, a funding agency panellist considering your application, a potential collaborator checking out your website – they’ll all be more impressed and more willing to trust you if they see a long list of corporate credits rather than a part-time shelf-stacking job on your CV.
Dealing with feedback. We’ve all heard the horror stories of directors who’ve received notes from studio executives demanding that they change this or that. Learning to take on board the comments and suggestions of the clients who are paying for your corporates is great practice for this.
Tax break. If you make money from filming, your expenses are tax deductible. And those expenses include the cost of making your own movies, because it’s all part of your business. Many’s the time I’ve lamented spending all my money on making films… until I received a “nothing to pay” statement from the Inland Revenue. Mmmm, nothing to pay.
Hollywood is known for its wallet-busting excess. James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Michael Bay, George Lucas and J. J. Abrams probably spend close to a billion dollars a year between them making their blockbuster movies. But all of these directors (or at least their visual effects supervisors) know that sometimes the cheapest, simplest trick is the most effective. Here’s my run-down of the top five best low-tech effects in massive movies.
5. Jedi camera tricks
George Lucas is a filmmaker who was at his best when constrained by clunky technology, and that was certainly the case when he made the first Star Wars film. The motion control work produced by the nascent ILM may have raised the bar for every movie to follow, but Lucas frequently had to resort to much simpler techniques to put the world he imagined on the screen.
Star Wars
To make Luke’s landspeeder appear to hover, a mirror was attached in front of the wheels, reflecting empty desert. Some optical work was required to complete the effect, but Lucas got 90% of the way there in-camera. Sadly his approach to filmmaking is now exactly the opposite.
Space Jockey
4. Space Jockey kids
When Diddly Squat came on board Alien, his vision was to take the B movie script and turn it into an A picture. This was embodied by the huge Space Jockey which the Nostromo’s crew find in the alien derelict. The studio didn’t want to pay for the massive sculpture, but Squat insisted it would raise the production values of the whole film and he got his way. When it was built, however, it still wasn’t big enough for him. The solution? If you can’t make the Space Jockey bigger, make the people smaller. He drafted in his kids and the DP’s, had the costume department whip up some small-scale spacesuits, over-cranked the camera and – bingo! – the Jockey looks twice as big.
3. Sie haben meine green screen gestohlen
The cinema of Michael Bay is like a twelve-year-old boy’s wet dream: explosions, car crashes, toy robots and Megan Fox. His best work, I suggest, is his 1996 film The Rock, featuring a destructive car chase around the streets of San Francisco. Amongst all the money shots of falling telegraph poles, coin-spraying parking meters and exploding trams (“Where’s that son of a bitch at? I’m gonna hunt him down! That mother fucker ain’t safe nowhere!”) are close-ups of the characters driving which were executed in a way a twelve-year-old would be proud of.
Did Bay put the car on a low-loader and tow it through the streets? No. Did he put up a green screen and comp in the backgrounds? No. Did he go old-school and use rear projection à la 24? No. He simply parked the car in a place where only empty sky could be seen behind, rigged a couple of out-of-focus lights in the background on dollies, ordered a bunch of grips to rock the car and shook the camera for all he was worth.
This technique is known as Poor Man’s Process, and is most commonly used for night driving scenes. But Bay had the genius to see that in a fast-paced action scene, as long as he kept the camera moving (note all the zooming) he could get away with it. To my mind it actually looks better than if it had been done for real, because the technique forced him to make the camerawork frenetic, which adds to the energy of the sequence.
2. Masking an edit
Arguably the highlight of J. J. Abrams’ masterful third instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise is the scene in which we finally get to see the whole process of making and applying one of those miraculous masks. In a single shot we see Tom Cruise put on the mask and Ving Rhames blending the edges until Cruise looks like an utterly convincing Philip Seymour Hoffman. There are many ways to transform one actor into another with digital technology, and while such technology was doubtless used to smooth out the transition, the shot has a very simple trick at its heart: as the camera tracks behind Rhames’ back, the momentary darkness is used to hide a cut.
