More stuff is a’coming. We just got back from NYC and there’ll be a post coming up soon about email etiquette. In the meantime:

——————-

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.
It’s early morning, That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. the rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.

A low clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.

You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake’s movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itelf into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.

Now right on that tap – stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.

Behind or inside or through the two hundred and eighteen words that made up my description, behind or inside or through those nine hundred and sixty-nine letters, there is some kind of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity of time, a stream that can only be seen if you choose to take a look at it from the precise angle we are looking from now, but there nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours.

Next, try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this awesome complexity of it. This is huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

Now, go back to your lake, back to your gently bobbing boat. But this time, know the lake; know the place for what it is and when you’re ready, take a look over the boat’s side. The water is clear and deep. Broken sunlight cuts blue wedges down, down into the clean cold depths. Sit quietly, wait and watch. Don’t move. Be very, very still. They say life is tenaciuos. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say. Be very quiet. Keep looking into the water. Keep looking and keep watching.

—————-

If you’re still interested…

We graduated! As promised, here is our recommended reading list so far, and I’ve also uploaded our short we made in a filmmaking class over in NZ (I was editor, Nick was sound).

For me, the first book to read is Sydney Lumet’s Making Movies. It is as Roger Ebert states on the cover, probably the best text anybody could read about the art of making motion pictures. Through thirteen chapters Lumet (the director of 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and many more) discusses almost every facet of filmmaking there is. It is a brilliant account by a director who is both insanely prolific yet exceptionally consistent. The book successfully communicates all the arduousness that can go into making a film, something which is difficult to explain simply to those unfamiliar with filmmaking.

He also gives one of the best inspirational filmmaking quotes on page 10:

“For anyone who wants to direct but hasn’t made a first movie yet, there is no decision to make. Whatever the movie, whatever the auspices, whatever the problems, if there’s a chance to direct, take it! Period. Exclamation point! The first movie is its own justification, because it’s the first movie.”

For cinematography, this book is required reading at USC. It’s a good technical book to have and is relatively up to date. If you want to learn the old techniques, John Alton’s Painting with Light is excellent. It was printed in the 40’s so there are bits that are outdated, but the techniques are incredibly useful.

Editing-wise, I’ve already written about the Murch books but I’ll bring them up again. In the Blink of an Eye was written by Murch and goes into his basic techniques. Behind the Seen is about Murch being the first person to use Final Cut Pro on a big studio feature. VERY good book that delves into his whole process for a film. Finally, there’s The Conversations which is half about his techniques and half about his philosophy and interests. Read this one if you’re still interested after the other two.

Screenwriting: There are a lot of books on actual screenwriting, but really you need to just read a lot of scripts to get an idea of the form. For basic formatting, The Hollywood Standard is a good book to just have at your side when you have questions. Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman is probably my favorite screenwriting book as it’s less about the writing and more about what it’s like to be a screenwriter in Hollywood and all the problems you can encounter outside of writing.

Lately we’ve been trying to brush up our knowledge of the business side. The Hollywood Economist by Edward Epstein just came out not too long ago and it deals with studio financing and how they make money off of their films. I read this in a day and it’s amazing how Epstein can make something very complicated incredibly easy to read. Right now I’m reading Epstein’s previous book, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood. So far he’s gone into the formation of the modern studio system and I’ve just got into the beginning stages of getting a movie made through a studio. Flipping through the rest of the chapters, it’s a more all-encompassing book than The Hollywood Economist and it looks like I should’ve read this one first. I should also say that these two books only talk about studio movies and not independent film.

So, obviously, that isn’t us.

