In February I posted about story structure. The structure of a film is important because it is the foundation of the story and the framework upon which plot can be built and characters can work. Strong plots and good characters can be weakened by poor structure. They can also be fragmented by a poor theme.
Theme is the real heart of good screenwriting, in the same way that structure is it’s skeleton. The theme of a film is what it is really about. It’s the main message and purpose of the story. The Hustler is a movie about pool players, but it’s theme is one of personal character. In the film, Jackie Gleason plays an aging pool champ. The young Paul Newman is a better player, but he still can’t defeat Gleason because Newman lacks the character, discipline, and self-mastery of the older man. When he obtains it later in the film, Gleason recognizes the fact that now Newman is unbeatable. It’s a clear illustration of the importance of character.
The film City Hall is on the surface a pretty basic political drama, but it shows how mayor Al Pacino loses everything because of small compromises made early in his political career. Its theme is based on integrity, and shows how small sins, no matter how carefully concealed, will lead to large-scale ruin. This theme of integrity is also crucial to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but in a different way, as Jimmy Stewart’s battle against corruption more specifically shows how our hero’s good name and personal integrity are his greatest strengths.
Scripts can have multiple themes, or characters who are not related to the ultimate theme, but this will weaken your film. Two excellent examples of scripts with strong, unified, over-arching themes are those for Rain Man and The Verdict. Neither of their structures are perfect, but both are good examples of careful handling of character arc, plot, and theme.
Rain Man’s theme is familial or brotherly love. Charlie Babbitt childishly kidnaps Raymond, his severely autistic brother, in a desperate bid to contest the father’s will and extort some payments for himself from the executor. Charlie’s girlfriend leaves him in disgust, partly a plot device to force Charlie and Raymond to be alone together, but mostly to prevent a romantic love plotline from distracting from the theme of brotherly love. Raymond loves Charlie, but his autism prevents him from showing it. Charlie loves his brother, but his immaturity prevents him from even realizing it. Nevertheless, when constantly torn between his own needs and those of his brother, Charlie repeatedly dies to himself to serve Raymond.
He does so begrudgingly at first, but gradually he becomes aware of the film’s theme. When he does so, he experiences true character growth. He matures, and becomes more of a hero than an anti-hero. In fact, he grows so much that his desires change. His want (money) and his need (loving his brother) are different, and his new, Act III want is to live with his brother. This type of inconsistency could be a weakness to the story, but the script handles it well.
Charlie still requires the money in order to keep his business running, but now he does not greedily desire it. Because of this understanding, the audience still wants him to get the money, thus fulfilling his first, main goal without compromising his newfound character. He then realizes his brother is better off in a clinic, and his love for him is so great that he lets him go back. The audience applauds his selflessness. This is a strong, universal theme, which easily supports a complicated script because it is the primary emotion that drives the characters. There are no other competing messages to dilute the power of the film. Even the initial kidnapping is motivated more by Charlie’s need for fatherly recognition than by greed.
A better example of this is in The Verdict, where the theme is truth; namely that the truth is important, even all-important, and worthy of professional and personal sacrifice to preserve. Everything in the script–every action and reaction–has to do with truth. Every obstacle in the film is the result of a lie, and every mystery revolves around finding out if a person is honest or if a statement is correct. Even the backstories of the main characters revolve around proofs and perjuries. In the end, the hero abandons the love interest because he knows she is dishonest. This is a tough ending to sell to an audience, but it works, partly on the strength of the characters themselves, but mostly because the theme is so powerful. If the audience understands the point of the film, they know our hero can’t compromise anywhere. Associating with liars is just not an option after he has grown.
In fact, the hero’s own character growth is very simple; he just comes to realize what the theme of the film is, and in The Verdict, its simplicity is its strength. At the beginning of the film, our hero is a disreputable, opportunistic, pragmatic lawyer with no clients and a serious drinking problem (which is incidental to his character–the film doesn’t distract from the theme by adding a temperance sermon). His journey is the ongoing discovery that truth is important. His redemption comes when this truth comes out and sets him free. He also follows the want/need dichotomy that makes up solid cinema character; he wants to win a court case; he needs to tell the truth.
