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.

First I’m going to do a quick run-through of my actual costs for the first year. Back in September of 2009, this was UCLA’s estimate of how much my first year would cost:

	Resident	Nonresident
University Registration fee	$      900.00	$      900.00
Educational fee	6,822.00	6,822.00
Graduate Students Association fee	39.00	39.00
Graduate Writing Center fee	12.00	12.00
Ackerman Student Union fee	55.50	5 5.50
Ackerman/Kerckhoff Seismic fee	113.00	113.00
Wooden Center fee	45.00	45.00
Student Programs, Activities, and Resources Complex fee	93.00	93.00
Graduate Student Health Insurance Plan (GSHIP)	1,564.00	1,564.00
Nonresident Tuition		12,245.00
SUBTOTAL MANDATORY FEES	$   9,643.50	$21,888.50
Professional School fee	7,231.00	7,231.00
TOTAL MANDATORY FEES	$16,874.50	$29,119.50

Now, because of the economic quagmire the state of California is in, they decided to raise fees last year. A lot. And they’ve already decided to raise fees again this year.

So let’s look at the tuition breakdown for 2010-2011.

This comes from the UCLA Registrar’s Website:

ESTIMATED BREAKDOWN OF UCLA GRADUATE STUDENT FEES
Student Services Fee 900.00
Educational Fee (Residents) 9,402.00
Educational Fee (Non-Residents) 9,810.00
Graduate Student’s Association Fee 39.00
Graduate Writing Center Fee 12.00
Ackerman Student Union Fee 55.50
Seismic Fee for Ackerman/Kerckhoff 113.00
Wooden Center Fee 45.00
Student Programs, Activities, and Resources Center Fee 93.00
MIP (Mandatory Medical Insurance) 1,921.08
Non-Resident Tuition $14,694.00
TOTAL: Resident Students $12,580.58
TOTAL: Non-Resident Students $27,682.58

Theatre, Film and Television
Standard 12,490.5
Nonresident 12,245.00
Prof. Fee 7,954.00
TOTAL Resident 20,444.58
TOTAL Nonresident 32,689.58

That’s a $3,574 dollar increase in one year! So how does this add up for myself, who came to the great state of California a non-resident?

Last year I roughly estimated my expenses as such:

Total Out of State Tuition	$30,119.50
Total Rent (10 Mth. Deposit Pd.)	$12,910.50
First-year Film Costs	$9,000.00
Monthly Living Expenses	$8,000.0

Total: $60,000

$60,00 is a bit high. I spent less on my film and raised money for post-production. All in all the year probably came out to around $56,000.

BUT, this year I have in state tuition and a 25% TAship for one quarter, which is realistically what all students my year received as a minimum in the way of financial assistance. A 25% TAship means your university fees (not including the professional fees) are covered for one quarter, and you get paid about $900 a month. So, for this year my budget looks like this:

Total In State Fees		$20,444.00
Total Rent		$10,800.00
Second Year Film Costs		$8,000.00
Minus Graduate Assistantship		-$6,800.00
Monthly Living Expenses		$8,000.00
Estimated Earnings from Work-Study		-$6,000.00

Total: $34,444.00

It’s a lot lower than last year, and I’m being generous with myself for my next film’s budget. It’s still not cheap though. If tuition had stayed the same I’d be looking at around $30,000.

I’m going to write a companion post this week comparing tuition at the top 5 film schools. At this rate UCLA will soon be competing with NYU’s roughly $44,000 a year in tuition.

Just as a comparison the DffB in Berlin, where I was living before I moved to LA, cost 200 euros a year when I left. In consolation UCLA now has the second worst website of any film school I’ve ever seen.