Experimental Filming – Full

Over the past week or so, I have been planning and also filming and editing a short, experimental film together in a group of four. From conceptualisation to screening, the entire process took place over the course of 7 days, which is a fast turnaround and doesn’t give a huge amount of flexibility in the ability to do pickups, nor leave a huge amount of time for post production. The film went from being nothing but a concept in my head to having a rough cut within a single day, taking about 7 hours in total. The day felt a lot longer than that up until the point were rushing through trying to get a finished project uploaded, where it felt like we hadn’t had any time at all. I loved every minute of it. A stressful day to be certain, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. This was my directorial debut, the first media to ever come out with me listed as the director, and was, as such, a project incomparable for me.

Before I get into a lot of behind the scene type talk and so you understand the context, watch the 2-minute film:

 

Being the director of this project and being in charge of the whole production was easily both at once my favourite and least favourite position on a film that I’ve ever held, and it’s all for the same reason: as director, it all ultimately falls to me. The director is in control of the production and the ultimate arbiter of taste, meaning the final product is an expression of the director’s. This is especially true for me in the case of this film because in addition to being the director and teller of the story, I also did all the cinematography and lighting as well as crafting the story of the film with help from the others in my crew. Despite all this responsibility, I loved it and greatly enjoyed directing, and will pursue directing again. The biggest trouble I have directing is that sometimes there is a translation issue from what’s in my head to what gets communicated to others. While I love the control and ability to tell the story my way that directing gives me, all the clear and yet concise communication required is something I think that I’m particularly adept at yet. I seem to struggle the most communicating specifics of my wants and wishes with others, but generalities are easy. Again, this problem could be more closely tied to this specific film than to my directing in general, as the entirety of this film is relating abstract concepts to specific objects, and I have no other directing experience of my own to compare to. The director needs to have the vision of the piece (which I did) and to guide the rest of the crew through the creation of this vision (which is where I fell down a little). Some of this is down to practice, certainly, but I also think that there are things I can do to try and improve outside of set as well.

Because this project was an experimental film, I got a glimpse behind the curtain of what the creative process for these less ‘standard’ films could be like. The conversations we were having about this project during its creation were totally different to the conversations I’ve had in any of my other projects. Creative conversations about more traditional narrative films revolve around the characters, their internal motivations and how to get this across on-screen, and around the beats of the story, the arcs involved. Every conversation is about “How does this help the story?” This is not a negative in any way, this is the way it has to be. But with this experimental film, where the story was told entirely symbolically, the conversations were all about “Does this show what we are trying to show?”, along with the ever present fearful “Does our meaning come across at all?” This is something I haven’t really appreciated before, as the projects I have been a part of before this one had fairly literal stories. The transfer from the question of “How can we best tell this story?” to “Can we tell this story?” is not an insignificant one, and I think one that will become more and more important to carefully consider as I work on more and more complicated stories and methods of telling them. Happily though, in this case, I firmly believe we succeeded in telling the story we set out to. Backing this up, all the feedback that we have received so far on this film has been overwhelmingly positive, and the meaning we were trying to express has been picked up by the audience without feeling forced or overbearing.

The main point that I picked up on from this process is that even when the style of film is changed, and the literal is ignored in favour of the symbolic, audiences are still capable of picking up on the meanings intrinsic to the film. That even though the style of the film may be fluid and unusual compared to what the audience is used to seeing, that doesn’t automatically make the film impossible to watch, enjoy or understand. Style is something that can be messed around with and does not have to be secondary to narrative in all respects. Narrative is not the be-all and end-all of all films. The other key point which I had driven home to me is that an audience is intelligent enough to understand symbolism within films and can be trusted to make an interpretation of what they have seen. Maybe this is just the cynic in me, but this was not something I took for granted, and so throughout the whole planning and filming process, I was worried that our meaning would be far too abstract for the audience to catch on. This project showed me that the things that are most important to a director (in this case the symbolism involved in the film and the metaphor itself) will shine through, as they are the things that most time and effort are put into.

There were quite a few films, both feature-length and short, that inspired me in the creation of this short film and influenced the ideas generated, but I’ll list some of the standouts. Primary amongst my inspirations was French new wave cinema (or my generalised understanding of it) especially the films of Jean Luc Godard, the filmmaker of that era whom I have seen the most work of, from which I took a lot of inspiration for the editing style,  pacing and tone, which in turn influenced how I believed the story should be told. ‘The Alphabet’ by David Lynch was another inspiration, from which I took the potential power of using pure symbolism in the film, and experiencing the hold that had. Despite the meaning wasn’t clear upon first viewing in Lynch’s short film did not in any way dissuade the viewer from the knowledge that there was meaning hidden within the piece, and that it was okay to have to decipher the film. The meaning didn’t have to be literal; a very freeing concept once embraced. Finally, Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, particularly the pre-man and post-Jupiter segments, the less narrative sections, which proved that meaning could be understandable upon first viewing without detracting from the quality of the work. That is, making something indecipherable was not automatically the same as making something worthwhile.

