FIGURE 43.1 Freecording groups are popular in video sharing sites such as Vimeo.
USING THE CAMERA
You have to be able to hang back and allow the action to unfold. Avoid trying to impose what you think should happen. Just record and think constantly about what the film is becoming and what shots you are getting. Roll with it. This is not for control freaks. Just get the images in shot and avoid camera-shake.
EDITING
Who said there was editing? Sure, you may need to assemble the footage later, but this is the film to bypass audience attention spans and create as long a film as you need. If you want to work within a pre-set time span to fit online, you can try using long shots, interspersed with fast sections to create a rhythmic set of sequences.
When you get home, edit it but don’t assume you have to take out all the long shots where nothing seems to happen. It isn’t that sort of movie. Edit in just the way you shot it – responding to the footage you have rather than trying to impose another sort of movie on it all.
Go to Chapter 22, Editing Methods: Montage to get help with this.
Upload It
Best sites to upload to:
YouTube
Best communities to join:
www.flickr.com/groups/845251@N24
Discussion and sharing tips on freecording
Best c.hannels to watch:
Freecording Channel at YouTube
* * *
Chapter | Forty – Four
Road Movie
FIGURE 44.1 Elliot Bristow on his epic car journey across the United States for his movie series Road Dreams.
WHAT IS IT?
A movie of your trip or journey. Any length, any place, any time.
Movies have the ability to make us see the world entirely in a fresh way, as if for the first time. Journeys are kind of the same – the constant flow of new things to see, smell and hear wakes up your senses and, just like a good movie, you are in a heightened state of alertness. You get switched on to the smallest details and notice everything around you.
Car journeys themselves are like montages – a stream of images slipping past your widescreen windscreen, and all in 3D high definition. They make fascinating movies, drawing together music, sound and a rich variety of images, constantly avoiding boredom. They don’t hang together as stories, and there is no real end to them – they just reach a critical mass when the effect of all those images builds up. Road movies tend to be unmistakable metaphors too – you can’t help but think of them as being about life itself with the detours you take, the stops you make, the people you meet.
It’s also the movie which is most like gaming. Video games let a story unfold in a spontaneous way, with no big build-up to a finale, and you explore the narrative possibilities over weeks or months as you encounter different parts of the game. Your road movie can be just like that.
MY KIND OF MOVIE?
You like stories, but don’t like the artificial way regular movies do it. You want action, but not guns, events but not contrived, you prefer not to plan a movie, and believe in luck, chance and being in the right place at the right time. You follow your instincts with ease, you trust the road and you get restless if you are stuck in one place too long. Like a nomad you thrive off movement, and feel oppressed by settlement. You think movies should show this, instead of trying to make those stories tie up in such a neat and tidy way. It’s more real, isn’t it?
WHAT’S IT FOR?
The travel movie is going to travel well – naturally. Its absence of dialogue and plot means it can be seen without subtitles in other cultures. It’s part National Geographic, part comedy-party, part meditation. The overriding factor is that it’s great to look at – the sunsets, the speed, the spectacle, all the things that bring out the best in moving pictures.
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE ME?
Your trip determines the length of the project. A week-long trip is ideal, but longer is better. Less than a couple of days would probably not net you the sort of footage you need. You need time to slow down and get into the right groove to shoot this movie.
HOW HARD IS IT?
Difficulty level:
The travel movie is fun to make but figure out before the trip starts how you might want the movie to unfold. Try out some of the script methods in Chapter 3, Scriptwriting.
You need:
A natural curiosity about the world
To enjoy travel
To be able to let go control of the movie – you are as much the subject as the maker
To be open to new ideas as you shoot
To be able to do most jobs in the production
WHO ELSE DO I NEED?
This is a solo project but will also work well with at most one other person.
WHAT KIT DO I NEED?
You need a camera that is sturdy, resistant to weather conditions and reliable. The Sony PD170 was a stalwart of the hard-bitten news guys, and could stand up to a few knocks. Solid-state of hard drive (HDD) cams might be a good option too, as they have no moving parts to get clammed up in difficult conditions.
If you are planning a long trip it might, on the other hand, be better to use a cheaper camcorder that you can replace easily when it breaks down. If you buy a camcorder in a country which uses a different TV system from your own, you may have trouble editing the mixed footage together – for instance if you mix UK camcorder footage (which is set to PAL) with US camcorder footage (which is set to NTSC).
You’ll need a lot of storage capacity. Tapes are a safe bet but might succumb to extremes of heat and cold. SD cards and discs are more resistant. You could travel with a laptop and an SD card reader and simply upload footage from cards to the hard drive as necessary, transferring to an external hard drive for safekeeping.
