When preparing for “C for Chaos,” we all studied feverishly. We read all the books we could find but another thing was watching movies. I know this sounds like a “Duh” type thing but…we watched them from as if we were making them. Streebo and I would get together and point out camera movement, lighting, pacing, screen directions, composition, coverage, etc… If you really watch and dissect films in this way you can see how different directors can cover similar situations. Some may use more wide angles, some may go in for close ups, etc… Commentary tracks are another great resource. Of course not all commentary tracks are created equal. If you’re a low budget filmmaker then I recommend lower budget movies. Robert Rodriguez has great commentary tracks. Some of his you need a note book and the pause button to keep up. Be sure you keep an open mind when listening to the commentary. You may only get one or two gems, But if it saves you a night of shooting or makes something easier, I’d say that was worth 2 hours of your time. For example, on the commentary for Ronin, he talks about the scene when they’re buying the weapons. They purposefully wet the entire area since they were filming outside, that way if it rained, it wouldn’t mess up their shooting schedule. Either write this stuff down in a journal or file it away in your brain somewhere.

Streebo is a big believer in only watching what you’re filming. So when we shot “C for Chaos” for about 3 years, that’s pretty much all Streebo watched. Thanks to places like Netflix he showed me horror films from all over the world. This can give you a lot of insight into the genre.

So before, while and after making your film, study as many films as possible. Notice I said study and Not watch. Watch is passive. Study is active.

Below Please leave comments about films with good commentaries for other filmmakers to go and study! Thanks!

And here, my loyal students, are those tips to help you avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered as a beginning low budget filmmaker.

1. Lay Off the Zoom!

Yes, I know that George Lucas did it in the new Star Wars films and, yes, I know it was popular in the new Battlestar Galactica show, but all playing around with the zoom on your camera will do is make your footage look like a tourist shooting vacation movies out on the Florida Keys. A really good cameraman can make a zoom look ok (or semi-acceptable)…a really really good cameraman, that is. For the most part, though, a zoom will look shoddy and amateurish. Your best bet is to break your zoom controller or, at the very least, the finger closest to it. A dolly, stedicam or even hand-held track in will all look 1000% better than a crappy zoom.

2. Vary Your Angles

One of the most common mistakes of most new directors and a whole heck of a lot of indie and guerrilla filmmakers is shots all looking alike. Most low budget films are shot very tight and never really open up for a long view – they’re full of close-ups, two shots and cramped quarters. They also tend to be diagram shots framed at eye level. If you want to make your film more excited, or more interesting, pull back for longer shots, tilt your camera, shoot from a bird’s eye or worm’s eye angle – use your camera angles to help set your mood and control your audience’s level of tension/suspense/drama. A good guide is to pull back further than you think you should (or push in further). Make sure to change things up a bit or your footage and your film will become stagnant and boring.

3. Use Proper Lighting

One of the hardest things for most indie, low budget and guerrilla filmmakers to learn is how to properly light for the DV or HD cameras they’re filming on. With a much lower contrast range and higher need for light than the human eye (and film), lighting for DV/HD cameras can often be a bit counter intuitive. In other words, what looks good to your naked eye often won’t work for your finished film. If you’re not careful you’ll wind up with footage too dark to use. If you’ve worked with, or lit for, film cameras then it may take a little while to get used to the change in methodology. I’ve shot with a number of really good DPs recently who made the mistake of lighting for their eyes and not for the camera we were shooting with. Shoot some lighting tests before you begin principal photography so you can get used to your camera’s dynamic range.

4. Write for What You Have

Since most low budget, indie and guerrilla filmmakers also happen to write their own material, the number one thing you should keep in mind when putting your new screenplay together is: write for what you have! The best way to give your film a higher production value is to make use of anything and everything you’ve already got access to. It’s tough to go out and find a cemetary or a muscle car or an airplane, but if you’ve got friends/family with unique locations, props or wardrobe then you can make your little $5000 movie look like you spent tens or hundreds of thousands on it. It worked for Robert Rodriguez and it will work for you.

5. Get a Good Tripod

Hand holding is great on a date with your girlfriend (or boyfriend, we’re not sexist here at the Film Sensei’s DOJO), but it should be used sparingly on a film set. Get a good fluid head tripod and make use of it as much as possible to give yourself a solid base to work from. Remember, hand held footage is great as long as it is used for a purpose and for an effect. If you’re just doing it because you’re too cheap to spring for a good set of sticks then your film will suffer for it.

