SCREENPLAY, THE DREAM VS. BUDGET REALITIES

SCREENPLAY THE DREAM VS. BUDGET REALITIES

You wrote a great screenplay. You were dying to go out and shoot it. You sat down and did a budget breakdown and discovered that Guy Ritchie would think twice before blowing that much money. In other words you are a low budget film maker, but you wrote a big budget screenplay. 

 

This has happened to us all. 

 

The thing that you are going to have to do is set it aside until you can afford to make this film and go about writing and producing a film or two that will help you to raise the money for that script. 

 

You are going to have to learn how to write a low or micro budget screenplay. The problem with this is that most film makers only have a few clues as to how to do this. Limited locations and limited cast members is part of it, but not the whole story. Because if you are not careful you will limit yourself right out of writing a quality screenplay. Instead you will end up with a film that looks and sounds like it was paid for with food stamps. 

 

The rules of crafting a great script does not change. In fact you have to focus more or these fundamental rules when writing your low budget screenplay.

This is a chapter from my new audio book on screen writing. If you have an audible account or a kindle account you can easily check it out there. Also available on iTunes.

You see that writing a low budget screenplay is not enough. You need to write a quality one. When I started this blog many years ago I wanted to help other film makers while learning as much as I could along the way. I love movies and want to see better and better stories being told. If you go back in time to the 1930's and 40's then jump to the 70's it seems like people did know how to make great films, but since then the secret of steel was left on the battlefield. It is time to get back to making great movies again. Great movies begin with a great script. Over the next few post we are going to talk about writing.

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Found Footage 3D, The Interview PART 1

This is going to be a two part interview with Steven DeGennaro, the film maker behind Found Footage 3D. At the moment he is in the middle of a Indiegogo campaign for his film. If you would like to check out the campaign you can do so by clicking here.   In you wish to know more about the project you can visit the website by clicking here.

If you thought that making a found footage film is easy I think that you are about to lose some of your illusions. It is easy to make a movie. Record ninety minutes of footage and cut it together and you got a movie. The problem is that making a good movie requires much more than this. It requires months and in some cases years of planning. Followed by endless weeks of shooting and re-shooting and then the hard work begins, it is called post production. I have interviewed a guy who shot a film in a day, I have seen it and it was not very good. I interviewed the director of Joker Rising which was shoot in six days ( shoot in six days, but there were months of pre and post production) and many believe that it is the best fan film ever made. You can shoot, edit and distribute a movie with your iphone, this does not mean that if you wish to be a film maker, whether found footage, epic fantasy or straight drama you do not need to learn all that you can about writing, lighting, editing and a hundred other things that go into making a great film. I know that many readers have taken the found footage series of post lightly while planning to shoot their own found footage films. If you plan to do it as a hobby then take to it any way you wish, but if this is going to be your profession then invest the time and effort to learn how to do it as well as possible.

Let’s get to part one of a two part interview.






Q) You are in the middle of an Indiegogo campaign for your 3D found footage film.
What is the plot and what will make it different from the other found footage films out there?

A) Found Footage 3D tells the story of a group of filmmakers who go out to a cabin the woods of Central Texas to shoot “the first 3D found-footage horror movie”, but end up in a found footage horror movie when the evil entity from their film starts showing up in their behind-the-scenes footage.  What Scream did for slasher movies, we aim to do for found footage.  Like Scream, our characters know all of the rules, tricks, and clichés of the genre, and we use that structure to comment on and poke fun at the tired tropes of found footage, while at the same time, turning them on their heads and executing an effective scary movie.

Q) Hollywood uses 3D as a way of milking more cash out of audiences for its tent pole films, with the occasional film that was meant to be seen in this format like Avatar and Inception. I would image that in this case 3D has been selected for the effect that it will have on the audience rather than any box office concerns?

A)The 3D is an essential part of the storytelling, for me.  We certainly didn’t undertake the decision lightly.  So on the most basic level, we’re shooting in 3D because the lead character of our movie, a charismatic but ultimately soulless movie producer, decides that if he shoots “the first 3D found footage horror movie,” he will make a killing at the box office.  So right away, we’re almost sort of making fun of ourselves for doing the same thing.

But at the same time, once we had given ourselves a good reason to do it, I decided very early on that we had to do some cool stuff with it.  And found footage—especially a movie about people who are making a movie—allows us to do some things that no one has ever seen before.  We have the practically limitless depth-of-field of a consumer camcorder, which means that rather than having the subject be in focus, and everything in front or behind him being out of focus, the viewer can choose what he or she wants to focus on in any given shot.  That allowed us to really compose shots with a ton of depth in them, with multiple layers, rather than just “here’s an actor; here’s a bunch of fuzzy stuff behind him.”