Some of these inspirations come across in simple ways: I think that the editing is reminiscent of the editing of French New Wave cinema, even if the style of film is vastly different. The film is entirely symbolic in order to get across a meaning without being blatantly obvious with the message. The lack of literal elements within the film makes the meaning less clear, but the meaning shines through clearly enough that the audiences we have shown the film to have grasped the meaning without an intense analysis or breakdown required. Additionally, I made the choice to use champagne as the liquid the objects are dropping into as champagne has the air of high class about it. By that, I mean that champagne is seen as a sophisticated drink which is consumed by the successful, who is the prime target of the meaning of the film.

However, despite all of this positive feedback and things I think we did well, it is far from a perfect film, and there are things I believe we could have done better. The objects which we dropped into the champagne could have been more specifically chosen rather than being whatever we had to hand, and so could have been used to add another layer to the story by creating a profile of the person that owned the objects. This is something we tried to take into consideration with the objects that we had, but unfortunately thought of this too late and had to make do with what was available to us, and so it seemed more like trying to shape what we had rather than an intentional element. Additionally, while I like the edit that was presented, I do think that is still some tightening that we could do to really enhance what we have and improve it in a minor way. Finally, while there was reasoning and consideration put into the choice of liquid used, the meaning of using champagne specifically didn’t really come across. While this didn’t stop the whole meaning from translating to the audience, it is a detail that could be pushed to add a further layer to the film as a whole.

Despite these possible improvements, I am very pleased with what we produced in this film, especially considering the limited timeframe involved. As an added bonus, I greatly enjoyed participating in this project and am going to try and use it as a springboard for future projects as well as a learning exercise to use to improve my practice overall, and my directing specifically. For something that seems so simple, it is amazing the amount of depth that could be incorporated into it, and I certainly learned a lot from it.

Pitching a Winner, and how I didn’t.

So not that long ago I delivered a pitch to a group, which received the response of a resounding lack of success. However, an pitch that had a similar core theme and genre was successful. So, disappointing that my pitch do not get greenlit, but at least I know that it wasn’t just based upon the theme, tone and genre of the idea. This does however lead to the question of why was it unsuccessful, which is something that I’ve been pondering for awhile now.

The first step I took was I tried to understand a little more about pitches, and the art of delivering them. To this end, I did a little research and discovered that I had badly misunderstood what I was doing when creating my pitch. I had focussed on all the things that made the story interesting for me, when instead the pitch ought to be totally focussed on the audience it is delivered to. As Caroline Van den Brul (2013) puts it “The Audience is the compass which should shape the shape and choice of content in an effective piece of communication.” She goes on the suggest that an effective pitch has to connect with an audience by acknowledging their needs, to stimulate an audience by crafting them an experience, and to be understood by an audience by know what you really wish to convey.

But it’s not all down to knowing the audience. Another nugget of knowledge that I dug up in my research was that the person presenting the pitch is as scrutinised and important as the idea itself the pitch is about. Even if the idea or story being sold is strong, if the person doing the selling cannot hold an audience or keep their interest or trust, the pitch is lost (Friedmann, J. 2000). Additionally, the person leading the pitch has to be able to convincingly sell the idea, as well as allow those being pitched to to understand the genre and audience of the story being pitched (Parks, S. 2012). All of this should be succinct and clear, without confusing or misleading, either accidently or on purpose, the people being pitched too. It all seems quite obvious now.

Now armed with all this extra information I should have looked at before delivering my pitch, I was able to look back at what I delivered and determine that the first reason is that the proposal that I was pitching was rejected was that it was reasonably underdeveloped, and had quite a lot of work required on it before it would turn into something really great. The result of this under preparation on my part is that the idea that I thought was so strong didn’t come across to my audience very well. This was not helped by the content of my pitch either, as I focussed more on details and seeming forgot about the bigger picture. It was a trap that I fell into without even realising it; I understood the core concept very well, so I didn’t really feel the need to explore it in great detail. Of course this meant that while I knew the core concept I had inside and out, no-one in the audience had a grasp on what I was trying to talk about. I massively misunderstood what I should talk about and what the audience wanted to hear. Basically, three quarters of my speech was basically tuned out by an audience who rightly couldn’t be bother with the details of a concept they had no understanding of. The end result of this is that the pitchees did not have a clear idea in their head of what the hell I was talking about or what I wanted to make. This is the critical point here: because the audience couldn’t envision what I could, they didn’t see it as a reality or something that would work to make. And when you get pitched something that you don’t think will work, you don’t greenlight it.

