8 Things I’ve Learned From Shooting Long Form Drama on the 5D That I didn’t Know Before I Started
Yeah yeah, long title for a blog entry but this is an important one. I consider myself pretty savvy about shooting on DSLRs and have made a monstrous heap of mistakes over the last eight months, enough to have learned some things. Having now wrapped production on Ladies and Gentlemen I think it’s only fair that I share a few things that I’ve learned that I simply wouldn’t have learned any other way. I’m not talking about moiré or rolling shutter, we all know about those already, more about the consequences of working with DSLRs over a protracted period on a big project.
1. Shooting handheld is nothing to be scared of
We all worry about the rolling shutter issue, and shooting handheld is a sure way to get that monstrous CMOS sensor jiggling like a jelly in a hurricane. Hurlbut shoots handheld all the time, he shot a bunch of marines (hoohah) running around and got away with it. If you’re properly kitted out (we had a fully featured Redrock setup) then those no reason to be scared of it. Oh but what about focus? – I hear you say. True that, focus is a problem, but only if you’re not ready for it. Don’t go shooting on an 85mm, wide open, whatever you do, that’s just daft. Having a focus-puller gives you a shot, but I actually prefer it when the operator does the focus themselves. Still, handheld is nothing to be scared as long as you’ve got it balanced on your shoulder and you have two handles to support the camera. It works just fine.
2. Monitoring – Buy Marshall, don’t bother with anything else
My monitor, a Marshall LCD-70XP was broken at the start of the shoot and we hired in a variety of different monitors. What a waste of time. We had a really really crap time of it judging focus, judging exposure, judging anything, it was hideous. When my Marshall came back it was suddenly a completely different ball game. False color is so essential for drama there’s no way I’d undertake anything without it now. For that reason alone I would never use any other make of monitor in this price range. It also helps that the Marshall’s deliver the best picture, giving you the most confidence to shoot fast and shoot smart. That’s not me getting a kickback from Marshall, I always try to be as fair as possible when looking at gear, but monitoring is such a crucial piece of the DSLR puzzle and, right now, there’s really only one company I trust.
3. F@£$%^&*() mini-HDMI
Technically speaking everyone already knows what a load of crap that mini-HDMI connector is. I now have to stock three cables in my monitor bag because I know, over the course of a weekend we’ll go through at least two. Once your monitoring’s gone, you’re screwed. I’ve learnt some new expletives dealing with those cables, they’re absolutely horrid.
4. New directors need opportunities like this
I’m not new to directing, but strictly speaking, I have been a first-time director on this job. The amount I’ve learned shooting a piece of long-form drama, particularly shooting at weekends when I could take stock during the week and improve my methods week after week. I’ve done a few short films but they never taught me anywhere near as much as this experience has done. Learning to shoot for absolutely bare minimum coverage, developing a shorthand with actors, moving the camera, analysing scenes, all of it has been the most thrilling and extraordinary experience. I will learn a huge amount more in the edit suite. The opportunity to shoot long-form doesn’t come around very often when you’re a newbie like me but I grasped it with both hands and I’m so glad I did. Directing’s a skill you have to refine on the job. You can read all the textbooks but it’s only by doing it that you really improve. I really believe if there were more opportunities to get involved with projects like this young directors would be able to gain the experience they need in a relatively risk-free environment and take that forward to their own projects with greater confidence. So much is pressure is placed on first-time directors it can become suffocating. Shooting someone else’s work, on a tiny little budget, removes the risk, removes the full on emotional head mashing that goes with directing your passion project. I get so wound up about the merit of my own projects, the quality of my writing, whether the project’s going to be a huge hit, that I just explode. This project has allowed me the objectivity to really experiment with some ideas, take risks, make mistakes of course, but ultimately remain upbeat about the whole thing. Directors need that kind of experience before pouring everything they have into something they care intensely about.
5. The 5D is just a camera (but now you have more options, oh yes)
DSLRs have become fetishised to the point of idiocy of late, and we forget sometimes that they are in fact just cameras. They are not miracle workers. You still have to work hard on your script, on your lighting, on your actors, on your edit, on your storytelling. However, what the camera does give you is more options. Shallow depth of field is now a creative option, you can choose to make use of it, or you can choose not to. The camera will look good and the footage will look nice pretty much most of the time and you have to work pretty hard to make stuff look ugly on the 5D. I’m amazed now how un-shallow a lot of 35mm films appear these days. Yes, the DSLR look is very distinctive and we’re all attuned to recognise it when we see it, but you just have to think of it as another creative tool in your arsenal. A staggeringly effective one for sure, but a tool nonetheless.
6. Slow-mo – 7D or Twixtor
I started off shooting slow-mo on the 7D, but by the end of the shoot I was shooting everything on the 5D with a view to slowing it down with Twixtor. Why? The 7D, for me, just doesn’t deliver as beautiful an image as the 5D, it doesn’t quite resolve as well and doesn’t hold up when blown up. When shooting slow-mo on the 7D not only are you asking it to work harder, and process faster, inevitably losing quality, but you’re also forced to shoot at 720p rather than 1080 and that makes a big difference. That, coupled with my preference for the 5D led to the decision to rely on Twixtor. However, Twixtor is no miracle worker (though it can often seem that way), you have to be very careful with fast movement left to right or right to left. It just won’t be able to cope. It’s expensive for sure, but the results, when you give it the right material, are just staggering.
