On Saturday morning I left the house at about 10:00, walked over to Timothy's, bought myself some Superman-related movie magazines (Cinefex, AmCin, Premiere), got a coffee, and busted out my notebook. All things considered, if you have the means to use hard-bound notebooks instead of cheap Hilroy crap, I highly recommend it. It makes everything seem much more meaningful. And so, sipping my coffee and browsing my magazines and listening to music on the trusty iPod, I started to storyboard Standoff. I don't think I've actually storyboarded a flick properly since before Bone Daddy 1. I usually just write out shot lists. But it's been a long while since I've shot a movie (I think the last time I actually rolled a camera was shooting the Taste of the Danforth plates for E-Watchamacallit Un-amation, almost a year ago), so I decided to go oldschool with it and actually make my truly pathetic doodles in their truly lopsided boxes.
And it was so much fun!
I'm always sort of worried about whether or not I'm actually going to be able to come up with anything interesting and/or sustain my camera-blocking creativity over time, but these storyboards fairly rattled off the pen with only a few stops required to chew cud, sip coffee, and survey the surrounding skyline. This was the first project I specifically conjured shooting at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, so that was kinda fun, really bringing out the Leone in my non-western. And in the section of the film that I designated "Fight 2," I indulged my manic experimental whims to a cake-eating degree unprecedented, possibly, since the shooting of The Hunt. (Or maybe Night of the Centipedes. Did I do anything cool with the camera in Night of the Centipedes? Fuck, I oughta watch that flick sometime.) Upside-down flips, "news photographer just trying to survive" interaction between camera and subject, and the pièce de résistance, a double-rotation barrel roll across the axis of action that may or may not be entirely useful, but sure was fun to write down.
I ended up with 43 setups, which is not the least ambitious shot list ever, but probably not the most, either. Certainly given that I staged Burn completely boardless on the fly, and never storyboarded a Bone Daddy movie at all out of sheer lethargy, it was the most complex shooting plan I've had in a good whiles. But anyways.
I spent Saturday night watching À nos amours, which has absolutely nothing to do with Standoff itself, but is an awesome film and one should always watch awesome films if one is going to make one of one's own. (One.)
Shooting, as I reflected with Chris in the car on Sunday on the way to the location, is a surprisingly angst-laden concept going forward, given that it represents on the whole the least buy-in for time of the entire filmmaking process. Whether this notion of shooting be an impassable labyrinth of inevitable doom is something that was inaccurately beaten into us in film school (a concept I will explore in the last Absent Storms piece, which I swear to god is actually coming), it's sort of amazing that three measly hours in the midst of a 3- or 4-month overall process can be the subject of so much feet-dragging and moaning on the part of the filmmaker (me). Especially given that I don't particularly like CGI-animated films and don't want to be an animator, you'd think I could get over my hangups on going into the real world and filming real things. But oh well.
We congregated at Mer's going-away brunch, where I ate too much cheese (I should have stuck with the mango), and then headed to Sunnybrook Park to shoot in a wide open field, which would eventually be known internally as "the anvil" or, less charitably, "the asshole of hell." Why? Because it was all of 43 degrees with the humidex in the city of Toronto yesterday (a degree for every shot on my list, prompting Daniel to ask me to delete a few shots and see if the temperature came down), and we were in full sun at the height of its mid-afternoon powers. With these flicks, it's always something.
In Standoff, Daniel and Demetre fight each other to the death. Daniel uses a Manfrotto stand, and Demetre uses a Manhasset stand. Putting these two guys together on this field of combat and having them actually duel with large metal objects made me realize that there's something about this type of cinema - whatever "it" is - that inherently appeals to me. The same impulses applied to the VCR movies. Something about the violence of physical objects and the unpredictability of their destructive power... i.e. when I go to throw a television out a third storey window, I really don't know what's going to happen, I just know it's gonna happen. Ditto for two guys smacking at each other with unwieldy metal stands. It's fucking loud and destructive and yeah, more than a little bit dangerous (when Daniel's stand went ahead and disintegrated on a particular impact, sending a large portion of itself flying into the distance, he quipped "This just shows that we didn't know until right now how much danger Demetre has been in up to this point"). It's all very real; the boundary line between narrative cinema and a Jackass stunt... and though I'm somewhat unable to explain the appeal, the appeal to me personally cannot be denied. I really, really like making movies like this. Standoff 4x? Maybe.
