FPC Post

The Bay area has been a brooding, breeding cesspool of contemporary and modern contemplative art since the 50’s, and Steve Seid’s First Person Cinema presentation certainly doesn’t undermine that fact. San Francisco has been home to numerous intellectuals and artists—and sometimes both—for decades to come and with his showcase Radical Light, Stories Untold, we get a vibrant display of both creative genius as well as trying-too-hard ‘artistic’ fanatics.

We start our show with an amazing display of life’s cycles with The Bed, showing life’s cycles on an amazing ‘stage’ made of something we are all very familiar with. Using humor as well as poignant and shocking visuals we get a sense of how we have adapted to using our beds and a taste of human life through a sliver of our furniture use. Shot on 16mm, this film is a dazzling representation of human life put through a quirky filter with a lot of heart and guts.

Next, A Visit to Indiana kept us grounded in everyday human life and its quirks by showing snapshots of exactly what the title promised whilst listening to a humorous conversation between two individuals discussing said trip. The images were simple and, without the audio dialogue, would have created an entirely different and more somber piece. Thanks the audio overlay, however, the piece took on a more humorous result and became more of a satirical note about Mid-west—if not all of—America.

George Kuchar maintains that-which-we-love, total Kucharian camp style in his 16mm print of A Reason to Live. We love George Kuchar because of his absurdist approach to everything Hollywood holds dear: the bizarre entanglement between “hero” and “heroine” in said picture, which is hardly what one might fill in those quotes due to their odd behavior. We have his mistress, who herself is not an ordinary character. Plus religion, bad weather, toilet behavior, and ridiculous suicide. Probably my favorite of the night’s program, Kuchar delivers humor as well as societal commentary in a nice bundle (sorry, I know this isn’t an opinion paper).

After, Max Almy’s Deadline is a poor excuse for playing with the capabilities of early 1980’s video programming. Although attempting to work with a serious subject-matter, Deadline comes off more as an experiment in new video resources, hardly of blame to newfound technology but better off stored away in a dusty video bin. With the name, the poor video and graphics, Deadline came off badly and trying-too-hard to create a message. Best left to gather dust, as I said two sentences ago.

Easy Living, by Chip Lord and Mickey McGowen was an uneasy film to watch, not because of its subject matter but rather it’s monotony. Although an interesting medium with which to display a subject—using stop-motion figurines in a miniature-built world, a very time-consuming task—the work was at first very fascinating but all-too-soon grew very long and the allure wore off quickly. If this had been a shorter, more concise work it would have been a strong success.

To speak honestly, I did not see the last two films, for I had to leave early, but I’m sure they were of good caliber/intentions if not surely of the best medium/display. I will never know. All in all, the program was a success in my mind, because it left me with challenges and new ideas and gave me thirst to find and discover more within this vein. So a big thanks goes to Steve Seid for bringing a piece of San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado and sharing his stories and films of by-gone artists.

Here's a thing that's real.

That's a phrase I use a lot. Sometimes ironically. Often not. So here's a thing that's real:

Having gone through all the steps of pre-production, all the horror and agony of assembling a crew and a cast and making 8,000 phone calls and e-mails and shopping for the most asinine things one could ever imagine and writing and rewriting and re-rewriting a script and changing and rechanging and re-rechanging a shoot schedule because of weather or people's availability and finicking about too many details for one human being; finally, a production comes together. On the (good) advice of my DP, four shoot days became two 10-hour days. Having been on 'real' film sets, I count my lucky stars it was only 10 hours. I know this stuff goes 12 or 13 on average in the real biz. And we shoot and shoot, and my panic subsides, and everybody gets along, and we (amazingly) stay right on schedule, and some of the footage I see between acting looks great. And basically, the whole shoot goes fucking fantastic (pardon my French). Couldn't be happier when all is said and done. But this is what we call riding the high of non-sleep and long days and being one of those energetic and spastic sort of directors who's tripping over his own thoughts while simultaneously acting (a high in-and-of itself, let me tell you).

