Making A Movie

I go back and forth about whether we’re making a film or a movie. Sometimes people are actually talking about film with sprocket holes in it, other times it’s just something projected on a screen. The words are no longer as descriptive about what we’re doing. Just as some of the best music performances I’ve ever seen were open mic nights in a bar (I once saw a drunk homeless guy play a 12-string guitar that was a jaw-dropping performance); college level independent short films can be the best of class productions, but is it a film, is it a movie, is it something else – who knows?

In the old days (5 or 6 years ago) every project was a big production. You bought tapes, planed things out, maybe rehearsed, got the equipment, lugged it to the location, set everything up, shot the footage, packed everything up, took it all back, logged the tapes, captured the shots you wanted, and started to edit.

Now the equipment side is much easier to deal with in number of items, weight, complexity, and cost. You go some place, pull out your camera, shoot, then put it away. Later you capture the footage and cut it up. It’s more relaxed, more inviting – just easier.

However, one part is just as hard - really hasn’t changed – is telling the story. What is your story? Where does it start? Most stories can begin at different times in the unfolding of events. Some times you have a long lead in, other times you’re quickly in the middle of the action. They each have different effects on the audience and thereby different outcomes.

The usual rule of thumb is you join a scene (cut into it) as late as possible and you leave it as soon as possible (but not always); you string all of those scenes together to make the film. The effect is that it moves along. If it’s confusing cutting from one scene to another you add a transition of some kind to help it flow, to make it work. You frame the beginning with enough information to make it just understandable and you end with enough ambiguity to keep us thinking.

Needless to say there are a lot of variables all of which can be fine tuned for various effects. Consistency of look and tone allows the work to feel like a single experience, one cohesive whole, but with both the feel of inevitability and, at the same time, surprise. There’s the really hard work - surprising inevitability.

Just as in music, the story needs dynamics of scale, emotion and complexity. Most of that comes from how you arrange the footage (pacing comes from the cutting, not the action), but the catch is you can only work with the footage you have. Often we find that we’re actually short on footage of one kind or another and have to go back out and shoot it. The film can only be made from footage that you have on your hard drive, not what’s in your head, not what’s written in the script, not from wishes. You sometimes even have to give up on the script and make what you can with what you have. Now it’s a different film, but that’s OK. It’s what it takes.

For most narrative work you end up using one camera and doing multiple takes, but for documentary films it may be expedient to use more cameras since it’s a one time event and you might want several angles to select from later in the edit. That used to be a big problem for us, but it’s a little easier now with an inexpensive camera like the Flip. A couple of Flip cameras placed in strategic locations can give you a lot of coverage that’s really handy to have later. It makes it seem like a more “produced” movie. You end up with a more polished higher end feel. Cool. (The Flips are nice because there are so small it’s easy to carry a couple of them in your pocket. Having two of the same camera also makes it easier to have the look of the shots match up in the edit. And yes, they’re inexpensive, too.)

Similarly, getting good audio is a little easier on a narrative shoot. You know where everyone is and where they’re going to go. No so with documentary. You may need the “reach” of a shot gun mic because you can’t actually get close to what you want to record. You can “place” mics in the scene either by using a wireless lavaliere microphone on a person wandering in a crowd or use flashcard based Wave recorders, like the Edirol, placed as close as you can get. Later in the edit you “sync up” these loose audio tracks with the video you shot and cut it all together. (There’s even software now that makes that syncing up of audio and video really easy: PluralEyes. That’s what an editor’s assistant used to do, now it’s software – remember that.)

We’re shooting to get footage that describes, illustrates and contextualizes the story we’re trying to tell. That usually translates into a wide establishing shot (where are we), closeups (shows us some elements, parts, examples), action (what’s happening, unfolding, ongoing, changing and reactions, too), and good old beauty shots (people, things, events, places).

If you can’t record an explanatory shot that tells us or shows us what’s going on you’ll have to tell us about it later as a voice over in the edit room. A lot of people, particularly in college, think that’s a cop out and we should only use what the footage shows – for it’s purity. My view is if I can’t figure out what going on, I’m no longer interested in watching. I don’t have the time to struggle through a film that’s incomprehensible even if it’s arty – sorry. So help me understand. Talk to me.

