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Rule 2 finished March 13, 2008

Posted by joost in : LFA, cinematography, directing, editing, film, sound , comments closed

In March 2007 our Diploma year had to come up with the first ideas for screenplays we would like to develop the rest of that year. George wrote an outline called “The Inquiry” and it was one of the scripts that I liked most. After many workshops and drafts it was nominated to be one of the 10 minute films.
I pitched to direct this script early October. We shot it in November, edited the majority of the film in December, made many minor changes in January and screened it on February 1st at the LFA. What I showed was a locked picture with mainly work on sound still to do.
It was great to screen it, for the first time to my three actors and to a larger LFA audience. Compliments left and right, a nice reward for a couple of months of long days and hard work.

For me the film wasn’t finished yet though. I spent several days in February working on the “atmos tracks”, the background soundtrack that makes the setting of a scene feel more real. In my case that meant things like adding sounds of tanks driving by or sounds of a radiator humming.
With the locked picture and all the soundtracks I went to the studio of Nick Ryan, a sound designer who teaches at the LFA and offered to help me with some sound effects and making the final dub. We spent almost two days leveling, tweaking and fiddling about. I had a great time, endlessly playing fragments, adjusting, trying out effects, playing again, quite an anal process – heaven for a techie and a perfectionist like me.
The end result of this process is a final dub with all the dialogue at the appropriate level, combined with sound effects and atmos tracks that add detail and texture to the film.

The last step in the process of making a film is the final color grade. Together with my Director of Photography Claudio and the locked picture and sound we went to Molinare, a post-production facility in SoHo (where all the major film labs and post-production houses are located). In a futuristic looking studio you go through the film shot by shot, and apply color correction. Explaining this in detail is too complicated for this post, I summarized it in the past to other people as “it’s like Photoshopping a moving picture”. See wikipedia for more info and Da Vinci systems for the gadgets and cool pictures.

In about an hour we went over the whole film, talked about what mood we want(ed) to achieve and what shots or scenes in particular needed attention, and we saw the colorist do his magic. Fascinating to see him control all the buttons and dials and apply his knowledge to show us how far you could push and change an image. Restraint is a very good quality to have in a session like this because one gets easily seduced by the endless possibilities.
Because Claudio and I had prepared the grading session in advance we knew what we were going for, so the grading went smoothly. We left the building after two hours, proud owners of the finished film on mini DVCAM and DigiBeta!

So, a year after its initial conception and almost half a year after I started working on it, “Rule 2″ is finished! Yay!

Of course, this is not the end, it is the beginning of a new exciting phase – trying to get the film out there where it belongs, on the big screen.
The next few weeks I will be working on making a DVD version of the film including subtitles and promotional material. This will be used to submit Rule 2 to film festivals all over the world.

The first screening of “Rule 2″ outside the LFA has already been organized. The film has been selected to screen at the BSC New Cinematographers Night in the Pinewood Studios at the 29th of April! The BSC is the British Society of Cinematographers, an established and wellrespected institution in the film industry. Quite an honor to be selected for this evening I think, with an audience consisting of experienced and acclaimed cinematographers. And the cinema at Pinewood is magnificent, the first time my film will be shown on a proper big screen with excellent sound. Or as one of my cinematoraphy tutors pointed out: “All your faults will be magnified by a thousand times when you screen your film here.” :-)

Finishing the 10 minute film shoots November 29, 2007

Posted by joost in : LFA, sound , comments closed

After a well deserved wrap party for successfully completing the shoot of my 10 minute film, business went on as usual. For me this meant: boom operating! And helping with the set build of this last film. Far less glamorous but a good and humbling experience to make someone else’s film as good as possible.

The third film was the most ambitious of the three. A very full schedule including one full day of exteriors, a child actor, an experienced Emmy Award winning actress (!), a cloaked “monster”, plenty of (time consuming) tracking shots, special effects with smoke and candles, to name a few elements. This all resulted in a shoot that was unavoidably tense at times.

On Wednesday the 28th of November I was softly humming the Stones tune “This could be the last time / this could be the last time / maybe the last time / I don’t know…” The last day of shooting, possibly the last day of shooting with my fellow diploma students. An odd idea. Luckily we had to get on with it and before we knew it, the day was done, and a smashing wrap party followed. Everyone went crazy that night, not only to celebrate the end of our 10 minute films, but also to celebrate the semi-official end of our year and the imminent departure of two of our classmates. Tequila!

