In my last post about SXSW shorts I mentioned that the story and performance mattered more then technique. Here is a link to the trailer for The Chair. This narrative short combines both an interesting, well told story, and fantastic technique. On its own it was fully impressive, then during the Q&A at the end of the screening we learned it was shot on 35mm film. This is pretty rare for any indie project let alone a short. I hope the full version of this film will be available to share soon, meanwhile, here is the trailer:

The Chair is the story of a mysterious outbreak of poisonous mold in a small town and one boy’s attempt to understand his mother’s death, his grandmother’s obsession with their discarded recliner, and the roots of this short-lived, strange, and inexplicable plague.
Director(s): Grainger David
Producer(s): Spencer Kiernan, Caroline Oliveira
Screenwriter(s): Grainger David
Cinematographer: Jimmy Lee Phelan
Editor(s): Jarrah Gurrie
Production Designer: Kate Rance
Sound Designer: Scott Hirsch
Music: Sasha Gordon
Additional Credits: SOUND: Levi Abrino, 1ST AC: Cole Koehler, GAFFER: Tristan Allen, GRIP: Igor Ibradzic, SCRIPT SUPERVISOR: Andinh Ha
Principal Cast: Khari Lucas, Ja’kye Williams, Jadin Williams, Amya Williams, Rev. Martha Florence Brown, King Hoey

SXSW was a month ago, since then I have intended to write about some of the films I saw there. It was a great education for me to see amazing short subject narrative, documentary and animation work at the festival. I would like to tell you some of what I learned here. Most of these films aren’t available to watch on sites like Vimeo or YouTube so it’s hard to come home from the festival and review what you’ve seen. I understand that filmmakers have to keep their work offline so it can debut at the various festivals. I suspect more will be released online as the festival season progresses. As I run into some of the great stuff from SXSW online I’ll be sure to post links here.

Here is the big, no surprise, take away from seeing dozens of shorts at SXSW. Gear heads, listen up. This is coming from a RED camera owner who cares a lot about technical quality: When the acting, direction and story are good you can get away with pretty average quality. Even the dreaded Canon 5d’s anti-aliasing and rolling shutter didn’t matter on a 40 foot screen if the performance was good enough. On the other hand, great image quality doesn’t fix an average story.

In a reel SXSW called Global Shorts I saw this gem. The Perfect Fit. Directed by Tali Yankelevich. You can’t see the full 9 minute version but there is a trailer online. I believe this is a great example of a director finding a simple, real story and telling it very well. It’s probably the kind of story most people would never look into.

Tourists photograph Air France's A340 as it lands at St. Maarten

We spent the winter holidays in Guadalupe visiting family. To get there we had a choice of flying through St. Maarten or San Juan. Since I had seen TV show called the worlds 10 most extreme airports featuring St. Maarten’s Princess Juliana Airport, the decision was easy. I’ve always had a thing for aircraft and lately I’ve been photographing them landing at the various airports we visit. Getting to see the approach at St. Maarten was a special opportunity.

Juliana airport features a long level approach over the ocean to a landing strip that’s just a few feet off the sandy beach. When the heavy airliners come in you feel as if you could touch them, then you feel a blast from the jet engines as they roar onto the landing strip.

Each day owners of Sunset Bar post arrival times of the international flights. The big 747s from Corsair and Airfrance are the highlights, tourists plan their days based on seeing these planes arrive.

When aircraft takeoff the blast from their jet engines produces a wind so strong that the beach turns into a sand storm. Some people position themselves right in the middle of these blinding blasts.

The arrival of Corsair's 747 is the daily highlight on St. Maarten's Sunset beach.

The beach is briefly transformed into a desert sand-storm each time a jet departs.

Since I’ve been writing these book reviews as a way of sharing my own film-making self-education. The first thing to mention is what kind of audience I think Rebel without a Crew is appropriate for. In some ways Rodriguez’ book is most appropriate for those of us who want to make movies. However it is so entertaining and the El Mariachi stories are so cool that I think any indy film buff will like this book.

Everyone’s heard of a bucket list, how about a cold beer list. After reading this book and watching 10 minute film school, I’d put Robert Rodriguez on any top 10 list of people I’d like drink a beer with. He is funny as hell and tells a great story.

As the title suggests, this is not a book about making Hollywood movies. Rodriquez made El Mariachi with his buddies, a borrowed 16mm camera, some cash he got from selling his body to science and a script he thought of as something to practice on. If Neil Young is the godfather of grunge, Rodriguez is the Patron Saint of indy films. The problem is our idea of an indy film is still a millions of dollars affair. His idea of being a true one-man-band is really worth some thought before your re-finance your house to make your first film.

“The creative person with limitless imagination and no money can make a better film then the talentless mogul with a limitless checkbook every time.”

In the film Inception the story turns on the concept that a single idea can be really powerful, that it can change someone’s life. Rodriguez had one of those singular life-changing ideas. He wanted to write a script. Someone told him that everyone has two bad movies in them, so the advice offered was write two scripts and throw them in the trash. Then write a script to shop around. Rodriguez didn’t think he would have the discipline to write something knowing it was going in the trash. So his singular life-changing idea, write a script and make a movie from that script. That way he would get practice at both. To sweeten the idea he figured he could make it on the cheap then sell it to the Mexican film market for just enough to cover the costs of making it and one more practice movie. You guessed it, he didn’t make a movie for the trash, he made El Mariachi.

