Making Indie Films

SFAA is a new festival that is different from the rest, because it feautres ONLY student films, and instead of one venue, it travels to 50! Due to some budget problems, though, they need help in order to stay afloat for the rest of their tour.

Please read this and help out!

Sorry for the lack of updates. I was involved with my first film festival this past week and I’ve been very busy promoting it and whatnot. I promise the articles will resume shortly!

Now.. If you’re anything like me, you know exactly what you want to say and generally you say it. But sometimes, if, for instance, you have to record a video or give a speech, you somehow forget what you want to say as you’re saying it.

I’ve had this problem for a long time, and it can be troubling, especially since I am a director and I should be capable of communicating in a decent manner. So please, if you are bad at public speaking or anything of the kind, I suggest either taking some speech classes or practicing talking in front of a mirror.

If you don’t, you’ll end up with a video like this:

I… I’m sorry.

This one’s a short one today, so here it is:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/

If you want to learn how to make your own steadicam, follow the link above. Steadicams are nice pieces of equipment. They use a weight system to counterbalance a camera which is placed on the top of it. With the counterbalance, you can walk around with the steadicam and achieve steady shots with your camera; hence the name.

Now, this design isn’t perfect. Your shots won’t be silky smooth without a lot of practice, and even then it can be hard to get right. But it sure beats shelling out $400 for a Glidecam.

Go ahead, try it!

Nothing angers me more than watching a TV show or movie where I see women with super-model looks playing astrophysicist scientists among nerdy old men in a laboratory. The world doesn’t work that way. I’m not trying to be sexist, but beautiful women tend to work in a field where their looks at least matter. That’s not to say there aren’t beautiful scientists… But when was the last time you saw a gorgeous woman operating a particle accelerator?

I also get angry when I see a drop-dead handsome man operating an oil rig, or playing a bum-like character. That never happens in real life! This world is of the superficial kind; beautiful people do beautiful things.

Hollywood is fixated on looks, thus filling rolls meant for otherwise “normal” looking people with the faces of beautiful people, which for me makes the film or television shows so unbelievable.

So here’s a tip when you’re casting your next film: If you come across a beautiful woman that’s a decent actress, but the script calls for the girl-next-door look with no discernible good-looking features… Don’t cast her. Cast the average-looking girl with extraordinary acting skills. Not only will she be more believable, but you won’t annoy people like me who see past the quarter-inch of skin on someone’s face.

Cast someone for their ability, not their looks. Hollywood will never get this right.

One of the hardest challenges I face as an independent filmmaker is coming up with ideas for films to shoot. I could spend days writing a treatment, and then deleting it straight away. But I could also spend an hour writing 30 pages of a screenplay that’s just pure gold (I wish that would happen more often). Most of the time, though, I just sit and stare blankly at an empty word document, sometimes banging my head against the keyboard hoping something entertainment might get typed out in the process.

Unfortunately, that never happens. So here are three tips I’ve come up with that might help you in your pursuit of a decent script:

1. If you are planning on filming your script once you write it, the best thing you can do to help yourself down the road is to write what you own. Usually I’ll go into a script idea with locations, characters, props, and locations in my head that I know I could easily get or that I already have. For instance, if I want to do a film about gangsters and crime, I know I can get a hold of a couple of seedy locations like warehouses and abandoned lots. I also know I have a few guns and coats and hats and cars I could borrow in case I need them. So to sum it all up, assess what you know you are capable of filming, and then write your script around it. Sometimes this can limit you on what you want to do, but you’d be surprised with what can be done.

In my film, “Somos Las Bolas” the original work required several scenes set in a school cafeteria. But because school was out of session and shooting in the high school would be near-impossible for someone of my influence, I changed the setting of the film to the summer and transplanted the cafeteria scenes into a coffee shop. In doing this, the film lost nothing, and I could continue with what was written without little troubles.

2. Ask yourself “What if” questions. Like “What if a deaf guy meets and falls in love with a blind woman?” or “What if someone bought a cereal box filled with something that wasn’t cereal?”

Make a whole list of these what-ifs, and then pick a few you really like. Be conscious of the tip above when you do this. I know that writing something like “What if God battled Satan on the Moon for the souls of the people down on earth?” is tempting, but how the heck would you film that? Try to write out a paragraph synopsis based on the what-if. Go ahead, try it. Usually you can come up with something pretty neat, and there’s your idea!

3. Think back through the many daydreams and fleeting ideas you’ve had in your lifetime, and try to pinpoint a scene you may have thought up, however big or small, and plan it out further in your head or just write it down. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Okay, now that you’ve got a scene I want you to then try to think of other scenes to put around it. Add characters, dialogue, locations, plot twists… Just keep adding until you’ve got yourself so many scenes you can start writing your movie.

This has worked for me in the past, and has worked famously for the Lethal Weapon series. The author of the first film knew he wanted to do a scene where two characters fall off a balcony and land in a pool. Around that one scene, Lethal Weapon was born.

And there you have it, folks. Three tips to get you on your way to writing the nation’s next box-office hit… Or flop, if your pessimistic.