6. Get a Good Mic

I feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken record after yesterday’s post about essential audio equipment for indie and guerrilla filmmakers. However, it’s a point well worth repeating over and over. While your audience may forgive a little wonky storytelling, dark images or even bad acting, the one thing no one will forgive is bad sound. There is almost nothing you can do that is worse than poor sound quality, and nothing that will make you look more like an amateur – well, short of accidentally filming all day with your lens cap on. Decent mics are available even for those of us on a more modest budget and there is absolutely no excuse to be shooting with your camera’s onboard mic – EVER!

There you have it: the extent of my wisdom. Yes, I know there are a lot more things to keep in mind and that will help (like making sure to get a good AD to help run your set properly or not hiring actresses you want to sleep with), but if you follow these six tips you’ll have a good head-start on keeping your first low budget film from sucking worse than a two-dollar whore.

That’s it from the depths of the DOJO for tonight. Until next time, Keep Shooting!

-Mat N., the Film Sensei

via Six Quick Tips to Keep Your Low Budget Film From Sucking | Asap Trip.

MVP Mutant TV Presents Editor’s Video Log: G.H.O.S.T. Week Seven.

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As someone who grew up in the independent film world and helped shepherd a company from “Reefer Madness” to “Lord of the Rings,” it is a pleasure to be here today.

I think it is ironic that I have been asked to kick-off this Independent Film Summit, having been a principal in perhaps the most successful independent film company in history – which has nevertheless become one of the biggest victims of the consolidation of film production and distribution that has so negatively affected the independent film universe. Fortunately, we are living to fight another day in our new production company, Unique Features.

There are however, several very telling points which can be made in this regard:

1 – If you are independent and value the freedom which that brings – stay independent. There is no free lunch – if you are owned by a major studio, you will ultimately be governed by major studio guidelines and major studio decision-making. It is kind of a Faustian bargain. When New Line agreed to be acquired by Turner Broadcasting, we had access to wherewithal for production and distribution substantially beyond what was available to us as a free standing public company. The ambitions which we had for New Line could be accelerated by years. But there was a catch – as Ted Turner said to us about six months after the merger when we referred to him as our partner – “Yes, guys, we are partners in a way and we are definitely friends – but you did sell your company to me – let’s just keep that in mind as we go forward.”

2 – Independent filmmaking emerged in a significant way in the early ‘80s with the arrival of New Line, Miramax, Cannon, New World, Tri-Star and others.  Each of those companies had a game plan and a strategy for the space they would occupy in the industry landscape.  It was an earlier time of irrational exuberance and lots of capital and very expensive debt was available.  The anticipation that we were on the brink of a new generation of film companies, was palpable.  Obviously, some of those companies have left a significant film legacy, but the truth is, and this is very telling, none of them today, if they exist at all, exist in the same ownership configuration in which they existed then.  And none is truly independent now.

3 – Just as there was an opportunity then for independent, maverick organizations to make films for underserved audiences and to create new paradigms, the same opportunity will undoubtedly come out of the very difficult times for independent filmmaking today as fresh, out-of-the-box thinking on content and delivery, from passionate and talented filmmakers and producers, finds its way through the ambient noise of the establishment to a public hungry for the new.  It may be one of us in this room – or it may be a kid with a dream, a digital camera and a fire in his or her belly.

4 – We should be prepared to rethink all of the commonly accepted practices and pre-conceptions about film production and film distribution.  There is and will be less funding available for the production of independent films and for the release of those films.  (In fact, there will be less funding available for the production and distribution of films in general.)  We will see the conventional timing and formats for film viewing re-invented to a meaningful degree.  Where films are seen, when they are seen, who pays for them to be seen, are all going to change dramatically in the next 5 to 10 years.  Some of those changes will make the process easier and some will make it much harder.

5 – Tough economic times may favor movie-going in theaters, but it won’t solve the shrinking DVD sector and, on balance, it has, and will probably continue to, encourage the production of safer product for a more mainstream audience looking for escape from their stressful private situations.  Obviously, that has never been the basic mission of independent filmmaking.  The real challenge is to work toward creating films that are original, thoughtful, even challenging, but which nevertheless can capture the imagination of audiences who will always be responsive to something new and unexpected and yes, to films that are entertaining, in the broadest sense of that word.

