Filthy and Complicated: A filmmaker's journal

Shooting!

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Lautaro

Saturday I recruited some friends to help shoot my film. I’m quite new to the process but it was funny to see how absolutely alien it is to most people. Their comments ranged from the inquisitive: “Why are you shooting all out of order?”, to the inspired: “What if you pull into focus as I wake up?”, to the unhelpful: “Why don’t you have the last shot be a big turd floating in the toilet?”

I’m pretty nervous about the exposure. I don’t think I had nearly enough light, and I have to wait days for the film to be developed before I can see if it turned out at all. We’re so spoiled by digital devices with viewfinders, with media that can be transferred to a screen immediately after shooting. At least during professional productions they have daily prints, so they can see rather quickly how it looks. Being stuck in the middle, without dailies, or quick digital transfer, kinda sucks. I hope this counts as “paying my dues.”

Film Story Structure

Posted on September 26, 2008 by Lautaro

So here’s a little graphic I made about screenplay structure. This is based on what I’ve absorbed from books, classes, and writing my own. I don’t take credit for any of the ideas presented here, I just thought It’d be fun to mash them all together in a graphical way.

This file is fully editable in Illustrator.

Click for PDF

Problematic Auteurs

Posted on September 25, 2008 by Lautaro

So everything I’ve read and heard about D.W. Griffith holds that he was an unmitigated genius who did more for the art of cinema than anyone has ever done for anything ever, and other such superlatives. Oh, and he was also mind-blowingly racist.

Honest critique is supposed to separate the art from the artist and judge it on its own merits. Take Roman Polanski, for example. He drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, then fled the country to avoid sentencing. And yet he’s one of the world’s greatest directors.

I think the main difference between the two is that Griffith’s most famous film is explicitly racist, whereas to my knowledge Polanski never made any movies about drugging and raping underage girls. This is why The Birth of a Nation is so much more difficult to watch than Rosemary’s Baby or The Pianist. Polanski’s movies are so engrossing that you forget about his fucked up life (holocaust survivor, pregnant wife murdered by Charles Manson, the aforementioned criminal trouble) . On the other hand, it’s hard to brush aside Griffith’s racism when you see the Ku Klux Klan riding in to rescue the poor white girls from a horde of marauding Negroes.

Forum!

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Lautaro

The forum is now up and running at http://www.filthyandcomplicated.com/forum/

Paper is Cheaper Than Film

Posted on September 22, 2008 by Lautaro

Today we were drilled on the importance of fully planning our shots. Some sort of system for translating a script is absolutely necessary. The traditional method is: Script –> storyboard –> shot list –> shooting order.

This is especially useful for me to hear, as my first impulse is to grab the camera and start filming stuff. But film isn’t video; it’s expensive. And considering this, I’m thinking my idea for the first assignment might be too ambitious. I wanted to do an on-location shoot in eastern Washington, on a dusty country road and a motel. But that might require at least 2 rolls of film.

Wrapping Up the First Week

Posted on September 19, 2008 by Lautaro

Today was pretty exciting: we were given our Super 8 cameras. We got a crash course on their operation and spent the rest of the day doing exposure tests.

We don’t get our film cartridges until next week but I’m kind of tempted to buy one on my own to play around with this weekend.

A couple of quotes on Art

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Lautaro

By two very quotable gay men.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it immensely. All art is useless.
~Oscar Wilde

For Raphael, the creating of a work of art is a bright spring day in the campagna: for me, it is the tramontana howling down the valley
~Michelangelo Buonarrotti

Film History

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Lautaro

In class today I learned:

Porn is the first thing made with any new technology.
’80s German Avant-garde synthesizer music is horrible
Some people haven’t seen Citizen Kane. Rosebud!

First Two Days of Film School

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Lautaro

So far we’ve had class sessions on editing and screenwriting. It’s all very theoretical and lecture-y at this point, and I expect that will continue for the first few weeks. They’re having us dissect movie shot structure and screenplays.

I have to decide which movie idea to develop for the feature length screenplay: the vampire western, the time travel period piece, or the Noir with a hitwoman.

By the way, I don’t remember if we have a text for the screenwriting class but “Save the Cat” by Blake Snyder is the best book on screenwriting I’ve ever read. Everyone seems to worship Syd Field as the screenwriting guru, but I find his books boring and rote. Snyder, on the other hand, develops his own paradigm for plot structure, story beats, and genre. It’s a quick, fun read, and you come out of it feeling enlightened and motivated.

First Post

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Lautaro

Hello, internets.

Here’s another fucking blog. I’ll be sharing thoughts and insights as I progress through the program at Seattle Film Institute. I’m also a working graphic designer, so I may end up talking about that as well. I’m also one of those smart guys who knows a lot of stuff and has original thoughts from time to time, so I’m likely to discuss just about anything here.

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