Abrams employs the same technique in his equally brilliant Star Trek reboot, when Scotty accidentally transports himself into a water pipe in the engine room. Released from the pipe, he falls painfully to the ground and then gets up and dusts himself off in the same shot. A foreground pillar wiping frame conceals a cut from the stuntman to Simon Pegg.
Titanic
1. Cardboard Titanic
Before he fell in love with performance capture, presumably as a result of getting the bends while shooting Ghosts of the Abyss, James “King of the World” Cameron was very canny with his visual effects. His films invariably ran the gamut of techniques, from the most cutting edge technology of the time to the oldest tricks in the book. So while Terminator 2 pushed the envelope with its computer-generated T-1000, Cameron was not averse to dressing Robert Patrick up in bacofoil for quick shots of the liquid metal villain in motion. And Aliens’ climactic nuke cloud was a cotton wool sculpture with a light bulb in the middle.
But perhaps Cameron’s most remarkable low tech effect comes in the second reel of his 1997 smash hit Titanic. The crew famously built a near-complete full-scale replica of the titular liner on the Mexican coast, while shots of the vessel at sea utilised a 45ft miniature surrounded by CG water and populated with motion-captured passengers (then a brand new technology). But when FX geniuses Robert and Dennis Skotak needed to put the Titanic into a green-screen shot of Jack and company playing poker in a dockside pub, they simply stuck a photo blow-up of the model to a piece of cardboard and dressed a Hornby train set in front of it. They called it the ship of dreams. And it was. It really was.
Working on my Stop/Ejectmood reel for FilmWorks last week got me thinking about the various methods with which a director can convey his vision for a film during the development process. Here are the ways I’ve used over the years, and the pros and cons of each.
The first ones are all static images, so they can be printed out and thus viewed without the need for any technology (no worries about whether the recipient will be able to open this particular file format) but are also small enough to be emailed. They’ll never grab someone’s attention as much as a moving image, but take less time to absorb and can produce an instant reaction.
If you have the skills or know someone who does, high quality CONCEPT ART can dazzle and excite. Choose dramatic moments and give the artist guidance on the colour palette and lighting you’re after.
The Dark Side of the Earth concept art by Ian TomlinsonStoryboards for The Dark Side of the Earth by David Ayling
You wouldn’t get STORYBOARDS out at an initial pitch, but they’ll impress at a second or third meeting. They show you’ve thought carefully about the script and how you’re going to put it on screen. This is particularly valuable if you have complex action or FX sequences. Beware that if the person you’re pitching to thinks the script needs more work, they’ll see storyboards as jumping the gun. Get the script right first.
A MOOD BOARD is a scrapbook or montage of images from films and/or other artforms that represent the tone and style of your piece. Less skill is required to make one of these than concept art or storyboards, and although as a creative person you may balk at the implication that your film is unoriginal, execs will find it very useful to compare your project to previous ones. If you use images from a film that did poor box office, again expect tough questions about why your movie won’t fail too.
The Dark Side of the Leaflet, designed and executed by Ian Tomlinson
A variation on this is a BOOKLET which might contain some of the above, plus photos and biogs of attached or wish-list actors, a synopsis, a director’s statement and maybe even an outline budget. Ian Tomlinson, The Dark Side of the Earth’s incredibly talented production designer, came up with the period-style leaflets pictured at left to promote the project. In one of my Cannes video blogs you can see a bit of these leaflets. (Sadly they’re now all gone and they got quite time-consuming and expensive to produce.)
Now we’ll look at moving images. Nowadays these aren’t prohibitively expensive to produce, and can be distributed for next-to-nothing via the internet – but beware of techy problems on the other end. Even YouTube doesn’t always work. If the person you’re sending it to can’t open it, they’ll probably give up and move onto something else, perhaps without even telling you why. Frankly I reckon you’re always safer with a DVD. Playing it off a laptop, tablet computer or iPhone in a meeting is a bad idea. Execs are narrow-minded and will see your project as a cheap YouTube video rather than a big, cinematic venture. Plus the sound will be awful. In another of my Cannes vlogs I discussed the dilemma of whether it’s better to show your pilot with poor picture and sound or not at all.