The strong theme infuses the entire film, from top to bottom, and makes the plot deeper and the characters more vibrant. What could have been a boring made-for-tv movie about a routine medical malpractice suit becomes a powerful morality tale with stakes far higher than a mere cash settlement. A film that could have been divided between multiple messages about alcoholism, medical responsibility, or judicial bribery remains laser-focused on a single theme that saturates all aspects of the film and makes it a more powerful whole. Good films are true to their themes.
Check out what just turned up in my mailbox the other day! It’s hard not to be excited about a book that tells you how to find cheap armaments, orchestrate helicopter gunship attacks, and blow up buildings and cars! The DV Rebel’s Guide is “an all-digital approach to making killer action movies on the cheap,” written by Stu Maschwitz. It’s such an expansive book that it’s difficult to classify, packing detailed descriptions of almost every production process in filmmaking into just over 300 pages (and no, those bullet holes don’t go all the way through).
Stu Maschwitz is a name you should know. Formerly an ILM effects artist, then co-founder of The Orphanage, and creator of Magic Bullet and Colorista, Stu is a master of post-production technique.
The first half of the book covers the basics of directing, storyboarding, how to make some of your own camera gear, lighting equipment types, and editing. It’s not incredibly in-depth when it comes to writing and logistical pre-production, but it’s very helpful stuff, and he also breaks down several large Hollywood movies to describe exactly how certain things are accomplished. Then he dives into effects basics and book really gets going.
The second half of the book is packed with post-production info ranging from cinema’s technical history to detailed how-tos of cutting-edge techniques. Everything from where to get guns to how to shoot guns shooting things is covered precisely, as well as digital stunts, bluescreen compositing, and crowd replication. However, its greatest strength is in describing how to clean up and color-correct your final footage into something that look more like Hollywood cinematography.
The digital grading tutorials revolve around onlining your film in After Effects, starting with cleaning the video and then grading it for maximum effect. This is what I’ve always done with my projects, and thanks to Stu, I’m now doing a better job. Advanced color theory is explained and demonstrated, and he shows how to build scene-specific palettes using DeGraeve’s image-based tools or the wellstyled.com color picker (personally, I prefer Adobe’s superb kuler system).
The book also includes a DVD, which contains several image control presets and scripts that will turn your copy of After Effects into a tool to rival any expensive dedicated color grading system. These plugins were written by Jeff Almasol and the author, and can de-artifact, optimize, relight, and grade your footage, as well as add gradients, diffusion, vignettes and other lens effects using After Effect’s native power. These alone are worth the price of the book.
The DVD also includes versions of Stu’s short film “The Last Birthday Card” in various stages of production, treated and untreated DV files from an edited chase scene in an After Effects project for you to dissect and then regrade yourself, and several squib clips you can add to your own films. There are also several neat After Effects tools for adding muzzle flashes, sniper scope effects, and other fun action movie staples to your film.
In short, this book is the perfect introduction for beginners wanting an introduction to all areas of modern filmmaking, but it is also a must-read for pros wanting to learn more about digital color space or advanced color correction, and the included tools and video clips make it a required purchase for anyone involved in film or video production. Buy it now.
Nino Giannotti has put up a great website on lighting for anyone involved in Electronic Field Productions (EFP) and Electronic News Gathering (ENG), or just wanting to learn more about gear and technique. He explains the principles behind video lighting for basic interviews and more complicated setups, like multiple camera shoots and exterior stand-ups.
He explains how to make backgrounds out of simple fabric and use filters and gels to control colors. It’s a great site for learning more about different kinds of lights and lighting tools. Check it out here.
Here’s a neat site with a collection of high-speed video clips. In addition to the usual water balloon and egg drops, Lucid Movement features some very extraordinary clips of things like balloons being popped underwater, or flint firestarters being filmed at 2000fps. This is a great resource for animators who want to see physical forces interact, or how certain chemical reactions happen, and it’s just plain interesting to watch tomatoes in a blender.
