A Goonies Of Thrones

January 27th, 2012

Danny F. Santos

Brilliance! Sheer brilliance!

Now THAT’S a dress!

January 26th, 2012

Danny F. Santos

Now THAT’S a dress!

Learning from Sundance: El Mariachi

January 25th, 2012

Danny F. Santos

By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)

Production still of Carlos Gallardo from Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi

Last time we were looking at Clerks for lessons we can take away from previous independent films which was shot for under $30,000. Today, we look at a film that was shot for even less, Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi was shot for a little over $7,000.

El Mariachi is action shlock to the nth degree, no one will ever praise it for it’s nuances, and that’s ok. Rodriguez has subsequently made films that cater towards an adolescent mindset but his directorial debut did so on such a tiny budget.

Before we go any further, I want to make a very specific point. This film was shot for about $7,000, a print was never struck in that budget, it was processed to VHS instead. Like Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez found himself in the right place at the right time for this film to blow up among the players in Hollywood. He would later be given a budget to recut on film from scratch.

Still, a shooting budget for $7,000 is still impressive, especially for an action movie. So how’d he make it? Well first, he was the entire crew. Second, he sold his body to science.

He spent a month in a hospital for a drug trial to help finance his film and while there wrote the script and met Peter Marquardt who did not speak any Spanish. He was eventually cast as Moco, the local drug lord and had to learn his lines without understanding what he was saying. There’s even a scene in the pool where Peter is reading the lines off of his hand while wearing sunglasses to hide that fact.

The movie was shot in a small town called Acuña, Coahuila where Rodriguez and his friend Carlos Gallardo, who would play the lead role, had access to several locations. During production two local journalists became critical of the production running around town so Rodriguez cast them into the movie in an effort to win them over.

Because film stock was at a premium he actually cut a lot of the movie in camera. The 16mm camera itself was extremely loud so audio was recorded separately after the visuals were shot. This made made for an interesting time editing as dialogue would routinely go out of sync with what was filmed, which is why there are a lot of cutaways in the film during scenes with dialogue. The film’s kinetic style was born partially out of this necessity.

El Mariachi was never meant to be seen on the world stage, it was meant as a low budget direct to video for the Latin-American market. The same film made with a much larger budget and a crew would never have gone anywhere. With such a small budget, Rodriguez had to think on his feet and come up with creative solutions to problems as they arose. But what really sells the film in the minds of cinephiles was how he financed it and how he did so much with so very little.

Learning From Sundance: Clerks

January 19th, 2012

Danny F. Santos

By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)

Every film tells two stories, the one on the screen and the one behind the scenes. This is the best part of independent filmmaking, sometimes the story behind the film is just as entertaining.

And informative.

There’s probably no better place to learn the craft of low-to-no budget filmmaking than movies that screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The films in this series aren’t all that obscure and may label me (shudder) pretty mainstream but I like them. So, first up on my list, Clerks.

Clerks

The black and white movie that launched a thousand dick-and-fart jokes. Kevin Smith’s debut film is crude, rude and visually uninspired. But damn was it funny! There was nothing quite like it at the time. It tied for the Filmmaker’s Trophy at Sundance with Fresh and was bought by Miramax soon after.

Smith went to a film school in Vancouver where he met Clerks producer Scott Mosier and DOP Dave Klein, but soon dropped out. Smith financed the film himself for less than $30,000 selling off his comic books, maxing out his credit cards and dipping into his savings for university. There’s something to be said for taking the money you would put into getting an education for film production and just use it to produce your own film.

The location chosen for Clerks was where Kevin Smith was working at as a, well, convenience store clerk. He quickly wrote the screenplay around that location and then called in Mosier and Klein to produce and shoot his film after they had finished film school. Rounding out the cast and crew with his friends, students and local theater actors he began to shoot his film.

Because Smith was still working as a store clerk during the day, most shooting was done at night for a grueling 21 day shoot. To cover for the fact that it was night outside, the gag of the steel shutters being down with the sign “I Assure You We’re Open” due to gum being jammed in the lock was written into the script.

After principle photography was finished, the film was then edited by Mosier and Smith on a flatbed Steembeck at RST Video (they really got a lot of use out of their locations!). The film then premiered at IFFM to a crowd of only a handful of people, some of which walked out. One of the attendees, however, was Robert Hawk who was an advisor to Sundance and began to open doors to Smith.

When you look at the impact of Clerks on indie cinema, it’s really hard to ignore. It went against all common sense in filmmaking at the time, financed out of the filmmaker’s pocket for almost no money using a cast and crew of friends, some of which had never made a film. It was, in short, crazy. But if you want to work in this industry, crazy is a great trait to have!

