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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Music, Movies and Independent Films

July 30, 2008

In this exclusive interview, Todd Cericola, owner of Clocktower Pictures, talks about his movie studio, about music in movies and about the independent productions world.

Manuel Marino: When did you start your movie studio and how did you have the idea?

Todd Cericola: Clocktower Pictures was started in February of 2008. We are a new company in the Philadelphia area that specializes in independent film. We started it after working on a t.v. sitcom pilot called “Two One Five.” Myself, and my two partners Keelen Monahan and Matt Tomko had all been working individually on producing, directing, and writing and decided to put our efforts into one basket by opening up what would eventually become Clocktower.

How much is difficult to manage a movie studio?

I don’t know that it’s as difficult as it is fun. We are all doing something that we throughly enjoy doing. There is a strong workload, especially since we are a new company, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We are a very hands on company working directly with our actors on a one on one basis. We try to cater to all of their needs as well as our own.

I’m a music composer, so the question is natural, how much music is important in the production?

As a musician myself, I think that music is one of the most important thing in a film. If you’re trying to paint a picture to set up a scene, background music is key to setting a mood. A good song will always have the scene set perfectly and you may not even notice it in the background, but when you have a bad song you, as the filmgoer, will always notice the mistake of choice.

What is your latest production? Can you tell us something about it?

Right now we are working on a few things. We are working on a feature film called “Describing the Moon,” about a guy in his mid-twenties struggling with trying to please his friends and complete his life’s goal of becoming a script writer. It’s a fantastic script that’s really dialogue driven, and very funny. We will be finishing up auditions for that next weekend, and should begin filming in October. Two One Five is a big priority as well, we are shopping around to try and sell and make an entire season. As well as entering short film and television festivals to get the name out. The entire episode is up on our website for free viewing at Clocktower Pictures. We are also looking into opening up a second branch of the company under the banner Clocktower Music helping to produce local artists and independent musicians. So we have a lot going on.

How we can define an independent movie and why it’s important that indies are supported in their work?

I think independent film is a very important thing because it brings out more creativity in people. When you’re writing without cause and shooting without big budget you’re working harder at making something the way you see it, so you’re getting the original vision of what you’re going for. It’s like an artists painting, you want to express your own ideas in your own way, not someone else. Too many hands in the cookie jar is never a good thing.

Do you think internet can help indies?

I think the internet is a great advantage for people in any area of creative arts. You can reach out to millions of people at the single click of a button for your company, your movie, your art, your music anything you want. I think with the advent of facebook, myspace, mandy, craigslist, and countless others we’re living in an age where getting yourself out to the masses of people is just that much easier, and that much better.

How do you see the future of movie production?

As far as movie production in general goes, I see it bulking up even more. Budget’s for production are getting larger by what seems daily, actors are making more and more money, and the intake is getting outrageous. On a smaller scale, Philadelphia is getting its own studio soon which has already scene production in the city jump up ten fold.

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Documentary Filmmaking

November 14, 2007

This is a special article written for us by James N. Weber. He has worked on Socially Aware Media, especially documentaries, in South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Mexico, and is currently working on a project on food security in Guatemala. His work and more info can be found at his homepage.

Documentary Filmmaking

On the video shelf where the Dewey Decimal starts with a number, there is an odd conglomeration of videos: a man gorging himself on fries, some guy living with grizzlies, and a bunch of slide shows of old wars. It’s the documentary shelf, a mix of the sensational, humorous, serious, and (supposedly) true videos.

So let’s say you want to get your work on that shelf. Maybe you know this awesome woman down the street who invents things. Or maybe you’re interested in the affects of high fructose corn syrup on your body. Here’s how you can do it, and really, you can.

Throughout my experience with documentaries, I’ve developed what I call Socially Aware Media. In other words, I try to make sure that my projects are dedicated to making life better for people, or at the very least, trying not to hurt people. A key issue for me is how people are portrayed, as many of the people I interview or film are oppressed in some way. I do my best to treat them with respect, and try to convey their own words, instead of shaping it into the message that I (or the intended audience) would like to hear.

To give you an idea on what it takes to make a documentary yourself, I’ll use my biggest documentary, Fuerza, as an example. Fuerza is a 30 minute documentary on immigration from Apan, Hidalgo, Mexico, to Goshen, Indiana, U.S.A. I and three others started pre-production in November of 2005, and then put together a short proposal (video and written), which we submitted for a grant in spring 2006. The grant was a meager $5,000 (mostly for travel) plus access to equipment and editing space.

Through the summer of 2006, we conducted interviews and taping, making sure we got some major events such as protests and important local meetings. In late August, we spent a week in Apan, where we interviewed tons of people who had lived in Goshen or had family in Goshen, as well as city officials. Then we spent three days at the border, interviewing the border patrol and attending a press conference for Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

After the trip, we tracked down some pivotal interviews, and interviewed local politicians, and started transcribing, translating, and writing the script. Finally, we started with the actual edit. By this time, I was spending 40 hours a week on the video, on top of my college classes, in order to have it ready by our premiere date in November 2006.

We premiered it a year after we started preproduction, on November 9, 2006, to a packed theater in downtown Goshen. Since then, we’ve sold hundreds of DVDs and been invited to show the film and speak at universities like Notre Dame, churches, schools, and homes.

One of the biggest challenges to making a documentary is finding the money. You’ll want about $1000 per minute of final product. At least. And if you’re wanting to make money, find another career (or more likely, hobby). There is very little money to be made, and very few documentaries actually become profitable. On the projects I’ve completed so far, I stand to actually make about $200 total (plus a lot of travel). So I do this because I love it.

In Fuerza, we had a lot of difficulty knowing how to apply some of the ideas of Socially Aware Media to a scene where a Mexican mother breaks down and cries over her son who had emigrated to the U.S. It’s a highly emotional scene, with footage of the son watching the video of his mother cry, followed by a heartfelt directive from mother to son to “Work hard so you can return home.”

We ended up cutting time the mother cries in half, and then probably half again, until we reached a point that did not gloss over the pain she felt, but also didn’t exploit either the mother or the audience.

So if you have an idea for a documentary, do it! Go find the money, and if you can’t, there are ways of doing it dirt cheap.

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