The End...

Well, after many sleepless nights, stressful mornings, and seemingly endless nights of shooting and production, it's with great excitement I welcome the end of the semester.  My team and I have worked tirelessly for months on our film Black Butterfly, and I cannot wait to see all of our hard work pay off.

I knew Fiction Field was going to be a challenge, but it was more than just many hours of hard work on a school project.  This course pushed me far outside my comfort zone, placing me in positions of authority I wasn't quite sure I could handle at first.  Arturo's expectations seemed impossible at times, and I didn't want to disappoint.  Despite my shaken confidence, my group remained supportive and encouraging throughout the production.  Every one of us had something valuable to contribute every shoot.  The overall open-minded atmosphere among us allowed our ideas to flourish fully and received critique positively.

Black Butterfly is more than a final project to us; we gave our all every day, constantly striving to improve and refine the film.  I appreciate the honest feedback from my fellow peers and classmates, as well as from Arturo.  Criticism is difficult to give and receive, and I am grateful to have honest peers with my best interest at heart.  While we remained competitive with each other, we didn't let that taint our relationships.  Many friendships were formed during the semester, and everyone's willingness to help others was truly admirable.

Thank you to everyone and anyone who assisted in the creation of Black Butterfly.  Our cast and crew sacrificed many hours of their time to help us make something great.  Their dedication never ceased to amaze me, and didn't go unnoticed among my teammates. We never would've been able to have such a wonderful experience without the generous donations of friends, family, and others who believed in our innovations.  Thank you to everyone who provided honest, genuine feedback in hopes of our improvement.  Lastly, a huge thank you to Arturo and my teammates, Meghan, Patricia, Kelly, Paul, Mike, and Dave.  As cliche as it may sound, you have each taught me something valuable.  Thank you for challenging me to better myself each shoot, and I hope you all had a great of an experience as I did. You're all so talented, and it was truly an honor to have worked with each of you!

Scandal

     Scandal is in its third season on ABC, but I only started watching this show this week. I have seen friends post on social media about the show, particularly about the main character, Olivia Pope, and their posts and the commercials I've seem have grabbed my interest.
     I can't decide if it's the characters, the quick, witty dialogue, or the editing that draws me into the show most. The characters each have very intriguing personalities, and when they come together it makes for a very interesting character dynamic. Their relationships can be both professional and personal at the same time, and you're drawn into both stories without missing a beat of either one. The dialogue can be incredibly quick and witty, which is a characteristic I appreciate in television and film. I love the fast pace. It keeps my attention the whole way through.
     The types of shots and editing also fascinate be because editing is what interests me most about this field of work. There are a lot of really quick cuts and really mind-blowing shots. The directors, cinematographers, and editors get very creative with how they show you things, rather than just blatantly showing you the obvious. Instead of getting a shot of a security camera to let you know that a character is being watched, they show you a shot through the security camera. When a character is looking at something on a computer screen, the shot appears to be taken from behind or inside the computer, showing you what's on the screen as well as the character's face. This is not only a fascinating method, but it also allows you to see the character's reaction to what they're seeing on the screen.
     In just one episode, the show has grabbed by interest and made me want to watch more. Shonda Rhimes has definitely created a successful show. I cannot wait to see more.

Purple Cobra's Project

Yesterday we had our first day of shooting for our project.  We got together our actors and equipment and headed over to the most disgusting apartment I've ever been to.  I think our shoot went really well.  Craig Mike and I worked very well to get all of the shots we needed in order to tell our story.  Of course the scenes in the apartment are not where the meat of the story lies, but it is still an important way to open and close our film.  Obviously you will run into problems every time you go on a shoot, especially in a location as messy as this one.  We were able to overcome difficult lighting, audio and blocking challenges to create a solid final product for the interior scenes.  After shooting my ICTV show all semester in a Studio, it was a real reminder to what shooting on location in the filed is like and how difficult it is to have a very small space to work with.  It also was a nice reminder of how difficult it is lighting wise, where in the studio all of my lights are over head and interchangeable.   The actors took direction well and were extremely solid on their lines.  I was impressed with the amount we were able to get done in the little time crunch and limited crew.  We were very polite and respectful to the people in the apartment.  It will forever be the most disgusting place I've shot a film at. (I hope.)

