Man, doesn’t the home page look awesome now? It’s taken a while but we can finally say that the site is 100% done (for now)! Many thanks to our buddy, uber-talented Halifax artist Alexandria Neonakis.

So, I’m planning on writing a big post on edtior/sound mixer Walter Murch, as I did a 30 minute presentation on him a couple of weeks ago and a lot of his techniques are insanely useful. It’ll be up in the next couple of days, but as a precursor to that I have a story to tell from his time mixing Cold Mountain. This is taken from the excellent book, Behind the Seen.

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In early September Murch came to a dialogue premixing station at De lane Lea with a copy of Growing Up in Hollywood (1976), an autobiography by director, film editor, and child actor Robert Parrish. After the lunch break Walter stood on the little mezzanine behind the mix board and addressed the sound crew:  “In 1948 Columbia Studio chief Harry Cohn let director Robert Rossen hire Robert Parrish to re-edit his film, All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, loosely based on Louisiana Governor Huey Long. The film was in trouble.”

Murch read from the the book:

“The preview last night was a disaster,” Cohn said. “The fuckin’ picture is almost three hours long and it still doesn’t make any sense.” He turned to Rossen and pointed at me. “What makes you think this schmuck can salvage it when the best cutter in the studio has been working on it for five months?”

I told Rossen I thought I saw a way to re-cut the picture. “OK, go ahead. I’m too close to it. I’ve been working on it for over a year. I’m taking a holiday. I’ll be back in a month and we’ll preview your cut in Huntington Park, a tough factory town. They’ll understand it.”

And that’s what we did. I re-cut the entire picture, re-dubbed it using music from the film library and we previewed it in Huntington Park.

The fat cats from Santa Barbara [where the earlier preview was held] must have been in touch with the working stiffs in Huntington Park, because the reception wasn’t any better. In fact, it was worse… Rossen alone still believed in it, and he somehow convinced Cohn to let us carry on.

We worked on the picture for six months after the Huntington Park fiasco. We had seven more disastrous previews with all kinds of audiences.

Director Rossen had a last-ditch idea for editor Parrish, Murch says, continuing from the book: “I want you to go through the whole picture. Select what you consider to be the center of each scene, put the film in the sync machine and wind down a hundred feet (one minute) before and a hundred feet after, and chop it off, regardless of what’s going on. Cut through dialogue, music, anything. Then, when you’re finished, we’ll run the picture and see what we’ve got.”

I went straight back to the cutting room, followed Rossen’s instructions to the letter… when I measured it at 5:00 am we had a ninety-minute picture… his brainstorm had worked. It all made sense in an exciting, slightly confusing, montagey sort of way… We took it to our final preview in Pasadena and were relieved at the audience’s enthusiastic reaction… the Pasadena fat cats stood up and applauded. After the Pasadena preview we cut the negative with all the imperfections, the mismatched cuts, and the jumps in the soundtrack.

All the King’s Men won the Academy Award for best picture of the year.

“So you see,” Murch said, as he closed the book, “nothing ever changes.” Then he walked to the mixing board and sat down to continue the premix.

It’s been great growing up with the creation of the internet and DVDs since they brought about a lot of filmmaking resources for those of us who didn’t have easy access to it, outside of books. Just in the past few years, the internet has exploded with helpful sites and blogs for the aspiring filmmaker. The trick, of course, is finding them and I’d like to present here the useful ones we’ve found lately.

The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog. If you want to get into the industry, chances are you’re going to be a PA at some point, and this gives you a little heads up on what it’s like.

Studio Daily blog. Lots of tech related industry news.

FilmSound.org. Everything you could want in sound design.

My Film Project ‘09. This guy chronicled his process of making an independent feature film and includes lots of materials including his proposal and screenplay.

Truly Free Film. Blog which breaks down film-festival advice to its most essential elements and delves into hardcore topics such as copyrights and branding.

Screenwriters:

Celtx. If you don’t have Final Draft or any kind of screenwriting software. It’s free, and although we’ve never used it, we know people who have and they like it. A warning, however: If you actually want to send your script out anywhere, you kinda need to shell out for a premium program. The main reason? Page count. Celtx formats pages just differently enough from the industry standard to really blow your page count. For anything short of professional submission, though, it should do you fine.