But these guys, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, are the ones responsible for the Carrot Cake Soup story we adapted (with their permission) into a short film. The reason why I’m mentioning them is because they made it onto TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2010, which is awesome. There’s nothing else I can really add to this so I’ll just post what TIME said about them:

Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins met in high school in Spokane, Wash., in 1993. Mike was obsessed with drawing. Jerry was obsessed with words. Both were obsessed with video games. They probably would have gone pretty far in whatever field they went into, but the field they went into was drawing an online comic strip about video games called Penny Arcade, which they started in 1998. It’s about two guys named Gabe and Tycho who play games and hang out with a talking video player with a drinking problem, a terrifying robotic fruit juicer and Jesus. By 2000 it was popular enough that Krahulik and Holkins could quit their day jobs. It currently runs three times a week and has about 3.5 million readers.

For a lot of people, that would have been enough. But in 2003, Krahulik and Holkins, with their business manager, Robert Khoo, started a charity called Child’s Play that sends video games to sick kids in more than 60 hospitals around the world. In 2004 they started the Penny Arcade Expo, a convention in Seattle that celebrates gaming culture. Last year more than 60,000 people turned out for it.

Krahulik and Holkins have become the tastemakers, and conscience, of an industry the size of Hollywood. But for all their success, they are almost compulsively self-deprecating, and they give all the credit to their fans. You can’t put a label on them. Labels smack of hype, and Penny Arcade doesn’t do hype. “We don’t think about it,” Holkins says. “We specifically don’t try to figure out what we are.” Krahulik adds, deadpan: “Except rad.”

Apologies for the delay in new posts. We’re days (days) away from finishing our last semester at Uni and we’re working on our final papers. The next post I plan on doing will be some book recommendations and as a prelude, here’s a crazy excerpt from Ed Epstein’s The Hollywood Economist, which comes highly recommended.

—————————

People outside of Hollywood never get to see details of the famed “big deal.” But here is the genuine artifact: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contract for Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines.

The contract was brilliantly put together by the Hollywood super-lawyer Jacob Bloom between June 2000 and December 2001, requiring no fewer than twenty-one drafts, and runs thirty-three pages with appendices. The eleven pages of the contract proper are reproduced here for the first time.

I analyzed this document for Slate in 2005, but in the years since I’ve realized that no one outside of the film business has ever seen a big Hollywood contract: this may be the first one to be leaked.

For starters, Schwarzenegger got a $29.25 million “pay or play” fee, meaning he would be paid whether or not the movie was made. (At the time, that figure was a record for guaranteed compensation.) The first $3 million would be delivered on signing and the balance during the course of nineteen weeks of “principal photography.” For every week the shooting ran over its nineteen-week schedule, Schwarzenegger would receive an additional $1.6 million in “overage.” Then there was the “perk package”-a lump sum of $1.5 million for private jets, a fully equipped gym trailer, three-bedroom deluxe suites on locations, round-the-clock limousines, and personal bodyguards. But, as I explained in Slate, the producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna did not agree to pay Schwarzenegger this record sum because he possessed unique acting skills-after all, the part he was to play (along with a digital double and many stuntmen) was that of a slow-speaking robot-or on the basis of his box office track record. Rather, Schwarzenegger’s image had become so inexorably linked in video games and TV reruns to the deadly robot that he had become the crucial element of the deal and Kassar and Vajna needed him to raise money for the film.

Schwarzenegger’s demands, however, did not stop with the guarantee of $29.25 million. He also insisted on and got 20 percent of the gross receipts made by the venture from every market in the world-including movie theaters, videos, DVDs, television licensing, in-flight entertainment, game licensing, and so forth-once the movie had reached its cash breakeven point. Schwarzenegger also could decide who worked with him. The contract “pre-approval” clause gave him choice of not only the director (Jonathan Mostow) and the principal cast, but also his hairdresser (Peter Toothbal), his makeup man (Jeff Dawn), his driver (Howard Valesco), his stand-in (Dieter Rauter), his stunt double (Billy Lucas), the unit publicist (Sheryl Merin), his personal physician (Dr. Graham Waring), and his cook (Steve Hunter). Finally, Schwarzenegger had the contract structured to give him every possible tax advantage. All the money was to be paid not to Schwarzenegger but to Oak Productions Inc., a corporate front he controlled. Oak Productions, in return, “lends” Schwarzenegger’s services to the production. Since Schwarzenegger didn’t get any money personally from the movie itself, he had more flexibility managing his exposure to taxes.

