Monday, January 23rd - Overview of the production phases and a closer look at screenwriting:

We started today by looking again at the film, Slip of the Tongue produced in BAVC's Factory program.  This time, however, we were looking at it less for the content and message, and more for the aesthetics - in particular we were looking to figure out how much work went into the piece in terms of planning it, shooting it, and editing it.

Watching the piece, it's clear the director did a ton of work.  We looked at just one section of the movie where the two main characters are sitting at the bus stop and counted upwards of 10 different shots - which means that when they shot the movie they had to move the camera, set it up, and perform the scene at least 10 different times.  Likely it was a lot more than that, because often you don't get things quite right on the first try.

Many different shots/angles in a single scene - from 'Slip of the Tongue'

This is how making movies works, though.  It takes many many tries.  For each scene in a movie, the actors and crew are prepared to do so many different angles and takes of the scene, the same basic thing can easily be repeated 5, 10, 15 times.  Some directors have been known to go pretty far - Jazmin brought up the story of Stanly Kubrick forcing his actors to do a scene from the Shining upwards of 100 times.

All of this is important to know as you start thinking about what it means to become a filmmaker.  However, none of this matters unless you have a good story.  The best stories - the movies that people fall in love with, are personal.  This can mean many different things, but generally you want to pick a an idea and a story that you can connect with - and in turn others will probably connect with it too.

So - how does your good idea turn into a good movie?  There are many different styles of filmmaking, obviously, but there is a pretty basic flow to how every movie gets made.

There are three major phases in the process of filmmaking: Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production.  Pre-Production is where all the planning happens, Production is the actual filming phase, and Post-Production is where the movie is put together in editing.

Here are key things that happen in each phase:

Pre-Production - Planning and screenwriting:
Idea, outline, treatment, pitch, screenplay, script breakdown, gather people, fund raising, budgeting equipment, create departments, casting, design, props, costumes, makeup, shotlists, storyboards, schedules, etc.

Production - Shooting the movie:
This is where everything you planned starts being put into action.  All departments are working together to create the world of the movie and capture the look in camera.  Rehearsals for actors, sets are built, props are placed, the electric department is providing power, lights are hung and tested, cameras are being loaded, tested, and mounted onto various rigs and moving parts, etc.  And of course, there are many different shots, angles, and takes being captured once the cameras roll.  One often overlooked but absolutely essential part of the process?  AUDIO!  You must be capturing clean, clear, professional sound as well.

Post-Production - Editing the movie:
As soon as footage is captured on-set it should be labeled and organized.  Then, it gets organized for editing, where the director and editor assemble the scenes, choose favorite takes, set the pace of each scene and actual assemble the movie.  Eventually they'll cut it down even more, clean up the edits, add music and visual effects, titles, etc.  Then they'll output it and put it out for the world to see!

A lot more goes into each step, but those are the basic ideas.  We'll talk about some of the complex stuff more in depth at a later date.

Next we looked a bit at screenwriting.  The screenplay is the heart and soul of the movie, it's where the story is first contained.  But, it also acts as the blueprint for planning the movie - in the same way that every department involved in building a house (contractors, plumbers, electricians, etc) looks to the blueprint - every department on a movie looks to the script.

Some screenwriting basics: Screenplays are formatted in a very specific way to make them easier to read and pull information from.  The formatting might seem strange at first, but thanks to modern FREE software, it's actually pretty easy.  Let's look at a few scenes from a screenplay and look at how it's formatted:

Every scene starts with a scene heading.  In this case it's: EXT. MONTAUK TRAIN STATION - DAY.  Scene headings are capitalized and always start with either EXT. or INT. which stand for Exterior and Interior, so we immediately know if we're inside or outside.  That's followed by the scene location (Montauk train station, in this case) and then a dash (-) and the time of day.  The time of day is usually pretty general (day, night, evening, afternoon, etc.) but in some cases it might be very specific (i.e. 12:25pm) if there is a reason (like, the bomb is going to explode at 12:30pm).

The scene heading is followed by an action paragraph.  Notice that screenplays are always written in the present tense, and from the 3rd person perspective.  They also only use visual descriptions and information.  If you can not SEE or HEAR it, then it shouldn't be in the screenplay.  Instead of saying 'Joel is worried because he's lying,' they say 'His speech is a self-conscious mumble' and we understand he's lying.

And of course, you also have characters who speak dialogue.  In this case our character is Joel.  When he's about to speak his name is always capitalized in the middle of the page, and his dialogue is underneath his name and justified in the center - but we don't have to worry about that too much because the screenwriting software will do the capitalization and alignment formatting for us.

The software we use is free and you can download it at www.celtx.com - it's called Celtx.  When you open it up, select that you'll be writing a Film project and you'll have a blank page in front of you.  You can now write your screenplay - use the drop down menu at the top of the page to select the appropriate formatting choice:

And remember the basic rules!