Also, because our villain is itself a creation of the very footage it inhabits, it can do things within the footage that wouldn’t necessarily make sense in a more traditional movie.  Things like moving from one screen to another as people watch footage on a monitor, or appearing differently in one eye than in the other.  That kind of stuff.



Q) There are a few ways to shoot a 3D movie. The easiest is to set up two identical cameras side by side and in post blend the footage to produce a 3D image. What types of cameras did you use to shoot the film? Also when shooting on a budget, you sometimes have to trade the camera that would be perfect for the job for what you can afford. Any cameras that you wanted that you just could not afford?

A)The beauty of found footage (from a budgetary point of view) is that you get to shoot on cheaper cameras. Indeed, in my opinion, to really do it right, you are required to shoot on cheaper cameras.  There’s a certain aesthetic that’s required in found footage.  If it looks too nice, then it works against your suspension of disbelief.  I’ve seen found footage movies that were clearly shot on state-of-the-art big-budget cameras with full Hollywood lighting, and then the character looks at himself in a mirror and you see this little dinky handheld camcorder and it pulls you out of the story because you know that camera couldn’t possibly look that good.

From even before we decided to shoot in 3D, I wanted the aesthetic of the film to be very lo-fi and real.  So when we made the decision to shoot in 3D, we did a bunch of research on readily-available 3D camcorders and we settled on the Panasonic z10000.  It’s a camcorder with two lenses side by side, and it operates more-or-less the same way any prosumer camcorder does, with the exception of being able to change the convergence of the 3D effect (which can further be tweaked in post as well).  So we bought 3 of them (two of which appear in the film, with a third as a back-up in case we broke one of the other two).

We also bought a 3D GoPro rig to shoot “surveillance” footage.  Because of the wide-angle lens and the fact that the cameras are not necessarily 100% aligned when you shoot, that footage was a little more difficult to deal with in post, but it looks really cool when we’re done.  Again, this is something that most people have never seen before.

Q) The found footage genre is the genre that has experienced the most growth during the last two years while also receive the most hate from hardcore film goers. For every Paranormal Activity, there are five films like Crowsnest, Area 407 and Devil’s Due.  Can this genre make it long term or are we talking disco?

A) We live in a time where everybody in the Western world carries a camera in their pocket at all times.  One hundred hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.  The news, our Facebook feeds, our Twitter feeds, and TV news are filled with footage shot by everyday people.  Terrorists upload videos of beheadings.  Protestors film cops. Cops film car chases.  Surveillance cameras watch a lot of what we do in public spaces.  Journalists and citizens alike film war and political unrest across the world.

So no... I don’t think that the idea of telling a story through the eyes of one of the characters in that story is a style that is going to go away anytime soon.

Q) The thing unique to the found footage genre is how so many of the film makers that I have interviewed approach the writing of their films in totally different ways. Film maker A may write a complete screenplay in standard format. Film maker B may craft an outline of scenes and piece it together in rehearsals. Film maker C comes up with a title, a basic beginning middle and end point and allows his or her actors to improvise the film from that point on. What approach did you take to crafting the screenplay?

A) I admire the balls it takes to go into a situation where you don’t know the story, you don’t have the beats of a scene in mind, you make everything up pretty much on the fly.  That’s how they did Blair Witch, which is still, in my opinion, one of the best horror movies ever made.  They got great results, and they also spent a hell of a lot of time crafting the movie in the editing room.  But it could just as easily been a complete disaster, and unfortunately, for many filmmakers, that’s exactly what happens.

At the same time, if you over-plan, you end up with something that starts to feel rehearsed and stilted, and you lose the realness that found footage relies on for a lot of its best moments.  So I didn’t want to necessarily script out everything.

So the screenplay was a constantly evolving process for me that took over two years from initial idea to the time we rolled cameras.  My first few drafts left a lot of detail—particularly the dialog—intentionally vague.  I think it came in at about 60 pages or so.  But then people had a hard time really envisioning the characters and the finished movie in their heads, and that made it difficult to get certain people—like Kim Henkel and some of our investors—on board.

So I went through and I wrote out a lot of the dialog, knowing that I was going to eventually scrap a lot of it once we were on set.  I’m glad I did, though.  In fleshing out the beats of each scene, I was able to connect more with who the characters were, which helped a lot in casting the film and in shooting it on a really tight schedule.




Q) Where and how did you find your actors and did you give them any room to improvise during shooting?

A)The most important thing for me was to make sure that the characters never felt like they were saying lines.  So the actors had free reign to use their own words any time they wanted to.  At the same time, because a large number of the scenes had to play out in long single takes from a single camera, I couldn’t let them just meander around a scene for hours and hope to fix it in the editing room.

