Meant To Be: A Music Video & Learning Experience

I was a part of creating something new! A music video, to be more precise, for “Meant To Be”, a song from upcoming Australian musician Demi Cruickshanks, whose SoundCloud can be found here. It is not only new in that it’s freshly made but also new in that I’ve never been part of a music video before and the experience was different to how I expected, meaning through the process, I learned a great deal. I will update this post soon with a link to the uploaded video so you all can watch it, so keep an eye out.

Some of the storyboards we used to develop each story.

While this was a client project, the client we were working for was not particularly demanding of us, and so I feel that this is a poor representation of what a client project in the real world would work as. The main difference between the producing this video rather than previous projects that I have worked on is the genre of the content we created, which had a much larger impact on the process than we believed it would, even as we were undertaking the process. I’ve certainly learned quite a lot about the creation of music videos but gained a lot less knowledge about the process of working with and for a client. The main difference was that we checked in with the artist about where the video was at in the creative process at different stages around that process, which is something that does not need to be done when there is no client, and so no one outside the project who has a measure of creative control over it. I can see that this could potentially be a large issue that would have to be tackled, especially for larger scale productions with much more time, effort and most importantly money poured into them, where clients and/or producers and/or advertising agency representatives have final say over the creative direction of a project that they were not remotely involved with before that point. I can see myself having to learn to deal with those types of interactions because at the moment I’m not sure I would be able to handle too well.
During the process of creating this music video, there were some problems, both minor and major, which arose and had to be dealt with in order to end up with a finished product at all. Some of the minor problems we experienced were things like actual athletes practising on the track we were filming on at the same time, without us being allowed to interrupt their routines, or having very limited space and powerpoints to work with in the bedroom we were filming in, or very nearly or even very actually running behind schedule. However, these types of problems both crop up on every film set and are quite straightforward to deal with, so are hardly worth mentioning really, more facts of life than serious problems. The major problems were where things got difficult. The biggest example of this type of near show-stopping problem that we ran headfirst into was that at no point during production did we record in-camera audio. This is a massive and classic rookie mistake, and ultimately the blame for this one lies with me. I was in charge of camera and just had it in my head that, because we were making a music video and no audio from the set would be used, that we wouldn’t need it at all, and so I didn’t bother to record it. I didn’t go out of my way to not record audio, I just didn’t bother to check one way or the other. Lesson learned: ALWAYS RECORD IN-CAMERA AUDIO. Even if you don’t think you need it. The actual problem that we found was because we didn’t have in camera audio, syncing the video of the artist singing her song to the audio of the actual song became very very difficult, and had to be done entirely by hand, with only visual confirmation. The brute force method: keep working at it until it works. But this was far from the only headache we had. One of our locations fell through on the morning that we were meant to shoot, prompting some emergency meetings and restructuring of what we were going to shoot, how we were going to show it, and where we would have it take place. We pulled together as a team brilliantly and worked out a stopgap solution, but ultimately the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. A final large problem we had during the process of creating this video was actually a lack of time dedicated to post-production, due to us as a group having weak time management and shooting quite late into the process. Almost immediately after we shot, the deadline was looming, and so creating a functional video that we were happy with was a tight squeeze into the time that we had left.

The bedroom we used before production design worked their magic.

We were not completely without our successes, however. Overall, the story that we were trying to tell came across worked, and translated to the viewer, which is something I’m quite proud of, given the storytelling restrictions of not dialogue and pushing 3 stories all through at once, parallel to one another. Additionally, our auditions ran very smoothly, and the actors that were cast in all the roles were both very easy to get along with (with a singular exception) and very dedicated to the project. This particularly applied to our leads, with whom we all got along with very well and who were happy to put in all the time and effort necessary, without hesitation or complaint. Also, the amount of footage that we captured throughout production was almost perfect for the length of the video, meaning that we were able to accurately predict how long each story should go for, and how much coverage we needed for this story to not just come across to the audience, but also keep things interesting and dynamic.

I think that on the whole, we delivered a project that is serviceable, if not overwhelmingly fantastic. There are some great moments in the video, but the video as a whole is kind of cliched and falls into a lot of tropes. This was not outside the realm of the client’s expectation, but other people that we showed the video to have pulled this up as a problem, explaining it seemed like we were not particularly creative in coming up with the project, which obviously doesn’t reflect super well on us. Despite this, I think that we did meet the brief, we just didn’t exceed any expectations and create something transcendental. I’m not trying to say that client expectations were low, but they were certainly lower than the expectations than those of others who were around the project, and it’s these higher levels that we were not able to meet.

The bedroom after production design worked their magic.

