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November activities December 2, 2009

Posted by joost in : LFA, festivals, film, reflection, screening, screenwriting, work , comments closed

An overview of what I have been working on in the last month:

Rule 2 festival news October 29, 2009

Posted by joost in : LFA, festivals, film , comments closed

I’m still sending out my graduation film “Rule 2” to festivals. Recently I received exciting news from Iran, my film has been selected for the Tehran 14th International Short Film Festival! Their website is a bit outdated, but there’s a general news announcement here.

This means so far the film has been shown at the following festivals:

Next up: American film festivals!

Graduation October 13, 2008

Posted by joost in : LFA, film, lifestyle, london, reflection, screening , comments closed

It’s true, I’ve graduated – again! “Because a Masters degree in Business and IT just doesn’t cut it” :-)

Graduation Diploma 11 at Riverside Studios
“Ladies and gentlemen, Diploma 11, the class of 2007/2008!”

And so it was that on a sunny Saturday in October 300+ people gathered at the Riverside Studios to celebrate the work of 34 graduate students of the London Film Academy. Almost everyone of my diploma year (13 out of 16) was back in London for this joyous occasion, plus about 18 students of the year that came after me. We graduated together, that is why my diploma year had to wait six months after having already finished our year back in March.

They showed all our films, the good ones and the bad ones (I should say “the interesting failures”, sounds a bit nicer…). Loads of family and friends were present to applaud, cheer and wipe away tears.

The official part of the ceremony consisted of handing out the diplomas to all the students by principals Daisy and Anna, and the two special guests David Game and Nicolas Roeg, and announcing the winners of the awards. Yes, awards, to honor some of the outstanding work and to give the day a bit more flair.

The good news for me was that I actually won two awards :-D First I was voted Student of the year by my fellow students and lecturers of the LFA. Really nice to be acknowledged like this by my peers.
More importantly my film “Rule 2″ was voted Film of the year 2008, out of 17 films! A great reward for our teamwork and the resulting film.

Apart from certificates that describe these awards, there are some prizes involved as well. I will receive some goodies, and best of all, £500 worth of rental equipment towards my next short film, and extra distribution support (festival submissions) for “Rule 2″. Good stuff!

All of this had to be celebrated of course :-) First a reception in the cinema bar to congratulate everyone, and after some food we headed towards a nightclub to club ourselves to death. I wandered out at 11am the next morning (!), blurry eyed and with only half my voice left, but incredibly happy.

It’s difficult to describe, but then again it is very straightforward: I’ve successfully finished a film school in London, something that I only could dream about years ago. I’ve been taught by some of the best professionals in the industry. I’ve made bonds for life with some of my classmates. My family and some of my friends were present to not only see me graduate but also to (finally) meet some of the people that I had been talking about the past year and a half. I’m incredibly proud of my own achievements, of those of my fellow classmates, of my loved ones for supporting me all the way through, and of course you my dear reader, for staying in touch if only from a distance.

Graduation time October 7, 2008

Posted by joost in : LFA, film, screening , comments closed

Saturday 11 October marks the day that I will officially graduate! Together with the Diploma year that came after us, my year will celebrate completing the course at the London Film Academy. All our films will be screened in the cinema of the Riverside Studios, followed by the graduation ceremony, drinks and a wild night of partying of course ;-)

Around this weekend two showcases take place, where selected films of these two diploma years are shown to industry people. It’s basically a networking event, useful for contacts and perhaps future work related opportunities. My film “Rule 2″ has been selected to be screened so I will definitely attend and will be handing out business cards.

On an “emotional level” the LFA is already done and dusted for me, I am expecting this weekend to feel more like a reunion than anything else – something I am really looking forward to!

Festival frenzy August 29, 2008

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The last half year I have been trying to get the short film “Sculpted” that I produced into festivals. The main motivation for the director is to have his film screened to a wider audience. For me it’s partly that reason as well, I’d like “the world” to see the film that I worked bloody hard on to get made. Apart from that my other main motivation is to get a more thorough understanding of the festival world; which ones are “career makers”, which ones specialize in a niche, what audience do they cater for, which ones have a film market at the same time, which ones offer eligibility for awards or other important merits, you name it.