The owner of the site, Neil Nafus, also posts lots of information on the cameras he is using, and more interestingly, the special lighting setups that some of these subjects require. Also, you can purchase high-resolution footage of most of the clips, and there are several things that would make excellent backgrounds for motion graphics, like smoke or fire in super slow motion. You could probably also use things like these flames from an aerosol can for several special effects elements as well. My personal favorite is just simple water being blended.
A few weeks ago Kurtis Harris contacted me about Men O’ War. After discussing how the film was made, and the role that Lightwave had in its production, he asked if he could post an interview with me on the Newtek site. I feel very honored to have a profile posted there, and you can read it here. There some information mentioned there that I didn’t post about here, so it should be of interest to the animators among my readers. In other news, I’ve also posted a larger version of the video for download here (50mb xvid).
A year ago I posted a few brief thoughts on the Sundance Film Festival. Now, a year later, I still want to write an article on what makes a film “indie” or not. In some ways, it’s totally arbitrary (what makes a regularly-updated website a “blog?”), especially now that the “indie” label is being used (with some success) to promote films. Take for example Little Miss Sunshine, a winner at last year’s Sundance Festival, and Best Picture nominee at this year’s Oscars.
Sunshine had a reported $8 million budget, a cast of Hollywood A-listers that few studio films could muster, flavor-of-the-month directors, and a WGA screenwriter. It sounds like a studio picture, and it should, because it was green-lit, partially funded, and for much of its production owned by Focus Features, an LA-based distribution/production company that has made almost thirty Hollywood films in the last five years and released over seventy-five.
So, is Sunshine truly independent of the Hollywood machine? Is it independent of Hollywood’s ideals? It certainly fits the modern ideals previously displayed in the edgy-enough-to-be-indie but still establishment-made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Brokeback Mountain, also produced by Focus Features. Is “indie” perhaps a genre now, as opposed to a label for a film without Hollywood ties?
I was doing some half-hearted research on this disheartening subject when I found what is very nearly the article that I was planning to write. David Bordwell has written an excellent piece on the Sundance phenomenon and the indie plague, entitled Visionary Outlaw Mavericks on the Dark Edge, and it should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in moderm film.
Bordwell begins by referencing Time author Richard Corliss, who points out that the indie phenomenon, claiming to eschew cliche and bring fresh new content to the screen, has created a string of movies so predictable that that they are a genre in themselves. Bordwell has brilliantly named this genre Indie Guignol:
The central conceit of Indie Guignol is that to be creative in cinema you have to be dangerous. James Mottram’s book The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood is an informative overview of Indiewood, but too often it equates being a “maverick” and having a “vision” with an adolescent naughtiness… Producer Christine Vachon, who named her company Killer Films, likewise identifies creative energy with edginess.
And so, in an effort to create “dangerous” cinema, groups of people who think that shooting without a tripod is “artistic” began thinking that shock value is some kind of immoral imperative. In a forced effort to be anti-establishment warriors, the Indie Guignol supporters rebel against the “cliched happy ending,” the “formulaic three-act story,” and the “unrealistic moral hero” to churn out thousands of depressing, deliberately structureless movies filled with purposefully unlikable characters.
Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist. Long before the sort of recyclings that Corliss identifies, unconventional moviemaking turned out to have its own conventions–unfulfilling or risky sex, pedophilia, damaged self-images, chancy links among the characters. More surprisingly, the daring indie film often trades on the same clichés that haunt program pictures and prestige items… Dark visions these films may have, but the landscapes and populations they reveal are pretty familiar.
It’s a very insightful article, filled with things that I wish I’d said, but there is one point that it doesn’t fully make: the line between the Hollywood feature and the indie freak-show is blurring. As audiences leave the theatres for their bigscreen tvs, home computers, and video games, the Studios are taking drastic measures to get them back. Buying into the hype about rebellious, dangerous film, Hollywood’s players are taking an oft-copied page from Indie Guignol, and this years Oscar nominees are a good example of that.
