Meet the Team

The teams have assembled, the scripts have been chosen, and the cast are being auditioned today.

We've been given the scripts to choose from to make our second 8 minute feature. This is the important one, the one which will be marked (Choices, which became Doorways -- was made to teach us how to make films), and which is worth 55% of our marks.

The dates for filming are the last weekend in February and the first weekend in March. We've gone for the earlier dates, since several of us have commitments the following weekend, which makes the timing even tighter -- but this time we have an idea of what we're doing.

We chose a script called 'Heads or Tails,' which was written by Lucy Baker. We really liked 'The Good Listener,' but had reservations about the viability of finding actors who could sign and would commit - in the space of a week.

The team making it --Four Eyes Productions (we all wear glasses) is very similar to that which made Doorways.

The one addition is Daniel Dearing who is adapting the script, with input from all the team. Daniel will also be one of the editing team during post-production, and is finding us the music.

The other four of us are the same team that Doorways, less a couple of people who have joined other groups.

Baylea Hart is responsible for scouting locations and casting during pre-production and sound on set and co-production during post-production.

Baylea will be co-producing during post-production, so with me will have the job of gathering the reams of permissions, release form and various scripts (original, final and shooting) into some sort of order.

Julia Hien is also responsible for scouting locations and casting during pre-production. On set she will take over as producer, and be co-camera person.

She'll be one of the three-person editing team post-production.

Finally, Jaeeun Jung is a Korean student studying English Language and Literature.

Jaeeun is going to be storyboarding during pre-production, will take over as Director on-set, and will be one of the editing team during post-production.

Today we have auditions, so I'll be able to introduce the rest of the team next time.

Black Swan

Yesterday we went to see Black Swan. Like many of the audience, our reaction was ‘Huh?’



Yesterday we went to see Black Swan, about which I knew absolutely nothing except that Natalie Portman has been highly praised for her performance in it as a ballet dancer. I was expecting many things, but none of them included a lurch into slasher-movie territory with a host of loud bangs and sudden jump cuts; at the end our reaction of 'huh?' seemed to be typical of many of the audience.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Nina Sayers (Portman) is an ambitious ballet dancer living at home with her domineering if well-meaning mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey). Picked to play the combined roles of Black and White Swans in Swan Lake, a combination that is not only incredibly high-profile but artistically challenging, Nina begins to crumble under the pressure.

Erica notices deep scratches on Nina’s back. Nina continually picks at her nails until they bleed. Nina hears whispers and begins to hallucinate as she seems to be descending into full-blown psychosis.

If Nina is the white swan (impresario Thomas Leroy recognizes her near-frigid perfection for the role) her rival Lily is the definitive seductive black swan. Lily always has an explanation for her behaviour, and when she doesn’t, she apologizes – after the damage is done.

In many ways, the early minutes of Black Swan perfectly encapsulate the art of film-making as we’ve been taught it. Minimal dialogue, none of it on the nose, lots of telling details, such as Nina’s cloying bedroom stuffed full of little-girl toys – and later as she tries to embrace a more adult persona, cramming them down the garbage chute.

But; but. The problem with telling details is that they don’t work if the protagonist is unreliable. Is Lily really after Nina’s role, or is she just misunderstood, easy-going, going with the flow? Is Nina her mother’s near-prisoner, or is Erica simply trying to look after her daughter? Do Nina and Lily have a night of passionate lesbian sex, or is Nina simply fantasizing?

I suspect the answer to that question, and in many ways the whole film is implied in the scene where Nina opens her door the morning after, but it's done so quickly and at the time it's significance isn't clear, that I wished afterwards that I could have taken a rewind button into the cinema.

The other problem with Black Swan is that its makers seem to be scared that their audience will get bored, so we’re given lots of jump cuts (literally at one point) and loud noises to stop us drifting off to sleep – rather as if they’ve taken Sergei Eisenstein’s view of editing as a series of images in collision rather too literally.

The film doesn’t really seem to know whether it wants to be a psychological study, a thriller or even a slasher movie. And in the end, it falls down between the two (or three) stools.

The Art (or Science) of Editing

A showing of The Cutting Edge, a 2004 documentary celebrating the centenary of development of editing, with contributions from directors and editors.


This morning in MAF we watched a 90 minute-ish film called The Cutting Edge, a 2004 documentary about the history of editing, from its inception in 1903.







The film was fascinating, and showed how actor's performances are far more reliant (than many of them would like to believe) on what happens in the cutting room, than what happens on set. A good performance can be made into an Oscar-winning one by how editors cut the images.



And presumably a good one can be made to look awful....



