We’ve just received some really exciting news. “The Library of Burned Books” has been nominated for a Student Academy Award. Of the nine films in the foreign section, three will win awards of some kind. The judging is due to happen around 13th May, so we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed until then! More updates as they come.
Check the press release here.
The Kickstarter campaign we’ve been running for “Exposures” has reached – and passed – its funding goal. We’re moving forward into production with a healthy budget to see us through. I’d like to thank everyone who pledged money, pestered others to pledge money, or who shared the links around. Thanks also to folks who responded to us on Twitter, including Duncan Jones and Margaret Atwood! I’m going to figuratively direct my pants off.
Gael García Bernal stars as an ad-man creating the TV spots for the anti-Pinochet referendum campaign in Chile in 1988. Dir: Pablo Larraín, 2012. Seen at: Hackney Picturehouse.
Well, what a week! I feel like I managed about 5 hours sleep total throughout my entire time at the festival. Loads of incredible work on potential campaigns for films that were showing at the festival, drinking and circular ping-pong in fly-by-night Berlin bars, drinking at warehouse parties, drinking in bars where only the Berliners drink, and the odd film or two. And I never thought I’d get to talk to people from Artificial Eye, Picturehouse, Soda Pictures, Wild Bunch, Cinemoi, and MUBI, but I did.
To all my new film friends: Prost!
When we made “The Library of Burned Books” we part-funded it with donations from people around the world using Indiegogo (our pitch page – including Al’s amazing comedy video – is still online) and so once the film was finished, we were obliged to follow through on all the things we promised people in return for their support.
Al adapted the stunning poster he designed as a prop for the film, and turned it into an image we printed onto the DVD. Then we ordered in some lovely recycled card cases, and hand-stamped the lot of them with our artwork. Finally, Al and his girlfriend Rachel hand-crafted little booklets (made from books we saved from the furnace) to insert into some of the cases for our extra-special donors.
It feels really good to put some hand-crafted love into the packaging of the film. Thanks again to everyone who helped us make the film!
I’m heading to the Berlinale with a few other film school colleagues, from LFS and around the world. The main focus of the week for us will be a 5-day course on distribution and marketing strategies called Making Waves. I’m really looking forward to going to Berlin again – such a great city! And to combine it with the Berlinale is going to be excellent.
I am proud and happy to announce that “The Library of Burned Books” is basically done. We have married the graded image with the final sound mix, and all is looking and sounding as good as it can. All that’s left to do is the final submission paperwork, the disc duplication, the box design and the festival run. You know, all those trivial things. Where’s the whisky?
If you’re one of those rare people with money burning a hole in their pockets, a short film I AD’ed during the summer is currently crowdfunding its post-production. “The Night of Brian” (working title) is a touching family drama with comedic elements set in rural Ireland in 1980. It’s about a brother, a sister, a tragic life story, the power of the Catholic church, and the film “The Life of Brian,” which was banned for years in the Irish Republic.
The shoot was great, the rushes look good, and now they need a little help getting the film through post production: getting it edited, colour corrected, sound designed and scored.
I just dug out my venerable MiniDisc player out and hooked it up to my amp to play some tunes that I don’t have on MP3 or CD. I love MiniDiscs – they never went mainstream, so there’s something about them that just feels sci-fi, which probably explains why they appear in The Matrix and Strange Days.
One day I will own a LaserDisc player, which I will only be able to use to play Bladerunner, and it will be absolutely worth it.
At the moment I’m checking out films about models and photographers. It’s part of my research for the short I’m developing.
Denys Arcand’s film Stardom (2000) is a high-pace satire. Tina Menzhal (Jessica Paré) is plucked from small-town Canadian obscurity and is launched into a whirlwind of money, fame and failed romances. Starting with cable access station footage, the film makers show Tina through the lenses of the media circus that gathers around her. There’s the fashion reporter with her video camera and aggressive style; there’s the genuine artist and camera nerd photographer who follows her, shooting black and white 16mm with an Aaton on his shoulder; there are news reports and chat shows. What we don’t see is Tina on her own terms. She is subject to constant attention, the invasion of her privacy, and endless demands. Everyone wants a piece of her. Men (including great turns from Dan Aykroyd and Frank Langhella) ruin themselves on what they think is her behalf, without ever figuring her out.
The event that ends the hysteria and concludes the film leaves a little to be desired. Awarding a prize to a ruggedly handsome doctor who has won a marathon, Tina falls in love. The notion that the key to happiness is a bun in the oven given to her by a stand-up guy from her hometown is the kind of simple and regressive formulation that the film has been skewering for the last hour and a half. But up until that point it’s been such a hell of a ride that you’re willing to forgive Stardom its mis-step.
Alasdair and I had an amazing morning grading “The Library of Burned Books” with Maria at Narduzzo Too on Monday. Now all we need to do is have the sound mixed, and we will be ready to launch the film on the festival circuit. I’ll post some stills from the final graded version soon. Thanks also to the good folks at diRoom for their work on the previous cut of the film.