So yes, I suppose that Little Miss Sunshine could now be considered an “indie” film, despite it’s many connections to the Hollywood establishment. If a film tries to demonstrate that cynicism is sophistication, that perversion is progress, and that free-thinking originality is proven by copying all the other identical free-thinking original indie films ever made, then yep, I guess it’s an indie, through and through.
In other news, all genuinely independent filmmakers that want to tell actual stories and make real movies outside of Hollywood need a new name for their endeavors.
Well, I’ve had a busy winter, which explains the lateness of this book review. Well over a month ago, Scott Kisner sent me a copy of his new book, and it’s only over the holidays that I’ve had a chance to sit down and digest it. As a regular reader of Scott’s excellent blog Cinematech, I’ve grown to appreciate his writing style and trust his journalistic integrity. All of his articles on the digital age of entertainment are the result of careful study and copious research.
And now, with years of experience under his belt and plenty of interviews and articles to his credit, he has now written the definitive book on Internet video: what it is, and what it can be. The Future of Web Video is a fantastic resource, filled with interviews, charts, diagrams, predictions, surveys, and practical analysis. This is an in-depth, must-read book for everyone wanting to produce or understand new media.
Web video is a tricky subject to report on, and its future seems almost impossible to predict, but Scott has covered the bases well. He has interviewed the owners of web video sites about revenue, examined the top viral hits, and collected a long list of web resources documenting the subject. There are also sections on movies and advertising, as well as examinations into new platforms and markets.
The only downside I see with this book is the fact that its subject industry is changing so rapidly. In fact, this is book is so timely that I’m afraid that by writing this review a month late, perhaps it has already been forgotten… Fortunately, The Future of Web Video is so clearly the ultimate work on this subject, it will be a long time before it reaches obsolescence.
It can be purchased here in both regular and e-book formats. While I am a confirmed bibliophile and firmly belive that real books should be printed on real paper, The Future of Web Video is so packed with links to websites, blogs, and various on-line services that the electronic version, with its embedded hyperlinks, could save a lot of typing.
The final touch to the project, which pulls everything together and does more to communicate the mood of the scene is the musical score. The music needs to match the scene, both visually and emotionally, and also fit in with the sound effects and dialog. Our score was (unfortunately) created without any real instruments whatsoever, and composed, performed, and mixed by three people on a single computer running Cubase.
Rather than recording the analog audio feed from our electric piano, the computer recorded the MIDI signals created by each keypress. This enabled us to go back into a performance and adjust each note’s position, length, velocity, and expression, or move them up and down across the scale, or change their tempo. This is particularly important for adjusting each track to better match the instrument that is playing it.
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Each of these performances sits in a track, and can also be manipulated on the timeline, as well as copied and pasted, extended, shortened, and affected by filters without destroying the MIDI data. At any time, any note can still be changed. We now have all the parts for the orchestra laid out and assigned, and it’s time to attach instrument sounds to them.
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The sound bank that we use is called the Garritan Personal Orchestra which contains audio samples of all types of instruments playing all of their respective notes. The software replaces our keyboard’s A# with a violin or piccolo’s A#, and adds several special controls to better simulate the individual characteristics of actual instruments.
The last step, after all the parts have been recorded and adjusted, is to mix all the tracks together. This requires special attention to volume, EQ, and stereo placement, but the finishing touch is to add just the right amount of reverb to the performances that they sound like they were recorded in an actual studio. The Garritan package includes an excellent ambiance plugin with superb control.
And here’s the final score, with the final visuals. This mix contains only the music, with no sound effects or dialog. Watch carefully how the music changes to fit the mood of the scenes, and how it matches the action.
Check out what just turned up in my mailbox the other day! It’s hard not to be excited about a book that tells you how to find cheap armaments, orchestrate helicopter gunship attacks, and blow up buildings and cars! 
