Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Hope for the best is not really something you can imagine any great director saying - when doing their pre-production. Proper planning is everything. You yourself have hoped for the best many times and had it go wrong on you.

Have you ever done a skills audit on yourself, Ryan?

Look at your competence in all these areas. Score those areas where you can do things with your eyes shut because it's second nature at the top, and at the bottom, those roles where you have do double check each and every decision you make, and where you simply don't know what to do next. This might show your strengths and weaknesses. In the UK where we're ultra sensitive, we now talk of strengths and areas for improvement - maybe that works better?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh maybe, but I am not quite sure what you mean by that. What do you mean talk strengths with areas of improvement? Talk about that with who?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

He’s saying that’s the terminology they use because of the particulars of UK culture. “Talk of” = “use these words”.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh okay. I read that a skills audit applies to identifying skills in an organization. But I am just one person, and not an organization, or what I am I missing?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

In the case of am individual, someone who knows you well and you can trust to be truthful with you. However, I suspect it may be something like this: https://www.ukessays.com/essays/engl...uage-essay.php

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Blimey Ryan! You're hard work sometimes. A skills audit can be applied to organisations and individuals, just a matching and evaluation of attributes. A way to assess your own sill level objectively.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh i didn't know how thise skills audits work. As far as skills go, how is my audio from the previous projects?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

We don't know - you only tell us about disasters. The entire point of a skills audit on yourself is so you analyse your own strengths and where you find them a bit lacking. On what we know from the posts, you struggle in every single area. This cannot be right. There MUST be some things you are really good and competent at - but you have forgotten them in the quest to sort out others. It's a self written tool to assess the state of development. I can have a big list of things I'm bad at, but its harder to quantify your strengths.

If you think back to the booming noise problem, we didn't believe you when you explained. We knew there was a solution but you had trouble finding it. We knew the real problem wasn't your mic, but your technique. We knew what you found impossible was just lack of technique.

You have issues with every discipline it seems - but above all, you're really weak at experimenting and you believe every bit of information given to you giving the same weight to a comment from somebody really skilled to somebody who has been own a course worse than the one you took. "I've been told" that you repeat endlessly should really be "I've been told by the guy who directed Lawrence of Arabia that ...." then their advice has worth - but you accept ANY advice as good reliable and robust advice. The idiot that got you into the wilderness with a religious guy and didn't do it properly, for example. Why every take advice from people who are clueless?

Perhaps your skills audit will reveal positive areas you haven't considered.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh okay, thanks, I'll do the audit then.

The person who wanted me to do the wilderness video was not a filmmaker though, or didn't have any filmmaking experience, so I never took any advice as reliable from her.

I would say that my vision seems to look much better on paper, in script and in storyboards, compared to the later product. So something goes wrong, during production, but it's different each time. So maybe my talent is having a good pre-product, and I need to figure out how to not make it go wrong during the process after.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

I agree with Paul. To be honest it’s pretty painful and exhausting listening to your indie filming making tribulations. You don’t seem well suited for it. It’s great to take chances and learn new things but you seem to take things too far, getting in over your head, no money, lack of proper equipment, inexperienced, working with others who also don’t know what they are doing. From our view point sounds like a nightmare. You need to find out what you’re good at and focus on that. In my eyes a director needs to be able to lead and communicate with the crew and actors, and problem solve. Neither of those are your strengths.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Well I will take the audit then. I still want to get into directing as it's the area I enjoy the most. I will try to get better at it, and find out what my skills are and try to apply those. I don't mean to be exhausting, just like taking in as many variables as possible, and I am thankful for all the advice and input.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

I'll refer back to the flying a plane analogy.

So you have written a plan as to how much fuel you need, where you intend to go and how long it will take you. You have filed a flight plan, checked the weather, and written down the appropriate ground and air radio frequencies. You have been told that the V1 speed is 80knots and V2 90 knots. You have also been told your take off flap settings, engine revs, climb rate etc and you have written it all down and drawn diagrams. You have been told that moving the yolk or the stick to the left or right will bank the plane to that way and that you may need to apply rudder in the same direction to prevent slip. You have also been told to pull back to climb and push forward to descend, so you are ready for takeoff. However as soon as you start rolling, things begin to go wrong because no matter how much you have written down, you have no experience to get the feel of the plane or be able to judge crosswind corrections, turbulence and a myriad other things. It's no good asking for advice on how much rudder to input or how far to move the ailerons to counteract a wing dipping. You have to experience these things multiple times to gain judgement and perception.

