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A few weeks ago I began the process of raising funds to get my last short film, A Son Like You, through post-production. This is a lengthy process that includes a colorist who cleans up the image, digital transfer to HD, foley (SFX) work, sound mastering and mixing, and DVD creation. It can be an amazing process to watch a colorist at work, as I saw on my last film:

Pre-Telecine

Post-Telecine

This is the kind of magic a great colorist can do. It’s night and day.

Please take a look at my Kickstarter page and donate to become a part of the film. I am offering some great perks for those who do.  Click on the link below to help out. Thank you for reading!

SHORT FILM NEEDS FINISHING FUNDS

*These notes apply to melodramatic films interested in viewer identification with characters and a realistic treatment. I believe that the majority of short films strive for this effect, which turns an audience member from a passive viewer to an active participant in the film.

1. Unclear Point of View

Whose story is it? Short films generally follow one character’s journey and it’s important that we know who that person is as soon as possible. Lead with your protagonist and introduce their problem before moving around into secondary characters. The protagonist is our entry point into the world of the story, so lead with them unless you’re going for a specific effect.

2. Lack of Unity

This is about beginning, middle and end. Every piece of a short film should have significance for all the others. Each narrative thread should wind its way towards a surprising and inevitable climax and resolution. The source of conflict at the beginning of the film needs to be organically addressed through the actions of the protagonist and the events of the plot.

Student films often have too much exposition or too little. What do we need to know about your character, his world and the relationships in that world before the inciting incident occurs? Show only what’s necessary, which is most often what is about to change.

3. Lack of Conflict

Conflict creates interest in an audience, because conflict implies resolution. Through conflict we create expectations about how that conflict will resolve itself. We see that the story is driving towards a conclusion. I once had a screenwriting teacher who said the essence of drama = two dogs and one bone.

4. A Passive Protagonist

A passive protagonist has no goal, and takes no action to achieve it. If there is no goal, there is no expectation of an outcome to that goal, and a film becomes interminable. In a recent post on John August’s blog he posted his favorite definition of a protagonist: The protagonist is the character that suffers the most. To this I would add that the character suffers in order to achieve something he wants. If a character just suffers, the audience will often remain disengaged.

5. Too Many Characters

There is not a lot of time in short films to introduce characters. Often times a new set of characters is introduced for every scene in a film. A secondary character needs to have a specific and organic purpose in the film that makes sense for the entire film. A writer should not need to introduce multiple sets of characters multiple times in a short film; use the characters you have, and have a few as possible.

6. Ambiguous/Vague

Many student writers are into open endings and ambiguity in their scripts. One teacher here gives a caveat; ambiguity is when there are two equally attractive or unattractive options for the protagonist. The opposite of this is vagueness, where the audience doesn’t understand what’s going on. Many open ended endings are not really open ended; the correct choice is obvious to the protagonist and the audience, though the filmmaker wants them to feel something else. Ambiguity is about making two possible options equally attractive for the protagonist and thus for the audience.

7. No Theme

Some stories are very clear, fun rides that don’t require deep resonating themes. Student films tend to stray toward dramas. Dramas generally have a point of view about the world, known as the theme. A theme is an assertive and arguable statement about the world that gives a larger richness and meaning to a story. Most films should have them.

8. Unnecessarily Long

Any scene that does not further the story needs to be cut. Long musical sequences, scenes without conflict, scenes with the same conflict over and over, can all be cut out. Every piece of action of the protagonist gives the audience new information about the story. Subplots that are not essential to the main conflict should be excised. A short film is not a feature, though many students end up trying to pack a feature into a short.

9. No Character Arc

Characters generally change as a consequence of their actions in a film. In short films the changes don’t have to be dramatic, but they should be there. If a character hasn’t changed, for the positive or negative, what’s the point of the story?

10. The Director Gets in the Way of the Story

This is a directorial problem, but you can always see in short films where the director fell in love with the camera because the story wasn’t working. Film is about storytelling, and the style of the film is ideally in service of the story. Don’t dolly because it’s pretty; dolly because it reveals information to the audience in a manner appropriate to your story. This problem is also related to why films are unnecessarily long; a director fell in love with a style that is not in service of the story, or spent a lot of money on equipment that doesn’t serve the story. They keep scenes in the film because they remember how expensive or difficult they were to get. A good director is concerned with communing with her audience, not with a dolly shot or crane move. On DUMPS they call this the “Look at me, I’m a director!” shot.