6 – As an industry we’ve tried to preserve the idea of windows of distribution, ordering the availability of our product by distribution channel, starting in about every instance with the theatrical distribution window.  And I don’t know a filmmaker who doesn’t want his film seen in a theatre on a big screen with beautiful sound.  But we should be prepared for the possibility – not clear how far off – that there will be 50 or 60 million flat-screen HDTV’s capable of receiving digital downloads around the world.  And someone will have the quintessential tent pole which can be ordered for $40 a household before theatrical release.  The stakes are high – maybe 2 or 3 billion dollars on one night high.  Of course theatrical exhibitors will have something to say about that.  But it will also be an opportunity for more niche product which can be targeted to a specific segment of that digitally connected audience, on an incredibly efficient and lucrative basis.  For independent films, we are talking about a version of the long tail, which one day may be a real lifesaver for these special films with discreet audiences who can then be identified and addressed directly.

7 – All in all, there is a lot to consider.  We are in a very interesting moment in time.  It is a time of complicated issues but of enormous potential opportunity.  Of course, everyone knows the famous William Goldman quote about our industry: “Nobody knows anything.”  It is cautionary, humbling and probably entirely true.  And we should all keep that in mind as we continue our conversation today.  The fact is, there are no real experts on the future of our business or any business – although I think I’ve found one expert.  He’s a true visionary who understood totally the risk of being too certain about what lies in store for us.  So in addition to William Goldman’s sage advice, let’s keep in mind what Yogi Berra said (which applies very much to our topic today): “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Michael Lynne, a co-founder of New Line with Robert Shaye, with whom he also co-founded the new production company, Unique Features.

Read the rest of the article at the link below:

via Michael Lynne at The Indie Summit: ‘Stay independent’ – indieWIRE.

From Mike Jones Digital Basin:  Allow me to be deliberately provocative…
How a Movie looks is a very important thing. The visual aesthetics of a movie profoundly shape the experience of watching it. Few would argue with this position.

Aesthetics, by definition, is the study of ways of seeing and of perceiving. When we consider the aesthetics of cinema we are considering how a movie looks and is perceived. To the filmmaker – concerned with making, building, constructing a film rather than just experiencing it – aesthetics are tangibly the techniques they employ to depict the world of their cinematic creation.

So far, this is all pretty obvious and straight forward. But something we must consider is this idea of ‘Technique’ and the choices at the filmmaker’s disposal – What are they? How are they used? What do they mean?

Any visual technique used by a filmmaker is simply a tool leveraged for an aesthetic story-telling purpose. Quick-cutting or long-takes, close-ups or wide shots, colour or black and white, dollys or pans, so on and so on… The effectiveness, impact and worth of any given technique a filmmaker employs is derived from its suitability to the context of the film. In simple terms, does the technique match the story?

Filmmaking is above all else a process of problem solving and the techniques employed are simply the solution to those problems – be they narrative, emotive, technical or creative. For example;
PROBLEM – The audience need to feel a part of the action, that they share the danger the characters face.
SOLUTION – Shoot hand-held and shaky, ducking and weaving the camera with the action

All this seems well and good and leaves open infinite possibilities for creative aesthetic solutions. Great films are made when directors find innovative, fresh and exciting aesthetics to solve creative problems.

But if we except this premise then we must face up to a distinct problem. If a single aesthetic choice becomes so dominant and common and ubiquitous across all genre’s of filmmaking, regardless of the creative problems posed by individual films, then it ceases to be grounded technique – it becomes stale, meaningless, banal, a default position rather than a creative choice.

In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly…. “What the hell happened to Deep Focus?”

Let me step back a bit from this verbose statement and provide some clarity on the trajectory that leads me to this point. In the early days of cinema film stocks were slow and so apertures had to be wide open in the hope of obtaining decent exposure. With wide open apertures you get very shallow depth of field – a short stretch of space where the subject is in focus that renders anything in the fore or back ground blurred.

In the 40’s companies such as Kodak and Agfa developed better chemical processes and faster film stocks. With faster film stocks apertures dont need to open so wide for exposure and thus depth of field can be extended. Deep-Focus cinema was born; an image aesthetic where subjects at varying focal-lengths from the camera can be equally sharp; both foreground and background in focus. Cinema changed dramatically as a new set of problem solving aesthetic techniques were opened up for filmmakers; new opportunities and possibilities for how a film could look. Shallow Focus and its offspring Rack Focus (where the lens is manipulated in-shot to shift focus from one subject to another) became not the staple of how films looked and worked visually but rather options of choice that a filmmaker may chose to use, or not use, depending on the needs and context of the film.

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and the superb camera work of Gregg Toland, stands as a penultimate example of the power of deep-focus and spawned the host of new thinking about cinema aesthetics that was embodied by the French New Wave and scholarly journals such as Cahiers du Cinema.