Project Update

Finally finishing the script is a very tedious job.  I was really nervous to send it to my team members even though I had spent a good amount of time working on it.  I had to make it seem realistic and actually flow like a story, all while maintaining the integrity of the actual news story the script is based off of.  One thing that I think students and new script writers often have a difficult time writing, is using real voices that make their characters sound like humans.  For example people in real life don't talk with perfect English or have the correct grammar all of the time.   It was my job as a script writer to capture the elements of how I think these characters and how these people talked.  Watching a video of the two main characters was a good indicator of how they can actually talk.  I am proud of my script and my team members were very helpful with helping me edit, and obviously creating the story since we all did that together.  I hope the product is solid.

That's a Wrap

Despite all the finals-related stress, it was a great experience to see the final project come together. The project was a lot of fun for me as I was able to develop my editing skills and work with new people; everyone was so passionate and wanted to make sure Dog House both looked and sounded great; Erica and Zack painstakingly color corrected each scene in After Effects while Alex made original music for the project. Their drive inspired me to do my best and I couldn't be happier with the end result.The lack of sleep we have is completely worthwhile, as I feel we've made something we can all be proud of.

Band Greeks also wrapped earlier this week, and while I'm sad to see the show end, it was an excellent learning experience. We'll be entering post-production soon, and the episodes will air this coming Spring on ICTV.

This semester has been a blast, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results of everyone's hard work tomorrow at the Fiction Field Screening. Congratulations everyone, That's a wrap!

Writing from Experience: True Fiction

This past year I have been working on many scripts and screenplays and I have begun to notice that by far my best works have been those based off of true events or personal experiences.  When I look at my life as a whole I think to myself, what a bland and average story I have.  I have never been shipwrecked, I've never had any superpowers, I've never even been in a gun fight or in a Jackie Chan style brawl.  However, in my opinion, I have found that you can tell the best stories from the details only you have.  My life has had ups-and-downs, as everyone has had, but the ups-and-downs I've had are unique to me.  My experience is my own and no one else's…that is unless I share it with them.

I recently become a finalist for a film award after submitting a script about a man struggling with addiction.  The story of a man coping with a drug addiction and the effects it has on his family is not a "new" story or ground-breaking idea, however it is the first hand detail through my own perspective and my own re-telling that gives the story its strength.

I feel if I gave the outline of one of my films to anyone they would see nothing special about the idea, but if you give them a script and they see a real conversation that was had, they hear your character's voice, accent, and inflection as you heard it.  They can see the details of a room you stood in.  They can share your experience.  To write a "fiction film" is not always necessarily about making a work of fiction; through my experience to write the best "fiction" films is to take a nonfiction story (or the guise of nonfiction) and present it to the audience so they may share in a personal story they could have never experienced over wise.

As People, Are We Good or Bad?

This question has been playing in my mind a lot over the past year.  Everyday, I see bad things on the news, people doing bad things to each other, doing bad things to the earth, the earth doing bad things to people, and overall society as a whole being mean spirited.  It leaves me wondering at times, are there really any "good" people on this earth; and what do we really consider good?  Usually it's our own messed up version of good.  Diluted by our own experiences and angles as well as our upbringings.  And then sometimes, there are people who are genuinely nice spirited, but do something horrible like sell, make, or do drugs, have cheated on there partner, have stolen things, or even hurt other people.  I'm sure at this point your wondering, how does this even remotely relate to filmmaking. 

One of the things that got me thinking about this subject was the show Breaking Bad.  Not a single character on the show is clean.  Walter is (in the beginning) a nice guy, a teacher, but has the unfortunate luck of getting cancer and because of this decides to make meth so he can make money to give to his family.  Then you have Hank who is a police officer and again, a generally nice guy.  Yet Hank makes poor decisions that go against what society and the law deem acceptable even though most people fully back him for what he does.  Then you have Jessie who does drugs, sells drugs, is a womanizer, steals, has killed people, yet has a personality that you can't help but love.  I could go through every single character and do the same thing.  They all share the same bond, the all have good and bad in them.