In return, Schwarzenegger agreed to make himself available for eighteen weeks of principal photography, one week (on a nonexclusive basis) for rehearsals-if any were required-and five days for re-shooting. In addition, he had to make himself available for at least ten days, seven of them abroad, for promotional activities in connection with the initial theatrical release of the movie. This media work included everything from television and radio appearances to appearances at premieres and Internet chat rooms. The negotiation of this contract did not come cheaply-the legal and accounting budget for the movie was $2 million.

Ironically, whereas Schwarzenegger was crucial to making the deal, once the Terminator franchise had been successfully resurrected, his acting services were no longer necessary for future sequels. In 2007, Kassar and Vajna sold the rights to the franchise to the game company Halycon for $25 million, which produced Terminator Salvation in 2009, the first of three planned sequels. Even without Schwarzenegger, who was by now fighting his own budget battles as governor of California, it did almost as well as Terminator 3 at the domestic box office, though not as well in the Asian markets.

I’ve known about Murch for a long time but it wasn’t until this past year that I really got interested in him. I think it was because one of my friends in NZ said that when he edited movies, he’d do it standing up (true) and when he wanted to make a cut he’d hit this giant button in front of the monitor and go “HA!” (not completely true). My interest was piqued and during the holidays I read two books on him. The Conversations and Behind the Seen, which I mentioned in the previous post. Both are great, but Behind the Seen is invaluable because it follows Murch through his whole process, from pre-production through post. The stuff I’ll be posting about here is taken from that book.

Before he begins to create the first assembly, Murch spends a couple of days making some tools to help with his process, the first being these scene cards.  As Murch had worked with Anthony Minghella (director of Cold Mountain) before, he was given free reign to do whatever helped him most. “Blue with a yellow background means Inman (Jude Law) is in a scene; plain blue means Inman is not in that scene. A lot of blue cards in a row means not much Inman – which makes me wonder ‘is that a good idea?’ A triangle indicates I feel it is a pivot scene. The size of card equals the approximate length of a scene.”

Another tool are the picture boards, which you can see off to his right. It’s a system he’s used on every film since Unbearable Lightness of Being. Murch selects from one to eight representative frames from every set-up – “defining moments,” he calls them – that best represent the “story” of that particular shot, emotionally or visually. They are mounted side by side, in story order (or, as the story was written in the screenplay). Walter uses the picture boards because it lets his eyes dance through the film and discover hidden patterns and rhythms.

Once Walter finishes the first assembly, which was around four hours for CM, it’s on to the first cut. One of the biggest problems here, along with editing in general, is maintaining objectivity. “When I’m working on a film, the image I have is of myself swimming in a fast-moving river. The film is always changing and I’m kind of in the middle of it. Objectivity would mean trying to swim to the shore, clambering up, and looking at the river go by. The dangerous thing about doing that is that’s when most people drown – when you’re trying to get out of the water. On the other hand, if you relax and let yourself be carried along, and even swim in the direction of the current – somehow, given the editor’s particular dilemma, that’s a better thing to do than to try to go back and forth from objectivity to subjectivity. Heightened subjectivity means learning to listen to very tiny voices that you hear in the corner of your head that say, ‘What if? What about this? What about that?”

The big technique at play here is his edit on-the-fly which Murch wrote about in his book In the Blink of an Eye.

Murch starts at the beginning, with the opening battle scene. After watching the entire sequence play, noting all the possibilities for trimming shots, he returns to the beginning. Now he sets Final Cut Pro into trim mode so it will loop, or replay, the same shot over and over. Murch holds his index finger over the “K” key and watches the shot play on the monitor to his left. As he feels the moment where it ought to end, he presses the key. The shot is trimmed by six frames, and a small readout “-6” appears. The shot replays. Again he feels the moment and presses the “K” key: the readout again reads “-6” which means he hit the same frame twice in a row. “If I can’t do this, if I can’t hit the same frame repeatedly at 24 frames per second, I know there is something wrong in my approach to the shot, and I adjust my thinking until I find a frame I can hit.”