This is one of my favourite images from behind the scenes of Like Spinning Plates: clips of Kevin (Toby Liszt) hanging above an edit bin waiting to be spliced into the conformed print by the film’s editor, Fateme Ahmadi. 35mm film is magical.
I’ve just started working part-time as a funding & marketing co-ordinator on Papa Hedi for Claire de Lune Films.
Papa Hedi is Claire Belhassine’s first feature as director. She was in her late 20s when she discovered that her grandfather was the Frank Sinatra of the Arab World. Hedi Jouini’s songs and compositions still resonate twenty years after his death. Reprised as the theme tune for a popular Tunisian soap opera and the holding music for Tunisia’s leading mobile network; covered by pop singers, including international superstar Shakira; and sung by 5 year old street kids as they kick footballs in the streets – they are part of the Tunisian story.
After his death, Hedi Jouini’s six children stopped talking to each other. Behind the usual story of siblings fighting over their inheritance, lies the powerful dynamic of men’s and women’s roles in 1930’s Tunis and the sad but often funny story of Papa Hedi’s divided family – separated across continents, fighting over royalties, competing to define their father’s legacy.
There is currently a TV version of the documentary, Papa Hedi: the Search for My Grandfather which has already been sold to France Televisions.
I am working on a festival strategy, promotion and sales for the short version of the doc, while also raising funds for the feature version, which we hope to start working on in early 2013.
Link:
Papa Hedi website
Papa Hedi Twitter feed
Papa Hedi Facebook page
This morning we start fundraising for The Library of Burned Books. I’m producing, and I’m pleased to be working on such a good, solid script, and with a director who has a great eye for fantastic images.
The Library of Burned Books is a short film that combines live action with animation to tell the story of a young girl who sees through the lies of a cruel adult world. We’re shooting in late October in London, and we’re raising funds through IndieGogo.
I’ve done a credit sequence for the directorial debut of friend and colleague Phil Whelans, Clowntime is Over, which takes its title from an Elvis Costello song. Phil plays a role in my latest LFS film, Like Spinning Plates, which takes its title from a Radiohead song.
The film, described by Phil as “a new genre: sadstick” concerns itself with the last days of an aged stand-up comedian and is a poignant blend of slapstick and tragedy. Ralph H. Levene stars as Maurice Barley, and the film is due to hit the festival circuit any time now.
A few days ago I finished editing a promo for fellow LFS student, Jonathan Tomlin. It’s a little teaser to give potential funders an idea of what the finished film could be. He’s currently seeking funds through Kickstarter, so please follow the link to have a look at his work, and my creative contribution to his cause.
Link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/121989931/coda?ref=live
Last week, Mr Gray sent me a photocopy from the New Scientist about a paper from Cornell University that analyses attention span and cutting rhythm in Hollywood movies. Their methods involved analysing cuts and shot length, and comparing them to biological rhythms of human attention span. Essentially what they have achieved is an mechanical version of film editor Walter Murch’s “blink of an eye” theory. He suggests that thoughts and blinking are connected (we blink when we “cut” in our minds from one thought to the next) and by being aware of where one blinks while watching rushes (and also by watching when good actors in the movies blink) you can tell when a cut will feel “right” emotionally.
Some of the sources reporting on this story lazily conclude:
The researchers concluded that over the next few decades film makers may take more care to follow the 1/f law to try to boost audience engagement.
This is almost the exact opposite of what the authors of the paper really conclude:
In no way do we claim that there is any intention on the part of filmmakers to develop a 1/f film style, even if they knew what that might be. Instead, we claim that, as explorations and crafting of film have proceeded for at least 70 years, film narrative has fallen naturally into 1/f shot structure as the myriad of other considerations in filmmaking have played against each other in shaping film form. Good storytelling is the balancing of constraints at multiple scales of presentation. Thus, we view 1/f film form as an emergent, self-organizing structure (Gilden, 2001; Van Orden et al., 2003), not as an intentional one.
It seems to me that the underlying assumption of the paper is, however, that shots in a movie can only carry one idea and need to be cut once that idea has been communicated. This is not a satisfactory way to understand the achievement of films that make use of sequence shots. Many high-grossing Hollywood movies of the “classical” period made much use of long shots with complex camera movements. This style leads – and holds – the viewer’s attention without fast cutting, and in some cases without cutting at all. An extreme example is Hitchcock’s Rope which is intended to be one long sequence shot with no cuts. A better example, because its style was emulated for commercial and artistic reasons, is the following shot from Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm
Between 2:44 and 6:01 of this shot there are no cuts whatsoever. That’s ONE SHOT that lasts 3 minutes and 27 seconds. The Man with a Golden Arm was a commercially successful film which paved the way for Hollywood movies to explore the subject of drug addiction. It would also not fit the cutting model proposed by Cornell’s scientists at all. Why, then, was something so antithetical to natural human attention span so successful?
Well, put simply, cutting isn’t the only way to direct a viewer’s attention. As for why it was used, and why this style has fallen out of use, attention span is only half the story. In this period of film history the studio system was at its height. Camera crews worked together regularly in the same sound stages, and it was easy and – as Preminger proved – cheap to shoot movies using this extended take sequence shot style. An added artistic advantage is that it allowed actors time and space to create subtle, nuanced performances. Furthermore, this style allows the viewer time to investigate the space within the frame, picking up on small details.
