from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 01/31/10

"Night School" by Ben Soper :: two teens break into a school after dark, looking for intimacy...

"Bitch" by Dom Bridges (via @futureshorts) a man buys a can of tuna & gets more than he bargained for.

"All You've Got" by A.E. Griffin :: a battered wife becomes emotionally attached to the cat burglar robbing her house.

2009 - my year in review

Last year was not a great year for me creatively. Stalled projects, false starts, fumbled paperwork and disillusioned collaborators litter the twelve months gone passed. But that's fine, because that's life. I set out to learn how to be an independent film producer on my own dime so that the only person these mistakes would affect would be me. And that's just how it happened.

Those are my mistakes. I own them. But they don't own me.

No-budget films, as anyone who's made one will tell you, progress at their own pace. Without the funds to channel into manpower, or to relieve yourself of the necessity of staying gainfully employed, time is your only asset - deadlines had to be flexible as I real-world issues demanded my time. The problem was, of course, that I'd set out with some false assumptions that shaped my strategy - a square peg, if you will, that I was trying to force into a round hole. As external pressures caused my personal deadlines to slip more and more, I wasn't giving myself time to reflect - I was just trying to hammer that same peg into the same wrong hole even harder.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I was absolutely driving myself insane.

That had to stop.

In July I'd had the foresight to plan a vacation - a visit with my family in Scotland to see in the New Year. The timing couldn't have been more perfect.

I left my work, and my computer, at home, and took a flight away from the pressure. And I didn't squander that time. I read Philip Hodgetts's "The New Now" and Jon Reiss's "Think Outside the Box Office." I reflected on the successes of my peers, particularly the ever inspiring David Baker, whose DVD of his feature "Mission X" I'd seen in December. And I spoke to other working filmmakers, like Kjeld Gogosha-Clark of Working Class Films notoriety, who gave me fresh and very welcome perspective on what's going on outside my own head in the world of independent filmmaking.

When you're too close to your work, too tangled in the problems to see what's causing them, you have to step away. You have to step back in order to see where the problem lies and to consider how to fix them. A short break can give you the time and the distance to assess your difficulties and formulate a new strategy.

By the time I got off the plane at JFK on January 11th I had a new treatment for "There Is No Drinking After Death" and a new set of goals for myself this year - new habits to make a clean, effective break with last year's disappointments. And since I returned I've also come up with a new strategy for the short film project, afilmabout.us. I'll be sharing those details soon. At the risk of overstating this, taking a break made all the difference.

James Joyce said that mistakes are portals to discovery. Well they are if you let them be. 2010 is going to be a great year. I hope you'll share it with me.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 01/24/10

"Terminus" by Trevor Cawood :: A man's sanity is tested when he is tailed by strange, ambiguous beings.

"Marcus" by Olu Fashakin :: A social worker gets more than she bargained for when visiting Marcus' mother.

"Ark" by Grzegorz Jonkajtys :: A stylish animated short. With almost the entire human population destroyed, one man leads an exodus.

In Celebration of First Features: #3 - Neil LaBute's "In The Company of Men"

The selection of these first features is anything but random. As I gear up to produce my first feature I'm looking for two kinds of first feature - (1) those first films by directors who go on to become my role models as working professionals, or at the very least become directors whose work I find fascinating, and (2) the first films whose themes and scenarios resonate or run in parallel with the themes and scenarios in the script I'm developing. Neil LaBute's feature debut, "In The Company of Men," falls into the latter category.

Two executives, Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), both men with axes to grind over relationships with women, plot to get even with all woman-kind for their past injury. They intend to find a vulnerable woman, vigorously romance her like some tag-team wrestling duo, and then dump both dump her at the point it will cause her most anguish. In that way they both believe they'll be settling some scores. Except, of course, it isn't that simple.


Adapting the film script from his own stage play, LaBute shot the whole film over two weeks for around $25,000 (financed largely by an auto-insurance settlement). Watching this as a filmmaker the money goes as far as it can - most shots feel underlit, though properly exposed. Interiors of the office, especially, often feel like they're night interiors when clearly their not supposed to be... not enough ambient fill splashing around the room, too many deep, deep shadows... But for the most part the camera is where it needs to be. Most shots are locked off with the camera on sticks. The only handheld shot that leaps to mind is the close-up of Chad on the bed with the object of their vindictive scheming, Christine (Stacey Edwards) - an unexpected organic touch that invigorates the frame and gives the scene an unspoken vibrancy.

The film does at times feel cramped because of awkward camera framing compounded by lighting that doesn't compensate for a lack of physical depth in the shot. This, married to the stagey feeling of this adapted screenplay, promotes the amateurish feeling in places. But that aside the characters are clearly written, and the performances are pretty solid - though Eckhart's Chad feels so demonic at times that he verges on caricature. The real strength of this film is the economy with which it is staged, and the energy LaBute tries to put into every scene. This is by no means a kinetic film, as is usually the case with low-budget screenplays, but here the interstitial music cues played during every title card and again over the closing credits are so feverish and bombastic that the non-filmed elements perfectly balance the quieter filmed elements. The music highlights the anger and hysteria of Chad and Howard's mission... a quest for delirious power over unsuspecting victims.



For me the key here is the writing - a solid script that inspires inventive and vigorous performance, not to mention an economy of locations and extraneous speaking characters that all go to making a two weeks schedule possible. My biggest disappointment, echoing what I said in #2 of this series, is that this film isn't more cinematic. The focus is so utterly on performance while little energy was spent in making the camera work more expressive. While it's possible that this was a creative decision on the part of LaBute's, I personally feel the film suffers from a restrained camera - the very stillness of the camera draws attention to itself, especially now in the era of handheld digital camcorders. The performances are left trapped in this inert boxes, with nowhere to run to.

A feature film is cinema, regardless of the production budget. It's the feature director's duty to find a vibrant cinematic vocabulary for themselves, in order to counter the point-and-shoot mindset that often creeps in when time is short and money is tight.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 01/18/10

"Little Terrorist" by Ashvin Kumar - nominated for an Oscar in the Best Live Action Short Film category. A Pakistani Muslim boy accidentally crosses the Pakistani-Indian border which is riddled with landmines...

"Between You and Me" by Patryk Rebisz - a short internationally celebrated for its innovative approach to still photography, using the burst mode — a photo camera’s ability to record a rapid succession of images — in the depiction of a chance encounter.

"Time Piece" by Jim Henson - an experimental short film produced, directed, and written by Jim Henson, who also played the leading role.