Louie In Film School

Good to be back on the blog.  This is a good way of externalizing all my thoughts about this.

My movie is going to follow a kid, Brian, in the hood as he struggles with the desire to get his mom out of their shitty situation.  He’s dealing drugs, but doesn’t want to.

I’m mainly concerned with giving the audience the feeling of living in this world, and all the anxiety and struggle that comes with it.  I want them to come away with a deeper understanding of the world and potentially a more empathetic attitude towards people who are forced into particular types of lifestyles.

For this film I wanted to try to spread the story out more and do deeper with it, rather than having a ton of different plot points that end up being difficult to follow.  I think I did that fairly well, as everyone who sees the film seems to get it right off the bat.  It helps a lot that I put the title “2nd Place” at the beginning but it is still very clear.  I’m still trying to figure out how to up the stakes more in my films.  This one is still fairly lukewarm in terms of conflict.

Honing in on the cuts is also difficult.  There are some cuts that I just know I got right, and some that draft on or aren’t long enough, but I can’t seem to quite dial them in.  As I become more experienced and take some editing classes, I’m sure I’ll get better at this.

I was told the scene in the dining room was superfluous.  After thinking about it, I realized this is absolutely the case.  Unfortunately, because the track scenes are meant to take place over several days and I had the actors change clothes to accommodate that, I need something in between the days to break it up.  I tried getting rid of the scene and just using a dissolve to go between the days but ultimately I found that I need that scene in there.  I tightened it up though so it was’t too long.

Locations

I used four locations: My house, my actor’s office, and two bus stops.  For the first two, I just had my mother and the actor sign location releases.  For the bus stops, I talked to my contact at the City of Shaker Heights, where the bus stops are located.  He is the Director of Law at Shaker and has helped me before.  He signed the releases.  The one thing I didn’t plan was the fact that busses only run once per hour on Sundays, when I was shooting the bus stop scenes.  For this reason I couldn't get a shot of a bus pulling away like I wanted.  Oh well.

Cast

I planned on buying my friend a Greyhound ticket to come back from OSU to act in the pilot.  This worked out fine.  My other friend just works so he got off work.  For the record exec, I used my other friend’s dad.  He was locked in a for a week or two before filming.  I didn’t have an actress to play Mariah until the day before I needed her, but she showed up and was awesome.

Crew

This was a little more difficult because so many of my friends were still at school.  For most of the filming, I had the camera on sticks and held the boom pole myself.  In some scenes, my brother was around and helped out with that. For the shots where I needed the camera on my shoulder, I didn’t really need production sound, so I just got the scratch track from the camera and I’ll replace it with better sound later.  BTS was done by whichever actor wasn’t in the scene we were filming, and some was done by my little sister.

Equipment

Look

One of my main stylistic influences for the series will be the “Mind Palace” sequences of the BBC show “Sherlock”.  Here’s a link to what I mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnHm2xfDDR8 I want to use this aesthetic for the sequences when Shawn and Chris are actually making music.  It will show how they concentrate fully, deeply, on the music, even though they aren’t successful (yet).

Of course, the show will echo “Empire” as the content is similar, and there might be similar drama.  However, I want to keep this somewhat lighthearted and give it a sense of humor about itself because it is a web series.  I don’t think the episodes are long enough to merit the full drama of “Empire”.  I’ll be looking at web series like “F to 7th” and “I Hate Being Single” to give the show a dry sense of humor.

Audience

The most probable audience for this show is high schoolers through college students, middle to upper class.  I think whatever I make will appeal mostly to those in the same demographic as me.

The table reading was very informative and also fairly encouraging.  I found that my script read fairly well and people understood the central conflict and approved of it.  I got a lot of good feedback too.  People said I should work on establishing the difference between Shawn and Chris visually.  I also was able to identify the parts of dialogue that weren’t quite working.

Character Bios

Chris

Chris is an upper-middle class white boy from the Mainline of Philadelphia, never spoiled but still very privileged (and unaware of that privilege).  He took piano lessons as a kid and is very musically skilled.  He wants to be a true artist.