There is another excellent sample of problems in student shorts on filmmaker.com’s “Directing Unsuccessful Motion Picture Shorts.” It’s a highly entertaining read.

1. Student films come in three sizes; Too Long, Much Too Long, and Very Much Too Long.
2. PASSIVITY is the capital crime in drama.
3. Obscurity is seldom a virtue. If the point you want to make is of any significance, then there is no harm in making it clearly.
4. Improvisation is only valuable when it has its roots in the highly disciplined and often exhausting work that has gone before.
5. Aristotle’s phrase ‘unity of action’ refers to the sense of completeness that is a basic satisfaction in almost every dramatic work. So if ou think you have a great beginning of a story, but the end is weak, the real truth is that you don’t yet have the right beginning
6. Film dialogue is best when it has an immediate purpose and produces reactions in others.
7. ‘Protagonist’ (the name given to the leading character in your story) literally means the person who initiates the agon (struggle). But a figure who does not (or cannot) actually do things or who hasn’t got the gumption to struggle in a way that produces new situations and developments is apt – in dramatic terms – to be a dead weight on the narrative.

It’s a brilliant book. I enjoy revisiting it now that I’ve made two more films. The lessons have some more weight to them.

The Beginnings of Microbudget

In 1998 a hopeful article in Moviemaker Magazine summed up the rising phenomenon of microbudget features:

Many of the most talented American independent filmmakers began by making ultra-low budget features. During the 1970s and ’80s, very low budget films launched the careers of David Lynch (Eraserhead), Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus 7), Wayne Wang (Chan Is Missing), Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), and Gus Van Sant (Male Noche). Because they were made on such tiny budgets, these films were regarded as exceptions, not models that other filmmakers could follow. In the mid-’80s the availability of money from home video companies enabled a number of filmmakers to raise $3 million for first features. But this money soon dried up, and by the early ’90s it was harder and harder to find money for first features. Made for $27,000, Rick Linklater’s Slacker was a precursor to the ultra-low budget wave. (The Film School alums among them: UCLA (Burnett), AFI (Lynch), NYU (Jarmusch, Lee) and RISDI (Van Sant)).

Next Wave Films, the fund described in the article, was created by the IFC to help filmmakers finish low-budget films. It now appears to be defunct. Its website, last updated in 2002, has that tumbleweed feel of late-nineties ghost-sites.

In 2010, twelve years later, the microbudget feature world has swelled enough for Sundance to add a new micro-budget section to its festival, entitled NEXT;

The new section, also referred to by the symbol <=> by the Festival, highlights new films that have been made on very low budgets. Rather than vehicles to make money, these films are proudly modest. But make no mistake, this group of filmmakers is not limited by a low budget – they made their films this way by choice.

The studios have also taken note after the success of Paranormal Activity, with Paramount announcing a new micro-budget feature division:

Clearly dazzled by the fact that it could gross more than $100 million on a movie that barely cost $15,000 to make, Paramount Pictures is set to launch a new production wing devoted to films budgeted at less than $100,000.

These are but two of the major waves being made by micro-budgets, spurred by ever-falling production costs. These developments are slow to take hold at film schools, including UCLA, where students often spend small fortunes to make esoteric short films, the pinnacle of which is the thesis film.

The Thesis Film in the Era of the Microbudget

The thesis film is often an extremely expensive endeavor, ranging anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000. UCLA’s biggest thesis grant is the Bridges Larson Production production grant, which offers $25,000 to one lucky candidate with an extensive (i.e. undergraduate) theater background. I once read that at AFI there is a limit of $100,000 for a thesis film budget; I have already heard of two films here at UCLA that, albeit unintentionally, hit the six-figure mark.

This begs the question of how micro-budgets, now an accepted fact in the film industry, are figured into a film-school education;  at UCLA, generally speaking, they aren’t. NYU has a well known Columbus/Vague production grant of $100,000 that only NYU graduates can compete for. With production costs what they are now, what was intended as seed money for a feature can now actually become the feature itself. UCLA has nothing comparable to the Columbus/Vague grant, although realistically UCLA does cost about $100,000 less than NYU, depending on how much you spend on your films, and provided you are not an international student.