So the first thing we did was spend three days on the set—just me, the actors, and the director of photography—talking through and rehearsing each scene.  The beats of every scene were there in the script, but they had a lot of room to improvise around those beats.  We used the rehearsal process to figure out what scenes and lines were really working, and which ones weren’t, and I went and did some rewrites based off of that.  That allowed us to show up on set and shoot very very quickly, because we’d already worked out a lot of the kinks beforehand.

During the shoot, we then didn’t do many additional rehearsals right before shooting, so that the actors could keep fresh and be spontaneous.  Often they’d nail it on take 1 or 2.  Sometimes, when we got to take 6 or 7, they’d start feeling too rehearsed, and we’d throw in a take or two where they got to completely toss out the script and have fun.  We very rarely used those takes in the finished film, but they usually loosened things up enough that the next take, which was much closer to the scripted scene, worked really well and found the perfect balance between improvisation and structure.

In the end, we had a mixture that was probably about 85% highly structured scenes with improvised dialog, 15% of what we called “marshmallow moments,” where we set up a scenario and the actors just freeformed it for ten or fifteen minutes and we jump cut the best parts, and then a rare scene or two where we ended up with the dialog very very close to what was written on the page.

It was a very unique way of working, and it never would have worked if the actors we got weren’t so damn good at it.  We went through a pretty traditional casting process. I spent several months watching audition tapes—I eventually saw over a thousand auditions from over ten thousand submissions—and then we had in-person callbacks for my favorites for each role, where I got to see them with the other actors.  It was actually very easy to eliminate about 80% of the hopefuls right away, because despite explicit instructions that I wanted them to use their own words and not stick to the script, most actors just can’t pull that off.  They either stick exactly to the script, or they improvise and are just really, really bad at it.

In the end, we ended up with six lead actors that had amazing chemistry together and were really great at exactly the kind of improv we needed for the film to work.




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Horror Film Writing, All About the Chase

Horror Film Writing, All About the Chase


For the longest time those who would write a horror movie have confused horror with thriller. This is not surprising since most film companies advertise thrillers as horror films. Before you sit down to write a horror film or a thriller you must keep one rule in mind.

In a horror film something is chasing the lead character.


In a thriller the lead character is chasing something.


In Halloween Michael Myers doing all of the chasing.


In Silence of The Lambs Agent Starling is doing all of the chasing.

 I understand that despite the fact that Agent Starling ends up in a classic horror film situation near the end of the film it is still a thriller and not a horror film. In almost every thriller the one who is chasing ends up being chased in act three by the villain.


In a horror film the chase does not end until the credits are about to roll if the main character survives.
The next thing you must keep in mind is that the audience has seen it all and surprising them is most likely not gonna happen so I would avoid rehashing the cool kill scene from Elm Street 4. Instead you should focuse of crafting characters who the audience can care about. All great horror films have the same thing in common. All of them, back to the earily days, from Frankenstein to the Wolfman, The Thing to Night of the Living Dead, Alien to the Descent, The Exorcist to The Sixth Sense, have strong characters in common. Even the ones that are going to die are relatable to the audience. Watch any horror movie and I promise you that the first sign of a bad one is that they are populated with characters that the writer and director do not like or even hate.

Consider these things when writing your horror film. If you would like more advice on how to write your low budget film I would suggest (shameless plug coming) getting a copy of my book On Writing a low Budget film. You can click the image on the side of the page. It is available at Amazon, B&N, iTunes and Smashwords.

Writing a quality screenplay or finding someone who can is ob one of producing a great low budget film. Your script is your blueprint and everything you do as a digital film maker will flow from it. The best cameras and finest sound equipment on earth will not save a bad script.



Consider this and try to study a few classic horror films to understand the way a good script should be structured. I would recommend reading the screenplays for the films The Exorcist (best horror script ever), The Sixth Sense, Alien and Tom Holland’s script for the original Fright Night.  Stephen King was right when he said if you want to be a good writer then you have to read a lot if you wish to write well.

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HV40 Feature, Mk Outlier- The Interview Part 2

HV40 Feature, Mk Outlier- The Interview Part 2

This is part 2 of my interview with Chris Jacobs, the film maker behind MK Outlier.

You can visit the website for the film by  clicking here   

Did you write the screenplay and was it your first feature length script?

-I wrote the screenplay. It was my 6th or 7th feature script. The others were pretty bad! I work with a Hollywood Script Editor; Paul Young, who I get script notes from. This provides actual Industry insight, which is worth its weight in gold. Don't ever make a film without getting script notes, and addressing the weaknesses found. Script is everything! Blake Snyder's Save the Cat books also have taught me a huge amount, without all the bullshit.Gold.-

There are many ways to approach the subject of casting your film. Some film makers consider this an after thought. Others dwell on finding the right person for each and every role more than any other aspect of the film. How did you handle the casting your film?

