Shorts One and Two

So, here are my thoughts on the first two shorts.

But before I say anything I need to preface it with this: I admire anyone who actually goes out there and tries to do this thing. So everything I say starts from that baseline of respect for the sheer guts it takes to make films and stick them out there.

OK. That said, here we go.

SHORT ONE - Short One

I watched “How To Be A Girl” and I have to thank Josh for this, because it’s a perfect example of the larger meaning behind my initial post.

This is a film with a great premise: a young girl growing up with her father, uncle and brother has turned into a tomboy — her loving family realize she’s missing out on being a girl and do something about it.

The only problem is, this is really a feature film concept and when it’s stuffed into short form you get a less than satisfying result. With a rite of passage movie the drama comes from the conflicts set up by the problem — so, the little girl needs to realize that she’s missing out and her distress has to become a source of conflict for the other characters.

In this film there is an attempt to set up this dynamic, but it all happens too quickly — the girl realizes immediately that she wants to be more girly and her father picks up on the first clue presented as to what the problem is and then immediately does the right thing. This instant fix means there is no suffering for the characters and as drama is pretty much always born of personal suffering for your characters, therefore there is no drama.

Let me give you an equivalent, if Die Hard was a short, John Mclaine would realize the tower was taken over by terrorists, he would have run upstairs and arrested them, the terrorists immediately putting down their weapons and surrendering the second he shouted “Freeze, this is the Police!”

Now, if instead of making this short the idea had been developed as a feature script, the opportunity to look at the pains and sorrows a girl who doesn’t want to be a tomboy anymore, could have created a really nice family feature film, or even a light family comedy.

The opportunities missed here to explore a basically “jock’ father’s attempts to understand his little girl’s need to be more feminine could have been both heart warming and funny, especially if you had build in a subplot about his ongoing ineptness at dating.

You only have to look at a movie like “Little Miss Sunshine” to see the incredible possibilities of unpicking a dysfunctional family on a mission.

So, for me this film really hammers home my thesis about why shorts suck. The problem with the short form is there is no room for this kind of idea, unless your writing skills are absolutely superb and you can set up the character dynamics in a profound and telling way, instantly. The only way to get this kind of idea to work as a short is to find a pivotal moment where the tension between the characters is huge and immediately understandable. Basically you have to encapsulate the drama. Not an easy task and although I’ve kicked it around for a few days I can’t see anyway of doing it that wouldn’t be better at feature length.

The only other thing I’d say is for the micro-budget filmmaker, compromise is your worst enemy. So even if you know you can easily get a house for a location and your mates are all willing to muck in as actors, that’s not a good enough reason to use that location and those actors. One of the primary ways the “Church Of Micro-Cinema” differs from standard indie filmmaking is this rule:

Never, ever compromise because of your budget.

Basically, if your film needs hard to get locations to be everything it can be, then don’t write to fit what you’ve got — go out there and find a way to get the locations and actors you need to tell the stories that really matter to you.

SHORT TWO - Short Two

The one thing I really got from this short “But What About Zombies” is it reminded me just how good lighting cameramen were in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It’s incredibly difficult to light well for black and white film, and these guys were just so very, very good at it.

It’s pretty difficult to comment on the content because humour is a really individual thing, I know from my own experience stuff that makes me howl with laughter leaves 90% of the rest of the world cold. This didn’t do it for me, and that’s the thing with laughter you either do or you don’t. There are no grey areas.

So, I’ll comment on the only area I feel competent: recording and mixing voice overs.

VO’s are hard to write and direct, and because we hear so many of them, unless they are perfect they always pull the product down. In this particular case the flat recording of the voice has been slapped onto the timeline with no processing. The problem with that is voices actually need a bit of processing if they’re going to have the resonance to really, really work.

This is even more true when you’re parodying a 1940’s education film. Recordings from that period have a particular ambience. Something recorded analogue has a distinct sound and this VO has a distinct flat digital sound.

This stuff isn’t that hard to rectify, all you need to do is alter two things, the EQ and the amount of reverb.

EQ breaks the overall recording into different frequency bands, allowing you to either cut them or boost them (just like a graphic equalizer on a hi-fi). Flat digital recordings of male voices normally need the bass frequencies tweaked up, but for a retro sound you might need to thin the whole sound out.

The adding of tiny amounts of reverb (I do mean very, very small amounts) will give the voice just enough warmth to make a voice recording sound brighter, warmer and more professional.

I know this may sound like nit picking, but attention to small details in post production sound are the difference between having a professional end product and something that was obviously done by someone at home. In many respects our ears are much more sensitive to minor details than our eyes.

Guys I hope you find what I’m saying constructive and useful and I really appreciate the fact that you’ve let me use your work to pass on some concrete thoughts about micro-budget filmmaking.

I’ll post on the other films later in the week (I’m still fighting a losing battle with Cannes script deadlines! EeK!)