In light of these developments the thesis film has become a smaller piece of the film-directing career puzzle. Many years ago students attended film schools because the high cost of equipment made them the only viable means of making films. In those days the thesis film, shot on 16 or 35mm, was the largest project most filmmakers could conceivably produce as a means of enticing studios, investors and producers into considering feature projects.

The 2007 edition of Film School Confidential, the only remotely up to date guide on film school education, has a section about life after film school. In it they discuss the reality of the low-budget feature as a stepping stone to the paid feature. They recommend shopping around your thesis to festivals to get to know programmers for your first DV (now HDV or RED) feature;

“Wait, what?” we hear you ask. “Feature? What feature?” This would be your self-financed feature shot on DV. We’re sorry to have to break this to you, but it’s the way the film world has reshaped itself in the digital-video era. You’re going to have to make a feature on your own before anyone else will give you money to make one.

Later in the book they discuss the process of putting your first independent feature together.

So with this new step, where does the thesis film leave you in terms of a career? Film School Confidential would argue, as have a number of other filmmakers, that it gets you some prestige, maybe some meetings, and contacts with programmers for when you return with your microbudget feature. The thesis film will always be an important part of film school, particularly as a culmination of everything learned while in school. For the vast majority of student filmmakers, it will not produce any (monetarily) meaningful directing work, and simply guide them to the next step of making the micro to low-budget feature shot on digital.

For certain people with specific expensive genre and aesthetic sensibilities, the expensive thesis film will still make sense, but for the majority of future independents, the microbudget, festival-ready film will be the next step in their filmmaking career. Therefore ideally the thesis film, and any student film for that matter, should be kept as cheap as possible. Instead of the 18 to 30 minute unprogrammable opuses we are currently seeing, the future of the thesis film is the reasonably cheap 10 minute and under short film.

One of my favorite examples of this is The Most Beautiful Man in the World by Alicia Duffy. The film was her thesis at The National Film and Television School. It premiered at Cannes and is a powerful, visual and brief short. She recently returned to Cannes with her first feature, All Good Children, which I’m very excited to see.

The Film School of the Future

The film school of the future will prepare filmmakers to write, direct and produce a no-budget feature. Ideally every student in that school would leave school with a fully developed, budgeted, scheduled and cast microbudget film in addition to a number of polished feature scripts and strong short. A major advantage of film school is the network of passionate and talented students you meet. These people make the ideal candidates to rotate through each others’ micro-budget films when they leave school.

Mr. Moneybags, Student Film Financier

In America, with little government subsidy of the arts and declining support of education in general, a student’s first feature film is not going to come from subsidies like in Europe. It will also not come from a person a friend here likes to call “Mr. Moneybags;” a mythological, monopoly-man figure who appears at film festivals to offer student filmmakers a million dollars to make their first features.

As young filmmakers we will first have to prove our talents through inexpensive means of getting our stories on the screen. Film school is a place to start learning the discipline of filmmaking, and that includes budgeting. Even with a half-billion dollar budget money remains an issue. We might as well learn to deal control them while they’re in the thousands.

A pitch is somewhere between a joke and a campfire story.

We recently had two pitching experts come in to speak to our class. They gave sage and candid advice about pitching screenplays. I also had the opportunity to get a pitch critiqued by them for my upcoming screenplay.

I bombed and it was an invaluable experience. One thing that I have come to realize is that many people make a good living on what don’t seem like real jobs to an outsider. Pitching and writing coverage of screenplays are the two I have been investigating recently.

Pitching is a craft and a profession that some people make a lot of money doing. For many of them it took years of practice and hard work. The two people who came in to speak to us spent their twenties writing; they didn’t go out, they didn’t party, they wrote. It took them seven years to sell their first feature. Here are some loglines of recently sold pitches (via Done Deal Pro):

Untitled Sascha Baren Cohen Project – 04/25/10 – Paramount Pictures – Revolves around a goat herder and a deposed foreign dictator who gets lost in the United States.

Untitled Parkour Project – 04/26/10 – New Line Cinema – Centers on the extreme sport of Parkour, the free-jumping sport in which people run and jump from rooftops.

My Ex Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me – Paramount Pictures – A girl finds out that her ex-boyfriend has written a book about her. (pretty straightforward).

Most of the pitches that sold recently are pitched by very established writers, actors and directors. This doesn’t mean that we fledgling writers and directors don’t have to know how to pitch. It’s vitally important for us to know how to tell our stories in a brief, engaging, and compelling way.