IF YOU LIKE THAT WATCH THIS
Road Dreams is the quintessential road movie – a series of programs for UK television (Channel 4) shot from thousands of hours of Super 8 film in a long and winding trip through the States (www.retroroadtrips.com).
For features, check out Wild at Heart (1990), Kings of the Road (1976) or Easy Rider (1969).
PREPRODUCTION ESSENTIALS
Avoid documents like storyboards or scripts – they won’t help you when you get on the road. Instead focus on what overall idea to have in your movie. Give it some idea, maybe even a really pointless one, to make it move forward:
A quest – like having to taste every coffee stop on a 100-mile rural journey.
A pilgrimage – to a place important to you or someone famous you admire.
Immersion – to become a traveler or delivery driver.
By foot or cycle – to sample the slow life at leisure.
FIGURE 44.2 For a travel movie, shoot a lot of footage, taking time to set up shots and record whatever comes your way. (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©Petrichuck Image# 6831154.)
USING THE CAMERA
This movie demands you slow down and take a chilled approach to shooting. This isn’t about seeking out the action, and it’s not about the big moments. Instead it’s about seeing what the landscape and the cities throw your way, responding to what comes along.
You need to be receptive and open to new ideas, able to be flexible about what happens and happy to change your views suddenly. You are like a lightning conductor – the land, the towns, the people, all strike you and your camera and you then convert this energy into a movie. You don’t care what comes your way just as long as it keeps coming.
In practice, this means shooting a lot of footage, not jumping to conclusions too quickly, and to keep looking. Shoot with a still and steady camera to let us do the looking, with wide angles and panoramas. Use close-ups to catch small, seemingly irrelevant details. Use the camcorder like a stills camera, framing each shot as well as you can, pressing record and just seeing what you get.
EDITING
This is an editor’s movie – if you enjoy editing you’ll love getting to grips with a travel odyssey.
&n
bsp; To start, look at the footage you got and try to spot common ideas or threads appearing. Imagine your movie is like a song, with a verse, then chorus, then verse, chorus and so on. You need to find that chorus – a few images which can come back again and again or which all resemble each other. For instance, it could be a certain moment where you sit and strum a guitar by the side of the road, the backdrop changing each day.
Edit more intuitively than in other movies. Expect to have long sections where not much happens – this is the sort of movie to be watched as you listen to great music, sip a drink and let the images wash over you. Don’t hurry the action either, instead letting the pace slow to a slower, more long-distance rhythm.
Experts’ Tips
Elliot Bristow, director, traveler, Road Dreams, UK
“Why did I make the journey and shoot it? Several different influences. The main one is that I had formed a romantic notion of the freedom that America had to offer from reading (in 1958) Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road. I’m hardly the only one who has responded to this book. What may make me a bit unusual is that I found the fantasy I had, lived up to expectations.”
“I tended to use the movie camera rather like a still camera, at least in the way I went about responding to imagery. This wasn’t a film that had a storyboard and a shot list – the scenes in it are all found; they presented themselves.”
www.retroroadtrips.com
* * *
LEGALESE
Keep careful track of release forms from people who appear in your film. It will be difficult to contact these people again when the trip is over.
Upload It
Best sites to upload to:
Vimeo and YouTube
Best communities to join:
Travel in HD at Vimeo:
“Add your Travel Video here and share places you’ve been, what you’ve eaten, travel tips, etc.”
Best channels to watch:
Project Pedal at Vimeo
* * *
ROAD MOVIE SCHEDULE
This movie is a long-term project, perhaps 14–28 days or longer. Add these ideas to whichever schedule you opt for:
Table 44.1 Add these extra jobs to any of the template schedules in Section 6, Make It Happen: Schedules.
What to Do Who Needs to Do It How Long This Will Take Chapters in This Book to Help You
Before shooting
Check you have enough batteries to last a full 12-hour day. If you are using SD cards, make sure you have enough. A single 4 GB card will store between 40 and 90 mins of HD video depending on your camcorder setting (lower to higher quality). (See www.sdcard.org.)
You
Less than 30 mins
Ch 12 Using a Camcorder
After shooting
Look for images or sequences you can use again and again, just like you have a chorus in a song. You can use the same kind of shot with something that happened a lot – lie watching the sunset each day in a different place. You Allow an afternoon to trawl through the footage Section 3, Cut Ch 20, Pre-edit Footage Viewing
Editing: Work on the movie for two hour stretches. Limit the time you spend on editing to avoid overworking the movie. (Montage is a great tool in this movie, and possibly the only way to work.) You A few hours for the first draft Section 3, Cut Chs 21 and 22, Editing Methods
Screenings: Show a finished draft to friends and crew. You Screening over one evening Ch 25, Screening for Feedback
Chapter | Forty – Five
Drama: Western
WHAT IS IT?
