Peter Hawley – Page 19 – A portfolio for my work as a filmmaker and podcaster

Navel Gazing

It was an interesting week for the dumb filmmaker. As you saw in the previous posts I was simultaneously shooting a film and teaching eight incoming students. If it was 3:30, I must be teaching, 4pm, filmmaking and back and forth throughout the week. It was all a blur but it went well.

I didn’t even think about becoming a filmmaker until I was in college. There was no path, I didn’t know anyone in the business. Filmmaking- whatever that was- was something that happened in a place called Hollywood and I didn’t give it much thought. Today it seems everyone knows a little something about how movies are made. DVD extras, websites and those infotainment TV shows all illuminate some part of the process, and as I result I think the barriers to entry in the business are much lower and more accessible. This is a good thing, I think.

Yet, despite how much my students thought they knew about the business, they were taken aback by what really happens on a film set. I think it was Werner Erhard (I am not a disciple, in my first draft I originally called him William- but a good quote is a good quote) who talked about three types of knowledge. 1) There is what you know you know. You use that in your life. 2) Then there is what you know you don’t know- that is why you learn and discover. 3) Then there is big other area about what you don’t know you don’t know.

One of my jobs as a teacher is to expose students to the idea that there is a lot more out there than what they know they know and what they know they don’t know. I like to peel back the curtain to expose something they didn’t know existed, and then let them learn and discover on their own. When it works, like this past week, it works well.

PeterH

Production in Action

I am going to let the pictures tell the story today. The words below are from an incoming student. It is pretty straight forward. A film is being made. Students are watching. The dumb filmmaker is teaching, the dumb filmmaker and his partner, Jim are shooting the making of documentary.

PeterH

Today I observed the production of The Collector. I witnessed firsthand the massive amount of coordination that it takes to create just a five minute short film. To my surprise, at least 25 people had their hands on this project. Perhaps even more astonishing, was the fact that this one week of shooting was preceded by three weeks of pre-production work and will be followed by another three weeks of post-production editing, computer graphics, sound editing, etc. Two months of dedicated labor for a five minute picture! It was just my first day of observing on set and I feel like I have already captured a great understanding of what takes place behind the scenes. Everyone specializes in a single aspect of the production and eventually all of their individual efforts will seamlessly tie together into a single work of art. I really look forward to seeing the final product!

Gabe Anello

Teaching Again

Today, for the first time since May, I get to teach. Eight incoming Flashpoint students have agreed to be my guinea pigs for the next four afternoons and they will be coming to the set and I will be breaking down, then building up this film I described in yesterday’s post.

I often joke that I make it up as I go along as a teacher, that I have no plan and I just go with the flow. It might even appear that way, but my approach is to try to be so prepared that I can deviate- ad lib if you will- from the plan to explore other options. I think of it as a trial lawyer asking questions in court. The lawyer asks the witness question, knowing the answer. You never ask something – to a witness or a student- if you don’t know how they will respond. The only way to do that is to be prepared.

The plan for the students is this. Today will be orientation. I will have them read the script and see the storyboards. Introduce them to the crew and give them an overview of the crew positions. Then we will go deeper. I will show them the script with the director’s marginalia, call sheets and more and more detail. We will watch a few scenes being shot and then have time with the crew to do some direct q & a. At some point (since we have to be dead silent when they are rolling) I will have them shadow specific crew members and report back to me as to what they think they do. By the end of the week, in theory, they will have a better understanding of all the small details that go into making a film.

Just a side note to finish. When I walked on the set yesterday, I was surprised to see about 1/3 of the crew are former students of mine. That made me feel good, even better when they were quick to tease me about “teaching” (air quotes here) these incoming students. Karl, the sound man, was my teaching assistant for two semesters and was quick to joke that he (as he did as my t.a.) could teach them more than me. I take it as a good sign that so many of these students are working professionals and were happy to see me after as much as five or six years.

