Productions of Grandeur

Tonight I had a quick little meeting with my art director for my up-coming school film project. It went pretty well and I think she’s starting to feel the vibe of the piece.
Last week when I began discussing the scope and enormity of this new film with her, she practically had a complete shutdown. She was interested in the project, but was unable to fathom the number of people we’d need to recruit from among the school ranks to make it work. It didn’t help that she wanted two people to help oversee the art direction.
I think her biggest worry was trying to match the continuity of the environment shot to shot. Shooting on location is always easy in that regard because the environment is self-preserving; you always have to work around it, but you never get the feeling that elements have changed as the story has progressed. But, since I’ll probably be working in the studio and creating an environment from scratch, she feared matching the continuity of each shot into the entire mosaic the environment represented.
Soooooo, I basically just took a few hours every day this week to sit down and plot out the entire environment for her. I did it from how I saw it in my head. However, I didn’t take into account camera movement while doing this; instead I envisioned the environment as a complete entity that actually existed in the real world.
Then, I went in and broke this environment down into sections. Each section referenced a point in the script where the character was. These sections represented the vast whole of the environment that I had created.
After that, I plotted out overheads of each section and how they could be created in the studio environment. I listed camera and light positions, character movements, f-stops, and what not. By knowing where everything was, I was able to block it out to show her how much we had to show on the camera, what had to remain continuous throughout the film, and what we could leave out. Some parts of the environment that I created in my initial projection didn’t end up being shown on the camera.
Once I showed all this to her she began to realize how easily and economically we could create it. She knew the grand environment, what was involved in it, and how she could break it down into manageable chunks for the various takes.

Sometimes, convincing people is tough, especially these days. Last semester no one knew me. But after shooting a few films and becoming familiar with my fellow student body, I’ve earned the reputation of being a “challenging” director who comes up with ideas that are “difficult to execute”.
My Director of Photography for Pantomiming, Chad Einwalter offered me some support over this issue. He sympathized that it’s terrible when no one wants to take on a tremendous challenge, yet urged me to continue creating challenges, if only to test my own boundaries. That was encouraging for me to hear.
My upcoming shoot is very difficult however. If I cannot get required elements and contributors aligned up in the next few days, I’ll probably trash it and move on to my secondary idea. That’s a tough call to make, but I feel that my secondary idea is very strong. It would also be easier to execute. In that sense, it wouldn’t be like I’d be giving up anything.

I think its of interest to note how I’ve become accustomed to night blogging. Could this become the normal routine? Possibly. For some reason I’ve just grown distasteful of blogging during the day. I have absolutely no problem reading other people’s posts and commenting on them, but I just don’t feel like writing my own posts. I think it’s more of an unloading process at night. During the day I often feel like I need to come up with topics and various subjects to discuss.
In the here and now, my ideas are free flowing. I just write and fill up the blank.

Now, I don’t want to present some overkill on the much analyzed Super bowl game of last weekend, but I do want to offer some thoughts about the various trailers shown during the game’s commercial break.
Two in particular caught my interest, War of the Worlds and Batman Begins:

Batman begins is going to be a very motivating film. It has a great look, yet at the same time it has managed to leave out the stylized edginess that Burton used to characterize his take on the series.

Yet, I worry that the character of Bruce Wayne is going to loose something in this new translation. Wayne is supposed to be brooding, dark, intense. Yet, in this trailer he’s making wise cracks about the Batmobile color. That may only be a comic relief moment, and one of few that actually make it into the final cut, but I felt that it was a tad inappropriate for a character of Wayne’s concentration.

I’d like to finally note that the cinematography for the Bat-Cave is breathtaking, absolutely stunning.

And then we had the trailer for War of the Worlds, which was very unimpressive and rather meandering. I know that Spielberg was trying to capture the feeling of the moment, which was obviously a feeling of terror, but I under whelmed. He could have said so much more in the limited space he was given, yet he didn’t. Don’t get me wrong however; I respect the director’s decision to keep so much unsaid. I can admire his choice to keep his best stuff under wraps until the film actually comes out. But, I just felt like Spielberg showed way too little.

Even some rapid, quick cuts of tantalizing images would have been neat because it would have had the net buzzing for days with screen caps and dissections. Oh well.

This weekend is the Intense Math shoot. We’re shooting in the Phoenix Library. Josh has been stocking up on lights, gels and a dolly. We ought to have plenty to work with. Hopefully, Gabe will be satisfied. I’m especially excited for this shoot because it will be the first time we’ll all be working together. Gabe and Josh have done some great things while working together, so I can only hope to add something to the team and learn to work from their creative process.