Indelible Freckles

Some people say that as long as you have a wham-bang-thank-you-ma’am finish, the dreck that preceded it will be forgiven. I say that if people give up watching your film because of the preceding dreck, no-one’ll appreciate the time and care and effort you put into that big finish.

If you asked me twenty years ago for a What’s Hot and What’s Not list, amongst the big hair, stove-pipe pants, and cellphones literally the size and weight of actual bricks would be:

In those blessedly naive days, I thought filmmakers of the latter kind of film had run out of money and had to cobble together some sort of ending. Or they’d climaxed too early. Or that the film just sucked. As I got older matured, I began to appreciate endings in which the antagonist didn’t get a multiple injection of hot lead. Instead of shrieking, Shoot the yellow-bellied cocksocker! at film’s end, I found myself nodding sagely by proxy - Let him live with his/her misdeed.

It was okay because it felt appropriate. It resonated.

The best stories - and storytelling - will do that. It’s where all the elements screenwriters juggle with - plotting versus characterisation versus pacing - come together and become an experience.

Jeopardy doesn’t have to be a firefight every ten minutes. Increasing stakes doesn’t mean a progression from saving a city to saving the world. I want the protagonist to work for my hard-earned entertainment dollar. I want them to suffer. And then, once eighty or so minutes have elapsed - as with Life If Only It Was Fair - then the protagonist can prevail, whether by mushroom cloud or bare knuckle fight.

*  Which were, come to think of it, really thrillers.

If I knew five-plus years ago how hard it would be to be a professional screenwriter, I might have tried a little harder to understand the Star Trek-like technobabble that was part of the editing classes at film school. At the very least I would have been employed much more contiguously in these post-film school years.

I doubt that I’d be as happy and content as I am now, though. When I look back, I can exclaim - just like those Hallmark cards or chain-email-angels insist - I’ve come a long way, baby!

My trick to surviving, I think, is my ability to be wilfully short-sighted. Take the short film, for example. I thought I had a pretty straight-forward project: five talking heads, no gun-fights, no car-chases, a half-dozen locations, and a nine to ten-minute running time. The devil is in the details.

• Inside or out? We had just one interior. Everything else was either on the street or in the car. As the shoot approached, I realised how vulnerable we were to weather. I worried a lot. And slept little beforehand. (But it worked out.)
• Location variables. So you think you’ve picked a reasonably quiet street, right? It was quiet when you recce’ed it earlier, it’s away from busy roads - and it’s a cul de sac, for pete’s sake. All those things doesn’t stop someone within microphone range from blasting away with their weedeater. Or a truck pulling up across the road from you and unloading a mini-dozer and heap of wood. (The dialogue’s gonna be re-recorded, and the truck/dozer-driver was a sweetie and we worked around each other.)
• It’s just some people talking in a car. Did I mention that the car’s travelling at the time - like, the car is moving - it’s on the road - while the actors are delivering lines and the camera is rolling. When the budget doesn’t stretch to a low-loader (a really low trailer towed by a truck) ablaze with lights and possies for a camera and attendent crew, you make do. (And I’m really happy with what we got - no make-do’s about it.)

I obviously like to kvetch.

In the end, in the heat of of any stressful moment, I’m always struck by two thoughts:

The Sarah Connor Chronicles premiere on New Zild televisions tonight. No pressure or anything, Mr Friedman but those long gaps between posts had better be worth it.(I’ll have to record it as I’ll be explaining to Mr Tripuraneni the cultural subleties of using paper-scissors-rock to make critical editing decisions.)

(Failing that, thanks to my Writer’s Toolkit (which I’ll post about at some point), I’ll be strapped.)

UPDATE: with many, many apologies to Mr Reid, this Box Watch post is a week premature. (According to the wiki, the television series side-steps Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, with Mr Friedman referring to its events happening in an alternate timeline. Whatevs, dude: that last film just sucked ass.)

Yep, I’m a day late, and although normally I’d blame it on Samoan time or some such rubbish, I actually thought I had a whole other week to do it in. But uh-uh.

It’s a work in progress that I’ll add to over the coming weeks. Alu la ‘ia!*.

* - Samoan; Go on then!

As post-production winds down on To’ona’i, Lucy Vee’s excellent series on genre (the thriller article is a must for such geeks) has been a nice kinda welcome as I catch up on blogs before I settle down to the next project.

Which is… hrm.

Last night, whilst tearing my nose-hairs out over an imminent deadline, I rashly responded to Mr Woods‘ post on the Jules, Ben and Dave Forum guild forum.

Apparently, I’ve got plans.

Chop-chop.

… Once I’ve devoured Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night: The Complete Series (thanks TradeMe!).

Mr Tripuraneni has some, uh, musings on the post process to date.

Day 4

The rough cut thrown together over Days 2-3 was, if I may say so, a decent start. (Editing a twelve-minute short film was a daunting enough project to grind through - but the thought of cutting a ninety-minute plus feature still shuts down various areas of my brain.)