Not only did he make El Mariachi, he kept a diary of the whole wild ride. That’s the meat of Rebel Without a Crew. It’s fully worth reading the story, it’s not only highly entertaining it will motivate you to make your film.

Rodriguez really is a rebel. Just like David Mamet, who says Hollywood producers have no souls, Rodriguez doesn’t have much patience for capital “P” producers. He is so convinced that breaking the rules is the first step to creativity that he urges you not only to break all the Hollywood rules but to break his rules too.

“question everything because it can all be rethought and improved… in the end the only techniques worth knowing are the ones you invent your self.”

Here is the original 10 Minute Film School:

As if Robert hasn’t taught you enough about filmmaking here is 10 Minute Cooking School, as I said this is a guy you want to have a beer with.

Back in the days when I worked for newspapers the Guardian in London would have been at the very top of the list of publications I wanted to work with, right up there with the New York Times. So, I was hugely honored when I received an email from Victoria Prior of Uttercontent.com telling me she had nominated Summer in San Francisco for their best travel videos page and it was live on the Guardian’s website. There are some great videos there, take a look. Victoria told me she watches the video when she misses our beautiful city. I’ve heard that from a few different people now, it’s so satisfying to know that I created something people connect with.

I stumbled upon David Mamet’s now twenty-year-old book On Directing Film while looking for something else on Amazon, Jeff Bezos should be happy. Whatever algorithm is working behind the scenes spit out  just what I was after.

I bought the book because I like Mammet’s writing for films like House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, Ronin and State and Main. Like Aaron Sorkin’s double speed writing you can really tell a Mamet script by the halting cadence.

On Directing Film comes from a series of lectures Mammet gave at Columbia University after directing House of Games. The format is a transcript of Mamet’s lecture with his student’s responses to his questions.

There will be two moments to give you pause reading this book, one in the beginning when you pull out a dictionary to understand what Mammet means by uninflected a word he uses again and again. Another when you wonder if the book should be titled, On Writing for Film. Mamet does have a Pulitzer.

Mamet’s key point is that a movie is a story told in cuts. It should be created by juxtaposing uninflected images which tell the story. By uninflected he means something like unrelated. This is essentially Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Show the audience a series of images that move the story forward; tell the story in the simplest way without narration. There is an entire chapter on this here: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: text and performance 

For a moment I wondered if this book was really about directing or if it was about writing drama. Really it’s a book about preparing. I think Mamet is very right when he says that being unprepared on set will not cause you to be creative, at the best you can copy something that you know works or do something interesting that may not be right for the story. He says that directing is all done before the cameras and crew show up.

Mamet shows his students how to see a film in manageable units. The largest unit is the film, the smallest is the shot and the unit of most interest to the director is the scene. Each scene should be a tiny drama of its own where the protagonist has a goal to achieve (or not). Then we are to break the scene down into beats and shots. For Mamet preparing this road map from shot to beat to scene to film is directing.

To better understand this, think of a scene. For example, the scene is “flee from a crime”. The protagonist’s goal is: get away. The beats are: a) get to the car, quickly b) start the car, c) drive away, unnoticed. At this point the shots start to fall into place: Running from a distance, tight shot of feet showing speed, looking over his shoulder, getting to the car, working the key in the lock, starting the car, hands on wheels, foot on pedal, eyes in mirror, tires spinning, car moving through the lot, turning onto the road, disappearing into traffic.

Mamet explains it much more convincingly then I could here, read the book. What you will learn is that this concept of looking at each scenes as a drama told in beats and shots provides a check-sum. An opportunity to see the story very close up (shot by shot) or to pull back to the beats or scenes and make sure that everything contributes to the through-line.

Polaroid Type 55: Sunday morning at Mt. Herman Baptist Church

Friend of the blog Jeff Singer let me know about New 55. Bob Crowley in Massachusetts is working on a brand new 4×5 film that resembles Polaroid Type 55. May even be an improvement based on his explanation of what they are working on. This is very exciting news. I wish these guys the best of luck and when they are ready would like to support or help them in any way I can.

Portrait of Michael Winokur by James Lesko, second sheet of film and we're off to a good start.

My friend James and I spent Saturday in my studio shooting some of the last Polaroid 8×10 film in the world. James brought over his beautiful Linhof 8×10 view camera – what a stunning example of mechanical engineering. We experimented with some black and white Polaroid 804 and a processor I had found on eBay. Neither of us had ever used this film before. All I can say is I wish I were shooting 8×10 Polaroid by the box back when it was still being made. It’s a slow methodical process but one with exactly the magic that people talk about when they romanticize photography.

James inserting the Polaroid film holder into his Lindhof Master Kardan.

The film was almost 10 years old. The processor in unknown condition. We could just have easily found out that neither worked. It could have been a hugely expensive pile of garbage. It was not garbage, it was amazing. All these years later it still made pictures that have that Polaroid goodness.