Overall, given the problems that we encountered or created for ourselves during the production of this project, I think that it turned out alright. The process and final product could have been improved with the recording of audio, more airtight securing of locations and better time management, but none of these things were deal breakers. The core reason that the music video is not as good as we wanted it to be, and nowhere near the level that it could have reached, with the major thing holding us back on this project being ourselves, and our approach to this project. You see, we approached this music video as we would a short film. Trying to impart a narrative, following continuity, attempting to have narrative pacing, focussing on trying to put subtext into the visuals, rather than allow the song to give the visuals depth. We thought more in terms of how having to keep to the beat and themes of the song, and not being able to incorporate dialogue or sound effect limited us in telling a cohesive story, rather than embracing the experimental nature of music videos and freeing ourselves from sticking to a rigid structure. I view is all as a learning experience though, and I’m glad that I did it. I learned a great deal which I am keen to take into future projects, and I really want to try something like this again soon.

Working with Actors

So recently I attended a masterclass run by a very experienced director to learn a little bit more about the curious process of how directors and actors interact and collaborate to craft a performance. I went into this class having recently completed a short acting course for a similar purpose: to understand how actors create a performance so that I can better appreciate and communicate with actors when I’m directing. This meant that going into this class, I had some understanding of what goes into making a performance out of a script, at least for me. Throughout the class, we took a very Stanislavski based approach to script analysis and crafting an acting performance, which is understandable as it seems to be the most common approach to acting and directing. However, while I have heard of it and am familiar with the basic concepts of the Stanislavski approach, it is not really something that I am very comfortable with or have very much experience with. Because of this, it takes me awhile to get into the headspace of breaking down scripts and I sometimes tend to neglect some of the details which really need attention. It’s something I’m trying to get better at, through practice, practice, practice.

Going into the class, I did not really know what to expect, and only had some vague details about how the class was going to run and what we were going to actually be doing, but I was excited about it nonetheless. As it turned out, the class was run in two distinct halves. The first half was us as a class watching the director leading the class work as she worked with two trained actors on a short, 1-page exchange of dialogue. We watched the three of them go through the stages of creating a performance together, primarily working out and implementing given circumstances, objectives and tactics to create something interesting, dynamic and nuanced. This was an interactive collaboration, not just between the actors and the director, but also included us as the beginners watching on. We were asked for feedback and ideas and were frequently asked for our understandings of different elements so that we were not left behind, without understanding. It was a very informative class, and over the course of just a couple of hours learned a great deal, not just by being explains different terms and concepts, but also just by observing a confident and capable director interact with established actors, listening to the way they all talked and related to one another, observing the power dynamic in the interaction and how questions were brought up and corresponding decisions made by all parties.

The second half of the class was different to the first but built upon the same concepts. The difference was, now we were expected to apply all the concepts we had just covered to do our own breakdown of a different single page script. After breaking into pairs and spending some time doing this and meeting with the director to discuss what we had come up with and the strengths and weaknesses of the directorial choices that we were making, we came together as a group again. Out of the large group, the director then chose several pairs out who went up in front of the class to discuss their concept, and to then get another pair of students to come up and be their actors, whom they would attempt to direct in order to get the performance that they wanted out of them. Out of 3 pairs chosen to present their ideas and 3 pairs chosen to act, I was a part of none of these. However, one of the groups that were chosen had come up with a remarkably similar set of given circumstances and character motivations as we had, so we kind of got to second hand see the effects and feedback our ideas would have generated. Overall though, through the feedback the director gave all the groups, and just watching how their given circumstances influenced how the actors played their characters, was not only enjoyable but was also a valuable learning experience. Even though the session explored a process much closer to a rehearsal rather than anything that would happen on set, it gave me a great deal of insight about how much power the decisions a director makes have, even the small little things that I wouldn’t have previously considered at all.

It’s an interesting thing to witness because it opens up a lot of questions about my practice and how they should change in future. The main point I took away from all this was how easy it is to fall into the trap of result directing, and how much of a negative impact that this can have on the performances your actors give. But the other point was how much power the small little details and ideas can have over crafting a performance and getting the best out of actors. So far I haven’t really had the opportunity to direct all that much. Or at all, really. So while these lessons can’t help me give context and greater understanding to my former directorial attempts, I think they will serve me greatly in all the attempts to come.

Green Screens and Post Learning

So semi-recently I was involved with a very small shoot involving a green screen, designed to teach us about green screens, their setup, lighting involved and all the post production elements required in order to replace the green screen with the desired image. More interestingly, the shot we had to composite a plate image into, the one with the green screen part to it, was a dolly shot (a moving shot), which meant that the set was moving at a different rate to the green screen, and so this differential needed to be accommodated for in post.