A MOOD REEL or RIP REEL is a moving version of the mood board or scrapbook. Ripping all those DVDs and YouTube clips can be a technical nightmare, but if done well it can be very useful. Here’s one for a very different vision of The Hunger Games by director Kevin Tancharoen. The accompanying interview on Slashfilm.com is also well worth a read.
Beware that many of the above materials will start giving the recipient thoughts about the budget. If your materials make it look like your vision will be expensive, be prepared to answer tough questions about that.
TEASER TRAILERS can be very useful for raising crowd-funding, but my feeling is that they’re not great for attracting conventional financing. Unless you’re going to chuck a hell of a lot of money at it and get an experienced trailer editor to cut it, the danger that a teaser trailer will look amateur and backfire is significant. You’d be better off with a rip reel.
PILOTS can also backfire. You can’t shoot it on a DSLR with a few hundred quid, then screen it at your pitch meeting and say, “The film will look like this, only better.” You have to shoot it with the production values you want the full film to have. That’s why my pilot for The Dark Side of the Earth was shot on 35mm anamorphic, and why we insist that anyone wanting to view it attends a screening of the print, rather than watching a crappy little quicktime or even a DVD. When you’re in that darkened screening room with the 5.1 track rumbling away and the image looking jaw-droppingly beautiful, only then are you doing your film-to-be justice.
Consider making a stand-alone SHORT FILM instead. My greatest regret with the Dark Side pilot is that we didn’t do this; we just took a couple of scenes from the middle of the screenplay and added an introductory voiceover and concept art montage to explain the story so far. It’s far and away my best work, but no-one’s seen it! If only I could have entered it into film festivals. Even if that hadn’t helped get the feature funded, it would have been great exposure for me and perhaps could have led to another of my projects getting made.
Another thing I tried for Dark Side before making the pilot was PREVIZ. These are filmed or animated storyboards, normally created once a project is greenlit to help plan and budget for FX, but they may also have value as part of a pitch, particularly if you want to prove you’re on top of how the FX will be achieved. The Dark Sides previz was shot with action figures and cardboard models and I’d certainly never screen them in a pitch meeting; I did them mainly for my own benefit. If they’re for a pitch, get a good CG animator on the case.
Finally, I once read about a filmmaker who created an AUDIO PITCH consisting of her own voice narrating the synopsis, mixed with music and sound effects. Whatever technology and skills you can access to best get your vision across, that’s what you’ve got to do. But remember, it has to be top quality or you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.
What methods have you used to get your vision across?
Regular readers may (but probably won’t) remember that almost a year ago I interviewed indie filmmaker Kate Madison as part of a documentary I planned to make under the working title of “Living in a Fantasy World”. I should have realised that shooting a doc about people trying to make incredibly ambitious fantasy films on shoestring budgets was going to be a long, slow process, but I didn’t think it would be eleven months before I did my next bit of filming.
Brett Chapman shoots B roll on Stop/Eject as Hadrian Cawthorne looks on. Photo: Paul Bednall
Yesterday I went up to Manchester to document the first day of shooting on Dan Rowbottom’s Dark Crystal-esque fantasy adventure Raven Waiting. In due course I will be sharing some of this footage with you, but today I want to share my thoughts on behind-the-scenes, or “B roll”, filming. Here are my top tips:
Pace yourself. It’s tempting to film non-stop in the morning, generating far more shots of people unpacking equipment than the editor will ever need, and to neglect things later in the day. Try to cover the whole day evenly.
Don’t get in the way and don’t film people if they ask you not to, but don’t be afraid to record the difficult conversations when things start to go pear-shaped.
Like anyone crewing, remember your on-set etiquette. Say “crossing” when you pass in front of the A camera, and when it’s rolling stay silent, don’t cast shadows and don’t distract the talent.
Remember that although you have a job to do, so does the main unit and theirs is much more important. Help them if they need it.