Being a realist, I find it hard to side with people being good or bad, one or the other.  I hate when you see a T.V. show and you can tell who the "bad guy" is and you can tell who the "good guy" is.  I hate this thinking because it is not real.  Good and bad in my opinion is a sense of perspective.  What I might consider good maybe horribly bad to someone but what I might consider bad, someone might treat that as a normal everyday thing.  While I do say this I do thing that people are good, and are born with the ability to do good, but the problem is society.  Society comes along and tells us what is good and what is bad.  It gives us this rigid framework that were suppose to fit our own beliefs into and deal with what society says is and isn't okay.

I don't bring this up to yell at the world over the internet, or to tell you you're all bad or good people.  I mainly bring this up because we start shooting our projects in the next few weeks and will start developing characters and stories.  I think it is always good to keep in mind this theme for when you shoot.  Shows like Breaking Bad that create characters that are so much more than one dimensional succeed.  They succeed because subconsciously, we all can relate to theses characters and there struggles to be good in a bad world.  To understand that sometimes what the world considers good, is not good, and sometimes what the world considers not good, can be good.  

Hopefully we all can create these types of characters so our stories can be told realistically and with purpose.  So our audiences can truly feel for our characters as if they are real people.  None of us are pure, none of us are wholly good.  We're all trying to grasp that fact and find other people that can prove that point.  We all have good, we all have bad.  Everyone wants to find something that they can relate to and our stories can provide that missing link.

Scriptwriting?

Last night, I went to bed around 9 PM.

Today, I woke up at approximately 3 PM.

18 hours of sleep, and I think I'm finally starting to feel healthy again.

I'd like to thank the makers of NyQuil for this; you simultaneously helped me feel better and shot any hopes I had of catching up on work today in the face, and that's not an easy thing to do.

I should know better than to take the stuff the night before I need to get things done by this point in life, but for the relief it provided short term, I can't complain much.  Nevertheless, the sleep it knocked me into actually brought a fuzzy dream that I think might've just influenced my path in TVR, and is taking me in the direction of a scriptwriting minor.  At first, I thought it was absurd; so I dreamed that I wrote a really amazing script and loved it, big deal.  It isn't like it was a prophetic vision of lottery numbers or anything (I wish), right? 

That was my mindset, until I realized I needed to sit down and write a script for a class and would have no other time during the weekend to do it.  So, I scrawled out a rough draft, and, what do you know, it wasn't half bad.  And...I enjoyed writing it?!  Hm.  Interesting.

I shared it with another member of my class for some feedback since I'd missed the day of the assignment in my class, and he really liked it.  He mentioned several points that I could fix up or work on, but was otherwise quite impressed at my "shitty first draft" (shout out to the Developing Story Narratives class and that reading, it's good to know everyone has a rough time in the beginning).

Now, as I'm brushing it up and still enjoying doing it, I'm considering adopting a scriptwriting minor as of next semester.  I used to like doing creative writing back in high school, even submitting to and being the editor in chief of our literary magazine for two years.  I've always thought that within TVR I wanted to go towards things like field production or doing animation, but I think another avenue just opened up.  This is definitely something I'm considering pursuing, because it's never going to hurt to be a bit more well-rounded in the field, and I could someday benefit hugely from knowing both how to produce and edit in the field or a studio as well as how to write for TV.

I'm curious if being in Fiction Field will impact my desire to do scriptwriting at all.  I hope that there are opportunities within this course to create some sort of epic script and storyline, because it'd be good to test the waters before diving in head-first to another commitment in Park.  Also, I think I'd want to sharpen up my writing academically, because it just took me three tries to spell "commitment" correctly.

I guess you've got to start somewhere.