Your film making is exactly the same, you can write infinite notes and ask unlimited questions, but you will never learn anything unless you put things into practice and find out for yourself what works and what doesn't. Without doing that, you are doomed to failure. You can't start at the top of the mountain, you have to climb it first.

Roger

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

It’s hard to believe you’re just realizing this. Executing a plan and dealing with all the issues you couldn’t anticipate is harder than the plan. I could hand you any storyboard/script from an Oscar winning movie and ask you recreate it. Do you think you could even reproduce any semblance of it’s greatness?

One thing you can count on is every movie, scene, location will be different and will pose unique challenges. Obviously the more experience you have, better prepared you’ll be at handling reoccurring issues.

Like Roger and others have said there is no way to talk you through the process.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

I know people compare making a film to fighting a battle (that's a lot worse), but one saying seems to hold for both;" No battle plan survives contact with the enemy"

https://blog.seannewmanmaroni.com/no...y-966df69b24b9

You can plan for things, but something always seems comes from left field that you need to react to and make the best of, especially if you're being ambitious with the film you're making.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh, okay, thanks.

One filmmaker I talked to said I should stop trying to do these shots I have seen in other movies and just come up with a style all my own, cause it will probably have more context, than trying to find contextual shots from other movies.

However, I'm afraid that if I went with a style all my own, then it would be like re-inventing the wheel maybe. Jean-Luc Godard was able to get people to accept a new style in the 60s, but would I be able to do that and people would accept it, or could it very well fail, and I should stick to filmmaking rules and guidelines that have been established before, to remain more safe?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

In suspect you need to grab hold of this friend as he's given you for the first time sensible advice.your need for rules and framework is stifling your creativity. You are using the rules, joining them together and finding conflict. Quite normal. You are trying to paint by numbers. Remember those? You have a rigid format to follow. Each box with a number that denotes the colour you MUST put in it, and setting rigid edges between them. On e other hand you could choose the Bob Ross method. Which gives a better result? Why not try changing your collection of rules into a set of gentle guidelines?

It's so clear you are not a natural filmmaker. You don't have, or reject gut reactions. You don't have vision. You also lack technical skills so are always on the back foot. You've clearly done considerable research. Again quoting people I have to Google. I was alive in the 60s, and my film making input from that time was just exposure to movies. There's no need to create a style of your own. That might come later, but what you need to do now is just make some movies and stop trying so hard. Maybe you're going too fast. All these people who are keen amateurs who don't let you do your thing. Go smaller and shorter and downsize to a few people who will follow your direction, and you be the director and cameraman and start getting results, rather than everything falling down around you because they didn't understand your storyboards, or questioning you. Stop claiming the title, but letting other people size control. Stop endless respect and incidental stuff. Generate an idea and go and do it. Stop asking all these questions over and over again, you're not benefiting at all from what I read, just getting more and more confused. We can see your thought processes violently flipping from left to right but not moving forwards.

Surely your goal is to tell a good story. You seem to be expert in watching and remembering scene from movies. Don't take them as excellent in entirety and recreate them badly, do your own thing.

You need to perhaps pick a few critical features from good movies. Good believeable acting, camera movements that are solid and stable, decent lighting and decent sound. So far this is still a problem. Forget all the subtle stuff, practice with these 4 critical elements. Camera types, video formats, clever features and other technical things come second when you get the basic right.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

It really comes few to a few basic things, get good performances from your actors, have the camera in the right place to catch the key elements of their performance and have them doing it in a location that is part of of their world.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh okay, thanks. And that's the thing I was told before that if I could get better actors, that good acting will trump over everything else, and that other things will be forgiven or even work better, if the acting was better, if that's true.

I feel I have visions, it's just later, they turn out to be incorrect though, but they are still there I would say.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

The audience should be more aware of what the actors are doing than your cuts.

You never get everything you want, even with huge budgets.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Okay thanks, from now I can try to edit for smoothness of the cut, more than performance, if that is better.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Cutting for performance usually refers to camera flaws, such as slightly soft shots, camera moves not quite perfect etc, but using a performance that's much better than shots that are perfect from a camera point of view. It doesn't refer to the editing, which should be of the same standard as with the camera perfect shots.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh okay, but are the camera shots more important than the acting if you had to pick between the two usually?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

You usually go for takes that have both good performances and are technically good. Don't stop doing a shot because you've got good enough performance and the camera people are unhappy, the choice for the performance take will come during the editing because there's something extra about it

The other takes are usable, but there's more to the performance in this take, but say there's a slight flaw in say the focus e,g it's not quite on the eyes, which may mean the camera people aren't happy, although not so objectionable that the average member of the audience is going to call it out of focus.