Think about what people have said or might say in the interviews and capture appropriate shots for the editor to paste over these.
If you can’t find a good angle to shoot from, don’t bother. There will be plenty of opportunities later in the day.
Unless something particularly interesting is happening, ten seconds is long enough to hold a shot for. Don’t shoot long conversations unless you’re miking them properly; they won’t be useable.
Pack fast lenses, f1.8 at least. Film sets are incredibly dark away from the lit area.
Remember to cover the action away from the set – hair, make-up and wardrobe.
Here are some shots you definitely shouldn’t go home without: the clapperboard clapping; the director calling “cut” and “action”; a cutaway of the camera being operated; the director pointing/looking thoughtfully at the monitor/giving an actor notes or otherwise demonstrably directing; actors preparing or mucking around between takes; an establishing shot of the location.
Here’s another one from the archives. This is a silly little short I made in 2003 as an entry to a ninety second film competition run as part of Borderlines Film Festival‘s inaugural year.
The prize was £1,000 and I didn’t want to have to share that with anyone if I won, so I used copyright-free music and did everything else myself. (Although the Calf Vader puppet was actually made by my friend Matt several years earlier as part of a Magic Roundabout spoof featuring Darth Vadertrude. I did not tell him.)
Hereford being a small place, there were very few entries to the competition. Three were selected for screening at the festival: Calf Vader, one by my friend Johnny Cartwright (who borrowed my camera to shoot it on) and one by my friend Rick Goldsmith. Like I said, small place.
Rick won. He decided to use the £1,000 to buy a new computer, which he ordered from eBay. He sent the money. The seller never sent the computer. Easy come, easy go.
Having shone a light on this site’s resources in my last entry, today I’m turning the spotlight outwards and sharing my five favourite filmmaking blogs (in no particular order).
Chris Jones is the author of The Guerilla Filmmakers’ Movie Blueprint, the director of The London Screenwriters’ Festival and has made three indie features and a great short film called Gone Fishing. His blogs focus mainly on writing and distribution, those book-ends of the filmmaking process so often glossed over in favour of the fun bits in the middle. Most new developments in the indie filmmaking scene I find out first from Chris’s blog, and he’s always looking ahead to new models of distribution and giving advice on essential peripheral activities like developing a social media presence.
Danny Lacey is relatively new to filmmaking, but he dived in head-first and will soon be premiering not one but three short films. He’s committed to documenting his “Filmmaker’s Journey” through his written and video blogs, many of which are very useful tutorials. Only the other week he published a video bordering on the revolutionary, explaining how to make your own Digital Cinema Package for free.
The Underwater Realm is a weekly video blog following the making of a quintet of short films. Not interested yet? Did I mention that these films are all set largely underwater? And that they raised $100,000 through crowd-funding? And that a couple of weeks ago they filmed a scene on a Spanish Galleon set built on a homemade gimbal? And that they’re premiering at Raindance next month?
Hurlblog is the internet home of Shane Hurlbut ASC, the DP behind Terminator: Salvation and Act of Valor [sic]. If you’re at all interested in the art and technique of cinematography, you should be reading this blog. After all, where else are you going to find a Hollywood DP breaking down his lighting set-ups? Of all the bloggers on this list, Shane should be most applauded for finding the time to share his knowledge, which is extensive to say the least. My Stop/Eject lighting breakdowns were very much inspired by Shane’s.
They Never Went to the Moon gives a unique and fascinating perspective on the making of Duncan Jones’ fabulous indie sci-fi thriller, Moon, through the eyes of Duncan’s concept designer and righthand man, Gavin Rothery. Gavin was involved in all stages of the project – creating artwork and previz, working on the set build around the clock, doubling for Sam Rockwell and producing rough VFX shots and grades. Although this blog is no longer running, a browse through the archives will reward you with numerous amusing anecdotes and you’ll come away with an even greater respect for what the men behind Moon accomplished.