PeterH

Wearing a Lot of Hats

I am wearing a lot of different hats this week. Paula Froehle, the Flashpoint Dean, is shooting a short film and Jim and I are shooting a “making of…” documentary to be used as a teaching tool. We have shot off and on for the last couple of weeks as Paula and her crew have been in pre-production. This week it is all production.

Paula’s film, The Collector– based on a short story by Jonathan Lethem, will be finished by September 17- the first day of classes. The Collector and our “making of…” companion piece will be screened on that first day of class to illustrate the collaborative nature of all four Flashpoint disciplines. There is a lot of work ahead of us.

Jim and I are shooting with the same gear as my students will use, so not only do I get a practical lesson on workflow and the ins and outs of this new (HD) technology, but this process will make me a better teacher. You can never stop learning. So far I have really liked what we have shot. The future is here.

Additionally, Tuesday through Friday afternoons this week, I will have eight incoming Flashpoint students on the set and I will be teaching them “production in action.” As Paula shoots, I will be working these students in with her key crew. I will be able to literally stop the production and have these students ask questions and really mix with professional filmmakers. We are using this experience as a dry run for a larger Production in Action class Flashpoint students will take in January. I will keep you posted on developments.

PeterH

My Cousin Bob

So more international filmmaking, but try to top this.

My brainiac cousin Bob is an expert on glacial ice. He has spent an entire year in Greenland and two, six month stretches in Antartica. He currently lives in England where he is a researcher at Cambridge. This fall he will be an Associate Professor at Dartmouth (show off). He is off to Greenland again tomorrow and on all of his journeys he takes a camera and shoots film (video.) Talk about brutal conditions- Antartica, 24 hours of sun, reflecting snow. How do you get exposure?

He is also part of a documentary on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet- it’s just 7 minutes long in this form, take a look, no Al Gore, but better. Visit his blog at http://coldclimes.blogspot.com/

Of course he got his big break in film as a p.a. on Victimless Crimes-where he also played a cab driver and got a line. So take that Ivy League.

PeterH

Flight of the Conchords

International week continues.

I am a huge fan of the HBO series Flight of the Conchords. Not only is it funny, and often it is very funny, but I really like what they do with the form of TV. Twice in each episode they break into a song and the ensuing low tech music video reminds me of Ernie Kovacs and early David Letterman.

They use their limitations- a low budget- as their strengths. In the most recent episode one video was shot as they rode bikes through the lower east side of Manhattan. Before that they did a dream sequence where “David Bowie” flew in to the room with his guide wires very visible.

There is a plot to every episode, but the real charm is their banter and their songs. I am not doing them justice here so take a look for yourself. This clip features Murray the band manager.

http://www.hbo.com/conchords/video/index.html

PeterH

Farewell

It was purely coincidental that yesterday’s post was about foreign films and then two masters Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni passed away.

Every time I see a student film with a character called “death” I think of Bergman (here on the left.) Yesterday I saw several times the scene from The Seventh Seal where the white knight- Max Von Sydow- plays chess with Death. It is a great film, but honestly hard to watch. I am glad I saw it 20 years ago, it helped inform me, but I am not racing out to see it again soon.

This morning I learned of Antonioni’s death and I was very saddened. Regular readers know of my fondness for Blow Up. I learned a lot about what film could be seeing that movie.

Both filmmakers challenged their audience. It was not always easy or fun to see their films, but they helped shape cinema and for that they should be celebrated.

PeterH

Foreign Films

The last few films I have Netflixed have been foreign and most of the next ones are international as well. This, I think, says more about my lack of getting to the cinema when the films are released and the ease of home video distribution than about my taste in films.

I watch subtitled films differently than English language films. (On IFC a couple of weeks ago I saw a great film called The Ticket and it was subtitled even though it was largely in English because of the Scottish dialect.) To me power of the images and the emotion of the film comes through differently when not bogged down by the specifics of what the actors are saying.

