uncollected thoughts on directing

was on set again directing this past week for 5 straight days for my upcoming web-series Micgroaggressions, about 5 individuals and how they intersect with a City mediation one Saturday morning (more to say about that in the coming weeks) and learned and/or was reminded about multiple things that I am going to put here for my future self:

- just ignore that pulsing imposter alarm that keeps going off in your head throughout the shoot.
- get good sleep where possible
- if you think you got it move on. don't do another one just because or for safety. corollary: ask the actor/s if they want another one and give it if so.
- let the PA or someone other than you handle the particulars of craft and lunch
- your relationship w/ 1st AD is key to days going well.
- every day is a sort of marathon w/ ambitions, difficulties, highs/lows, varying energies, occasional heartbreak - don't get snagged by any of it. move on to next setup.
- while it's good to be flexible and in-the-moment about what to shoot, it's better to have an ordered set of shots in your head that you can speak to and deviate from.
- you will be asked an endless river of questions so don't let yourself feel annoyed when they keep coming.
- don't be afraid to say I don't know or I haven't thought about it.
- if low/no $ you may be tempted to have no hair/makeup person and ask actors to do their own. don't do this.
- though your head may be elsewhere, pondering specific details, missed opportunities, happy accidents, shortcomings, budget etc, remember that you are working with people so come up for air and talk to them. in some ways genuine conversation at lunch can be just as important as the screenplay
- the importance of deeply trusting your cinematographer cannot be overstated.
- something will go wrong.
- something will go very wrong.
- If something going wrong is an actor dropping out 4 days before you're supposed to shoot w/ actor, don't panic, just recast.
- If something going very wrong is replacement actor dropping out at 1:36 AM the night before you're supposed to shoot w/ replacement actor, don't panic, just rewrite scene for 3 people and make it a scene for 2 people even if it means you're late to set. Then when you remember 1 of those people is not an actor per se and not honed at new lines on the fly and how you were counting on 2 other actors in the scene to bolster him don't panic. Adjust shot/s w/ DP, get wild lines where needed. Maybe it's a happy accident b/c you didn't location scout this location in the first place and you'll realize that the space wouldn't work great w/ 3 people in scene anyway.
- always have a scripty.

podcast

Honored to be here ! RT @needmore: Now #OnTheJob, @brian_padian of @TheBlackSeaFilm fame. http://t.co/LY5rDfREb3 pic.twitter.com/kmhmagRdvM
— the black sea movie (@TheBlackSeaFilm) August 1, 2014

I appeared on the great podcast The Job recently, talking about the black sea movie and a bit of my life in Portland and Los Angeles and here and there. I am not a fan of listening to myself talk (despite my wife's contrary opinion) so I have trouble hearing it but I know I am not alone in issues of self-regard. Check it out and let me know what you think

screenplay versus direction

There is a world of difference from screenplay to production to finished film. (This is not a new thought and has been expressed/covered in multiple forums most cogently in the maxim: a film is made 3 times - screenplay, production, and in editing).  This is not to discount the primacy of screenplay because I, in part due to my background as a once aspirant screenwriter, think it's vital. But I used to think the script was at the top of hierarchy, the tree the other limbs sprang from instead of how I see it now: the embryo that grows the complex organism. Essential but not ultimate.

The screenplay for the black sea went through multiple iterations and drafts across many years until it finally was nailed down. It's a complicated, slightly dense thing - amusing since i set out to write/direct something straightforward and easily digestible for my feature debut - but after a lot of work I got it to a place where every word of prose and every bit of dialogue was to my liking as we moved across pre-production and into shooting. Overall, it worked. 

On set there were minor adjustments here and there, growing pains, adjustments and reconfigurations particular to production. A line altered here. A line ad libbed there. Bigger: A plate of chocolate (seen in the dinner table shot below), and one character's animated refusal to take any was meant to happen in the background, under the dialogue, to be a foreshadowing for later things. It's tiny and small but important to the world of the film. Further, it worked on the page. But in directing this (to me) complicated scene the plate of chocolate was subsumed by the on-set machinations of multiple eyelines and 2-shots and 3-shots and covering 5 plus pages of dialogue shooting a 4:1 ratio (on Super 16). The plate of chocolate and its import became diminished so the animated refusal was not even shot. A perfect example of how production can overwhelm/alter the screenplay. The writer in me might have fought for the plate of chocolate but the director in me cut it loose to better get through the day. Perhaps this is a case of directorial inexperience.

A bigger example of screenplay v. film came in a another scene that worked on the page. We see character 1 sitting by the window, looking at the ocean and then cut to a flashback where he meets character 2 at a bar. However the scene ended w/ jump cut to later in the night, at same location w/ Character 2 on phone w/ Character 3, Character 1 long gone. Then we cut back to Character 1 sitting by the window. Believe it or not it worked on the page in a sort of lyric poetic way, the words and prose guiding the reader's POV so that it made sense in terms of text. It had a flow and the reader could understand what the screenwriter was attempting to do. So I directed it and we shot it. But once we were in post-production, we could not make it work. All the lyric prose in the world can't shoe-horn two opposing POVs across the cut. Perhaps directorial inexperience again but I also like to think it is a remnant of my dependence on the written form instead of the filmic one.

A screenplay is made of words so it's easy to confuse with literary forms.  But the image and what it says/does-not-say is more enduring and vital than any well-turned phrase in the prose of the screenplay. It's taken me a long time to realize/admit this.

 cross-posted at northern flicker films production blog

500 posts

i've had this blog about 5 yrs, here's post number 500, a photo that features a couple things that i've been working on lately, with a love-swollen heart

disturbing still

here's a image-grab still from the footage of The Big Black Dark, currently being edited.
cross-posted here

northern flicker

so, weird story. about a year ago i wrote a post about how i heard a ruckus upstairs and it turns out a blue jay had somehow gotten stuck in our fireplace. you can re-read that here. this morning i was working on my website, northern flicker films, trying to get things in order b/c of the new short. it's been a good few weeks, finally seeing this film to completion and having a good public showing and gearing up for the next ones and so forth. i am prone to hyperbole but i'll say this anyway: things i've been working toward my entire adult life are slowly crystallizing. to say the least it's felt important, these past couple weeks. so anyway i was moving some stuff around on the site when i hear a strange clawing sound from inside the fireplace. keep in mind that this is a different house and a different fireplace. in fact this isn't really even a fireplace it's a wood-stove more or less. i hear the sound again. there's definitely something alive in there. M comes into the living room and says the dog was sniffing at the stove last night in a tizzy but she thought nothing of it so whatever it is has been in there all night. we can't see into the stove b/c over the years the smoke and ash have darkened the window but we can hear it. We don't know what to expect: bird, rat, squirrel. I grab the handle and slowly pull the door and step back all in one fluid motion and out flies a Northern Flicker. It takes a few moments of encouragement to get it to the open front door - after all it's scared and exhausted - but we do. and finally free, it takes flight.