 Shawn

Shawn, a black kid from a single-mother home in West Philly, has always had a thing for words.  He said his first words when he was 8-months old and hasn’t stopped since, always writing poetry and raps and lyrics.  He wants to be an artist just as badly as Chris, but money is tight in his life.

 Mariah

Mariah is Shawn’s girlfriend.  She comes from a similar background as him, though instead of being raised by a single mother, she was raised by a single father.  He taught her to defend herself, and to always demand respect from everyone.

 Jon Dichter

I’m happy with how my first film for PROD 200 turned out.  I think the story was good and I executed it well.  I cast young kids and adults, adding to the credibility of the film.  That being said, there are of course things I would do differently next time.

I needed to raise the stakes in the story and give the characters more motivation.  I think in my head everything made sense and I thought it would be really powerful, but on the screen it comes off a little boring.

I tried to do too much in too little time.  There are too many scene changes and too many story points to effectively hit in the 3 minute time limit.  Because of this, some of my cuts are not as powerful as I would like, and it feel like I’m rushing through the story.

Because I lost the use of a location I had to change the story a bit.  While I was shooting I realized that this change called for a new shot, which I then got.  What I didn’t realize until after I had done an assembly was that this new shot made an entire scene obsolete.  Of course deleted scenes happen, but it just serves as a reminder that I need to have my script 100% nailed down well before shooting.

Our most recent assignment in PROD 200 was to create a sequence of 10-12 still images that tell a story of something found.  We then had to time the images as if they were shots in a sequence, keeping in mind what cut length can do to the meaning of a sequence.

I think it is more difficult to nail down timing of a still image sequence than of a moving picture sequence because often the action in a shot can help dictate where cuts should go.  It was certainly very informative to be forced to think about how long the audience needs to process the necessary information in the image, and how long they need to get the intended meaning and feeling from the image.  

A)         Jake just landed a summer job as a lifeguard.  He not only has to learn how to save lives, but also how to survive among the dysfunctional group of returning guards.

a.          Learning lifeguard skills (backboarding, cpr etc.) sometimes in the early morning and cold

b.         Deal with characters: flamboyant gay guy, friendly but slightly incompetent boss, hot dumb girl, unruly patrons, other annoying guards, teaching swim lessons

B)         Armed with only a keyboard, laptop, and shitty microphone, Shawn and Chris try to take their love of music to the next level: making it big in the hip-hop game. They’ll have to deal with label execs, venue owners, and each other if they want to realize their dream.

a.          Start with mostly them in the bedroom studio, dealing with parents mostly, also showing music to friends etc.

b.         As story progresses, start playing shitty venues to small crowds.  Start trying to get a record deal.  Lots of rejections.  Shawn and chris argue

c.          Get a deal, more arguing, but hopeful

C)         Randy Cline makes a living reporting on high school sports, but he aspires to report on the pros.  Can he juggle his commitment to his wife and kids while still navigating his way to his ultimate goal?

a.          He does love his job while he’s doing it.  When he goes home he dreams of reporting on the pros.

b.         Loves his wife and kids, but problems with attention and being present.  Starts to strain relationships when he starts moving up in the reporting world.

F to 7th follows the life of Ann, a lesbian living in New York City.  Each episode is 4-6 minutes long and is essentially one conversation between Ann and another character.  I’ll start with what I like about the series, then talk about what I don’t like.

Pros

I was immediately drawn in by the witty, dry writing of the series.  Ingrid Jungerman writes really great characters and gets good performances out of her actors.  The simplicity of each episode allows time for the campy dialogue as well as the skillful exploration of Ann’s lesbian identity as it relates to the other characters.

Cons

As with any production with such a low budget, production value is going to suffer (many of these issues are fixed in the second season which was funded by a grant from NYU).  The cinematography was good at times but also fairly clunky and noticeable at others.  The first episode was really the only major issue here.  There were also a few instances in which the performance felt slightly jaded.  Writing wise, I think it would be nice to have a greater change occur during each episode, although the episodic nature of the series itself account for that.

Audience