But the cinematic party of aesthetic choice, possibility and variety seemed to be cut short as deep-focus became the victim of the Video and Digital Revolutions.

Let me explain…

Video technology – the ability to capture a moving image electronically rather than chemically – came along in the 70’s and 80’s. For the most part such technology was seen as having a great many benefits but one of them was Not visual fidelity. The technology still had many years to go (and an evolution from analogue to digital) before it may be considered visually equal. The simplistic result of this was that Video Cameras at this time were made, in large part, not to directly compete with film cameras for conservatively traditional cinema roles but to serve different purposes. As such they were largely small cameras with small sensors. There is of course a direct mathematical correlation between the size of the sensor (the imaging plane) and the depth of field rendered. Small sensor = deep depth of field. Large sensor = shallow depth of field. Video technology, by nature of both its technological limitations and cultural position within media industry contexts, was innately deep-focus.

What must remembered about cinema aesthetics is that they are deeply connected to cultural responses. Take for example the modern age of mobile phones and mass popular YouTube uploading. We have become so used to seeing nightly TV news filled with amateur footage that is shaky, pixelated and out of focus depicting immediate and current events in a veritae style that there is a prevailing cultural construct that directly associates such Shaky / Out of focus / Pixelated images with ‘Truth’ and ‘Actuality’. It’s for this reason that modern TV news proactively requests amateur footage from its viewers despite it being only a few years ago that airing such footage would have been considered beneath ‘Broadcast Quality Standards’. Similarly TV networks the world over have been known to compress and deliberately degrade images of natural disasters and war zones in order to make it seem more ‘authentic’.

This same cultural construct response was forced upon deep focus by the video revolution of the 70’s and 80’s. What was ingrained into the popular visual language was that ‘deep focus’ equated to video and so, in the minds of viewers, primarily to documentary, news reporting, amateur footage, cheap production and pornography. Conversely that ’shallow focus’ equated to ‘film’ and high budget, narrative cinema, high-art.

This shift in the popular cultural ‘reading’ of moving image aesthetics and the separation of High and Low cinematic art on the basis of Deep or Shallow focus has been a blight and a curse on filmmaking ever since.

In the digital age, amid the famed ‘digital revolution’, we at last moved towards a parity of visual fidelity between celluloid and digital but have been simultaneously afflicted with a prevailing bogus desire to constrict the aesthetics of digital to the legacy hang-ups of film.

Sadly the prime concern of digital indie filmmakers over the past decade has not been the new aesthetic possibilities afforded them by digital technologies but rather an almost singular focus on the cost saving and pragmatic elements of digital. As such, the much lauded desire of digital filmmaking has been to, on one hand, shoot cheap but, on the other, have it look like ‘Film’.

Now, despite the thousands of website articles, posts, forum treatises and essays dedicated to the mission of how to get the ‘Film Look’ it is arguable that a useful definition with any clarity on exactly what constitutes the ‘Film look’ is near impossible to come by. Frame Rate, Progressive scan, Grain, Flicker, Weave, Dynamic Range, Gamma curve – these are all the traits often cited as the ‘film look’ but together they constitute such a broad palette of hazy and in-tangible possibilities that distilling them into a particular set of aesthetic traits is a highly ephemeral process.

May I suggest this…. The ?film look? is bullshit; a product of marketing representation and the digestible distillation of an association with a particular mode of viewing. The ‘film look’ is a cultural rather than aesthetic understanding; one drawn from our legacy of personal cinematic experiences in the movie theatre watching a projected image – Nostalgia not Aesthetics.. Thus, when it comes to making ‘films’ in the digital age for ourselves our base instincts are to want our films to evoke those same nostalgic memory associations we have with celluloid. This we translate as the aesthetic of film, the ‘film look’, but in truth it’s much more about cultural and personal association.

Through all this, the ramifications of this for digital indie filmmakers have been profound. In working with Digital Video but desiring a ‘film look’ – that is near impossible to quantify – their efforts were skewed and corrupted. For so many digital indie filmmakers over the past 15 years their functional definition of the ‘film look’ was primarily whatever aesthetic characteristics were the opposite of what was innate to small-format video. Most specifically Shallow Focus.

Because deep-focus is the default position of many small format digital cameras, owing largely to small sensors as imaging planes, the prevailing aesthetic desire of indie filmmakers was to invest their films with the opposite – to enforce shallow-focus as a way of connecting with a popular culture mindset that connects Shallow Focus with ‘high-budget cinema’ and Deep Focus with ‘low-budget’ video.