Live Television

When I was in high school, starting my sophomore year, I took a communications course for three years. Because of this course I got involved in our morning news group, where I started off as an anchor and some days a camera man. I used to like being on the television every morning, except for the part where I had to watch myself. My junior year I got more involved in the behind the scenes stuff, where I started doing the switchboard and putting up graphics. I quickly found that I was better and enjoyed this job a lot more than being an anchor. During my senior year I began taking the teacher's job  for the morning announcements and directed it and did some field work for it. In high school I thought I would always be a live television person because I was really good at it. We went to a few television stations in my area also, places like Fox and CBS. As much as I don't care for Fox news, they have a really nice studio and nice people working there. I was really amazed by all of the cameras they had, how they did the weather, and how some of them dressed. The weatherman for example wore his nice button up shirt and tie, but he also wore shorts since no one could see his pants. Another cool thing that I learned this summer that I wish I had known back then was that the director for the CBS station is an Ithaca graduate.
With all of that said, I don't like live studio work anymore. I took an introduction to live studio course last year and I felt way too stressed. I prefer field work more because you can mess up and you can easily just re-tape it. I have also been editing with all kinds of software since sophomore year of high school.

"Making films is solving problems"

I really have no idea what to think coming into this class; sure, I've spent my time in Park's multitude of introductory level classes and found a love for field production, but this is something entirely new.  Now that I have a little of a background in the area, it's expected that I also possess some basic level of knowledge about all stages of the field.  Some things are fuzzy from last year (attending class on painkillers for a contusion and sprain in your knee doesn't really help you focus), but it is with absolute certainty that I can say that I enjoy what I do.  However, scheduling Fiction Field 1 into my semester for Fall 2012 was a bit anxiety-inducing.  Not only do I doubt my own ability, but what's to say that I won't have a terrible class, limited skills, or an awful professor?  What will I do then?

Fortunately, I didn't have to give that much thought once I was into the first class.  Almost immediately, I felt comfortable in the lab with the group around me, and Arturo's words caught my attention from the start.  I was particularly drawn to one statement, which I went to great lengths to remember: "Making films is solving problems."  Now, there's something I could latch onto and think deeply about.  This quote really hit home for me, because it seemed so incredibly relevant to my life and what I'd like to do with my future.  It is my greatest dream to somehow work within the communications industry to bring about change for the better, or at the very least bring notice to overlooked yet important ideas.  I've had a passion for filmmaking and editing for several years now, only to be enhanced within Park's walls, and to hear words that so profoundly state what I want to dedicate my life to is perhaps the most reassuring thing I've had said to me all week.

I'm no longer worried about this initial leap into a new level of work and intelligence; as a matter of fact, I'm quite looking forward to it.  I want to have my skills and thoughts challenged and provoked by new lessons, despite knowing that I will inevitably make mistakes and get down on myself for slips in my work.  Hopefully, by the end of the semester, I can look back and say that I've made progress on my journey to making films that solve problems in the world.  As long as I can do that, and be happy with said progress, I think that Fiction Field 1 is going to be one hell of an awesome class.

Here is to the future!

Looking at that blank screen in the back I hope you feel compelled to create great work to make this world a better place! It was a pleasure to have you in class and I owe you donuts big time:-)

Ideas for Fiction Field II

- A gang of teens tries to rob a bank to get cash for Spring Break. They inadvertently set fire to the building and all but one is killed. (This is actually good. Dammit. I was going for spoofable ideas here.)

- Oh, here's one: Sex romp featuring a vampire and a nerdy kid in high school. Have corny name such as "Love At First Bite" or "Blood Lust" or "Twi-Boobs."

- A few hipster kids frolic in the forest, smoke a hookah, and talk about obscure bands. The climax of the film is when one of the girl characters doesn't know who Band of Horses is.

- Mimi, a young stripper, decides to turn her set one night into a song and dance. She is fired, but discovered by a talent agent who is visiting. They fall in love and she becomes successful, but not without opposition from Betty, a veteran actress who sees her as nothing more than "filth."

- A robot spends two hours being sexually frustrated and humping things at a gas station.

- A weird kid creates a robot girl for his pleasure. She ends up killing him and going out with the school jock. Moral of the story: Creepy kids don't win. Ever.