7. There is no excuse anymore
I’ve now used DSLRs in a bunch of stupid situations, shooting fast turnaround conference telly, shooting cars, shooting drama, shooting sports and never once had a bad experience. In the UK everyone’s wringing their hands over the abolition of the UK Film Council, the funding body that administered lottery money for UK films. I personally don’t give a monkeys, but there’s no doubt it was an important piece of the film puzzle in this country. It’s gone now and nobody really knows how they’re going to get their film funded. Let me tell you this: we’ve shot a one hour drama for $6,000 and it looks good. Normally you’d have to compromise the way a piece looked to make the budget stretch, but with a 5D you simply don’t. For all those producers and directors wringing their hands now I say, stop being so sodding lazy. Get off your arses and make something because there is no excuse not to anymore. DSLRs can compete, tricky they may be, but they genuinely can compete. No more excuses.
8. We need a new model but now we have the tools to build one
It’s become blindingly clear to me during the making of this project that what I used to consider a ‘safe’ budget is simply not applicable anymore. By ‘safe’ I mean sufficient to get to within about 70% of your vision. Only Kubrick would ever dare believing he could get that percentage into the nineties. For the rest of us 70% represents a miraculously high figure. On Ladies and Gentlemen I think I came in around 65% and that’s not bad at all, but I kept my expectations low and let the 5D make up the shortfall, which it did, in spades. Back in 1995 producer Ted Hope (co-president of Good Machine, along with partner James Schamus) wrote an article entitled ‘Indie Film is Dead’ in Filmmaker magazine. In that article he proclaimed:
Independent filmmakers are currently standing on a precipice. It’s jump or get pushed. We are overdependent on the Hollywood studios and their far reaching apparatus. If we want Indie Film to survive into the next millenium, if we want it to expand our artistic horizons, we must start to grow truly self-sufficient.
Far from offering a solution to the problem he cited all the reasons why independent filmmaking is (nine times out of ten) doomed to fail. I’ve been writing on my own blog about the possibility of a new model of funding/distribution/production and one in which the independents can truly become self-sufficient as Ted suggests we should be. I would advocate that there has never been a greater opportunity to create that model. When I see Google TV, 1080p on Youtube, uStream, Twitter, Facebook and of course the mighty DSLRs, I ask myself, why isn’t anybody taking a blank piece of paper and simply writing their own rules? The answer lies in the slippery notion of the ‘audience’. Without an audience you have no project, for a film’s raison d’etre is to be seen. If no-one sees it, it doesn’t exist. As independent filmmakers we are 100% concerned with product first and audience second. In order to create a new model for independent filmmaking we need to do the opposite. Build the audience first, then create the product. Philip Bloom generates an enormous number of hits every month, somewhere near a million or so, it’s claimed. That probably equates to around 30,000 unique visitors… 30,000!!!!! For a camera nerd? That’s an audience, right there. Youtube, 1080p, on our televisions, in our homes, direct from the studios of Philip Bloom – hello. And we wouldn’t need to charge the earth for the content. Roger Corman used to shoot features for $50-60k in old money which is a lot more than you need today. Charge the Bloom audience $3 to watch an exclusive piece of content created by Bloom inc. and you could actually start putting a business model together… (maybe!)
Obviously, this is vastly simplifying the problem, but you can see what I’m driving at. I would love to see film communities, like this one, around the world, take up the challenge to become a network of micro studios, producing, promoting and funding their own projects, directly from within the community, using crowdsourcing models to engage their audiences and make them more than viewers, make them investors. We can create online ‘festivals’ where short films are programmed together, bundled with interviews, behind the scenes and director commentary, connecting communities around the world, who watch an hour and a half’s programming from us, rather than a film, but they watch it on their television. It’s potentially massive. I’m already working on this idea in the UK, trying to see if it can work, and boy do we need it because our industry’s really in the crapper. Of course, this may all be wishful thinking, but I’ve to some ideas about how to make filmmaking internally competitive and, by extension, actually make the work better, but I’ll keep those to myself for now! Any ideas welcome though.
Finally, fast forward fifteen years from that Ted Hope article and we’ve seen the collapse of those boutique ‘independent’ arms of the major studios and independent film has been cast back out into the wilderness, from whence it came, and where it ultimately should remain. Ted was asked to revisit his article and comment on it by the magazine in which it originally appeared and his view, post banking crisis, remains bleak:
In the interim, audiences and communities have been besieged with budget-conscious entertainment choices and become both more dispersed and selective in their filters. We can reach them far more easily now, but getting them to pay attention is far more difficult. As producers, we’ve watched our job description expand tenfold, whereas our billfold has been sliced and diced to record lows. Indie film was a legitimate career for about a decade, but it has returned to the realm of the “amateur” — in that it is now truly all about the love.
I do indeed love this job and I think this new generation of filmmakers are so well-versed in blogging, tweeting, creating communities, that they simply do all those jobs Ted refers to much much quicker. I look at my potential career path stretching out in front of me and it just feels like an anachronism. It really does feel like there can be a better way, a more socially responsible way, a more creative way, and a way that really lives up to word ‘independent’.