Murch’s on-the-fly technique derives from his theory of “the blink.” The edit in film isn’t so different from what we do thousands of times every day in real life when we blink our eyes. While editing Coppola’s The Conversation, Murch realized his decisions about where to cut shots were coinciding with Gene Hackman’s eye blinks. Murch took the idea one step further by noticing that we also blink when separating thoughts and sorting things out. “Start a conversation with somebody and watch when they blink,” he says. “I believe you will find the listener will blink at the precise moment he or she ‘gets’ the idea of what you are saying, not an instant earlier or later.”

Next, we have the Rule of Six.

1. Emotion  (51%)

2. Story  (23%)

3. Rhythm  (10%)

4. Eye-trace  (7%)

5. Two-dimensional plane of screen  (5%)

6. Three-dimensional space of action  (4%)

“An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”; 4) it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace” – the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects “planarity” – the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the dimensions of stage-line, etc); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom. The values I put after each item are slightly tongue in cheek, but not completely… emotion is worth more than all five of the things underneath it… there is a practical side to this which is that if the emotion is right and the story is advanced in a unique, interesting way, in the right rhythm, the audience will tend to be unaware of (or unconcerned about) editorial problems with lower-order items like eye-trace, stage-line, spatial continuity, etc. The general principle seems to be that satisfying the criteria of items higher on the list tends to be obscure problems with items lower on the list, but not vice versa.”

I’ll end it now with a quote from the end of the book from a talk Murch gave to editors in LA about the future of editing/filmmaking.

Feature filmmaking, as we’ve known it, also requires a collaborative community. We can all be painters now if we choose, and the art form has benefited from such pluralism. But there may be a price to be paid for such freedom. As Murch points out: “The presence of other people during the act of creation kept painting grounded in a way that it is obviously not today, when it’s done almost exclusively in isolation. Likewise, the artist who inhabits a self-contained world of silence and imagination is vulnerable to demons and distempers – look at Van Gogh.”

Movies have only been around for 100 years but the comparison to fine art is instructive. Digital technologies are to today’s filmmaker what inexpensive art supplies were to European artists four centuries ago. Economical editing systems such as Final Cut Pro, used in conjunction with other new digital filmmaking equipment and techniques, permit a filmmaker working alone to take on complex functions previously handled by dozens, even hundreds of crew members and craftspeople – shooting, editing, graphic effects, color correction, music recording, and sound mixing – and there are no apparent sacrifices in production values. Digital films can be exhibited just as widely as expensive productions made in traditional ways. For directors who prefer taking on more and more jobs themselves – and who have the energy, disposition, time, and talent to do so – methods are available for them to become one-person bands. This may be a good thing – lower costs, more efficient workflow, singular visions being realized – but this trend discourages collaboration – not necessarily a good thing. Movies seem to magically appeal to widespread groups of people because they are created by a team of diverse people, each bringing something different yet essential to the final creation. Take those creative contributions away and a pure, individually expressed conception can become odd, bizarre, and appeal only to the narrowest audience.

“The future is in the Final Cut direction,” Murch says. Editing systems from here on, he predicts, will give users maximum flexibility and be engineered so third-party developers can invent elegant solutions for niche users (like editors of big feature films), while also providing high-quality images at affordable prices. But there’s a catch. “As with all digital non-linear editing, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness,” says Murch.” It gives you what you say you want, but that may not be what you need.” The speed and precision with which digital editng systems deliver results for the editor can also cut out artistic surprises that come by accident. “These systems don’t talk to you very well. The picture boards and the scene cards are my way to kick back at non-linear editing.”