Wordplayer. This was started by Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot, the guys who wrote the Pirates movies and lots of other things. The most useful thing for me are the columns which give lots of tips for writers as well as general industry advice.

John August’s blog. More helpful stuff from another established screenwriter.

Hollywood University: or How to Get a Job in Hollywood. Started by a girl from Kansas who wanted to move to LA to work in TV. Lots of tips as well as general advice to newbies wanting to move to LA or just enter the industry. She also just started the HU Scriptwriter’s Network which is like the facebook for screenwriters. If you’re looking for work, roommates, or whatever it’s really helpful.

For just keeping up with film news, you’re best off with having a handful of websites that you check regularly.

Nick and I will try to update this post with more sites as we find them, or we’ll just make another post. We’ll also be making more posts with recommendations for books, dvds, etc.

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And here are some more links from me (Nick)

List of organizations willing to provide free information to writers. Really invaluable for any kind of research!

Screenwriter/Showrunner Jane Espenson has returned to the blogosphere and we are better for it.

Alex Epstein is another screenwriter, but one who’s very well informed and who often answers questions from readers in his posts.

Art of the Title Sequence does a swell job at examining the opening credits of films new and old. They also sometimes post interviews with the creators of such sequences which tend to be fun to read.

We’re not posting any kind of tutorials for stuff like After Effects or Final Cut Pro because you can easily find such things on youtube or vimeo if you search for them, and they would probably be better than what we’d post.

All of these links are a good start, and we’ll probably make another post in the future with more. Hopefully this helps!

IFP producer’s conference went really well. We’re trying to learn more about the business side of the industry and hearing about the collapse of distribution models for independent film was disheartening/exciting. They had a networking get-together afterwords, and the film festival had a “film schmooze” today that we also went to, which is why I wanted to make an add-on to the networking post I made previously.

First, I want to reiterate that these things are essential for filmmakers like us who are just starting out. We’ve found out that Minneapolis has a bigger film community than we thought, but really, if you’re a student and you can’t find the motivation to go to a film panel with a networking party afterward (which is what it was today), then maybe you should reconsider your options. Motivation is key here, and with the student discounts that are often offered, they’re practically free.

So, networking yesterday and today made me remember why it can be so hard for people starting out. Usually these things happen after some kind of big event, like a panel or conference. Let’s say there are five panelists coming to the party, as well as fifty people who attended the event and are also at the party. A lot of the people are going to want to talk to these VIPs so you’ve got the difficult situation of working your way over to them, assuming you want to talk to them, as well as general networking with other people. What makes things awkward, at least for us, is that you usually don’t know anybody in the room personally so you have to find a way to ingratiate yourself with other people and introduce yourself, or just hope somebody recognizes you from somewhere else.

Remember, nobody wants to talk to the guy standing by himself. We’re lucky since we can at least look like we’re talking with each other, and the twin thing makes it easier for us to network because it’s uncommon in the industry and makes us easier to remember. That said, my piece of advice is to bring a wingman/woman if you’re by yourself, and if you’re a student, never shy away from asking to meet up with people if they’re in town. Just be nice about it and if they see you’re motivated they’ll usually be happy to do it.

Last thing. I should say that the advice that we’re giving out here stems from our experiences outside of the industry, mostly from our experiences abroad as well as from the people we’ve met so far. Really, this stuff is more useful for the aspiring filmmakers like us, and if any of the industry people we’ve met are reading this, hopefully you’ll get a laugh out of it.

Carrot Cake Soup won the audience favorite award last night at the UMN Student Film Festival by a margin of 42 votes! We were certainly surprised that that many people had enjoyed it over the other films. It was also fantastic that they laughed at the parts we weren’t sure about and laughed harder at the parts we were.

Wait a second… Does this mean that we can introduce ourselves now as the award-winning Folkman brothers? That wouldn’t be pretentious at all.