All of this makes you revisit a film and look at it from a “cold” marketing perspective. What distinguishes this film from all the others? What are the unique selling points? Are there any names attached…? (well known actors or crew members) Is the tag line catchy? (enough?)

The net result for “Sculpted” so far: 14 entries, 0 screenings. We have changed the strategy from the initial targets of “generic medium sized festivals in Europe” via “smaller and more arty festivals worldwide” to “lesbian / gay festivals worldwide”. We should be able to notice the coming three months if that last change has any impact (because you submit a film generally 3 months before the festival takes place).

I have now come to the point where I hope I can make good use of the knowledge that I’ve gained while producing this film. I intend to apply this for the promotion of the short film “Rule 2″ that I have directed.

My film academy has sent “Rule 2″ off to two or three festivals so far, and I think that is not good enough. Their philosophy is that they will send it to festivals that will have some benefits for the film makers involved, such as grants to visit the festival or cash prizes towards new short films. As much as I appreciate that attitude, the harsh reality is that the competition is fierce and it is damned hard to get a short film into any kind of decent film festival anyway.

So starting this week I am taking the promotional aspects of the film in my own hands. I have selected 18 festivals in the next four months to which I will submit “Rule 2″. Some of them have a special student section, some of them are the bigger festivals in the world. In a way it is a bit of a shotgun approach, but I feel that it is better to bet on multiple horses than to sporadically submit the film over two years time. By then my film will perhaps feel slightly outdated because the political climate has changed (cold war revisited, anyone?). And with Memorial Day and the US elections coming up in the next few months, I feel that my film earns more exposure than it has had so far.

Life after the LFA June 9, 2008

Posted by joost in : LFA, film, lifestyle, london, reflection , comments closed

From March 2007 until April 2008 my life basically was the LFA. I’ve spent days, weeks, months at the LFA production office, in the theatre and in the editing suites. Truly a time to never forget. But as with all good things, this too came to an end. Is there life after the LFA? What does it look like? I’ll try to answer some of those questions in this post.

In my previous post I already mentioned that I worked on some shoots. These were (all but one) unpaid, but that did not really matter, it was great to make some more short films, this time outside of the safe environment of the LFA, but with people that I knew from and worked with at the LFA. And as said before, those productions were quite useful because the short films that I hope to be doing the coming year(s) will probably be shot on HD out of budget constraints. And shooting on HD was not part of my course since I attended a proper film school. Thanks to these shoots I am now much more informed about the practical pros and cons of shooting digitally.

One of the things that I want to do in this “post-LFA” era is fairly obvious: work on more shoots, to get more experience and also to network with other filmmakers.

A lot of the freelance film work starts with a phone call, someone that you’ve worked with before is doing a new film and is looking for a crew. Who does he approach? People he has worked with before, people who are professional, people he can get along with. So connecting with other filmmakers, doing the best you can and establishing a trustworthy reputation is quite important. Of course a little bit of luck and being in the right place at the right time also helps.

Apart from doing these unpaid or low-paid short films, one other goal for me is to try to get onto more professional shoots; commercials, music videos, feature films. If I want to work on feature films in the future, I need to work my way up and try to find a way into that world. My interest is not so much into the technical roles on set (camera, sound, lights) which doesn’t leave that much if I want to gain more on-set experience. Right now I’m thinking about pursuing assistant directing roles and script supervisor / continuity.

On a more practical level I need to find work to pay for my rent and the bills. This is tricky, since a lot of film work is freelance and short term. I am not expecting to be able to live on those kind of gigs any time soon, so I am aiming to find production related work, either in a fixed (ideally part time) position or project based work.

As said, ideally I’d like to work part time because that leaves me time the rest of the week to work on my own projects, and to write and direct my own (short) films. At the moment I am working on one short film (that I’ve just shot last Friday!), and I have written an outline of an idea a while ago that might develop into my first feature length script – very exciting!