Another false presumption is having a strong point of view, but not showing it. Letting the viewer decide what the point is or who’s right or wrong may be a nice liberal sentiment, but it makes for dull movies. If you don’t believe in your own point of view and tell me what it is I, again, don’t have time for your dull (slow) film. Stand up for what you believe in. Tell it. Show it. Make a point. I don’t have to agree, but it’s usually much more interesting to hear what you really think. That’s why I want to watch your film in the first place, to learn what you think.

After all the shooting is over, annotating the footage is both a lot of work and really worth while. It’s a chance to see it all over again more dispassionately and take notes about what your really have. I’m a firm believer in making subclips from your footage. In Final Cut (that’s the editing software), in the Browser (that's the area where all of your footage shows up), double click on a clip to load it in the Viewer (that's where we watch the footage). Then mark an In and Out point (start here, end here) to describe a “shot” (a unit of footage). Press Command + U and you get a subclip of that master clip sent back into the Browser, highlighted for you to enter a new file name. It’s a little awkward at first and you might be tempted to not do it, but this is the most powerful way to edit effectively - particularly with long form work. Go through all of your footage, break it up into shots that you name; then you can sort those clips into bins (folders) to make it all more orderly and understandable. If you can’t find a shot, your can’t use it.


I think of subclips as being able to see all of the elements I have to work with laid out to sort through. Not to use subclips is as if you were building a house and kept all of the lumber stacked on the truck that delivered it. Each time you wanted a 2x4 you would have to re-stack all of the lumber to find one. Painful. With subclips you unload all of the lumber, stack it up by size, or color, or shape, or reference number making it much easier to find anything, everything. The effort in unloading it all is greatly made up in the ease of finding it later.

One of the most exciting aspects of working in Final Cut is the ability to have multiple versions of the work. You can cut a sequence, duplicate it and then go wacky with changes and not have to worry about fixing it back to the way it originally was. What an opportunity.

Work in sections. Often what we thought would be a great ending we discover is really a great opening. We can pick sections up and plop them down anywhere we want in another master sequence and, yes, have different versions of that, too.

Work as quickly as you can and don’t bother to fix problems along the way. Do that much later after you’ve seen the whole thing from beginning to end. Most of the time we change things so much that any work we would have done fixing things gets thrown out anyway, so it would just be a waste of time. Save fixes until you know what’s actually in the film. It’s often on the second or third pass that we start taking the time to fix things.

Usually on a first past (rough cut) I cut only for audio. I don’t even have the video window visible. It’s really fast to look at the audio waveform (it's wonderful to be able to see audio) and see when a sentence starts or ends. Mark your In and Out point, do the edit and move on. The most important thing to discover is what the film is really about and you’ll only know that by playing it back. Then you start all over again with that information in mind and make it work – better.

I eventually change most of my edits into L-cuts. That is I lead with the audio track and after a beat or two I bring in the video track. (That’s why it’s easy to cut for audio first. That's also why it's smart to shoot a little long at the end of a scene. It gives you more time to hold on the out point of a clip. End of action, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, cut.) That smooths out the feel of the editing and makes it more flowing, more invisible. We’re drawn into the next shot by first hearing the audio, then seeing the image.

At some point we start adding graphics and music. If you have a montage section drop in some music to cut against for pacing and rhythm. You can change it later, easily. Musics job is to unify separate picture elements and make them seem more connected. An audio track under a bunch of image cuts makes the whole thing seem locked together. You delete the ambient sound from each cut and edit in a continuous audio track that covers the entire length of the edits. Now it's all happening in one place instead of many.

I’ve always found it useful to cut a "trailer" (preview) in the early stages of the process to act as a device to help figure out what the piece is about or to verify that I have the footage to tell the story I think I’m telling. A good trailer, even for a documentary, can help you clarify what the story line is and the tone of the work. Pull out some still images and make a poster too. It’s inspirational, well at least it allows us to be hopeful. See, it could work, it’s on the wall – coming this summer.

After it’s all over you need to make copies to hand out. For all our pretense of living in an HD world, good old standard definition DVDs are still what people want. Make Reference Movies and drop them into iDVD. Pull still images out and use them as the background for the menu. The more sophisticated the DVD menu the better the setup to your film. Really. Wouldn’t you prefer to have someone dressed up nice coming to your showing instead of arriving in their pajamas?

See, it’s all so easy.

gunther