Surveying the Land of Scape
February 18, 2009
Taegen Carter is a movie director. He is also the owner of Mythmaker Entertainment, a company that produces shorts and features in the genres of adventure, sci-fi, thriller and drama. Taegen tells us about the production of Scape, that should be completed around June of ’09. Let’s read his words, in this exclusive article that could be a page of a well written diary or a best selling novel.
Surveying the Land of Scape
Making a film sucks. It’s hard. Really hard. When it’s finished, and people sit in darkness, silently watching in a matter of minutes what may have cumulatively taken years of work, it’s worth it. But really, the process couldn’t be harder. Start with the fact that an alarmingly high number of people will look at you in utter pity when you mention you’re making a feature film. Mix in some healthy doses of family doubt, maybe a pinch or two of high school friends making ten times more money than you in a real job, and that’s just the beginning. But don’t get me wrong, I’m an optimist.
Maybe it’s my optimism that continues to lead me, often blindly, toward my goal of becoming a professional (see definition of professional: paid) director. Having directed a ninety-five minute feature film already, you might be wondering if the guy writing this article enjoys pain. Sure, maybe a little. But with experience at my fingertips, my second feature had to be easier, right? No. Not a chance. The following is a chronicle of my pain experience, and some of the many problems that arose.
I spent six months writing the script and raised a budget mainly by begging investors (see definition of investors: family) for money. The sum of which was not very much. Just enough to pay a skeleton crew of ex-students, get a deal with the acting union SAG and rent some camera equipment. The law of filmmaking says this: the closer one gets to filming, the more will go wrong. One week before filming and things were really getting dicey. I was still converting my script to a series of shots that I wanted to film, rehearsing with actors, coordinating logistics and dealing with problems. That’s what filmmaking really is, by the way, problem solving.
Problem A: the actor in your opening scene, the scene that is the most important save for the ending scene, tells you a week before filming that he doesn’t own a car and the filming location is 300 miles away. Problem B: the costume rental house will not accept insurance, so you must charge 4 times the value of the clothes on your credit card as insurance. And it’s a period piece movie, so there’s a lot of expensive clothes. And the total charge is so much you don’t have enough credit cards to put the charges on. Scratch that, there’s a credit card you never use in your chest of drawers at home. So you max out your credit cards, hope to hell no one damages or loses or steals the clothes, buy your actor an Amtrak ticket and make a note to pick up a very large bottle of antacids at Costco to help stave off ulcers that you know are on their way. Yes, this is all true.
Even now, I dread looking at a FICO score. Four days before we were to leave from Los Angeles for Santa Cruz, disaster struck. A quarter mile from the sixty-acre horse ranch we were going to film on, a fire started. I had no backup locations. Half the budget for the film had already been paid out. I couldn’t get it back. We had to film. I checked the fire report hourly, popped antacid tablets and realized that we’d film in some random forest even if it meant getting arrested for trespassing or filming without a permit.
All ten of us drove up to a summer rental house and crammed ourselves into our tiny, modest hovel. Later that day the fire dissipated, the police barricades came down, and we found out our location had been saved. Now came the fun stuff. Filming. I had a total of 12 days to film 76 pages. A Hollywood film typically shoots about 3 pages per day. Do the math on my movie. Yeah, we had a lot to film in a really short amount of time. The first shot of the first day took place in a colony for the diseased. We had ten extras to help make the colony feel real. Five actually showed up on a very cold morning. Three actually got back into their cars thirty minutes before filming and left. And these were people who were going to get paid! We had two extras to make a colony feel like a colony. Equipment wasn’t working right. Light was changing fast. And as always, there were lots of things to think about. Those antacids became like Pez to me. I put myself and most of the crew in early nineteenth century clothes and we started filming. Problem solved. Kind of.
Every second on set sends a problem the director’s way. People have questions. People want to know what you think about fill-in-the-blank. It is a director’s medium, for his better or worse. Throughout the twelve days, we had more problems than grains of sand on every beach in the world. I had arguments with the crew. A production assistant got bored four days in and left. Not good when your production assistant is also your makeup artist, wardrobe and caterer. The main prop for the film, a mask the villain wears, showed up very very late into filming via mail.
And on top of all of that, our opening scene became a disaster. If you can’t hook people in the first five minutes of your film, what’s to keep them from continuing to watch? No pressure. The opening included two horses. Not a problem when shooting on a horse ranch, right? The ranch would only give us one horse, and told us this fact an hour before filming. Next problem, it was an Appalachian horse. And it kicked my actor off several times. I was near tears. The scene was definitely not working. The actor who came up via Amtrak for the day had come in vain. And he was going to leave for Los Angeles the next morning. And I had four days of filming left. I was not going to cover the number of pages I needed to finish the film. And on top of that, I now needed to write a new opening scene after a very difficult and very long 12-hour day.
Every morning, after 6 hours of sleep, I would get up, figure out what scenes we were shooting and prepare for each scene. We’d spend the entire day and sometimes nights filming. We’d usually get back to the house around 8pm, eat dinner, watch the footage we shot during the day, transfer the footage and sound to hard drives, go to sleep and start the process over. Now, with only 4 days left, I also had to come up with a new opening. I wrote something and we filmed it on our last day. Having already cut 8 pages from the script while we were filming, I wasn’t too happy about filming a scene twice.