There are no rules, you may have to reshoot if it's not working for either reason.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

And I'll complicate it even further...

In editing (watch shows or movies to see what I mean, plenty have "mistakes" in the final edit), you will have to learn to judge, and correctly, whether a good performance take outweighs the technical flaws. Not just focus, continuity errors, etc. The ultimate questions are these...is the performance good enough to outweigh technical flaws, compared to the technically better takes with performances that are lacking? And secondly, will the audience/average person catch the technical flaw?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

A good case was today on British National News - the BBC! An interview with Prince Harry doing good deeds in Africa. Remember, Harry is well thought of here, and despite tabloid attempts to make him look bad, the public think he does a good job generally. The cameraman who shot the interview made a great job of getting the background really sharp, but somehow missed the fact that Harry's face and nose were blurred. Probably either a camera fault or I suppose incompetence? However - the content and what he said were important and I've not seen one complaint on social media. The UK professional cameraman's forums are of course very miffed, but the viewers seem not to have noticed. This is where real faults can be excused because it really is the story that does the work. In this case, the words did it - sharp pictures without the words in this case would have been ruination.

I always like to look at the edit and try to imagine what could be cut without spoiling the narrative. I'm a heavy Cubase user, and audio wise, I colour code my projects - looking at the screen, clips go from green to red, so I can see which takes are better - I wish we could dob this in Premiere - it would help me to keep quality up.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh okay thanks. Well as far as camera shake goes during the gimbal moves, this is the first time it was mentioned on here, and no one else noticed it. I asked the viewers that watched it before and they said they only notice the shake when i specifically point it out, and never noticed before, especially since you see hand held in so many movies today in comparison.

So if the average person is not noticing the shake, should I not bother to adjust the shots then?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Because professionals strive for excellence in everything we do. The worst kind of professional submits poorer work that they are capable of just because the audience are not versed in professional production. Yesterday I had a panic job to repair a 5 minute piece of classical piano recording where after finishing it two months ago, the pianist found he had played an Ab instead of an A, just once, and none of us noticed it. However, once he found it, it HAD to be fixed. If your movie was aimed at illitate people would you happily use bad grammar? Would it matter if the captions were spelled incorrectly? To them, may not one jot, but it's a matter of pride to fix things that are fixable. I find the notion of knowing there are errors and NOT fixing them unacceptable. In the past, for deadline reasons I have had to accept it, and every single time I see it, I cringe. The camera work I mentioned on Prince Harry - I'm not sure I'd want my name as cameraman, because it's out there for ever.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Only accept camera shake if it's appropriate to the action within the scene, because camera shake is then part of telling the story. There are reasons why some productions use hand held shots for certain scenes, while in other scenes a camera dolly or high end stabilizing system is used in the same film. Kubrick makes full use of this.

It becomes more noticeable on a large screen, against a small screen, sometimes to the point of inducing sickness.

As the filmmaker, you should be more aware than the average person.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Okay thanks. For the next one I will try to get a better gimbal operator then, if that's best.

As for this one, I don't really feel like spending the money on sending it into a lot of festivals, but the person who hosted it and wrote it is really excited and wants to go in on it half and half with me. I kind of feel like telling him that if he wants to send it in, he can, but I am not interested in spending much of my money on the festivals, cause I feel that money could be used on future projects of mine.

Would that come off as a bad impression of I told him that, or am I denying myself exposure by not sending it into many?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Exposure never paid a bill! If he's willing to invest, take his money.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Enter it as an early bird entry to some festivals, local ones are good starting points.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Paul R Johnson said:
"I'm a heavy Cubase user, and audio wise, I colour code my projects - looking at the screen, clips go from green to red, so I can see which takes are better - I wish we could dob this in Premiere - it would help me to keep quality up."

I gather you can in Premiere: Google for "Flags, Markers & Clip Colors" and you may find some information on this. Someone mentioned this to me.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Brian - if you're right I will kick myself silly! I bet you are!

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

I can't guarantee the accuracy, since I'm just passing it along.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Dumb, plain Dumb! Highlight the clip, right click, select label, and pick a colour! This would have helped me so many times ............. Stupid I didn't even think to look properly.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Lots of things are hidden away in programs, they just need digging out.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh why early bird, is there an advantage to that?

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

An early bird entry is cheaper.

Re: Would festivals have a problem with this type of short film?
 

Oh right, that makes sense, thanks.

Are there any festivals that would be more open to my this kind of short film, since it's more of a video essay? I was told by one person, that Europe is more open to that, since they are more political and I should market it there more, and they are also accepting of movies in English if I do, if that's true?