Don't get me wrong, the footage looks pretty darn good, I have to admit. But I made the mistake of being the cool guy. In my production meeting I specifically laid out the notion that "I'm not gonna playback every single take, it just gets annoying and takes up too much time. I will trust my DP to deliver me quality footage." This statement became mostly true. Most of the footage he delivered matched, or came close to, my vision. But now, here in the editing room, I see that some visions weren't exactly shared. And the problem with a zombie movie is that I can't exactly go back and shoot pick-ups that easily. Unless I want to drop another $100+ on dayrates for my make-up artist.

So this is where we get to the part that's real, right now: here I was, under some foolhardy presumption that once my footage was filmed I could breathe a little, that the hard part was over and now it was just editing. Just editing. I scoff at my naive self from two weeks ago. No no, the easy part is over. Now comes organizing soundtracks, going to a studio to record singers, color correcting, messing with too many different file types of HD and too little data-space, rendering, tweaking sound, second-guessing cuts and finicking about too many details for one human being. That's a thing that's real, and it's called being a film student, and it's crazy and insane and why would anybody want to do that... but I wouldn't trade it for a goddamn thing. Not one.

4010 Presentation

This is for Film 4010. Ignore it if you are in 4500.




All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQntZXrhwz4

The hills are alive with the sound of music. Zombie music.

My hand is still stained red from where I put fake blood on it earlier, decorating set pieces. The struggle continues. My room now looks like somebody exploded in there, there's so much blood and fake body part strewn about. But enough of that. Here is a song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NTV-8qRpyk

Treatment

Ok, what we’re dealing with here is a twenty-first century treatment of the zombie ‘genre’. On a particularly insightful day in the woods many years ago, I came to the conclusion that life is a great cosmic joke and was not meant to be taken seriously. However, this conclusion has not led me to letting everything fall at the wayside, I have no plans of becoming a hermit or bum. In fact, because of this, I am only more impassioned with life and my goals. I just take them less seriously, as I think most people should.

This film is not meant to be taken seriously. And yet, for its absolutely absurd content, it should be taken deadly serious (pun intended). Zombies, as a motif or ‘genre’, have meant many different things throughout many generations. I find it fascinating that they have risen into such particular popularity in the last few years, despite being around as subject material for over four decades. Just like skinny ties, zombies will go in and out of popularity over the course of our lifetime. So, if there was ever a time to broach the subject, as a mindless youth observing his world from an idealistic stance, now is the time.

What I present here is a zombie tale unlike most I have encountered. Although there have been zombie comedies, there are seldom to none where you root for a zombie protagonist, in a world that has been taken over by zombies. In fact, you would prefer that the humans get eaten. It’s a piece that shows there is even life after the zombie apocalypse, albeit technically it’s a dead one. Then again, the humor comes from the fact that despite having gone through an apocalypse, life resumes to normal: people go back to work, they ride buses, they ascend in elevators. They fall in love. The crux, the turning point in this whole project, however, is the musical number at the end. Not unlike many people I’ve met, zombies are technically dead on the outside, they are rotting flesh that walks (*cough* just like CELLS *cough*) but we are all so ALIVE on the inside. So by having zombies singing and dancing in the end of my film, maybe we can get a glimpse of the curious and unusual singers, dancers and lovers inside ourselves.

Biblio-Filmography

The Latest: The weekend has been a productive one. I composed the song which is used at the end, where the zombies sing and dance and it is FANTASTIC. Better than I could have expected. But we'll get to that on the sound day... It's been a better week for shaping my vision, not simply aesthetically, but in a sort of deeper understanding. However, I've been having some trouble with some flaky actors, so we'll see what happens with that.

Bibliography/Filmography

Dawn of the Dead. Dir. Zach Snyder. Perf. Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phifer. Strike Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

Shaun of the Dead. Dir. Edgar Wright. Perf. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost. Universal Pictures UK, 2004. DVD.

Zombieland. Dir. Ruben Fleischer. Perf. Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Woody Harrelson. Columbia Pictures, 2009. DVD.

Brooks, Max. World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War. Detroit: Thorndike, 2007. Print.

Kirkman, Robert, Charles Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn. The Walking Dead. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2009. Print.

Reesurch n' Stuff

 The latest addition to the rom-zom-com:

How to make fake (and edible!) intestines...