If I have one criticism of the interviewees, it is that many of them need to get out of the cutting room occasionally to get some perspective. Walter Murch may be a brilliant editor - and I was impressed by his focusing on eyes in the eyes of actors in Cold Mountain - but some of his analogies were wildly exaggerated or downright bizarre.

I particularly liked Election director Alexander Payne's description of editors as being like 'a sneaky politician.'

I can relate to that...

Script Example -- The Usual Suspects

How to make a film, using the opening of The Usual Suspects, and how not to make one, using some extracts from student scripts.

One of the best Making A Film seminars yet saw us study the script and film of the opening few minutes of The Usual Suspects, one of my favourite films of all time.

TUS -as I'll call it from now on-- was made on a shoestring budget. Since Bryan Singer went on to direct big budget X-men and other big budget films, I assumed it was a major release. It just goes to show that big budgets do not necessarily make better films.





A script is available here; it's worth noting that if a script is very, very close to the finished film, the chances are that it's actually been written after the film was shot. In the case of the date on this script, it's actually about 12 - 18 months prior to release date, and the script is a little more bare bones -- Keyser Soze doesn't appear in the script version of the opening scene.



What's striking about the opening sequence is the music clearly identifies the film's genre (thriller), and the judicious use of sound with the striking match, the fizz of the petrol catching and the stream of urine as Keyser Soze puts out the fire.


The opening five minutes provide a textbook example of providing an arresting opening, while the next five are an equally model example of pipe-filling, to use an industry term for setting a scene. In this case it's through a montage of action scenes.


But to contrast all of this this, we also looked at examples of badly written scripts, from detailed lists of camera shots (scripts aren't there to tell the director which shots to make but to outline action and dialogue), scripts littered with typos, to those written in past tense.

A great morning which makes we want to get hold of TUS and watch it again, leavened only by sadness at the loss of Pete Postlethwaite, whom I met briefly in a pub outside Chichester in 2000. I can't claim anything profound was said, but he seemed a genuinely nice, down-to-earth guy.

Re-visiting The Comfort Zone

Back to uni yesterday, and straight into workshopping our scripts, which was both a pleasurable and unsettling experience. Pleasurable because I'm in the comfort zone. Unsettling, because...I'm in the comfort zone. And that's something I've never experienced before in MAF.

So yesterday it was back to Bath Spa for the start of a new term. And of course, since we start on a Monday at 9am that means...Making A Film! We briought along our draft scripts, which we'd worked on over the Christmas break, and workshopped them.

It was both a pleasurable and unsettling experience. Pleasurable because for the first time in Making A Film I was in familiar territory. Which was in itself such a rare experience as make it unsettling in itself. (Typical writer, you mutter. Never happy...)

But I'm under no illusion; although it was an entirely comfortable experience it doesn't mean my script is any better than anyone else's. It's just a case that I've made my mistakes already, and while watching the example films provided by John August may have helped me tighten it up, it's no better than say, the raw but more original scripts some of my classmates brought along.

But for the time being, I'm going to enjoy a week back in the comfort zone

The Point of Film

The novel version of The Bridges of Madison County carries the best description of the purpose of photography and cinematography that I've ever read. But ironically that very description led me to ponder a question I don't have an answer to.

I’ve never seen the film version of The Bridges of Madison County, but I’m reading the novel for Genre Fiction. This may seem off-topic, by the way, but bear with me...all will become clear.



There is one point in the novel when the protagonist, Kincaid, is talking about his profession, that of photo-journalism:

She’d noticed he’d said ‘making’ pictures. “You make pictures, not take them?”

“Yes. At least, that’s how I think of it. That’s the difference between Sunday snap shooters and someone who does it for a living. When I’m finished with that bridge we saw today, it won’t look quite like you expect. I’ll have made it into something of my own, by means of lens choice, or camera angle, or general composition, and most likely by some combination of all of those.”

That’s the best description of the purpose of being a cameraman that I’ve ever seen, be it a stills photographer or a film cameraman, or any other person who uses a lens.

Which brings me to my second point: I can’t see such a passage of dialogue ever making it into a film adaptation, unless it’s in some way core to the film’s purpose. It’s too ephemeral.

So what is the point of a film adaptation, except to provide a story? In which case, why not just write one’s own story? This is not a pointless musing – one possibility among my script ideas was an adaptation of a published short story.

Any suggestions? What does a film adaptation of a written work bring to the ‘table’ apart from obliterating any mental images the reader has? In which case, isn’t it a prop for the imaginatively deficient media consumer? Hardly a ringing endorsement for an art form, is it?