-In typical low budget fashion I cast my friends in the major roles. This is just an extension of the idea that you only use what you have available, whenever possible. I wrote the parts with them in mind, so I knew what they could and couldn't do. So the characters just became slightly exaggerated versions of the real people, for the most part. I think the thing here is to match the temperament to the person as much as possible. That way you avoid those horrible "I don't think the character would do that" conversations. I did hire a casting director when the female lead I had cast got pregnant and had to pull out. This was a very interesting process. I auditioned 40 actresses over two days, on my own. It was like 40 first dates! Horrible really, because almost all of those people were able to do the part, but really only a couple were ever serious options. A few people really stood head and shoulders above the others. There were a few 'personalities' that I wouldn't hire if they were the last actors on Earth, but you get that. You are going to spend a long time, under potentially grueling conditions with these people. You don't have to love them, but you do have to be able to work with them. I reviewed the tapes and made the decision from there. You get a feeling on the day, but you need to review the footage. Casting is so important to get right. It amazes me that there is so much talk online about cameras, lighting etc. and everyone forgets that the actors have to be amazing to keep you engaged. If your actor sucks or makes production hell, all the megapixels in the world won't save you. I could write pages on this. You have to be a psychologist to some degree. A large component of Directing and Producing is people management. Honesty and Integrity are key, and don't be afraid to fire people who aren't working out. You just can't afford them. -




How long did it take to shoot the movie?

-We recently finished what I would call principal photography, so about 3 years. Maybe 4. We have only ever shot in our spare time, as we all have day jobs. This is one aspect I would never repeat. It was probably a good idea at the time, and has kind of worked for us, but there is a lot of potential for pain. We were lucky. In terms of time, I just looked at it as my 'film School' period, and thought if I can come out the other side with a feature, rather than a degree no one cares about, then I'm in front. I committed to it taking as long as it took, and just got into the healthy habit of laughing at people who asked me when it would be finished. If people start getting preachy about deadlines I start asking them for money! haha -

Special effects are an important part of sci-fi films. Who is handing the visual effects for your project?

-Yeah I'm doing the visual effects. It's a really fun area that I like being involved with, as it really directly affects the look and feel of the finished film. I have been able to outsource the rotoscoping component which is fantastic, and has really sped things up. I have a Fine Art background so I'm pretty particular about framing, colour and aesthetics in general. This is still a big work in progress, so watch this space. I recently showed a preview to a Sound Designer who was very impressed with the few finished effects shots, so hopefully we can keep up the quality with the rest. More sleepless nights! -

It looks like you are editing the film as well. Are you self taught like some many digital film makers these days or was there any formal training?

-I did do an editing course about 12 years ago, but can't remember much of what was taught. I also did a Directing and Cinematography Summer School which was fun, and helped out on other people's films. I also did some work with a commercial director which was great experience. I mostly learnt by editing shorts, docos and music videos, but I must say that editing is an art form that I don't pretend to have a mastery of. I have done all the editing so far, and we have a cut of about 1hr 50mins. Story wise it's fine, and is paced well, but I'm looking around for a pro to help with the final cut, perhaps as an advisor for a few days.- Also what are you using to edit? The system and the software? -Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS5.5 on a self assembled Intel i7 PC, 16GB RAM. We'll probably grade with Speedgrade too, when we get to that. Sound will be done in a professional studio, most likely on ProTools.- Now that you are nearing he finish line on MK Outlier what is it that you wished that you had known or prepared for before you started? -This is a tough one, as all the lessons learnt along the way are ones you only learn by doing. I wish I had never waited so long to get started, but I did. I'm just sorry I didn't have the confidence to back myself sooner. I think I did waste some time at the start worrying that people were doing me all these favours by helping me and that I could never repay them. The truth is whenever you do a big creative project and invite others to be involved you are the one doing the favour. Other people can help you, or not. That's their call. Either way is fine.-




Is there another project in the planning stages or are you going to put your feet up for a while?

-I am a projects kinda guy, and I always have several going at once, because projects are just the most fun ever! For now MK OUTLIER is THE project, and I just can't wait to get it done and in front of people. I do have another script that I'm working on in my secret lab. I'm VERY excited about it, but MK comes first.-

Any final words on MK Outlier?

-Good things come to those that pre-order! haha Thank you so much for your interest in MK OUTLIER. We can't wait to hear what people have to say when they see the movie.-

Thank you Chris for taking the time to do this interview.

I look forward to posting the trailer for the completed film and seeing it. Again if anyone would like to pre-order the film they can do so visiting   here .

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