Profile for my make-up artist, to get a feel for her work:

https://www.facebook.com/My.Manyck.Makeup

Working titles:
Hearts and Brains
Beauty and the Brains
Undying Love
Entrails and Ecstasy
Other Suggestions?!?!?!?!

On Bresson

Looking through Bresson's thoughts, I could not choose just one lone aphorism, but found rather three which struck me most. However, in essence, these three passages are different ways of saying the same thing, or expansions on one another. They are:

"Who said: 'A singe look let's loose a passion, a murder, a war?'"

"The ejaculatory force of the eye"

"Expressive face of the actor on which the slightest crease, controlled by him and magnified by the lens, suggests the exaggerations of the kabuki."

These struck me in particular because I've recently made the transition in the past few years from stage acting to film acting, which aren't only different ballparks but rather entirely different games. From many of the other aphorisms, it seems that Bresson is not a fan of theatre (or is at least strongly divided on the matter) and doesn't give a lot of credit to his film actors, referring to them often as 'models'. However, these three passages show another side, which is his vast appreciation for both good actors and the power of good cinematography.
Having been a stage actor most of my life, I come from a place where big, bold gestures are essential; how are the people in the back row going to see your emotion unless you don't? But it makes for a strange transition to film, of which I had difficulty at first because I was acting for the stage still and not the camera. Unlike the audience member in the back row, the camera picks up every little nuance. Some of the most powerful performances in film are not performances at all, but rather presences. This is what I've learned over the past few years, perfectly entwined in the act of shaping an identity as I move into adulthood. I've always been an actor, on stage and often in real life; we all act certain ways according to norms and mores and wanting people to like us and accept us. But here's the rub I've simultaneously come across in film acting: the more I rehearse for film acting, the less authentic it appears to the camera. The camera doesn't lie. So, I've had to shape myself to simply be in the moment, to actually be involved in the thought process simultaneously with the character, to listen instead of waiting to deliver a line. When you exist in a moment, the camera sees it, sees every little furrow of the brow and twitch of the mouth and the audience therefore will believe it. And it translates perfectly to real life, to simply be in the moment instead of worrying if someone like you or accept  you.
Knowing this, I know exactly the power Bresson is referring to with subtle performances. All three of these aphorisms did not strike me in the mind but rather in the gut, because I understand perfectly. There are moments in a movie, such subtle and simple moments that strike in the gut the sort of emotion that would make a man capable of murder, of war. There is a raw, guttural quality to the notion the way an eye can cause an ejaculatory response, can make you squirm or laugh or cry, but strike you in the gut. It is the way that kabuki theatre, or any theatre for that matter, must exaggerate actions and emotions for the person in the back row, but a cinema screen, projecting a face that is 40 feet high will allow any viewer to literally see a sparkle in an eye without moving a muscle on a face. This is the sort of power Bresson views in cinematography and I can't say I disagree.

Proposal

We start from black as we hear an alarm sound, absolutely stereotypical of a student film. As we come up and the alarm is pushed, we notice that the hand is dirty and bloody. Short montage shots show us a dark figure moving slowly and eerily through an apartment: grabbing a battered suitcase, putting on a bloody shirt and tie, brushing disgusting teeth. Little by little we are revealed to our main character ZOMBIE MALE. We then see him leave his apartment, full reveal. He goes to stand at the bus stop with other zombies going to work. He goes to work and makes copies of bloodied paperwork and gets grunted at by his boss. Then one day he meets ZOMBIE FEMALE. They instantly fall in love. There is montage of them skipping through a field, chasing human prey. They devour a human in an alley and eat his entrails from either end, eventually coming together in a "lady and the tramp" moment. Another human is backed into a corner and screams "why, WHY?!" The zombie males looks contemplative and then begins singing "Beeeecause we're zombies, we're going to eat your brains. We're zombies, we're not playing any games!" etc. A small chorus line joins. This is how we end.

The visual style, at least for the beginning scenes in the apartment, will likely be color corrected to have more of a stylized 'zombie movie feel'. The following clip is from a film I made in high school, which was very silly, but I like the color correction.