Nun’s knickers March 22, 2007

Posted by joost in : LFA, cinematography, screenwriting, sound , comments closed

Last week we had to submit one or two proposals for a screenplay that will possibly be turned into a film later this year. The next weeks we’ll have weekly sessions where we will discuss our rewritten draft versions. Other students and tutors give feedback on each script and come up with new or alternative ideas for your screenplay. In reality it has just as much to do with the resulting screenplays as with exercises in creative writing, giving and receiving feedback and methodically getting to the core of your idea, characters and story.
I am quite happy with the proposal I wrote and with the enthusiastic reactions from the others. Yesterday I submitted the second draft of my proposal, tentatively called “The Number Cruncher”. A few weeks from now, the students can vote on the screenplay they’d like to film, an external screenwriter will give his or her opinion as well, but the LFA department heads have the final say. We’ll see how things will develop.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we received instructions on how to handle the film and audio gear that we will be using the rest of the year. This is every boy’s wet dream if your into technical stuff :-)
For the afficionados amongst you, we’re talking about an Arriflex SRIII Super16mm film camera, filming in 1:66, printing in 1:85 (cinematic widescreen format). Catalogue value is 20,000 pounds, add several (tens of) thousands of pounds for the lenses and other accessories… Audio will be mixed on a SQN Series IIIa mixer and recorded on DAT or a Flash recorder, using a wide variety of microphones. There is a bunch of lighting equipment as well, ranging from 300 to 2000 Watt and accompanied by all kinds of rigs.

Because this equipment is so expensive and heavily used by students of the LFA, there is a lot of paper work involved whenever one wants to use it. Every item in every box has to be verified and checked on a book out form, and the same when booking in at the end of the day (or at the end of a shoot). On our instruction days the paperwork and moving all the gear cost about an hour! When doing a shoot, they reserve half a day to an entire day for the booking out procedure. And apparently, this is the first example of lots of paper work to follow. I will write about this non romantic side of film making when it comes up.

Of course we got to practice after receiving the instructions: aligning the tripod, assembling the camera, loading film stock in the magasin (first in clear day light, then in a small tent without being able to see what you’re doing. Crrrazy!), setting up a lit set, tweaking the audio mixer, doing fake street interviews with different mics, …
One of the many things I learned during these days: camera people have a funny sense of humour. There’s a piece of cloth between the lense and the matte on a camera. This looks very much like something that you would use to tie your hair with. But here they call it “the nun’s knickers”. In a similar fashion, they have something called “the teddybear’s arsehole”… I’ll leave that one up to your imagination :-)

Collective daydreaming March 15, 2007

Posted by joost in : LFA, cinematography, directing, sound , comments closed

Lots of introductionary classes this week. The image of listening to monotonous lectures while sitting on wooden benches comes to mind. But hey, this is a film school, you don’t seriously think that picture is correct?! How about this: imagine “The Theatre”, a small cinematic screening room within the LFA. Three rows, each consisting of seven luxurious black fluff cinema chairs with cup holder :-) Add a big screen, beamer, vhs and dvd player, acoustic tiles and walls, air-conditioning, … did I forget anything? Oh wait, that’s right, yours truly sitting in one of these chairs enjoying courses on screenwriting, sound recording, cinematography and directing! “It’s a dirty job but someone has got to do it…”

Some of the courses were a bit dry this week, with recaps of things like how the human ear works and how colors can be perceived. Not everything was theory though, we got to do some boom operating and sound mixing on Tuesday. One person had to walk around while talking, another had to record this voice by following him with the boom (the microphone on a pole) – and without putting the boom into the (virtual) camera frame. The third person did the audio recording and mixing (watching and correcting the audio level). Of course nobody dreams of being a boom operator, but doing it yourself is really useful. Humbling fact: it takes about five years of practice to become a good boom operator…

The cinematography course on Wednesday was great. Our tutor is one the world’s best steadicam operators and has worked as a cinematographer with some big names like Luc Besson and Stanley Kubrick. Every now and then he casually tells a story of things he experienced and lessons he has learned in the many years he has been filming. Truly awesome! Meanwhile he taught us the basics of lighting a set. In case you did not know, cameras and lenses are an important part of cinematography, but lighting is the key element.

Thursday dealt with directing, or “collective daydreaming” as our tutor put it. After some theory and analyses, we spent several hours trying to come up with and executing different ways of filming a particular scene we saw earlier that day. Even though a lot of shots and camera angles seem obvious or at times even necessary, we experimented with ways of telling the story and accentuating particular elements. Very very cool!

In the evenings of this week we had to come up with premises and proposals for the 5 and 10-minute shorts that we will be making later this year. I submitted two proposals. Every idea and proposal will be discussed next week so we’ll see how that goes.

A special event today, the Polish documentary filmer Marcel Lozinski will give us a masterclass. We watched several of his films as preparation, but I have no idea what will happen during this masterclass.