As a result we have a whole generation of filmmakers who measure their aesthetic mark by how shallow their focus can be and how often they can Rack-Focus their shots. They are a generation who have been obsessed with rack-focusing rather than staging to move the viewer around the cinematic space; using the camera lens to depict space in flat 2D planes rather than a 3-diemnsion staging of space itself.

We’ve spent so much of the digital revolution fussing over how to make digital look like film that we’ve neglected the subtle art of arranging space itself, forgotten how to focus the eye Spatially rather than the far more clumsy and overt mechanics of doing it Optically. Most importantly we’ve forgotten that the viewer is a sentient and intelligent being, more than capable of deciphering, analyzing, speculating on and articulating the visual information they take in.

Let me offer a verbose rebuke of Shallow Focus and Rack-Focus by way of being provocative.

Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmakers disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.

Shallow focus and Rack Focus  is the cinema equivalent of spoon-feeding the audience one small digestible and banal visual morsel at a time. Handing to them a deliberately unsophisticated and unchallenging image platter. It is the camera equivalent of writing only in capital letters and short sentences for fear your reader/viewer may not understand precisely and exactly what you want them to understand. “Look here”, “see this”, “turn now” – no distractions, no surprises, no accidentals, no confusion, no uncertainty, just the domineering dictation of a moving-image experience on pre-determined flat 2-dimensional planes.  This is the essential internal logic of Shallow-Focus/Rack-Focus cinematography which, by nature of it’s elimination through blur of any distractions outside of a singular focus, is an acutely dictatorial aesthetic. An aesthetic that leaves nothing to the viewers analytical mind and doesn’t engage the viewer in a more complex visual contract. Rack-Focus refuses to  allow the viewer to decipher and assemble meanings for themselves and is a condescending and patronizing way present a cinematic image.

That said, the problem is not Shallow and Rack Focus unto themselves as techniques but rather that they are not seen and used as deft Tools and problem solving Options. Rather they act as blithe and banal default methods fueled by a misguided desire for an association with nostalgic ‘high-art’.

Utilizing deeper focus allows for a complex play of light, space, distance, obstacles and subjects. The arrangement of the framed contents becomes paramount, the subjects proportions and relationships to each other the prime creative device. The construction of a cinematic space that is detailed and nuanced becomes the main canvas of the filmmaker. Shallow focus eliminates and takes these options away, it dissolves a great deal of the problem-solving and decision making process that is the art of the Director. In shallow focus the Director is not demanded to solve problems of space, is not compelled to ask questions of arrangement and position, is relieved of the requirement to convey proximity and relationships.

A post such as this may be very confronting for some indie filmmakers who have dedicated so much of their time to extolling the virtues of shallow depth-of-field and to toiling in their colour-grading system to mimic film-stock emulsion and gamma curves. But for those more enlightened readers who feel compelled to think outside of banal convention and consider how else things might be done, I encourage you to read David Bordwells superb book ‘Figures Traced Light’ which explores in exquisite detail the lost art of Cinematic Staging and Deep-Focus.

Likewise the two links below present some interesting reading in regard to the contentious history of deep-focus and its connection to movements such as the New Wave and the idea of ‘reality’.

via Mike Jones Digital Basin : Weblog.

With all those lights and all that great looking talent, you have the perfect chance to shoot stunning, attention grabbing publicity stills. Instead of thinking of these shots as add-ons that slow down your already Super Tight production schedule, I say schedule them in and SAVE time! Do your publicity shots after the last take, before you strike the lights, that way it takes 2 minutes to get a great shot in stead of 20. Here are some shots to consider adding to your Shot List.

Close-up of lead crying or laughing

Two shot of leads arguing or being VERY expressive

Director giving notes to talent on set

Medium shot of actors pointing at lines

Actors playing with (er…um…I mean Rehearsing with) props

DP and producer with camera

Gaffer and DP or director setting lights

Writer and director framing a shot

Talent and director pigging out at craft services

People usually find these “candid,” behind the scenes shots much more interesting than a wide shot of the entire cast and crew. May I also suggest that you go ahead and feature individuals in your shots, make them STARS, but for different media outlets. Let the talent be the stars of main stream newspapers–they love that stuff. PAs can be stars in their college newspaper. Producers can be stars in business journals and newsletters. Directors and photographers can be stars for weekly newspapers and journals. I hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Rodney Robbins

via Directors–Include Publicity Shots in Your Shot List – Charlotte Film Community (Charlotte, NC) – Meetup.com.