The Magical Stranger narrative proceeds as follows:

We are introduced to a protagonist (hopefully) with a problem; be it their relationship, their work, or their addiction, their lives are full of struggle and conflict. The character then sets about on their day.

The narrative at this point can go a few ways: either the character hears of the magical stranger and goes looking for them, the character stumbles upon the magical stranger, or the magical stranger intervenes at a low point in the character’s life.

The magical stranger is invariably a member of some minority group; black, homosexual, transvestite etc. At the very least they are of the opposite gender of the protagonist. Being of a minority group somehow grants them magical powers of insight into the invariably white, straight protagonist’s life.

The magical stranger then utters some perfect bit of wisdom to the protagonist, who then marches off into a not so unfriendly world, ready and able to triumph over their difficulties in the third act.

Aside from its questionable exoticizing of “the other,” these films are generally unsatisfying for a number of reasons:

The first is, quite simply, it’s a deus ex machina. We watch movies to see how protagonists solve their problems, not to see how they are solved for them. It rings false in the audience’s ears: we’ve all been given great pieces of advice and ignored them because we had to learn the lessons for ourselves. Why now does the protagonist get to skip all of the difficulties implied in human growth?

The answer is often that the filmmaker doesn’t know how to solve or address the protagonists’ problems themselves. The Magical Stranger thus serves both as a story crutch and a psychological one.

We all yearn for the existence of a god who can grant us divine insight; a parental figure or mentor who will point us on the right path. The problem is these people don’t exist, and even if they do, we often resist their insights until they are proven to us by our own experience. This is what we resist when watching these short films, as well we should; it’s an adolescent fantasy. From a structural perspective, the mentor rarely appears at the climax of a film. There’s a saying that the end of act 2 is where good mentors go to die: they do so because the protagonist needs to face and overcome their problems alone. That’s what’s dramatically satisfying. Obi Wan can pop back at the end for a beer, but he’s not going to hold Luke’s lightsaber for him.

So the next time you’re writing a film and a Jamacian guy comes in to give your protagonist a bit of “jah,” or a a Buddhist monk shows up in a cafe just when your character’s about to kill herself, ask yourself; “Is the Magical Stranger really going to help my story? Is it going to engage my audience through a truthful statement about the world? Or is it going to get me out of this problem and come off vaguely unsatisfying at the same time?”

I say these things with love; I once wrote a short where the magical stranger was, you guessed it, an IKEA sign. After many furrowed brows and polite compliments I slowly learned my lesson. I should have gone for the Jamacian.

http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/01/francois-truffaut-certain-tendency.html

I’ll keep this short guys, but read (hopefully re-read) Truffaut’s attack on the “tradition of quality” in French cinema.  We’re in a similar place at UCLA.  UCLA is a state school.  We’re supposed to be the rebellious outsiders, fucking around with cameras and making what we want to make for cheap cheap cheap.  Go watch “Radio Days” and try to figure out how much it cost.  Nothing?

Way way way too many of the advanced films from last year were not that at all.  They were “high quality” squashed features.

Clearly I can’t tell you what to do with your money, but I’ll highly encourage you: don’t spend it on films.  The only two areas we should really really be spending money on are: sound guys on set, and MAYBE a casting director.  “Maybe a casting director” I think means “if you need to cast anyone above 33 or below 18.”  Why not just write something that fits our limitations instead?

UCLA is teaching us a really weird way to make movies.  They’re teaching us to act like we have money.  We don’t.  We don’t have money to build sets, to pay for permits, to rent a shit ton of gear, to pay for long post-production pathways . . . I understand why they’re teaching us that, I just don’t agree.

Monsters was made for $15,000 and it looks (meaning the look of the film, the quality of the effects) better than Skyline, which doubtless cost 100 – 200x more.

George Washington was shot for $40,000 and looks incredibly beautiful.  DGG talks a lot about the intentional design of the film: they didn’t have money, and were worried rolls of film would get lost in developing (they did) so the film was designed so that every scene was expendable, and wouldn’t destroy the overall narrative.  they also spent a lot of time scouting unique locations.  they decided to find stuff that had never been put on film before – that’s quality that money can’t buy.

Some Proposed Guidelines for Advanced Films:

Don’t shoot on the Red.*

Don’t build a set.  Unless you can get it done for FREE (and if you can, more power to you).  But even then: be honest about hidden costs.

Don’t pay for permits.  Go outside LA and shoot on the run.  If a cop stops you don’t mention UCLA.

Don’t shoot on film.  DON’T SHOOT ON FILM.