The day's shooting went well. There's always the strange mental trade-off between how you conceived the thing looking in your mind's eye, and the set-in-concrete reality of what is actually rolling onto the tape like an unstoppable freight train. Some films have more divergence in this area than others; I'd put Standoff on the high side overall, probably due to the unpredictability factor mentioned above. Also, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, it was amazing how much shooting this was like working on film, inasmuch as the on-set ability to monitor the shots was concerned. In full sun, and with masking tape guides on the viewscreen to compose for 2.35:1, it was almost impossible to get a really good look at a shot while it was happening; as is the case with film camera viewfinders, best guesses were about as good as it got. This sort of lent itself to the style, though; I think it looked good. The only thing I was worried about was any situation where the shot wasn't going to give me enough to work with in post - too contrasty, too many harsh shadows, etc. The visual elements that can be increased in post, but not decreased if there's too much "on the negative" already.
The other thing I found hard was "thinking on my feet." I think I'm just rusty at this. On the whole it's good that I storyboarded so meticulously. I followed the boards religiously throughout, only making slight modifications as to angle or framing, or re-staging certain actions in more classical compositions to cover elements that might be lost in the more avant-garde staging. The only time I threw out the storyboard altogether was the very end of the movie, where I abandoned the planned 6-shot sequence and composed a 360° long take in its place. It was hard. It was hard to know if I was going to be able to make it work in the cut, hard to figure out the blocking of the characters and where the camera needed to be, and just plain hard to concentrate in the moment, devise the shot, and know if it would work. In yesteryear, I would have jumped into that kind of on-set improvisatory opportunity with both feet. Yesterday, it was damn scary.
Practice, practice, practice.
We pretty much scorched ourselves out there, me and Daniel and Demetre and Chris. Chris was shooting stills of the entire action that I am considering cutting into the video footage; that might not work out, but even if it doesn't, I'll warrant that Chris has an equally viable stills version of Standoff that will match or improve upon the full-motion version for overall storytelling. (And doubtless, Chris will come up with some sort of way to turn the stills into a dense, moody contemplation on the futility of artmaking and the place of the masculine ego in the 21st century, told entirely with cats.) We were all fairly pink by the end of the day; shooting wrapped at around a quarter to six, an hour over schedule, but still within the 3-4 hour timeframe I was aiming for, so that's good. I hate working longer than I have to, on anything, but on a film shoot in particular. It's just so goddamned unnecessary, and contributes to the "shooting as an impassable labyrinth of inevitable doom" mentality that stumbles so many of our movies before we even dare to make them. Shooting is just collecting elements, and for the most part, elements can be collected faster than you think. Speed does tend to equal freshness and innovation, and freshness and innovation tend to equal good.
So Standoff's in the can, and I'll look at the footage this week (ack! the only true horror of the filmmaking process) and make with the cutting on the ol' PC workstation. This will be a sound-design-heavy post-production, given the milieu; I brought (some of) the remnants of the stands back to my place for the ever-amusing foley, and there will have to be plenty of ADR'd grunting and breathing (and strangulated dying sounds). I'm going to have to come up with an overall sound "scheme" for the environment itself, which is going to have to be somewhat different from the "children playing in the distance" vibe that's on the native audio. Oh, and didgeridoo. I'm finally scoring a flick with my didgeridoo.
Next up: gotta solve the One Minute Film Festival problem (problem: too many vague and thereby useless concepts, no solid concepts), and write all nine segments of Asshole. before going into character development on the asshole in question. I'm pushing Stanley's Death to the winter, and I still haven't given up on This Is What We Do. But them's for laters. Oh, and I think there's one more thing on the go, but I can't remember what it is. It's probably in my notebook somewhere, feeling meaningful.
I'll post storyboard scans and stills from the shoot when I have a mo'.