First we were given some basic philosophy on life as a writer/pitcher:

• Building a career is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time, effort and failure to learn how to do these things well.
• You need very thick skin and very low expectations to keep yourself motivated.
• Never take anything personally, you really never know what’s going on with the person at the other end of the table.
• Be careful who you’re nice to on the way up, you never know who you’re going to meet on your way down.
• The people who skyrocket to success often burn out just as quickly. The writer of My Girl, who went from unknown writer with a spec to a completed film in six months, was cited as an example of this.
• You have to be idea machines, constantly coming up with new material. Don’t be the guy who’s shopping around the same script for 20 years.
• If you don’t do the work, someone else always will. There are always 100,000 other people writing that spec that you’re not.

Preparation

1. Have multiple ideas. Don’t walk into a room with just one idea. If it’s shot down, you have nothing and its awkward.
2. Have ideas in the same genre. People in Hollywood want to put you in a box; she’s the one who writes romantic comedies. It’s ok to stray a little, say into straight comedy or even dramedy, but if you come in with two comedies and a sci-fi movie eyebrows will be raised.
3. Know what’s out there, what’s being sold, and who’s buying. Do your homework. Sites like Deadline, Variety, Screen Daily, Hitfix, Vulture, and Done Deal Pro are excellent resources for seeing who’s buying what ideas for how much money at any given moment.
4. Do your homework about who you’re meeting with, what they like, what they’ve bought etc.

Your Idea

Start with a two-sentence version of your screenplay. Then for the longer version be very aware of your beats:

1. Introduction of Protagonist and Problem, Desire, Flaw and Obstacles
2. Midpoint of Act 1
3. End of Act 1
4. Keeping the story alive 1/4 of the way through Act 2
5. Mid Point of Act 2 (Big Twist)
6. Keeping the story alive in the second half of act 2
7. End of Act 2 (New Twist)
8. Cliffhanger (all is lost, darkest moment)
9. Climax and resolution.

These beats must be crystal clear in your story and in your pitch. Practice, practice, practice. In front of a mirror, with friends. Get their honest feedback and adjust for the notes they give you. If it’s a comedy, it should be really funny, if it’s a thriller, it should be thrilling. Bring a lot of emotion to the pitch and keep eye contact with the person you’re pitching to. If people aren’t reacting the way you want them to, something needs to change.

The Pitch

When you walk in the room, make small talk until you know when the time has come to give your pitch. Make the material personal to you; explain (or fabricate) your personal involvement with the story. It makes it more compelling and also makes a strong case for why you should write it.

Then ask them what they’re looking for,

Give them a logline, then ask if they’re interested. If they’re not, give them something else. If they are, make sure you include the following information in your pitch:

• How long the pitch is going to be. A standard length for a “Stanford” pitch is 15-20 Minutes
• What the Genre is.
• What successful films it’s comparable to.
• Open with a visual.
• When you describe a main character, give an age, an actor you can picture playing them, and a pithy bit of description (i.e. “he’s the kind of guy who…”
• Go through your nine beats.
• Let your listener know where you are; “this is the end of the first act” etc.

Other important suggestions:

• Plot does not sell scripts, character does.
• Maintain a balance between summary and dramatization.
• Be energetic, have coffee before the meeting if you need to.
• Be clear about character arcs. One anecdote was related about pitching for Scooby Doo; one of the first questions the executive asked was “What’s Scooby’s arc?”
• Give them “trailer moments,” moments that are juicy enough to put in the trailer.
• Give them “sound bytes,” concise encapsulating phrases that can be easily repeated to other people. (i.e. it’s a coming of age story for women in their 40s)
• Have a backup list of actors if the people in the room don’t like your first choice. Picture Clint Eastwood, ok, picture George Clooney etc.
• Have a cheat sheet with 10 loglines for ideas you can use if you need to.
• Tell them what you’re going to do, do it, and then tell them what you’ve done. “I’m going to give you a logline.” “I’m going to give you a ten-minute pitch.”
• Tell the character’s ages.
• Be prepared for the worst interruptions (Blackberrys are just the beginning), don’t let them throw you.
• Introduce only the characters who move the plot forward.
• If you have a lot of characters, bring in a bulletin board with photos of actors you would temp cast for the roles. Then the person you’re pitching to can see who you’re talking about, and you have a means of indicating to them who’s doing what.
• What is your character’s Achilles heel?