The first step in this process is, of course, the setup of both the set and the green screen. The set was set up with a ‘window’, behind which a green screen was set up about 5 meters further back, and around which there could be no green objects so that they did not interfere with the key that would be necessary for the compositing to take place. Additionally, the green screen had to be large enough to totally fill the window at all times, so the limits of the shot movement had to be settled upon first. This was a bit of a feedback loop, however, as there was a limit to the size that the green screen could be, which limited which movements were possible. Once these limits were decided and both the set and green screen were set up, the lighting had to be adjusted on both to make sure the video at the end was of a high quality. Lighting the set is a problem in and of itself, but this problem was not affected by the inclusion of the green screen. However, we did have to make sure that the lighting on the set, particularly the time of day and direction of the lighting, was consistent with the lighting that would exist in the plate shot (the shot superimposed onto the green screen), which we shot later that afternoon. The lighting of the green screen itself was an issue that I had not come across before, so it was lucky there were experts on hand teaching us. Turns out, a green screen should be lit very flatly, so that the entire screen is a single shade of green, with as little fluctuation or noise as possible. This is so the key (the selecting of the green colour to be digitally removed from the shot) is uniform and of a higher quality, or accuracy, meaning that there are no green lines around the outside of everything or green sparkles throughout that we were compositing into the shot.

When you set up a green screen, however, you don’t just set up a green screen. You also have to place the green screen tracking markers, small marks or crosses of a different colour so that the movement of the screen itself can be seen relative to the movement of the foreground set. This is a largely ‘invisible’ part of the process, as it is one of the last things done before the shot is taken, and is never seen outside of the post-production process, and perhaps as a result of this, it was a part of the process which I didn’t know about. The purpose of these tracking markers, if you were wondering, is to give reference to how fast the movement of the green screen was in relation to the movement of the set. The difference between these 2 speeds will increase as the distance between the set and green screen increases. Another way of saying that is that the further away from the camera the green screen is, the slower it will move, while the set stays at the same speed while it is close to camera. However, the further away from the set the green screen is, the larger it has to be to completely fill the space in the shot it needs to, and the harder it is to light the whole screen evenly. But if the screen is too close, then light from the screen will bounce back into the set, which can both disrupt the lighting setup for the set, and look totally unnatural depending on what the green screen is being replaced with. It’s all a balancing act, and I’m glad that the first time that I encountered these problems was in a controlled exercise, rather than something where the final result was drastically important. There has to be a minimum of 3 tracking markers to create a plane (as in a 2D surface, rather than an aircraft) which moved at a different rate to the plane of the window. The markers were positioned to be as far apart as possible while still all remaining visible at all times in the moving shots. This meant that the marks had to be moved in between different shots, and again, wouldn’t have been something I realised before doing a take and noticing in the frame. It also means that for shots where the camera doesn’t move, these markers become totally redundant. The marks themselves have to be sized big enough to be clearly visible, but not so large as to overpower the green, and had to remain as separate and distinct marks, so can’t overlap in any way.

The plate shot seems like the simplest part of this whole process, but as I discovered, there are far more technical consideration for the plate shot that need to be taken into account than I realised. These include that the plate shot has to be shot with the same lens as the green screen shot, and all the details of the green screen camera shot (such as the distance from the camera to the green screen, any angles involved) must be conserved over shots between the green screen and the plate. It makes sense once you think about it because it ensures that the background appears and behaves as it should once it is composited into the shot. However, it’s one of those things that, had I not been in the presence of people that knew what they were doing inside and out, I probably would have forgotten to measure in the first place, and so would have been unable to faithfully recreate these factors, meaning I would end up with a final product that would just look off.

Despite all of these obstacles and challenges involved, life on set actually went really well and it felt like we were able to easily overcome or avoid all of these potential trip ups. This was, of course, due to the fact that we have advanced knowledge sources helping us every step of the way: if we tried to accomplish this on our own without all of this expert help and advice, we would have ended up with a disaster, I have no doubt. It was only because we had experts there helping us that we didn’t have to learn all these lessons the hard way and end up with an absolutely disastrous final product.

The actual composite was the part where we were left on our own a lot more, meaning it felt a lot more challenging. We still did get some expert pointers but were left more on our own to encounter any problems that showed up and learn first hand what the point of all the precautions we took on set were for. And even with the help we got, problems did show up. Because we recorded in cinema lock, the colour space was compressed and the LUT we tried to use to correct this didn’t work perfectly, causing a lot more colour grading to be done. Additionally, the colour grade was difficult to get to the stage where the colours popped without creating a huge amount of noise in the green of the green screen. The noise then makes it difficult to get a decent key off the green, so then the key has to be expanded and includes all other green objects in the room, making it so that more layers have to be added to the composition to add a mask over the top, so that only the green of the green screen is replaced by the plate shot. Despite this, I can’t even imagine all the problems that would have shown up if we hadn’t had expert help. 