Next time, we’re moving a year forward to one of my favorite action movies with an even smaller budget, El Mariachi!

Saturday Morning Cartoon: Dilla

January 7th, 2012

Danny F. Santos

An armadillo is chased down by a hunter.

Understanding Space in Film (Part 2)

January 3rd, 2012

Danny F. Santos

In part 1 we introduced the idea that as filmmakers, our canvas is the frame and everything happens inside of it. There are notable exceptions as some films have a live theatrical component to them but for the most part the screen is what you have to work with.

What if I told you this isn’t necessarily the case?

You’ve already jumped to the logical and easy conclusion, 3D films.

Three-Dee

3D has come of age and despite your preference for or against it, Hollywood is pushing forward with the technology. While stereoscopic movies is nothing new (Jaws 3D anyone?) the technology for viewing it has come a long way.

The way that it works is that 2 cameras are set up very near each other to capture images that are slightly different from each other because what your left and right eye see are slightly different. If you put your hand in front of you and close one eye at a time, you’ll notice it covers slightly different objects before you. Usually the cameras are placed in a system that uses one-way mirrors because it’s impossible to get camera lenses close enough to each other to create a decent 3D image.

Open Space

If your not shooting in 3D, there is still a way to create images that jump off the screen. This is known as open space, where the viewer is tricked into believing that there is more happening outside of the frame even though the frame confines everything inside of it.

My favorite example of this is the opening to Star Wars. After the crawl has faded off into deep space, the camera tilts down on to Tatooine. The Correllian Cruiser, Tantive IV (yes, this is all from memory, I’m a geek) flies past the camera followed by an immense Star Destroyer that flies overhead.

The key to that last sentence is that the Star Destroyer flies overhead. It really is just a two dimensional projection onto the screen but it seems like it’s flying above your head.

The trick to opening a frame is to reduce the amount of stationary lines in a frame and since lines occur so frequently (think trees in nature or buildings or windows, chairs, doors) creating open space is difficult. It’s also more difficult to create open space on a small screen so the larger the frame, physically, the better chance you will have of opening the screen.

Random movement of many objects into and out of the frame is another way of opening the frame up. Staying with our Star Wars examples, the opening battle in Revenge of the Sith where we’re following Obi-Wan and Anakin’s fighters is a hodge podge of explosions, starfighters, turbolaser beams and capital ships. Camera movement here also helps with opening the frame as any stationary line now moves across the screen caused by the camera moving.

In the next part, we’ll start covering different cues that simulate depth on a two-dimensional plane. If you have some feedback, comments or questions, leave them below!

Understanding Space in Film (Part 1)

January 2nd, 2012

Danny F. Santos

Space, or the illusion of space, is incredibly important in filmmaking. With it, you control not only what the audience sees, but how you want them to see it.

There are a few simple ways of controlling space, the easiest to explain is the frame.

The Frame

Simply put, stuff happens in the frame, it’s the space you have to work with. We’ve also briefly touched on how to compose your subjects in your frame in my previous posts on composition (parts one and two), but using space effectively with composition is a powerful tool.

Inside the frame, I like to break space down to 2 basic kinds of space, positive and negative.

Positive and Negative Space

The concepts of positive and negative space are really easy to grasp and yet extremely powerful. Negative space, also called white space, is the space around your subject while positive space is the space your object inhabits on screen. The larger your subject is in frame, the less negative space there is.

One of the better known examples of using negative space in the last few years is Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads. In it you have your two subjects, the Mac and the PC being the positive space in the frame and a simple white background as the negative space.

Another famous example is the “Beyond the Infinite” portion of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Dave Bowman finds himself in that creepy white room, the color scheme Kubrick chose was white and neutrals making the background washed out compared to the subject.

There are several illusions based on positive and negative space, one of the better known being Rubins Vase where the negative and positive space are switched depending on whether you see two faces or a vase. Many of M.C. Escher’s work is based on manipulating negative and positive space.

Depth of Field and Negative Space

Having a background of only a single color or analogous colors is one way to create negative space but a simpler and far more used tool is using a shallow depth of field.

Depth of field is used extensively in film for close ups and medium shots. By reducing the depth of field (using a shallow depth of field) the background blurs. The opposite of a shallow depth of field is known as deep space.

By using shallow depth of field you focus in on your subject while the background is blurred. This blurring makes your subject pop out of the scene and creates a negative space around it.

In the next part we’ll explore more ways of controlling space in the frame! As always, if you have some feedback, comments or questions, leave them below!