Ten Tips to Indie Filmmaking

John Steinbeck once wrote that a lie is often more believable than the truth, and that telling the truth sometimes gets you into trouble. A well-crafted lie, he says, will make you seem more liked, more respected, and require less explanation than the truth. hat is the reason !"m often tempted to lie and say that we shot our film, Cement Suitcase, on the #ed, or perhaps the Alexa, or some other sexy camera. $ut in truth, the technology of making movies is coming down so quickly in price that it will soon be comparable to purchasing paper and a pencil. %hen ! tell people that we actually shot the film on the &anon '(, ! often see a flinch of disdain. )*h,) they seem to be saying, )+ou"re one of those.) ,ven though this camera was used on *scar-nominated Black Swan, it doesn"t get a lot of professional respect. %hat ! should really tell people when they ask, is that we shot on the Jeffrey Waldron. +our choice of cinematographer is more important by far than his or her equipment. %e probably could have given Jeff a cardboard box with a hole in it, and he would have created something beautiful. -!mmediately after shooting our film he was nominated for an !ndependent Spirit Award for &inematography.. $ut that is /ust a preface. his is Creative COW, after all, and if ! said ! didn"t care about the cameras, or the equipment, or the software, !"d be a boldfaced liar. ! love all the tools. %e are craftsmen, and we love the hammers and chisels of our trade. $ut let"s not forget that they are the means, not the ends, and that if we can"t get our hands on the best paints, we"ll raid a burned-out campfire and produce some charcoals0 1ere are ten tips to making a film2 ONE: KNOW EVERYTHING !t is not necessary for a director to know every single facet of filmmaking, but ! believe it is truly beneficial. ! have been employed as an editor, photographer, director, writer, producer, motion graphics artist, and post-supervisor. ! even interned at a radio station once, in order to learn more about sound. 3nowing everything is a complete impossibility. And you shouldn"t be trying to do all the /obs yourself 4 your film will suffer for it. $ut if you have a little experience in each area, it will help you communicate to the artisans who are much better at that craft than you are. TWO: !"N YO#R WORKF!OW $EFORE YO# %HOOT ONE FR"&E As we have been shooting with the &anon '( quite often, we had developed a pretty great workflow for shooting, transcoding to 5rores, and using 5lural ,yes with 6inal &ut ' to sync all the sound -which was recorded separately from picture, into a AS&A7 multitrack recorder.. %orking with filmmakers who are very adept at both production and post is very beneficial. As

! was also going to be the editor of the film, ! knew exactly which shots ! could cut if time was running out on set. *ur (! -(igital !maging echnician., the guy who was unloading all the data cards out of the camera, was also a man who knew post, and our boom op8sound mixer, 9awrence ,verson, was also going to be our post sound designer. %hat does this mean: !t means there was no clumsy hand-off from production to post. ,very clip was labeled and organi;ed exactly as it should have been, and our sound designer had a real head start, as he had heard everything we recorded on set. 1e even spent an extra day driving around recording wild sounds, like the sounds of a car engine, because he knew he would need them later on down the line. THREE: RE&E&$ER TO TE%T TH"T WORKF!OW ! thought ! had a pretty good workflow for post. $ut it"s always important to make sure. 6or every take, we recorded about < tracks of sound. *ne boom track, generally =-> lav tracks -one on our main actor, and one or two on whoever he was talking with., and one stereo track of camera sound. ! knew that the sound the camera recorded would be mostly unusable, but ! wanted to keep it all the way throughout the process /ust in case, as it would serve as a guide track in case anything went wrong. 6or ease of editing, ! wanted more than /ust merged video ? audio tracks in 6inal &ut. ! wanted the video intrinsically tied with the audio. Since we"d have to transcode all the media anyway, it wouldn"t add any degradation. So what we did was export 5rores @uick ime clips of each take, with < tracks of audio exported right along with it. !t added quite a bit of work at the beginning of the editing process, but ! can tell you that editing the entire feature film was an incredibly smooth process because of it. 6irst thing ! did once we came up with this process was to edit a scene using it, and export that as an *76 for 9awrence, our sound editor. Sure enough, it turned out that the sound ! had attached to the @uick ime clips came through perfectly, but wasn"t referenced 4 in 5ro ools it had the same exact filename as the @uick ime -which were named for the scene and take.. 6or example, if 9awrence wanted to find a similar take, he"d have a hard time finding the original audio take, and have to look it up in an excel spreadsheet where we had everything listed out. So, because we had tested the workflow right at the beginning, we were able to add the sound take filename # to the @uick ime filenames, and everything was very easily referenced. *ur sound editor was super happy that we had tested this out, and it ended up saving him probably days or weeks of work.