Jim and I have edited a couple of foreign language films. The first was Serbian, the filmmaker returned to her devastated home country and toured Novi Sad, Belgrade and the small farm community where she grew up. While watching the dailies and having no idea what the people were saying, it was pretty easy to identify the powerful scenes. In addition to images of destruction two scenes that jump out at me are of an old man with only one eye and a handful of teeth telling us that this is their (Serbians) cycle of war and destruction. This scene was contrasted by a young woman in a church in Belgrade repairing a mosaic. She was as full of hope as the man was full of doom and gloom. Even though we didn’t know what they were saying, you could tell from the images that it was important and should be in the film.

We also edited a film called The Music of Morocco and the Cycles of Life. In this case we made English, Arabic and French versions; and much like the Serbian film the important images and scenes were easily identified. From an editorial standpoint we just looked for scenes we liked and had the director talk us into the correct cutting points. In an odd way I learned a lot about cinema- the power of images- by editing a film in a foreign language. I hope to have that opportunity again.

PeterH

Finding the Story

Jim and I have been working on this film about teen parents on and off for 13 months. We have interviewed parents and counselors and doulas and administrators and health care professionals all to help paint the picture of these young lives. We have been working very closely with a non-profit called Teen Parent Connection. The TPC folks are incredibly upbeat and positive and everyone we have dealt with on this project is nice and caring. There is no judgment or negativity or religious affiliation, or politics, just positive actions. It is as if they have over dosed on Happy Pills. For a cynical, ironic guy like me it is very disconcerting- why is everyone so nice I ask myself.

So, the other day, on what might be our next to last day of production, we were interviewing their executive director and I asked her, “What makes you different from other social service organizations?” And she said, “We talk the talk because we walked the walk. Many of the staff and administrators (herself included) where teen parents themselves.”

Ah! that’s what makes them different. (Note to self, next time ask this question like 9 months ago.)

My point here is not about teen parents, but about the process we go through to paint a complete picture. Our not realizing this was not our fault- Teen Parent Connection does not promote themselves as a place for teen parents by teen parents, nor do any of these women wear their past on their sleeves. We needed these 13 months as a time of discovery. This little, almost anecdotal, piece of evidence will completely change our approach to the edit. And we may even decide to go shoot some more from this point of view.

In an earlier post I talked about good, fast cheap- pick two. In this case I hope you see why fast was not picked. We needed the time to find the story to make the best film possible.

PeterH

A Boy and his Camera

Something happens when you bring out a motion picture camera to both those in front of the camera and those of us on the other side. Anyone who has seen a home movie knows what happens when the camera appears- your inner ham comes out. Even professional actors have their on-camera personality and know how and when to turn it on and off.

Something similar happens on the other side of the camera too. In Victimless Crimes about half of my cast gets killed and the other half does the killing. This means I had to film lots of shooting, strangling and stabbing. These scenes- which in another film I would watch through my fingers- just seemed like work. When a take was over I would say let’s do it again and the actor who had been shot or stabbed changed his clothes, put on new squibs (exploding blood packs) and an hour or so later we did it again. This went on all night.

My point is that as a filmmaker you shoot until you get what you need and the camera gives me confidence I don’t have in my regular life.

While shooting a TV commercial for OFF, the mosquito repellent, we had to make a ten-year old boy stick his arm into a transparent box full of mosquitos and hold it there, still, for 30 seconds. He did and he got bitten and there were tears and I felt like Hell but it was the job and we had to do it. (He was wearing the “other leading brand” which wasn’t as good as OFF, but he was well compensated and his parents knew what they signed up for.)

Today, Jim and I are wrapping up a documentary about teen parents and I sit opposite these young woman and ask them very personal, very probing questions about choices they made (or in some cases didn’t make) . It’s not something I would do if the camera wasn’t there and I have to get into another mindset in order to do it, but again it is part of the job. I am always surprised when they open up and start revealing themselves to me. The power of the camera is really working for me in these instances.

Now I need to remember the next time I ask for a raise to bring a camera with me. No one can say no to a boy and his camera.

PeterH