A moment of self-discovery late in the morning: doing the rough cut myself has dealt to a hitherto unvoiced fear of not knowing if I have enough coverage or not, and the paralysis that would ensue. There is never enough coverage - and if you do have enough coverage, there are never enough takes to give you ‘options’. But instead of being paralysed, I was forced to try different approaches like new sequences and new narrative structures - finding new ways of telling the same story.

Where I had started Day 3’s rough cut of 27+ minutes, by the end of the day, I had reduced it to twelve minutes.

Day 5

Twelve minutes can still be an eternity. I’ve sat through ten-minute-long short films that have felt interminable. Although I want a deliberate pace for To’ona’i, I definitely didn’t want it to drag. The cut just didn’t drag for me. Despite numerous trims and nips here and there, they made only a few seconds difference.

Two sets of fresh eyes were railroaded into an impromptu screening. One pair liked the pacing and story and acting. The other pair thought the cinematography was the best thing since sliced pan. The cinematography has been getting such good press, I get a glimmer now of the attractiveness of a possessory credit:

I took the cut to Mr Tripuraneni who pronounced it ‘good’ on arrival. He has since taken over: he’s going to tighten it up, clean up the audio and give it a quick grade. Despite his teasing about giving the whole film a hallucinatory feel - or possibly a Michael Bay-fired blur of images cut to Celine Dion warblings - I never once took the bait. I was too sick of watching and tweaking and watching and tweaking the footage.

He could do what he damned well liked.

Within reason.

Day 6

After I told The Goddess the joke about the sloth who’s mugged by a gang of delinquent snails (when asked at the police station what happened to him, the sloth says, I don’t know - it all just happened so quickly…), she pointed out that after a week of frowning and groaning and sighing at the hired MacBook screen, my mood had lightened considerably.

“Really?” I asked. She gave me Her look.

But I was having so much fun at the time.

Yesterday, I threw clips down onto the timeline just so all my eggs were in one basket.  It’s called an assemble edit.

Today, I’ve been trying to make a story out of them.  The more time I spend with the footage, the better an idea I have of what I’m doing. It’s tedious work.  But it has its moments - I give you a txt-exchange between my post-production whip supervisor and I from this morning:

ME (0828):  JESUS ON A STICK I HATE EDITING

HIM (0830):  So you finished the assemble edit i presume :)

ME (0831):  IM NOT TALKING TO YOU

HIM (0833): No you are not. You are just texting

ME (0833): Assemble was 30+ minutes. Am cutting now. Am kinda sorta maybe getting a feel for things. Slowly. But. Surely.

HIM (0836): You wanted to do the rough cut, so dont you point finger at me amigo. :) Make sure you [EDITING TECHNO-BABBLE.]

ME (0840): Stop interrupting. Genius at work. (Thanks for tip about [TREK-LIKE EDITING TECHNO-BABBLE THAT I ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD]. A typically excellent idea from yourself.

HIM (0842): Oh yeah i am at work - you didnt have to state the obvious. Now back to the keyboard for you ;).

Just typical of him to get the last word in.

But who’s blogging right now, huh?

We wrapped today.  (Considers executing a little happy dance; thinks better of it in case of total body collapse.)

We had a wrap lunch of sorts yesterday as Mr Eversden and his ever-present assistant, Mr Hall, were no longer required for their lighting expertise - the camera was going to be operated from within the car, come what may.  I’d been warned that Mr Eversden could be a bit of a curmudgeon but I found him to be patient and accommodating and utterly professional.  Another name to ask for specifically when I can afford to pay full rates.

Today it was just our actors, the unflappable Mr Amosa and the irrepressible Ms Leilua, our grizzled DOP Mr Meikle, and myself.  Second unit stuff, I think this is called:  getting ‘dirty’ over-shoulder stuff of our actors driving around the city, catching shots of this or that guerilla-styles, capturing moments that may or may not come in handy. It’s always better to have options in editing, than not have enough footage at all.

Our day was five hours long.  After four looong days (I’d be up at 0600, out the door by 0630, home by 2100 with production stuff to attend to, followed by bedtime at 0000*), it was… I can’t find the words to describe how happy I was to see my family in the day time.  It sounds incredibly saccharine but it’s true of my relationship with The Goddess:  time apart is painful.

Sometime this week I’ll post about more specific things - like how could I possibly fill up a day like that with a mere short film, or why in the gods’ name would I do such a thing.  Until then, I’m off to bed.

*  Yes, this was only for four days.  Yes, I am a wuss.  And yes, right now, I don’t care.  But I’ll remember you said that.  I remember things like that. 

I was selfishly hoping that we could wrap today.  I hoped (not quite prayed, but came close) that what coverage/shots we’d got for the montage would be sufficient.

Mr Meikle, through harsh and bitter experience, knows better than to take the hints of a tiring and decreasingly coherent multi-hyphenate.  So we’re shooting tomorrow.

Oh well.