Shooting and processing 8×10 Polaroid requires - according the the instructions - 33 steps. From inserting the negative in the holder to placing the positive in the processor and timing the development to finally peeling the print from the negative. We shot 8 pictures in about 5 hours. We could have been faster but we didn’t want to waste any film. Oh, we did waste film. The first sheet got flared and then we mis-processed a sheet – that’s an expensive mistake about on par with shattering a bottle of fine wine.

The very first sheet we exposed, showing light leaks form improper handling.

Let us not give all the credit for this look to Polaroid. The Linhof camera fitted with a Heliar 360mm lens is special all by itself. One of the reasons this camera is exceptional for portraiture is that huge 8×10 image area. Technology companies have done wonders with small sensor digital cameras. But there is no changing the physics that govern light and optics. The bigger the imager (in this case 8×10) the longer the focal length of the lens which creates a “normal” field of view.  The longer the focal length the greater the compression and shallower the depth of field.

Back to the Polaroid. The science side of photography is all about controlling variables. E.g. processing time and temperature effect film speed and contrast which in turn effect exposure. Many of these variables are well documented. In the case of 10 year-old film, the temperature vs. processing time side of the equation  is a mystery. We started at the recommended 45 seconds and quickly doubled that to 90. With a decent supply of film that was all manufactured and stored under the same conditions we could determine the “right” processing time. Since that’s not possible we tried some variations around 90 seconds then accepted that as optimal.

This incredible day of making pictures purely for the sake of experimenting with the medium reminds me how much I loved working with Polaroid films, especially Type 55. It of course also reminds me how betrayed photographers feel by Polaroid for taking away integral film. There are fine-art photographers whose entire style was based on Polaroid’s films, if I’m annoyed by loosing this film I’m sure they are devastated.

The ghostly Polaroid negative just after being peeled away from the positive print.

There has never been more interest in photography and never have we seen more people building small companies devoted to photography enthusiasts. Somehow the MBA’s at Polaroid thought it would be better to hire Lady Gaga then to make even small amounts of the film that made them a worldwide brand. All we can hope for is the impossible. Impossible project that is. Maybe in years to come there will be more of this film. But there are very few 8×10 cameras, so it’s kind of hard to imagine. There are however tons of 4×5 cameras, I am told that 4×5 integral film like type 55 will never be made again. Polaroid destroyed the equipment. Fuji still makes a 4×5 instant film, it’s very good but it’s not the fine-art media that Polaroid’s films were.

Digital photograph of the ground glass

Michael Winokur photograph by James Lesko

James seen on the ground glass of his Master Kardan

While I’ve been waiting patiently for Red to ship my Scarlet camera I’ve been taking the opportunity to do some reading. On a recent flight I brought along Movie Makers Master Class. It’s a good read.

Laurent Tirard wanted to be a filmmaker but found a career as a journalist. He figured out a way to make great use of his job to meet the best directors in the world. In the process he taught himself to make films – which he is now doing – and created a book which is at the least a good read and at the most may be the inspiration for your directing. The masterclass is an interview format in which Tirard asks the same series of questions to 20 of the best directors in the world. Or as he says the ones he could get to sit with him. The result is that the reader has a  framework to compare the answers from each director to each question. For example Tirard asked each interviewee how they decide to position the camera, what is the first thing they do on set each day, how they work with actors, their opinion of the auteur theory…

Some of the directors Tirard talks to are household names, all are people whose work has helped shape the way movies are made and stories are told: Joel and Ethan Coen,  Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, Tim Burton, David Lynch, John Woo, Pedro Almodavar, Sydney Pollack, Bernardo Bertolucci,  Emir Kusturica, Claude Sautet,  Wong Kar-Wai, Wim Wenders, Lars Von Trier, Takeshi Kitano, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, John Boorman, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard.

The problem with a book titled Master Class is it can’t help to be disappointing. The reader has been promised the meaning of life. The reality is the only high-level lesson that will come from a book like this is that each of the artists interviewed have found their own path, stuck to that path and brought a unique vision to their audience. That alone is a lesson any creative person needs to learn – maybe again and again. The real value in these master classes is accepting that there is not one path but seeing how each of the directors found a unique solutions to the creative problems at hand.

You may not recognize Walter Murch’s name but there is no doubt that you know his work. He edited Apocalypse Now, Godfater II and III and The English Patient to name a few. I bought this book when I was deep into my first couple motion projects. I realized learning to use the editing tools is just putting your toes into the water. To edit film you have to understand what a cut is and why it works for the human brain. This is where Murch’s book starts. He takes us through both the mechanics of film – frames flashing by 24 times a second – and the neuroscience of why the human brain accepts the illusion. It could just as easily have not worked and movies wouldn’t work the way they do. He spends a fair amount of time talking about editing actual film and most of this is wasted on people who are only familiar with NLEs (non-linear editors like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut). The second edition goes into his beginnings in digital post but I would love to see him write a new version of this book discussing his own thoughts now that digital intermediaries and digital capture are standard. That said, the tools are irrelevant, read this book to start thinking like an editor and start really understanding how films are like dreams and how the audience perceives the cut.