Overall this project was very interesting to be a part of because I learned a lot more than I thought I would. It gave me an appreciation of all the difficulties involved in green screening that I didn’t know about, and I already thought it seemed difficult. I’m glad then that I did this exercise because, for me, the best way of learning is doing and seeing the process done, seeing the mistakes be made (or making them), or seeing them purposefully avoided. It helps me learn far more than just being told “a green screen needs to be lit flatly”, to see a green screen be lit flatly and understand the reason why. I fully recommend you to practice messing around with green screens if you have the opportunity because it is very interesting and different filming experience. If you do, however, make sure you follow the process through post-production as well, because that is where a lot of the learning takes place, and you see all the effects of the measures you take on set. Well worth the effort.

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.

Stuff I’ve made.

So through the last 3 months or so I have had quite a lot to do, and quite a lot of projects all on the go, some simultaneously, some spread out. The upshot is, I have been quite productive over the last while, and I wanted to take a minute to reflect on and share what I’ve created, or helped to create. Also I’ve been pretty busy these past couple weeks and so I’m pretty tired while writing this, which is my excuse for the sass.

Firstly, I was a camera operator on a music video shoot which took place over the course of a single afternoon and evening, but which resulted in footage of three different songs by singer-songwriter Ben Clements. I would love to show you a whole video, or at least a section thereof, but honestly my connection to the project ended once I had finished helping to pack up the set, and all I know about the project at this point is that it’s not finished or released yet. Nevertheless, I do have a few set photos and a photo of one of the shots I got, so I can at least show you something.

Next up of the ‘stuff I made’ list is a wedding that I helped film. I was one of two people running round with video cameras, and ended up capturing some great moments. This is finished, but I don’t really feel that it is my place to share someone else’s wedding video with the world, so instead you’ll have to settle for some screenshots of the location and hope that they do the video justice.

Next up is a short, slightly non-narrative single shot that I was gaffer on, which in this context means a partner and I created the look of all the lighting seen. In addition I was grip and assistant camera, so I also set up the jib the camera is on as well as setting up the camera itself, but that’s beside the point really. The point is: look at the pretty lighting. Also, this doesn’t have credits yet because I am not much of an editor.

Another thing that I made was something that was all me, and also something that I haven’t actually made yet. Confused? What I have done is write the story, find a location and do a test shoot, which includes setting up the lighting, camera and dressing the set to see what the final product should look like. Everything you see here was all me, but I was mostly focussing on the lighting and dressing the set here, so those are the main takeaways from this. I could show video, but honestly screenshots are all that are necessary, so that’s all you get.

Another thing that I made all by myself (aside from a friend of mine who has never had anything to do with films) is a small scale passion project that this friend and I have been joking about for quite a few months now. This is us wondering what happens to a pokemon inside a pokeball, and inventing an answer to that question. It is supposed to be quite campy, but I was not prepared for how bad I look on camera, and so I refuse to show the whole video off. Also I haven’t finished editing it yet, and I’m not showing off unfinished work either. Screenshots it is. Also, through the process of making this over the course of a day, I discovered exactly why film crews are more than one person who is also trying to act. That is difficult.

So another this that I have made that doesn’t really have a purpose except to prove I can do it is a set that I dressed with a partner. As we didn’t actually film anything on the set except for behind the scenes stuff I can’t show you the final product created on this scene, but I can show you what it looked like on camera. I was the production designer on this one, and I actually quite enjoyed myself, even though I didn’t think I would.

Finally, the other project that I worked on was something that I genuinely cannot show you anything of because I don’t have any of the footage. The placeholder name it was given that just never got changed to a real name was Project X, and it was a collaboration between games students, design students and film students. The games students designed a board game, the design students created all the art and elements involved, and we the film students filmed press statements that the mayor of the small country town the game was set in delivered. It was one of the larger sets I’ve worked on, and certainly the highest calibre of set I’ve worked on. While my role as telecaster operator didn’t seem overly glamorous when it was first assigned to me, it turned out to be quite central, as I was constantly working with the actor and interfacing with many central roles on set. A solid 10 hours on set that I greatly enjoyed and would easily do again.

 

That pretty much wraps up what I’ve been up to recently. I know that my blogging has been sporadic and mostly non-existent, but I’m actually stating to enjoy doing it, and I will try to keep it up over the next few months. I have a few things lined up to do over the next few months, but the majority over the next couple weeks are proposals, so I’ll be spending more time writing. If you’re lucky, I’ll tell you about it here. Stay tuned!

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.