Every now and then opportunities pop up, the most recent development is that I might be working as a location manager for a couple of weeks on a long short film.

Wrapping up my year at the LFA May 29, 2008

Posted by joost in : LFA, film, producing , comments closed

So much catching up to do!

I totally forgot to tell about the 4th film we did in February… This short film was based on a script called “Checkmate” that I wrote and then further developed with the director. Quite an intensive three weeks of rewriting, and then 1st AD-ing the two day exterior shoot in Battersea Park. Really cool, it was a period piece set in the 18th century, pre-French revolution, with a peasant, bourgeois, king and queen, all dressed up and ready to fight each other verbally or with a pitch fork, sword or knife.

In March I finished “Rule 2″, and before I took a break and went to Amsterdam for the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, I worked on a couple of LFA related film shoots. People that I worked with before and/or knew through the LFA were doing some short film shoots and I worked on those. Great since they all shot using HD cameras (because shooting on film is too expensive on a small privately funded budget). I was camera assistant on a handful of shoots, which meant some hands-on experience with these cameras, lenses and how it looked (lightwise) on HD.

On one entirely different and wacky shoot called “Valley of the Dommes” I was 1st assistant director. How to describe this 48 hour short film competition madness? Judge yourself and watch the trailer of the resulting film on youtube. Yes, this film will be big, very big, very VERY big…

April and the start of May was a transitional period in time. I finished “Rule 2″ in March, but still had plenty of things to do for the film, in particular the promotional side. In order to send the film to festivals you have to have a logline (one line summary), a synopsis, the full credit list, biographies of cast and crew, the complete dialogue with timecode (subtitles), selection of still photos, etc etc. Not very creative work but it needs to be done, and this dragged on for a while. Luckily I finished all of this at the end of May, which means the film will be sent to festivals worldwide in the coming months.

For the film that I produced, “Sculpted”, I already have some experience with festivals. So far we haven’t been successful getting it into festivals :-( The competition is fierce, sometimes more than 4000 entries of which 40 get screened during the festival… We are now trying to focus our efforts on festivals that could be a good match with the film, in particular gay & lesbian film festivals.

This wraps up my year at the LFA. The inevitable question is: now what..?

Screening “Rule 2″ at Pinewood April 30, 2008

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On Tuesday the 29th of April, the BSC New Cinematographers Night took place at the Pinewood Studios.
Pinewood Studios

My short film “Rule 2″ was selected together with six other English short films from up and coming directors and cinematographers. An honour to be screened here at Pinewood before the eyes of renowned cinematographers and amongst fellow young filmers of course.
Last but not least this was the first time that Rule 2 was shown outside the London Film Academy, for an audience of 100+ people, on a big screen. Quite a thrill!
At the same time you can’t help but to feel a little bit dwarved compared to some other films that were shown that evening, made by more experienced filmmakers with more time and money. Nevertheless, my film was part of the evening and that’s what matters.

When all the shorts had been shown, one by one the makers of the films were asked to come to the front for a Q&A session. The interviewer had some questions and then there was room for the audience to fire away.
BSC New Cinematographers Night - Q&A group

From left to right: interviewer, me (director), Claudio (DoP), Riman (producer), George (writer)

Upfront I really didn’t know what kind of questions to expect, because this event in principal focuses on the cinematography, but as a director people tend to look at you to explain why and how you have done things the way that you did. The good thing about not knowing what to expect is that you can’t really prepare, you just show up and hope for the best :-) Which is what we did, and it went fine.

Questions ranged from explaining why we chose to shoot the projection room scenes on a particular kind of stock (Fuji Reala 500D, for those of you who are interested) to how much it had cost us to make the projection screen (about £480, including free labor by Claudio, George and me…).

BSC New Cinematographers Night - Q&A Claudio talking

Claudio explaining our setup for the projection room scenes.

BSC New Cinematographers Night - Q&A Joost talking

Yours truly talking about why we filmed with a live projector and how we got the images.

After about 10 minutes we left the stage again, and after the other Q&A’s had finished, that wrapped up the evening.