- White privileged people feel bad about destroying an indigenous world. Everyone's also blue. And -- oh yeah -- we rip something straight out of TV Tropes. "Unobtainium?" It's been almost three years and I will still not forgive James Cameron for that.

Fiction I in the bag!

I'm pretty much done with my project, and honestly I don't think it's going to get any better than this. I mean, when I'm taking subpar footage from the Internet and making it into something even more subpar, I can't worry about being HD or having a coherent story or Bananas in Pajamas or what have you. You're getting a trailer for a fake movie festival, and it is what it is. Give us all an A- and have a nice summer.

Look, I get that our stuff is bad. I get that every film has mistakes. There's horrible acting, horrible framing, horrible continuity errors, horrible everything. But film isn't some kind of crystal clean art form any more. It's a business. We're catering toward an audience of viewers, many of whom don't even know what a wide shot is. The framing should be good -- it doesn't have to be perfect -- but it should be good. You want people to have a good time with your movie at the end of the day. You want people to feel like the movie had an impact.

I saw several films at the Doorknobs that had definite problems. However, I enjoyed them nonetheless because there was clear effort into all of them. The stories were good, the acting was... well, I mean, we're not all theatre kids... but they conveyed some kind of message. Communication of a story. That's what happened. Remember, we're in the Park School of Communications, not the Park School of Let's-Nitpick-Every-Single-Thing-In-A-Film.

Anyway, now that my lovely rant is over, I need an idea for my Fiction II film next semester. Who's taking it with me, and who would be up for filming somewhere out of Ithaca? Say, Pennsylvania? No, wait; Montana. Let's go to Montana. Yeahhhh.

See y'all finals week,

Will

Its Monday Already...whoa

Lots of shooting over the weekend for GDK. Business school pt. I on Friday evening; green screen studio and parking garage on Saturday (plus relay for life); business school pt. II Sunday morning. Plenty of footage to look through, already started editing some.

Can you win an Oscar?

Oscar night was sort of a letdown for me. The hosts being probably the weakest since, well, The Oscars. Showing how Bob Hope hosted the early shows only emphasized the huge talent gap.

However, the highlight of the evening for me was Luke Matheny, the Brooklyn based filmmaker, writer and actor whose “God of Love” won the 2011 Academy Award in the Best-Live Action Short category.

The short film was Matheny’s thesis at NYU’s graduate film program. It had previously won the gold medal at the 2010 Student Academy Awards, a special jury recognition at Aspen ShortsFest and first prize and the King Award for Screenwriting at the NYU First Run Film Festival.

He is of course not new to the festival circuit. His previous short film "Earano" -- a hilarious take on Cyrano de Bergerac's love exploits, won the King Award for Screenwriting at the NYU First Run Festival, an honorable mention at the Angelus Student Film Festival, and Best Student Short at the Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City, Nevada.

So, can you win an Oscar? Yes, you can. You just need to walk the walk...

Here is "Earano" in two parts:

Community

One of my favorite shows on television right now is definitely Community, which airs on NBC on Thursday nights, at 8pm. Having gone to community college for two years before transferring to IC, I can definitely say you meet some characters, but nothing compares to the professors and students who attend Greendale Community College. When lawyer Jeff Winger, played by the amazing Joel McHale, finds out his law degree is invalid he has no choice but to go back to school. During his first day at Greendale Jeff poses as a tutor and starts a study group with members from his Spanish class. From this point forward hilarity ensues as Jeff, Abed, Britta, Annie, Shirley and Pierce work toward their degrees while growing closer along the way. Although this show follows a storyline and most of the episodes build on from the last, many of the filler episodes borrow themes from iconic films. For example, the Halloween episode this season was filled with zombies, while the most recent episode revolved around an intense game of Dungeons and Dragons featuring music very similar to Lord of the Rings. I find this show intriguing because it demonstrates how film and television are not completely different. The storylines that made great films such as Goodfellas so unique, can be re-interpreted and used on TV. It just takes creativity and clever scriptwriting.