Don’t have a big crew.  Keep your crew under 4 people (Director, DP, sound, line producer) and keep your cast reasonable.  This helps with catering costs.

Don’t go crazy on lighting.  DPs will hate me for this but: a little bit of lighting is totally needed to make sure people can see your image.  Anything more than a little, and you fall into the Red Zone Trap – your lighting starts to accentuate the other pitfalls of your film.  This is kind of like how robots are great when they are totally not human (no lighting) or look totally human (studio-level lighting budgets) but in-between looks horrible and make people vomit.  Too much time lighting slows your set down.  Shoot outdoors and use the sun, or if indoors shoot next to a window.  When Chris Nolan shot Following, he staged all interior scenes next to windows so that he’d never have to light.  And no one can accuse Nolan of not giving a shit about his images.

Don’t write a feature film.  Write a film that has very narrow goals.  The more you try to tackle, the more general your film will become, and as it is said, “the general is the enemy of art.” You don’t have to do a single scene, but it helps.  Definitely do a single location, though.  I honestly can’t think of a short film that had more than one location (and a: wasn’t foreign and b: didn’t cost real money) that was any good.  open to being proven wrong about this.

Don’t have a B plot.  See above.

DON’T SHOOT ON FILM.

Add or alter this list as you see fit.  It’s Sunday morning and I’m on a coffee high.

Abe Silvia and Justin Lerner are awesome, awesome guys and incredibly talented artists.  But they shouldn’t be our models.  They’re both exceptional filmmakers and clearly exceptional hustlers.  They are exceptions.  For the rest of us, I wouldn’t count on it.

*the Red reminds me of a guy, (redacted), I used to work with in NYC.  He pulled down $40,000/yr and had three kids, two in college; He was not wealthy.  BUT, robbie bought himself an incredibly nice burberry overcoat, b/c working for (an extremely successful NY law firm), around all the partners making $2.5 million/yr made him insecure.  His crazy expensive coat didn’t make him look richer – it accentuated his lack of real money.  It was the only nice thing he owned.

The Red does the same thing.  If your images look too good, it just makes all the other warts on your film stand out in greater relief.  Shoot on the HVX, or at most the EX-1 (what Monsters was shot on).  FYI: I was with Robbie when his coat tore while getting out of a cab downtown, and he started crying.  Because that coat didn’t represent “shelter from the elements” it represented his food budget for like 3 months.  That’s also why we all get so fucked up about our films and have such a hard time taking criticism: they’re not just fun little learning experiments, they’re another two years of debt.  Not good.

Ben Arfmann is a serious man. He studies film at UCLA. Before that he was a fish. See more at his website: http://benjaminarfmann.com/

One DP’s Response:

Guys I don’t agree with what you guys are saying about these arbitrary list of rules for “emotional” film making so to speak…  Lets be realistic here for a sec… The films you mentioned are anomalies… They are not the model, and you cannot build a set of principals based on them.  I agree that being prolific is a great way to master ones craft.. And that these films should cost very little when it comes to a continuous body of work… But… A good looking film goes a long way, it’s the initial thing that grabs a programmers attention, a great image.  If you all want to be your own dp’s and make more intimate movies, there’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t do it because your trying to save money on lighting, do it because it serves the story.  We as DP’s are there to visually tell your story the way it needs to be told.. If that’s siting in a room with one camera position, a china ball, and a sony handi cam, that’s fine… It just needs a better reason than *NO FILM *NO RED…  Utube is filled with videos on ok prosumer cameras and bad/no lighting… And it makes them look exactly what they are… Cheap and amateur, and good lighting only adds production value.
Look at the shorts in Sundance and tell me how many were shot on the HVX?  People should tell the stories that inspire them and shouldn’t be limited to one room family dramas.  This is the only time in your life you are free to expirment as film makers… You have the time devoted to just this… Do what you want, because you can…  Remember the shorts eric marin showed a last year in sound class?  Those NYU shorts were pretty polished.  A great story married with the right art design and great cinematography blow people away.  Above all remember story comes first.

My Kickstarter Page

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!

Here’s the Link Again

The Swimming Lesson is the first film I made at UCLA. We were given four hours and one roll of 16mm film (about 10 minutes) to shoot a film.

*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 surprising and inevitable conclusion.

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/Locations

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. All of these rules apply for locations as well. Aristotle’s unity of action, place and time are especially valuable for the short filmmaker. Rarely do great short films cover more than a day, a few locations and a single storyline. Most that do end up requiring narration.

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.

On the whole these problems deal with the three patron saints of good writing: Clarity, Specificity and Unity. Every writer should strive for these three at all times, god knows I do.

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.

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 control them while they’re in the thousands.