FO#R: KEE YO#R FC RO'ECT FI!E #N(ER )**&$+ Antil this film, the longest pro/ect !"d ever worked on was about >B minutes long, and ! had never ever had any problems with a 6inal &ut ' pro/ect getting too bloated. $ut after editing this film for a while, not only did the pro/ect take about CB minutes to open, but it would often crash in the middle of a session. urns out, our .fcp file had grown to over

=BBmb in si;e0 his is apparently a big no-no. ! ended up having to carve out the old sequences and leave them behind. hey were still in another 6&5 pro/ect file that ! could access if ! wanted, but it made everything %A+ faster, and after that it hardly ever crashed. FIVE: KNOW HOW TO GET YO#R E(ITING FI!E INTO "FTER EFFECT% 9et"s face it, in this digital age, you"re probably going to need titles, or D6E, or screen replacements, or graphics in your film. 7ake sure you know how you"re going to get your film out of your editing software and into your graphics software. Sure, you can export it, but ! feel that is clumsy, and if you ever need to add a frame on the head or the tail of a shot, you have to start all over. !t"s much better to translate the sequence somehow, if you can. !f you"re editing in 5remiere, and need to take it into After ,ffects, this is as easy as going into A, and choosing )!mport 5remiere 5ro 5ro/ect.) 1owever, we were editing on 6inal &ut. 9ucky for us, since 5remiere was so eager to steal business from Apple, they have made it very easy to translate a 6&5 pro/ect into a 5remiere pro/ect via E79 export. And from there, it"s easy to go from 5remiere to After ,ffects, as stated above. !t"s still a bit clumsy, but now in A, you have film handles, and you"re still referencing the actual media, and not an exported copy, so potential degradation is nonexistent. DoilF0 %I,: WH"T-% YO#R FIN"! &"%TER GOING TO $E. WHY. +ou should be able to answer this question before you start shooting. rue, the digital landscape is changing so fast that by the time you finish your movie, the answer to this question might totally have changed. $ut you should have a good idea going in. 6or us it was a 5ro#es G==1@ @uick ime file. 9et me tell you why. 5ro#es, as far as ! know, is still the de facto archiving and editing format for independent features. 5rimarily, ! am guessing, this is because of Apple. $ut ! have found 5rores to be extremely robust, and haven"t seen anything yet that is as widely accepted and respected. 5ro#es G==1@ was the codec required by our D*( delivery company, the file they translated for CB different D*( platforms, including i unes, Ama;on, and Hetflix. ruth be told, our film was edited as 5ro#es G== -not 1@.. ! did a lot of reading right before we transcoded, and because our film was shot on the &anon '( in h.=<G, there /ust was not enough information in the files to require G== 1@. So ! transcoded all the clips to 5ro#es G==, saved a bit of hard drive space, and presumably a bit of #A7. %EVEN: &"KE YO#R OWN (C %hen we started filming &ement Suitcase 4 heck, even after we finished editing 4 ! had no idea what a (&5 was. !t stands for (igital &inema 5ackage, and it"s the six digital files you need in order to play your movie on a digital server, which is how most movies are pro/ected these days. A (&5 of your film, when you start playing theaters, is going to be your best friend. !n the past, if you shot your film digitally and wanted to show it in a theater, you"d either have

