Jesus Christ. I've been inking like a motherfucker for days on end now, and I need a break. Time for a little more story telling then, shall we?OK. So we arrive at the graveyard. Now, the special significance of this place, is that it's the site of a little know local legend, known as Sarah's grave. as the tale goes, this Sarah lady was either raped or raped and murdered. She died cursing all men. so now, any men who visit the graveyard at night can feel her presence, in the form of mysterious scratching and an overwhelming feeling of being unwelcome. Women don't get off lightly either. Seems Sarah had a bit of a taste for the shiny stuff, as girls often have jewelery swiped of their person while in the vicinity. It's a load of horse shit, for many reasons. I've been there many times and never felt anything. It's just a great, old cemetery that looks really good on film.
A key phrase among my friends who have worked with me before is "You're not doing it right!" Apparently I have uttered this on several occasions, and it signifies my tendency to take over. It's hopefully not an arrogance thing. I just get frustrated when I see someone doing something that I feel I can do quicker or easier, and try to get it done as efficiently as possible by doing it myself. Nowadays I'm very conscious of this, so I try to leave others to do their thing as much as possible.
Now this was Tony's baby. He came up with the idea, he'd done some storyboards - it was going to be his film. Our camera guy had arrived, some of the others were there - I'd asked Camera Guy - who from now on will be referred to as CG - just to get some shots of the graveyard while we talked through some of the shots. He went off and started doing his thing. I had every intention of letting Tony be in charge, and just helping out when I could. After all, I still had my film to direct tomorrow, or so I thought. I was acutely aware of how quickly the light was fading, so I tried to hustle things along."OK Tony. What do you want first?"
"I have no idea"
Exactly the words I was looking for! Tony really trusts my judgement on these things, so I took over.
"Right! CG! This is what were going to do first . . . " I started quickly trying to run through the film in my head, working through the shots, seeing what we needed - I ran through some of my ideas with Tony, he was fine with it, we got to work. I quickly got everyone lined up, run through the shot, then explained to CG the camera position and the angle I wanted. That was the point I realised that this wasn't going to be as smooth as I thought.
This little shoot taught me a very valuable lesson. If you're trying to become a film director, NEVER work with outside people who want to be film directors. Now, I'm not talking about healthy quid pro quo situations, where they help you out if you help them. It's a strange situation. Out of about every 10 people you meet, 7 or 8 of them would like to be a film maker. Out of those, maybe 1 or two actually have the drive to do something about it. That last one or two are the ones that you want to work with. Because at some point, they will get their shit together, organise a project and need your help. which means they are quite happy to help you with yours. These guys I LIKE working with. Because you learn a lot from those guys. There is a really healthy case of back and forth in those situations that everyone benefits from. The other 6 are the dangerous bastards. They never want to have to go through the trouble of organising anything, they just kind of want everything handed to them on a plate. So when an opportunity like this does come up, they start thinking to themselves "Hey! There's a film being made! I wanna be a film maker! I'll just make this one mine!" A recent situation came up with a friend of mine who tried to organise some people to do something, and had 6 or 7 offers for possible 'directors'. And unfortunately, our camera guy seemed to fall into this last category.
Now, lets say I told camera guy I wanted to do the shot low, down and from the left. He would immediately move the camera around until he had a completely different shot, usually completely opposite from what I had asked. The first time he did this, I wasn't happy, but I let it go. Like the kid who was playing with the other kids cricket bat, I couldn't really complain. But more and more and more he would do this. That wasn't the only thing that I was getting my back up about. We'd have the camera set up, I'd be talking through the shot with the actors when CG would ask what exactly I wanted. When I explained it to him, he would reply by telling me he already had that and we should move on. Other things as well. He'd set up the camera, I'd try to look through the viewer to see if the angle worked or if it was the shot I needed and the guy would block my view. If he didn't understand what we were trying to achieve, then an attitude of it being stupid would present itself. Two or three other things. I was really starting to get the shits.
Now a lot of this might sound really petty. "Oh, he wouldn't let me do things my way. What an asshole. Boo Hoo me." The thing is, when you're directing a film, you have the thing worked out in your head. You know what you want your audience to feel, and you strive to convey that. The shots and angles you pick are very important to that. They might be right, they might be wrong, but that's the way you saw it and that's the way you try to shoot it. There's really no right answer in creative situations. When someones not on board with that, or is messing up the way you envision it, it throws the whole project in doubt.
So we got as much as we could shoot done. I had raced to try and get everything done before the sun completely disappeared. I think all up we had only shot for about half an hour. I had planned to be shooting since about 11 that morning, and we had shot for half an hour. I wasn't happy. We got back to my place and started to set up for the final few shots for the end of Tony's film. Still no word from my main girl, so I wanted to get at least something completed that day. Tony had the last shot in mind based on the cover of an old issue of Justice League. He explained what he wanted to CG - I had moved back to the background here - and ran through it with the actors. CG point blank told him that the shot couldn't be done. We discussed it over, came up with an alternative, and got the last shots in. Then we sat down and watched the footage. We weren't happy.
Except for the two or three shots where we had forced out point of view on him, nothing had come out how we wanted it. We tried to keep it to our selves, but by the end of the tape, we we're becoming very vocal about our displeasure. We ended the night, agreed to meet back again the next day and CG and his cronies left. We walked them out to the car, where Cg blamed any of the problems on the fact it was a crap idea, that we were just really amateur, so on and so forth. Tony was at least gracious enough not to voice his growing hostilities until we were back in the house. My other friends took off, and Tony and I went and tried to edit something out of the mess.
We quickly cut together the footage to see what we had. The end scene completely didn't work, so we decided to redo that altogether. A few other things. I tried to cut it as best I could, but it didn't work. Tony was a little happier with it though and asked if we could finish it off tomorrow if we had the time. Why not, I thought. Hopefully when my main girl showed up, we could quickly get Tony's shots in the morning and mine down in the afternoon and into the evening.
I was oh so optimistic. More to come.
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