A narrative movie set among pioneers – often set in 1880s, in USA, Australia or Mexico.
Forget all other movies, the western is the original genre, the Native American of the movie world. Once upon a time, every film was made of shootups about lonely heroes west of the Mississippi, north of the Rio Grande, south of heaven. But then the bigbusiness corporate confederate hit town with his bigbudget blockbusters and soon the western was reduced to its own reservation in small film festivals for the faithful.
So what did the western do then? Just like you’d expect, the genre went a-wandering – ending up with some great movies from Australia, Italy, Spain, Mexico, any place where the countryside was hostile, poverty beckoned and the lawmakers were no different from the lawbreakers.
What makes the western a great genre for a filmmaker is its sheer unrivaled capacity to carry just about any idea, any theme, in its desolate landscape. This desolation acts like a big blank stage, and you can have whatever combination of revenge, chasing, searching, losing or fighting you might want to drop into it. There are no distractions to dilute the plot – just the hero, the enemy and the big sky. Low-budget filmmaking doesn’t get any better than that.
MY KIND OF MOVIE?
You have a sharp and almost cynical view of the world. You don’t like frills and prefer your apartment basic, sparsely decorated but not neat. You might not have seen too many westerns and you certainly don’t have any nostalgia for the old movies. You might prefer noir films, you don’t mind if there’s not much talking, and you don’t care if there are long pauses – you just expect bad things to happen. In fact, you don’t care if people are a little uncomfortable or get a few illusions shattered – that’s the real world to you.
WHAT’S IT FOR?
Westerns have a huge fan base, mostly in countries where there is a history of braving the elements and taming the fierce force of nature. Film festivals and online sharing sites like the genre for a few reasons: it blends like Jack Daniels with just about any other genre to add a twist to it; film festivals like it because audiences have a kind of retro fondness for it; and it has managed to keep reinventing itself over the decades so it still doesn’t seem dated.
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE ME?
It’s a narrative movie so expect to spend time on the script. Full-blooded westerns, or movies with even a hint of western in them, need a script that has been stripped down to basics, with a simple plot but a complex character. But this also means that shooting is simpler, without excessive props, makeup or sets. If you get the location right you could make this a quick movie to shoot.
HOW HARD IS IT?
Difficulty level:
You need to be able to commit to the pared-down, sparse kind of movie this is. It thrives on a simple story, bare locations and yet the meaning in this sort of movie gets filled up by the intense emotional power of the primal themes it uses. It’s going to be a great movie.
You need:
To be able to do a simple, mean and sharp script
To work with a team
To resist making a flashy, MTV style movie – this is a brooding and threatening movie and needs to be edited that way, slow and menacing
WHO ELSE DO I NEED?
Sound
Camera
Producer (or at least someone else who believes in the film as much as you)
Runner for extra help
WHAT KIT DOI NEED?
Shoot on HD – the lens and camera will deliver a great-looking movie and make the most of your locations.
For sound, use a boom, but also try and get hold of a radio mic to enable you to shoot way back from the actors.
IF YOU LIKE THAT WATCH THIS
Sam Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1957) is way ahead of its time, while anything by Sergio Leone can be safely eaten whole – try Once Upon a Time in the West or the Dollars trilogy for all the ingredients you need.
And the western is not just about pioneer times: it’s no surprise that the big days of the genre have been in turbulent times – with 1950 seen as the year zero, where High Noon brought America’s fears about Korea and McCarthy to the screen. In the early 2000s, the brutal 3:10 to Yuma (2007) added in a graphic prisoner torture scene to this classic remake, hinting at the Iraq war and the Abu Ghraib incident. Or there’s The Wild Bunch in 1969 with its corrupt hunters, helping America figure out the moral confusion in Vietnam.
Other genres absorbed the western in the 1970s in movies
set in modern cities but with real western themes, atmosphere and plots – Dirty Harry (1971), Serpico (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Badlands (1973).
Online, try the superb The West Side, an urban western that shows how to update the genre for today, winner of a Webby Award for Best Online Drama in 2008 (www.thewestside.tv). (See Chapter 30, Create Your Own Web Series.)
GET INSPIRED
Westerns succeed with strong plots. The best westerns hinge on plots so tight they can be described in a dozen words. Practice reducing your outline story down until you have sheered off the frills and detours, ending up with an austere plot unadorned with distractions. Then flesh it out with subplots, love interest, or backstory.
Learn from the past and take from the genre what works; sixty years of classics have given us enough traits to choose from, so cherry-pick the best ideas and sift them into a streamlined story. In the best westerns, landscape is more crucial than in any other genre. It isolates the hero and it switches from Eden to hell overnight – it’s your extra enemy waiting to pounce.
Stand-Out Shorts Page 25