Are you getting the most out of this site? Here are some things you might not have known were on neiloseman.com…
Firstly, this blog goes right back to March 2001. It covers the making of my two micro-budget features, The Beacon and Soul Searcher, from development through to completion and distribution, and the development of my next feature project The Dark Side of the Earth, plus all stages of making that project’s pilot (demo sequence), a large-scale 35mm production starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Over those eleven years I’ve tried to share all the emotional ups and downs, everything I did right and (more frequently) everything I did wrong. There’s plenty for any low budget filmmaker to learn from my experiences, good and bad, and I hope they’ll inspire you as well.
At the time of writing there are 73 videos on my YouTube channel, most of them informative behind-the-scenes or “how to” featurettes. These are organised into playlists according to the film project they relate to, but now for the first time I’ve compiled a list (below) according to subject matter.
With the exception of the ones in italics, these videos are all free to watch. And remember that every time the total raised for Stop/Eject‘s post-production passes a hundred pound mark we’re releasing public rewards, many of which are behind-the-scenes podcasts. So head on over to stopejectmovie.com and make your donation if you want to see this list grow.
Some of the crew, plus our makeshift dolly and our transport
Exactly a decade ago today, I flew out to New York to serve as director of photography on Tom Muschamp’s microbudget thriller Beyond Recognition. It’s the story of Geoffrey Mills, the world’s best plastic surgeon, who gets ensnared in dangerous machinations when he refuses the mafia’s request to alter their don’s face.
To this day it remains my favourite of all the shoots I’ve been on. I was 22, I’d made The Beacon (an experience which largely led to me getting the job, I think) but I’d never DPed a feature for another director, and I’d never been to the States before.
Director Tom Muschamp in The Star Building
Tom, a Brit, had met an American producer who offered to source all the locations in upstate New York and host the cast and crew at her mother’s house, which was massive in a way that only American houses can be. There is something quite post-modern about the fact that, although I was there to make a film, I was seeing and experiencing things which had hitherto been confined to films for me, like screen doors, root beer and morbid obesity.
My bed for three weeks
The gaffer, the first assistant director and the runner (Tom’s cousin Ed Reed, who later production-managed Soul Searcher) travelled from the UK with Tom and I, but the cast and the rest of the crew were American. For the most part the atmosphere was fantastic. We were all young and enthusiastic and bonding over the trials of shooting an ambitious script with minimal resources in roasting temperatures – in fact “Hot in Here” by Nelly became the anthem of the shoot. Michelle Branch’s “Everywhere” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” also have strong associations with Beyond Recognition for me, as one or other of those songs seemed to be playing on the radio every time we piled into our hired minibus to go to the next location.
Part of The Star Building becomes a plastic surgeon’s reception
I’d sent a wish-list of lighting equipment to the production team ahead of time, including several large HMIs and a whole bunch of other kit. When I arrived in New York they said, “Er… well, we’ve got the gels you asked for…” A quick trip to Home Depot was called for. I think that was my first experience of lighting with halogen work-lights, otherwise known as DIY lights. Later Tom splashed out on a set of four Arrilites, which he kindly let me keep at the end of production, and most of which I still have and use to this day.
Many scenes were shot in what became known as The Star Building – a small, disused factory in the grounds of the house we were staying in. It was full of junk, which we were constantly shifting around to enable us to film in different corners. The toilets didn’t work properly, and I distinctly remember an incident in which the first AD disappeared for a bowel movement, and shortly afterwards some suspiciously brown water started dripping from the ceiling.
Blacking out a window
There was a lot of night shooting, which was great experience for me and helped me develop the Cameron-esque blue look that would define Soul Searcher. When it came to interiors, my memory is that daytime scenes were typically shot at night and vice versa, though God knows why. We were forever blacking out windows or setting up artificial suns.