to have it transferred onto film -prohibitively expensive. or compress it to a (D( -which, assuming you shot CBIBp, cuts the quality of your film by 'JK.. 6or the ten film festivals that Cement Suitcase has screened, !"ve found that most of them have requested either (&5"s or $lu-rays. $lu-ray is a good alternative, but you are still compressing your film, and it still has to be read by a laser in a machine with moving parts. %hen you screen your film with a (&5, it is robust. +ou are screening it the exact same way that big films, like !ron 7an >, are screened. ! asked a pro/ectionist if he"s ever seen a (&5 fail, and he said he"s heard of it happening before, but has never seen it personally. )!f there"s anything wrong with it, the system spits it out pretty quick. *nce it passes the system check, !"ve never seen it fail.) And best part is, if you are somewhat technical, you can make it yourself0 1ere are a few links that show you how2 http288nofilmschool.com8=BC=8B'8pro/ect-in-digital-theater-make-digital-cinema-package-forcheap-with-opendcp8 http288youtu.be8J(3++>(u(AI !f it sounds too complicated, you can find someone that will do it for you, usually for about LCBBB-=JBB. $ut the problem with that is, if you have to add credits to the film, or take out that stock footage you couldn"t get the rights to -which happened to us., now you"ve got to spend another grand in order to redo it. ! will stress this, though2 make sure you are friends with a movie theater that will test your (&5 out for you0 %e were lucky to have 6ilm !ndependent down the street from our 9A production company, 5sychic $unny, so ! could hop on my skateboard and ask the pro/ectionist to check it out between other films he was playing. 7any film festivals, once accepted, will also let you test out your (&5"s with them. his is important0 he first time ! made a (&5, ! didn"t reali;e the filenames on the image sequence all had to be the same number of characters -long story., so what ended up happening is that the movie started in the middle, and then later on cut to the beginning. +ou wouldn"t want this happening in front of a live audience, with no way to correct. 7ake sure to give yourself a week or two to make a (&5, because it"s a long process. EIGHT: " FI!& I% RE"!!Y/ RE"!!Y !ONG !t sounds stupid, but this was something ! totally didn"t reali;e until we started shooting. Since this was my first feature, all my other pro/ects ! have been able to hold perfectly inside my head before. ! could visuali;e them from beginning to end, hold them in my hands, so to speak, and look at them from all sides, easily. his was not so with a feature. !t was because of this that ! thought, like an idiot, that we would not need either a costume person or a script-supervisor. !t became incredibly transparent the first day of shooting that !

was wrong. %e were shooting at the house exterior of our main character, 6ranklin. o be efficient, and also because the outside of the house was completely different from where we were shooting the inside of the house, we were going to film every single scene in the movie where 6ranklin enters or exits his house. At CB am, ! was thinking about performances, budgets, and wondering, )(oes this shot look right: (oes this yard look clean enough: Are we already running late: %hy are we hearing 7ariachi music down the street: !s that going to ruin our production sound:) At that moment, my lead actor turned to me and asked, )So what shirt should ! be wearing in this scene:) 1mm...what shirt should 6ranklin be wearing in scene <=: %here is he going: %hat day is this supposed to be: %hat else is he doing that day, and are these clothes appropriate for the entire day: rying to flip through the script and figure all this out, while still meeting a very tight schedule, would have been impossible. #ight on the spot we promoted one of our 5A"s to Script Supervisor, and made another one in charge of %ardrobe. And it made all the difference. !n my head, it was two /obs that ! considered luxuries. !n practice, on set, without these two people ! think ! would have gone insane. NINE: EVERY %T"GE OF FI!&&"KING I% " CH"NCE TO WRITE " $ETTER FI!& %hen we set a date for production, ! was really happy with the script. $ut ! kept sending it out for feedback because it"s best to know how the film will be critiqued as early as possible, even if you don"t agree with it. A lot of the notes, ! agreed with. So ! was rewriting the script up until =am the night before we began. Some of the scenes didn"t appear to have writing problems until we shot them. %hile rehearsing some of the scenes, !"d watch the actors and think, wow, this is really boring. 1ow can we spice this up: *ften the actors had really great suggestions to made the scene more compelling. +ou have to be open to that. ! didn"t have issues with some scenes until the editing room. *ne, ! thought, was too straightforward. ,veryone /ust said exactly what they were thinking. So ! decided to make both the characters seem nervous by editing it as if they were speaking over each other"s lines. he result was something ! was really happy with. Some scenes didn"t work, or didn"t work nearly as well, without the sound design. !n a climactic scene where 6ranklin is starting to lose it, 9awrence made the sounds warp, and migrated the dialogue away from the center speaker, where it is traditionally placed, and steered it to the surround sound speakers at the back. hen, when 6ranklin snaps back to consciousness, the sound all snaps back to the front of the theater. Hot everyone knows what effect we"re using, but everyone feels it. 5oint is, every stage of production and post-production is a chance to make the movie even better. 7ake sure that you use all of them0

TEN: THERE I% " TRICK!E0(OWN EFFECT TO (IRECTING " FI!& his is /ust a basic management lesson, but as the director of an independent film, if you"re happy and energetic, everyone else on the crew will be happy and energetic. !f you"re angry and yell a lot, it"s likely that everyone else will be angry and yell a lot. !f you show you"re really dedicated, you will have a dedicated crew. And if you act like you"re too important to take out the trash, everyone else will find things that aren"t part of their /obs either. As the director, you really set the mood of the entire shoot, so make sure it"s a good one. After all, this isn"t heart surgery. his is the best /ob in the entire world, and despite the low pay, the long hours, and the incredible stress, it should be fun, dammit.