This seems more complicated than it is. It’s important to be confident and relaxed and show your enthusiasm for your project. This is a job though; some people, though few, can make a living at it.

Pitching is an important skill even if you write small art-house character dramas. You still have to transfer your enthusiasm to the person listening to you, who may finance you, act in your film, be your director of photography or even your costume designer. Conveying passion to other people is a very important skill to have.

A Melbourne film school grad and former editor of Oz cinema mag Inside Film, Michod shot to prominence through a series of compelling short films. Many were made with frequent collaborators, such as Susser and Edgerton, with Michod also writing for and acting in their respective shorts. Michod’s award-winning short “Crossbow” was invited to the Venice fest in 2007 and to Sundance the following year. from Variety

Crossbow was recently mentioned as a short film that was good enough to land Michôd an agent. He followed Crossbow with Animal Kingdom, his first feature which won the World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance in 2010.

Whether you like it or not, Crossbow is an incredibly accomplished work, both narratively and visually.

Many film students drive themselves mad figuring out how to get an agent, one of the major steps to getting into paid feature film directing. I’ve heard this question asked of a number of people at a number of Q&A sessions since I’ve been here. The answer is always the same:

Create something amazing enough to be worth an agent’s time, and they will come.

The end goal is not getting an agent, but having a career making good movies. How do you have a career and not a one-off? You develop your craft as extensively as possible.

Hal Ackerman, a screenwriting professor here, says that success is when luck meets preparation.

There are many horror stories passed around here about students who manage to get a film into Sundance, have a lot of acclaim, then have no feature scripts or pitches to turn that acclaim into a career.

Luck without preparation. You can’t decide luck, but you can decide how prepared you are.

This means:

1. Constantly writing, rewriting, filming, editing, reediting.

2. Being brutally honest with yourself about what you’ve already done.

3. Writing good features or being attached to a writer who does.

4. Learning how to pitch those features. By pitch I mean tell your story in a brief and compelling way. I recently heard a story about how Paolo Sorrentino, a native Italian speaker, wowed a producer here with a low-concept pitch for This Must Be the Place, his first American feature starring Sean Penn. He did this before he wrote the screenplay. I wish I had had to do the same for some of these features I am killing myself rewriting.

5. Getting a lot of feedback on your films, writing and pitches.

6. Networking; meeting people who you’re interested in and who are interested in you and could someday help you down the line.

7. Putting your work out there through festivals, blogs, youtube, vimeo etc. .

Then when you get into the festival with your great short, you will have a few great features and great pitches to back it up. You have helped plan the trajectory of your career. What agent wouldn’t love that?

A situation is not a story.  A story is a beginning middle and end about someone who wants something and goes after getting it.  They can’t just want anything, though, they have to want something in the long term, something that will require them to adopt a series of short term goals that, if attained, will get them their long term goal.  The character can have a series of long term goals over the course of the story, as in The Wrestler (first he wants to become successful again at wrestling; then, after his heart goes bad and he can’t wrestle anymore, he wants to try to live the normal life he’s always been avoiding by reconciling with his daughter and trying to get a girlfriend; then when he fails at that he wants to die, so he goes back to the ring), but the character needs long term goals that will engender short term goals.

So, when you have an idea for a film, short or feature, ask yourself;

Is it a story or a situation?

Some examples:

A man gets hit by a bus – Situation

A man wants to kill the driver of the bus who hit him – Story

A college student gets a new, obnoxious roommate. – Situation

A college student desperately wants to drive his new, obnoxious roommate out of their dorm. – Story

A story has a goal, which implies conflict, i.e. obstacles, antagonists etc. A story with a goal also implies a beginning, middle and end. A situation can continue on indefinitely. Life is composed of many situations, most of which are inadequate (without goals) for depiction in film.  Interestingly, some short films, including Oscar nominee Manon Sur Le Bitume succeed despite their basis in situations.

As John August once wrote: life is characters without a plot.

As David Mamet said at the Arrow last night; it is the role of the screenwriter to provide the plot.

• Filmmaker Magazine | FALL 2008: MY ADVENTURE IN THEATRICAL SELF-DISTRIBUTION, PART 1
  My story is not unlike that of most independent filmmakers these days. We bust our butts for years producing — in our minds — a great film, only to find the distribution landscape radically different from the one in our hopes and dreams.