I tend to think of this as a learning experience. Honestly, I’m not too cut up that my pitch was not successful because if it succeeded, I’d just go about thinking that the quality of pitch that I delivered was acceptable and was going to succeed in other contexts, even larger, more serious ones, which is just simply untrue. Since I’ve been forced to raise the quality of the rest of my pitches and content in order to increase the likelihood that they will be successful.

On the plus side, I did get to see quite a few other pitches, including a few that were successful. The main thing that I noticed in the pitches that were successful is that the person delivering the pitch was part of the the pitch. The research I had done too late was right; the person pitching matters as much as the concept or story itself. The people who were most successful were the ones most in touch with their audience, and the ones who knew what their audience wanted; what they found funny, or scary, or interesting. The ideas were always clear, if sometimes underdeveloped slightly, but the pitcher carried the pitch through to success by interfacing with the audience and forging a connection.

These are hard lessons to learn, but I’m glad I did. The only way from here is up, and I can only get better as I practice and deliver more and more pitches.

 

Bibliography

Film finance handbook : how to fund your film. (2007). London: Netribution.

Friedmann, J. (2000). How to Make Money Scriptwriting (2). Bristol, GB: Intellect.

Parks, S. (2012). The Insider’s Guide to Independent Film Distribution (2). St. Louis, US: Focal Press.

Van, D. B. C. (2013). Crackle and Fizz : Essential Communication and Pitching Skills for Scientists : Essential Communication and Pitching Skills for Scientists. Singapore, US: ICP.

Lessons Learned

So recently I partnered up with a friend of mine and we tried our hand at creating a short film to a brief. The brief was quite a tricky one actually; to create a short film, 60 seconds long, which tells a narrative and relates to the theme of blood. Additionally, this was a project modeled after The ABCs of Death (IMDb), where 26 different teams were all asked to fulfill this brief, but each given a different letter of the alphabet to draw inspiration from. The letter my partner and I were given was F. After developing and ultimately dismissing several ideas, we settled on F is for Flight/Fight, a horror concept trying to use tropes in a different way. We wanted a young innocent girl running away in fear from a hulking killer with a large knife through a dark forest, a classic horror scenario. The twist in the tale was that the killer was inexperienced and ill-prepared, and so corners the girl but botches the final kill. In the struggle, the girl would be able to gain the upper hand and turn the tables, killing the killer. This was the idea. In execution, however, what we ended up with was an underexposed glorified chase sequence, with a conclusion of a dude with a knife stumbling and a girl taking the chance to tackle him and stab him with the dropped knife. So obviously things went wrong along the way, because the end result was not what we were hoping for or trying to get. The question now is, what went wrong?

The hardest part of the creative process was coming up with a concept that we both liked, that was achievable, and that connected strongly with the theme. The hard part about satisfying us as creatives was that we wanted it to tell a concise and yet cohesive story, but as beginners and students we were obviously reaching for the stars in terms of the complexity that we wanted to pack in there. These difficulties were compounded as we rejected several ideas that were more achievable (read: less nuanced, simpler stories, simpler locations, etc.), but that we thought lacked a strong story, or that got too far away from the core ‘blood’ theme. We wanted something interesting, and a hulking killer before they became established and comfortable as a killer was and is interesting to us. We failed to take into account how difficult to show on screen this would be, especially within a 60 second timeframe.

This was a core problem that cause the end product to be so different from what we set out to create. the story we tried to convey with quite complex and nuanced, and we simply did not have strong enough storytelling and character setup to get the story across within 60 seconds. The trap we fell into was that because we spent time developing and creating the character and scenario, we assumed all of the traits that were so obvious to us would be obvious to others, and so didn’t really spend time trying to work out how to properly develop these traits on screen. We’d done it in our heads, surely that would come through on camera, right? It’s a hard lesson to learn until you get the feedback from people who watch your creation that your character did not at all come across. Since it happened to me, however, it’s something that I’ve tried to take into all the projects I’ve done since then.

Another weakness in the project is our apparent lack of planning, demonstrated by the minimal lighting, which resulting in a very underexposed film, as well as minimal and almost invisible production design elements. These elements are invisible at least partially because of the inadequate lighting. This was not really brought about by a lack of planning although that was a contributing factor for sure. More so it was a lack of understanding and a failure to comprehend how long filming would take, coupled with a failure to properly prepare for possible and probable issues that it should have been obvious we would run into. Time was the main one. The original concept was for the final climactic shot to be silhouetted in front of the setting sun. we kind of shot ourselves in the foot with that one, especially as we didn’t really have a strong idea of how sets are run or how much time it takes to get done so all our scheduling went out the window instantly.

All in all, this project was more of a learning experience, rather than a triumphant success. The traps that we ended up falling into are dangerous to the health of any project, but the good thing about it was that the project we ended up testing all these traps out on was quite small scale with relative unimportance. The lessons contained within it, however, are of massive importance, and are things I will keep in mind for a long time coming.