The lead actor
One key thing I learnt from Beyond Recognition is the importance of having your cast and crew sign contracts before you start shooting. The lead actor was very unreliable, but made all kinds of demands once the film was in the can and Tom needed his signature on the dotted line. The lead actress was a bit ditzy as I recall, repeatedly plugging in her hair-drier at a hotel location and blowing the fuse every time because of all the lights we were running. And then there was the actor who, when we needed a bug detector as a prop, said “I’ll bring mine,” and was sent to prison a few years later when he was caught defrauding hundreds of thousands of dollars from a hide-out in the basement of the World Trade Centre. And you think I’m kidding.
Crew-wise, we seemed to splinter into two factions towards the end of the three week shoot – those who were happy to do whatever it took to get the movie made, and those who just wanted to moan and slack off (I will never understand why these people sign up to unpaid shoots in the first place). The hours were very long and there wasn’t a single day off in those three weeks, but I’m afraid that’s what micro-budget filmmaking is like. I loved it.
Like many Brits returning from the US (especially New York) for the first time, I was quite depressed afterwards and for a few months could think of little other than wanting to return to New York and how much cooler everything is over there.
But principal photography on Beyond Recognition was not over when the New York stuff wrapped. Part of the film is set in Italy, and Tom had lined up locations in the picturesque Fai della Paganella in the Dolomites. So on September 29th I was back on a plane, this time to Verona. The crew line-up had changed a bit; strangely the members of the second faction mentioned above were not invited back, and a couple more Brits joined us including Simon Ball and Max Van de Banks, both of whom I’d worked with before and who would go on to work on Soul Searcher. Ed Reed, meanwhile, had been promoted to first AD.
The Italian leg of the shoot ran smoother than the US leg, as far as I remember, although we were not popular in the town by the end of the shoot. This was mainly due to the unruly actors, who tended to help themselves to alcohol from the hotel bar (leaving money for it, I should add) and generally act like they owned the place.
I finally got my HMIs in Fai. Tom hired two 4Ks from Arri in Milan, which I used to light the town square. I also got to film a craning shot up in the mountains from a cherry-picker.
All in all, the project was an amazing experience for me, and left me with a burning desire to work far more regularly as a DP on indie films, an ambition I sadly still haven’t succeeded in. But besides helping shape Soul Searcher, both in terms of its look and Tom’s distribution experiences which I drew on when selling my film, it did lead to other work and in 2007 to my DPing Tom’s second feature, See Saw, on which I met my wife Katie.
Beyond Recognition was released on DVD in the US and other territories, but is only available in the UK as an import. I’ll leave you with the trailer.
P.S. You can read my original blog entries from the 2002 Beyond Recognition shoot here, here, here and here.
For a while now I’ve been following Raven Waiting, a feature film currently being developed by Dan Rowbottom. Like my own project, The Dark Side of the Earth, it’s a fantasy-adventure set in a visually rich world populated by both human and puppet characters; Dark Crystal is one of Dan’s key influences for the piece.
Unlike me and The Dark Side of the Earth, Dan is not wasting his time pitching the project to a bunch of production companies who are too narrow-minded, risk-averse or unimaginative to see its potential. He is getting off his arse and actually doing it. Right now he’s running a crowdfunding campaign. Which means YOU can help it get made. YOU have the power. YOU can say, “Yes, I want to see films with vision getting made in this country.”
Yesterday Col and I travelled to Amsterdam to film part of the web promo for Aryma. (See my earlier post for more info on that project.) So I thought this might be an appropriate moment to share my top five tips for shooting overseas.
Always pack the camera, lenses, cards and batteries in your hand luggage. Not only will they be safer, but if your checked baggage ends up in the wrong country, at least you can still shoot.
If you’re taking lights, check your bulbs are rated for the voltage of the country’s electrical system. For example, US bulbs (110V) will blow if you try to use them in Europe (220V).
Don’t forget plug adapters.
Where possible, hire a local runner/driver. That gets you a chauffeur, translator and tour guide all in one, and their local knowledge will save you time and money.
Despite what some may say, I can personally testify that DV tapes and SDHC cards and the data on them are not affected by airport x-ray machines.
Filming in the Italian Dolomites for Beyond Recognition (2002, dir. Tom Muschamp). Photo: Simon Ball