Right now we’re gearing up to shoot our next short this weekend. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do all of it within a day or two, as it’s pretty simple and should only be around two minutes long, but we’ll see. We’ll also be attending an independent producer’s conference that our local IFP chapter is having. It’s a full day event with speeches about getting funding and distribution today. There’s also a reception at the end which is probably where a lot of meetings and deals will go down.

And here we come to the subject of this post: networking.

Everything you’ve heard about how the film industry is all about networking and who you know aren’t lying. It’s always tough to break in, and even moreso now. One person we talked to said that he’s never hired anybody cold, that is without somebody knowing the applicant. Depending on where you live, this can be pretty easy or maddeningly difficult. One of the worst things you can do if you want to work in film is to be nervous and shy from talking to people. You can’t expect to merely put out your work and hope people notice you. It’s somewhat easy to do it on the internet now but physical meetings are always preferred.

So, before Nick and I went to NZ, we barely had any contacts within the industry. Through our art teacher we were able to work at the AnimfxNZ conference in Wellington, handling registration and basically being runners. That year (08), they had a ton of great speakers like the VP of Production for Disney, an animator on The Jungle Book, and the Director of Feature Assets at Universal. Now, at this time we were still pretty shy and nervous. As Wisconsin doesn’t really have a thriving film industry, this was a big opportunity to actually talk about the industry with people who worked in it.

We were able to talk to a few people during the conference and they were nice enough to let us keep in contact with them, but we were still jonesing to talk to more of the VIPs. On the last day they threw a party for everyone, and we went without really expecting anything. During the conference we met and became friends with James Everett, who was/is a designer for Sidhe Interactive, and at the party he noticed that we weren’t really talking to anybody so he took it upon himself to introduce us to people. This started a chain reaction where we tried to talk to as many people as we could and by the end of the night, we had made more contacts and gotten some sweet business cards.

The point here is that you need to put yourself out there and talk to people. People in the industry know what it’s like to start out and they’re (usually) very happy to help out. While we were running the registration table, a producer noticed that we had American accents and after we talked for a bit (she was American), we exchanged contact details. After the conference, I sent out a wave of emails to people just asking for advice on going to grad school for film. A lot of people responded, but just as an example, the producer got back to me and said we should discuss it over coffee. An email later it changes to “Why don’t you come by the office and we can show you some stuff we’re working on and talk about grad school?” Fast forward a year-and-a-half and she’s become one of our best contacts.

Let everybody know what you want to do and I guarantee that somebody will know somebody who can help you out. We never took a class with the art teacher who got us in to Animfx. While we were in high school, he’d heard that we wanted to be filmmakers and we just kept in touch after that. This also ties into proper email etiquette, but that’s a topic for another post. Also, half of networking is having the nerve to go up and talk to people. The other half is actually getting to these things, hence why we’re going to this producer’s conference thing. If you’re like us and living in the midwest somewhere, these things don’t happen very often and if you’re serious about getting into the industry, you owe it to yourself to get in to these things. Motivation is everything here.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Also, we put up some of the B-Roll footage we shot for a documentary during our studies in NZ.

So, over spring break we went to Maui and I knew I wanted to bring the camera even though I didn’t have any sort end goal in mind for what I wanted to do with the footage. Nick and I shot hours of footage (400+ gigs!), and as we neared the end of the trip I thought that a music video would work well with what we were getting (time lapse and slow motion surfers). I’d heard Sun Rise Light Flies on the pilot for David Milch’s underrated John from Cincinatti and I figured it gelled nicely with the footage.

I’m really happy with how the time lapse footage turned out, especially the one we got on top of the volcano next to the observatories. We’ve been trying to do more of it ever since we shot time lapse footage in New Zealand for one of our professor’s documentaries. If I could have done anything else, I’d go for more locations and try to get some movement within the shots.

We’re a little over a month away from graduation! We have another short we need to finish before then as well as a documentary, and we’re also determined to finish our feature spec scripts. Right now, it looks like LA is where we’ll be headed after graduation. New Zealand was our other option and it would be heaps (heaps!) more enjoyable than LA, but there isn’t that much work there at the moment. Then again there isn’t much work in LA, but we’ve got better chances there. We’ll be updating on our progress in moving there as it happens, and hopefully we’ll start posting the helpful stuff later in the week.