It is notable that the films that fit most closely with the attention span formula of the Cornell team are action films. Certainly when you’re planning to cut very quickly, you seldom have time for more than one idea per frame. As Mr Gray noted in biro on the bottom of the photocopied article:
[Is it] that modern films have less to look at, that their compositions and choice of inclusions have grown simpler due to a simplifying market?
It is worth noting that the film the Cornell scientists observed to adhere most rigidly to the 1/f shot sequence structure was The Phantom Menace.
Links:
The New Scientist: Cine-Maths grabs our fickle attention
Attention and the Evolution of the Hollywood Film
It’s funny how humdrum everyday employment manages to eat up so much mental bandwidth. I’ve had almost no brainwaves worth blogging in months. Dull, dull, dull. But now the becalmed feeling is GONE. The day job finished over a week ago, and since then we’ve shot a music video and I’m about 70% through editing it. Fantastic! It is so good to be master of my own schedule again, even if it’s just for a few weeks.
I love reading well-written arguments from different sides of the global warming polyhedron.
First: Contraception Fights Global Warming from Salon.com
Second: The Population Myth from Monbiot.com
Personally, (and, I confess, as someone who has no plans to procreate) I found the Salon article quite convincing at first, but was wondering how the numbers stacked up. It was reaffirming to read George rightly pointing out that the groups experiencing the largest population growth are normally the ones who contribute the least per capita to carbon emissions.
What happens when you translate the first line of a Dylan song into Japanese and back over and over again until it translates into the same English phrase twice?
Chris Marker’s Junkopia is watchable online. I really love the framing and the rhythm of the cutting in this piece, and the way each shot of an object reveals a different aspect depending on angle and context, both spatially and within the film’s own timeline (“narrative” seems too strong a word). There is something reminiscent of Ozu’s little transitional sequences here.
The film was shot in Emeryville, near the east section of the Bay Bridge, but unless I’m mistaken the co-ordinates in Marker’s intertitles appear to be for somewhere in Redwood City.
David Lynch was thrust into development of Dune too early in his career, it seems. The producers’ idea was to profit on the success of Star Wars by creating another sci-fantasy epic, but a standard length feature film is not a big enough container for Dune, with all its plotting, counter-plotting and Messiah-creation.
I’ve now seen both the original theatrical release, on which Lynch has the director’s credit, and the TV edit, which is attributed to Alan Smithee. It was the Smithee version that I just watched. The producers, showing an absolutely dreadful grasp of the possibilities of film, front-load about three hundred years of exposition using a dull voiceover and a bunch of hastily assembled paintings, some of which recur multiple times. The aim, apparently, was to save time in order to cut to the action quicker, but seeing as it takes about ten minutes to outline everything, it is deathly, deathly boring.
I think most people who are aware of Dune know that Lynch had to struggle to trim his rough cut from about four hours down to about two and a half, and that as a result the story is unclear and under-motivated. It feels as if a missed opportunity flies by every five minutes, but despite this, there is still something interesting buried in the narrative rubble. Much of the time the production design is evocative and hints at a society that exists beyond the screen, and there is something that sticks with you in the dream sequences — which is what you’d expect from Lynch’s direction. Performances from Kyle MacLachlan, Max von Sydow and Patrick Stewart are commendable, and there’s an almost unparalleled moment of male objectification when Sting steps out of a futuristic shower clad only in a large white nappy while his uncle, an evil duke, coos and drools over him.
Probably the best way for Dune to be brought to the big screen is as a trilogy, pitched somewhere between the original Star Wars movies and the Lord of the Rings. One would hope the latest crew to attempt to make it would dig Lynch’s early four-hour rough cut out of the archives as part of their research, because as imperfect as it is, there is something worth salvaging.
The missus is re-reading David Mitchell’s number9dream for the dissertation. Every now and then she reads a bit aloud for me.
I watched for a while longer. Not much happens in Paris Texas.
“Sort of slow, isn’t it?”
Buntaro licks his hand.
“This, lad, is an existentialist classic. Man with no memory meets woman with huge hooters.”
I really enjoy days when I write and she reads.
A River Runs Through It is Robert Redford’s 1992 period feature about three men and their relationship to God, fly fishing and each other. Seeing as God and fishing are two of the subjects most likely to put me to sleep, I was astonished to find that not only did I stay awake throughout, but that I genuinely enjoyed it.
Much of the credit for this film being watchable has to go Redford. His style is relaxed to the point that it appears effortless, but getting this much authenticity into a film takes serious effort. The cast is excellent, Redford allows them time to find their own cadence, and editors Lynzee Klingman and Robert Estrin cut sympathetically with those rhythms. The way that characters continue living outside the boundaries of the frame is reminiscent of Renoir’s French Can-Can; the shots of Montana rivers and mountains are gorgeous without being pretty; the whole thing is so very sensibly restrained and wise that if I were a more religiously informed person, I’d say for certain that it’s designed to evoke the feeling of the Presbytarianism that crops up throughout the film, but as it is, I can only guess.