But the new opening scene has cut together incredibly well. In fact, the film is my finest work to date. If a filmmaker’s problem solving skills are his tools to building the film, then problems are the essence of filmmaking. Without these problems, creativity stagnates and the product is awful. I’m convinced that Scape wouldn’t be as good as it is without the stomach-churning dilemmas that appeared throughout the process. Now, as I finish writing this, I’m preparing to write my next screenplay. You’re probably wondering if I read what I just wrote. I know, I don’t make sense. Oh well, you have to do what you love. I wonder if the person who coined that phrase did?
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A software that helps you to be a novelist
July 28, 2008
Erick Behymer wrote for us The Djinn Chronicles. Now he is back with the review of MyNovel. MyNovel is a novel writing software. It contains a complete word processor and will get you to think about and plan your characters, settings, and the events that will form the skeleton of your novel. But let’s read Erick review about this unique software.
A software that helps you to be a novelist
Rarely when testing software (mostly security related stuff), am I impressed by anything. I will spend hours picking apart a program, attempting to find any flaw or blemish, major or minor. When I was first approached to test MyNovel, I donned my glasses of pessimism expecting the worst. This is not meant as a detractment, it’s just something I do.
At a quick glance, MyNovel appears to be a standard word processing application, however, there are several major differences/enhancements. The first, and most striking is the ability to create a story template. At any point, you can change the details of your novel, add diagrams, events, characters, places, objects and even check progress/completion.
There’s even an “inspiration” option readily available. Specifically, the character and place generators are rather impressive, as you can choose between various name types. If that weren’t enough, you can choose and/or customize a color scheme.
Once you’re finished with your MyNovel project, there is a fairly comprehensive list of publishers available to choose from, along with relevant contact information and requirements. This takes a lot of the hassle of looking for a book publisher using a search engine.
All of these features are put together in an easy-to-use-easy-to-remember interface. MyNovel’s tools are put right at your fingertips, so there’s no endless searching to find what you need. Regardless of whether you’re a novice or a seasoned veteran to writing, I would strongly recommend that you take time to give MyNovel a try.
For the computer savvy, I have compiled a list of observations below:
MyNovel is fairly impressive, and has quite a bit of potential not only in features, but also performance. When idle, the program takes up a less than 3MB of RAM and during the most intensive states, 12-19MB. If that wasn’t impressive enough, it only requires ~25MB of disk space for a full install. Even running MyNovel at full throttle, it remained fairly quick and responsive to user interaction.
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The Djinn Chronicles
June 26, 2008
Today we add a new Category: Writings, where we’ll publish exclusive short stories, novels or poems available on ManuelMarino.com only. Today’s Author is Erick Behymer. Read his words about this work of fiction:
The Djinn Chronicles
Well, I do have one that directly involves the mythological creatures known as Djinn. Naturally, I have titled the first one “The Djinn Chronicles”, even though I have not had the time to continue the series just yet. It’s in a script-like format for ease of reading/translation into other mediums. I wrote it back in 2003, so it’s fairly old by comparison with a lot of my other works/short stories/etc. It’s about 64 pages in length.
I’ve attached both the synopsis and the actual story itself, if you’re interested in reading. Granted, I have not tried to get this one published, as there are approximately 4 other continuations that I will complete first regarding this story, along with the possibility of turning it into a manga series.
The Djinn Chronicles borders more along the lines of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits more than anything, but I’ve tried to make it seem as realistic as possible, while at the same time making it a point that the work is indeed fiction.
Let me know what you think.
Leave your comments after reading this Writing, I’m sure Erick can’t wait to read your posts about his Djinn story!
Here’s an excerpt:
Victor: Hm… that sounds interesting. What kind of story are we talking about?
Anita: Have you read middle eastern mythology or the Koran?
Victor: I’ve heard bits and pieces about their mythology.
Anita: Lemme ask you this. Have you heard of the Djinn?
…
Victor: And that’s where it all began (laughs). At a diner, with a woman I had just met. It’s strange the way life deals cards to you in a poker game. Half the time you don’t even know what’s going until after everyone’s laid their hand down and the chips are gone. Usually by that time, someone has folded. Guess I should have folded my hand as well and just stayed at the garage.
Just to think that all my problems started with her and that damn book she mentioned. I should NOT have trusted her. But somehow, I wanted to. I wanted to believe that she was helping me, but I was too blind to realize that she was only there to screw me over and have me take it up the ass like some freak show in a cage at some small town carnival. I can’t believe I trusted her.
Now look at me. Sitting here in a place that I should not be, and everyone thinks I’m some sort of goddamn lunatic. I’m not. I am not crazy. And with all the medication they give me, sometimes I wonder if in fact this is all a dream, and when I go to sleep and see my wife, kids, and family, that it is THEN when I am truly awake. And the comfort of sleep makes this seem less and less like a reality and the dreams more and more of a lifestyle than a fantasy. I guess Anita was right. You don’t find too many compassionate people these days anymore.
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