I’m back home now, looking back at a successful evening. Great to have shared that with the key people who were involved in the film (apart from Paul who was 1st A.D. and who has returned to South Africa last December). Tonight more than ever I realized that I have actually made a film :-D

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.” :-)

Back in action January 26, 2008

Posted by joost in : LFA, editing, screenwriting , comments closed

In case you are wondering: no, I did not disappear from the face of the earth. Somehow I didn’t get round to updating this blog, even though there is plenty to tell! So here is a quick recap to satisfy your appetite.

Christmas and newyears back home were great. You know the drill; family, friends, catching up, boozing. Several good friends offered me their place to stay, which I gratefully accepted.

Part of the visits coincided with showing my work-in-progress version of “Rule 2″. I was really looking forward to this, because I could literally show what I had been working on in the past two or three months. Until that moment, only filmmakers had seen and commented on it. Now it was time for people close to me to watch it and share their thoughts. The most basic checks that I wanted to do were “Does the story make sense?”, “What do you feel (if anything) at the end of the film?” and “Were there parts where you got bored?”.

Of course people try to be nice so every now and then I had to push in order to hear what they really felt. It’s hard to summarize everything that I have heard, but the bottom line for me was that the film seems to work. Also interesting: I am not planning to change anything that I wasn’t already planning to change before. In other words: I received a lot of feedback, but nothing lead me to rethink or re-edit my film. Which is good I think! (or stubborn – you choose :-)

The second week of January I returned to London. Most important news that week was that we reached an agreement on making another (“the 4th”) film at the LFA! I’ll write about that at a later moment, what’s relevant for now is that I am trying to get this thing on the road together with some other determined students. Part of this process is that I have written a new short script that might be selected for this film. The plan is to prepare and shoot this extra film in February. Yay!

My year at the London Film Academy is nearly over. We all returned for three weeks of classes. I nicknamed the first week to “Life after the LFA”. We talked about and practiced how to (make a better) pitch, learned about what an agent can and can not do for us, how to make a filmmakers resume, we had career interviews, talks about wrapping up our production files, an ex-student telling how she managed to get a career going after graduating at the LFA, and last but certainly not least a visit to the Pinewood Studios!

Pinewood is like a industrial complex only filled with studios and film related companies, outside Northwest London. Two of our lecturers gave us a guided tour accompanied with all kinds of anecdotes of their filming experiences. Words are hard to describe what that day was like. It was the best way to finish that week. The start of the week everyone was (or got) worried; “how will I ever get a job in the film industry? how do I make sure I eventually get to do what I want to do?” (etc). The week ended with my whole group being psyched about the visit; “THIS is why I want to make films, this is where I want to be!”.
Not so strange when you know that we got to be on the infamous and massive 007 stage where they were shooting the new Bond film “Quantum of Solace” (!), that we were 2 inches away from Oscars, BAFTAs and Cesars for classic films like Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia (!), that we saw things like gigantic blue screens, special underwater facilities, old 35mm cameras and the preparation for a registration with four top of the line HD cameras of the King Lear play featuring Ian McKellen.

The past week we shot 10 short films in 5 days, with actors from the Central School of Speech and Drama. We filmed scenes from existing films. For them one of the first times they act on camera, for us an extra opportunity to direct, camera operate and to DoP. Quite a high pace, something we could achieve because we shot on a professional digital camera (and not film). And of course because we are a lot more experienced now than one year ago ;-)

Next week is the last week of our course. We have a couple of days left to finish the edits of our 10 minute films. Friday February 1st marks our official last day, with the screening of these films. My aim is to have “Rule 2″ completely ready by then. The picture is pretty much locked now, I just need to focus on the dub. Leveling the overall volume, fixing gaps, hisses, pops, clicks, adding ambient sounds, that kind of work.

In case you are wondering “So Joost, what are your plans after that week, what will you do?!”: February will function as a bridge between finishing my year and getting ready for the real world. I intend to stay in London the coming months, hopefully to work, but also to write and direct (my own) short films. And then we’ll see.