1. Director
2. Boom Operator
3. Assistant Director
4. 1st Assistant Camera
5. Gaffer
6. Director of Photography
7. Sound Mixer

All seven people in my group (6 directors and 1 DP) went through this rotation starting in a specific position. I started out as boom operator and directed last. Some interesting combinations that come out of this:

1. You AD for your DP
2. You AC for your DP
3. You DP for your AD

I shot my film, A Son Like You, last weekend and telecined last night. It was an expensive but rewarding experience and I am excited to go into editing in the spring. Here are ten important things I learned on these shoots:

1. Block it. Light it. Shoot it. As a professor said, “if you’re not doing one of these three things at all times on set, you’re not making a movie.” Set the blocking with the actors, show it to the crew, let them light it, then shoot it. We got better at this as the shoot went along, but it’s a surprisingly difficult thing to remember when things get hard.
2. The director sets the tone on set. If the director is calm and focused, so is the crew. If the director is frantic and emotional, so is the crew. There are many things you can’t control as a director, but your tone and mood is a big one to watch out for. The crew sees everything the director does on set.
3. Respect your crew. The crew works very hard at all times to make your movie as amazing as possible, knowing that an audience member is probably not aware of how difficult it can be to get proper focus and exposure. Feed them well, have good craft services, don’t make them go over unless it’s absolutely necessary. Spend the little extra money to make sure you have a proper vehicle to transport equipment and proper beds for the crew to sleep in on location. They will pay you back by making your movie happen. On a side note, the crew should not only be physically taken care of, but emotionally as well. Outbursts and infighting should be kept to a minimum, and criticisms should never be public.
4. Trust your collaborators. A distrustful director is a burden on everyone, and generally makes them do their jobs worse. If you have hired a number of people to fulfill certain position, trust them as much as possible to fulfill those positions. This is difficult for us, because the films we made before coming to UCLA were usually self-produced, designed, managed, etc. A crew exists so the director can focus on their specific task: getting the performances they need on camera. There was a quote I read about Cassavetes the other day: “He thought of you as a hero, and you became one in response … believed someone into doing more than they thought they were capable of.” A big problem for directors is that there are certain moments where they feel they have nothing to do. These moments are often filled with helpful suggestions to the crew. It’s probably better to be thinking about the next shot at that moment. Let the crew do their jobs.
5. How to take light meter readings. You point it at the camera, not at the light.
6. How a DP prepares. A director of photography is a creative artist who works with light and framing to create images that convey your story. On a practical level this means creating detailed lighting plots and being very involved in scheduling with the AD in order to make sure that your shared vision is realizable on set. I believe that after extensive preparation with a DP, including storyboarding, you leave them to express your vision photographically on the set. Other directors have different approaches.
7. Check the frame constantly. This is more as a DP than as a director, but on a larger set the damndest things will wander into the frame: water bottles, PAs, the script supervisor. Check the beginning frame, the end frame, and 45 times in between, especially when working on small spaces.
8. How to work with a script supervisor. I had the benefit of a wonderful script supervisor on my set. By the last day we would have a brief meeting in the morning to discuss the day’s shots. A script supervisor can save you countless headaches in the editing room. They make sure wardrobe and props match from take to take, as well as keeping an eye on eyeline, entrances and exits, gestures, and anything else that can give you a major headache in the editing room.
9. How to incorporate improvisation into a shoot. This is very specific to me, and came out of a lot of practice, study, mistakes and frustration. I ended up getting some wonderful, spontaneous performances on set. The way I worked was I did extensive improvisation of backstory in rehearsal, then slowly allowed actors to change non-key lines of dialogue to make them more natural for themselves. When they came up with something I felt worked, I would “set” the new line, and that became what they said every take. On occasion I would rewrite the line myself, seeing what I finally needed. It was a wonderful, exhilarating process, one that I began a year ago in Berlin.
10. Patience and forgiveness. Both of myself and others. These are student films. We all worked our hardest, but we are all learning. Each of us will improve in different ways with every film, but much of these shoots were learning about ourselves and how we collaborate (and conflict) with people. Most of us coming into the director’s program made small films ourselves and our friends. It’s much different directing a set with 20 people on it; it requires an amazing amount of people skills. Some things came out brilliant on the shoots, others didn’t. In the end we will learn more from our failures than our triumphs. I know I did.