A fair warning - making a film involves creative and technical stages, and making a good film involves taking command of them both. These looks into my thought process will include both sides of that equation, and if you have no interest in the numbers and technical know-how, feel free to just skip those sections and move on ahead. No feelings will be hurt.
DEVELOPMENT
Every film starts with an idea. My idea came suddenly while sitting around my apartment on the day before concepts were due in Story class. You never know when ideas will hit; waiting until the day before the story concepts were due wasn't procrastination. Rather, I just hadn't had an inspired idea hit me in time, and as a result I had to force myself to come up with an idea to meet a deadline - something I am not entirely fond of. Idea after idea rolled off my pen and onto my paper and they all just felt forced, I can't really explain it any other way. They weren't right. Finally I looked over at my TV and the mess of plugs around it and wondered how I ever got anything plugged in. BING! Idea. This was a natural idea that popped up on its own accord - by accident - as opposed to me racking my brain looking for something. That being said, right away I already knew it was a better idea. Who's going to write the better paper, the student who has to write an essay for school or the author who writes whatever he or she wants? My point is that I believe that working and building upon inspired ideas will always lead to a better end than trying to build upon those that are uninspired. Moreover, the idea is absolutely crucial. It is your cornerstone, and although the building may change throughout construction, the cornerstone must remain as a firm foundation.
After we (my class) submitted our concepts to class and received feedback from our professor, we were instructed to expand the concept into a fully fledged story treatment. A treatment is essentially a deeper investigation into the idea. A treatment serves to hammer out the actual story beats and develop a specific plot on top of the general idea. You may know that in your story you want your character to travel from New York to LA, but how does your character get there? Does she take a car? A plane? A train? These are the details that have to be detailed out in the treatment. Furthermore, a treatment is a great place to explore your world, characters, and themes. As my professor put it, a treatment should effectively answer every question about your film: who, what, when, where, why, and how.
After submitting our treatments to our professor and, of course, receiving feedback, we went ahead and dove into the first drafts of our film. Unfortunately, this fell on week 7 of the semester, and if you have already read my post about weekend project 6 (which was actually on week 7), you will know that that was no easy weekend. If you haven't read that post, you can check it out here. As a result, we had a class writing party at IHop... at 2 in the morning... with all you can drink coffee... One long night later, we finally got to bed at the healthy hour of 5 in the morning, only to wake up at 8 to make it to class by 9 to submit our first drafts.
My first draft was substantially different than what my film turned out being, and for that I am immensely grateful. The wisdom of my faculty and advice of my peers went a long way in revising my script to what eventually became the final draft, which I believe was a much more powerful piece than what I originally started with. Four minutes is not a lot of time to make a film, and sometimes it is really tempting to try to tell a cohesive story within than four minutes as opposed to defining a moment. In my opinion, finding a moment and fleshing it out - for all that it's worth - can be much more powerful in four minutes than trying to create an intriguing plot. I think PIXAR does a fantastic job with this, and the PIXAR shorts were a huge inspiration to me in making "Starfishing". PIXAR shorts always tell a story, but focus completely on the characters and their emotions as opposed to their lives. OR, the films have a witty ending that leaves the audience entertained (like "Geri's Game"). In either case, the films focus on a single aspect of each character's life as opposed to following them around and learning their story.
But all that PIXAR stuff aside (man, it really is easy to go off topic when freeform writing in a blog - in fact, just yesterday... wait a minute), by the end of week 11 of the semester, my final draft was locked and I was ready to begin production! But of course, I wouldn't have been able to enter production without all the work I put into the film during preproduction... which conveniently overlapped with the development stage, making our lives much easier...
PREPRODUCTION
Aw man, did I say easier? What I meant was the opposite of that. Generally speaking, a film won't enter preproduction until the film is developed to the point that preproduction work won't be in vain. This isn't to say the script is always finalized before preproduction. In fact, most scripts are constantly revised all the way through filming! But rather, elements of the film are developed enough that the filmmakers can begin preproduction work on the film knowing that the work they do will in fact contribute to the the film as it is seen on the screen.
For the sake our F1's, the preproduction work that was required included a minor script analysis (I thought it was a major script analysis until I started my second semester), storyboards, shot designs/floor plans, and production design. What was unfortunate was that as I would complete a draft of storyboards, I would radically change the script and have to go back and do them all over again. Trying to balance all of that and yet maintain my 6-8 hour a day class schedule proved to be difficult, but I definitely got it done. The weekends were a big help.
My storyboards went through a couple of revisions before I was happy with them, and obviously I couldn't finish them until my script was complete. Once I finished my storyboards, I passed them off to my director of photography, Victoria Cragg, to design the shots based on my framing. For Victoria, this meant figuring out exactly where to place the camera, where to place the lights, and how to balance the lights to the correct colors. This phase of preproduction we call shot design... I'm not sure if there is an official name for it, but basically we just make a floor plan of what the final setup will like including all the actors, lights, and cameras from a birds eye view.
As for production design, for our F1's we were our own production designers, meaning we had to gather our own props, set dressing, and wardrobe. I had plenty of time to do that, because although my script radically changed from the first draft to the last, the world and the characters stayed more or less the same. As a fun fact for the costumes, for the holes and wear and tear on Red's pants, my Dad took a blowtorch to them. I was skeptical at first but it turned out great! Moral of the story: you never know when a good blow torch may come in handy while filmmaking.
My final piece of the preproduction puzzle was the script analysis. Before shooting, I made sure to meet with both of my actors and go through a rehearsal process. This is where I identified the beats of the story with my actors and went through their motivations and objectives with them. It was an extremely helpful process that proved to be incredibly valuable when we got to set, and even more valuable in the cutting room when editing the film. After we read through the script several times and decided on story beats, we blocked out the scene so that when we got to the set we would have a good idea of exactly where each character needed to be and how we would accomplish each shot.
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In my next blog post I will go into production and post production. Then, hopefully I'll have a third post where I go into miscellaneous aspects of the film, like what it meant to me and why I told the story I told. The title of my blog mixes the words cinema and philosophy, and so far I've had a lot of the cine- and very little of the -losophy. I definitely hope to be able to touch mere on the latter soon. And I know I warned about the potential of some highly technical paragraphs, but for the most part it looks like I stayed away from those this time around :) Although beware, the technical will most definitely return in the next post when I tackle post production, so stay tuned for that.
And I know I said this last post but I just want to emphasize it again - for the few that read my blog, thank you so much. It really means a lot more than you might think.
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