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Car Turns on a Dime
First snow of the year, although it will melt tomorrow.
Teleconferencing with Schneider on Sunday to start work on the next film, possibly a found-footage piece. Took some snaps for a humorous photo series about gaze and (clothed) body image that will probably stay private for quite some time.
Schneider hasn't pitched his film concept yet, so I'm not sure what direction it's going to take. (Hayseeds is something he pitched to me and I then developed and scripted, which is also something we've done in a smaller way on some shorts that attracted interested but didn't wind up getting produced. It's a style of collaboration I find comes very naturally to us.) All I have to go on at this point is "found footage pitch."
For me, the most successful found footage films are The Blair Witch Project (fiction) and Capturing the Friedmans (nonfiction). Part of what works for me in both films is that the people or characters holding the camera are filmmakers, people who are interested in image and committed to getting footage. In, for instance, Cloverfield, I find the image quality very distracting - here is someone who is not a cameraman, with a nonprofessional rig, who nevertheless beautifully composes shots and keeps the camera steady while running away from things which startle him. I find I can't suspend disbelief; the world is not plausible.
However, I feel pushed away from documentary or mock documentary, probably for the same reason JJ Abrams was when making Cloverfield - it's done and done and done. Everyone's kid has made a fake documentary or fake reality show and put it on YouTube. Some of them are very good - I love the fake news of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, Christopher Guest is a category unto himself, and I wish I Am Not Infected was still updating. And even the worst ones aren't as bad as bad goof-off teenage movies without that structure. But if you walk into any 24-hour video race, 3/4 are going to be fake docs or live TV spoofs. It's safe. It's expected. It's working with a net; you're protected from hitting the ground, but you're limited - you have to keep yourself over that net. It might as well be a standup routine of "men are like this, but women are like this." It's not for me.
Another alternative is your classic "the killer likes snuff films and documents his crime" setup, which does have connection to the real world, and which is upsetting. (Just look at the kill photos some American soldiers have taken in Afganistan, or the recent video that surfaced in Libya documenting the attempted sodomization of a captured Gaddafi.) Funny Games is the fiction pinnacle of this, but the technique is used in parts of Saw, The Cell, and dozens of other films.
I don't like to watch that, though. I don't like the camera as predator. I wouldn't enjoy making that film, any more than I ever want to direct a rape scene. I think it's hard to say with certainty that you're drawing attention to a particular type of vicimization rather than participating in it. I think I owe something better to my audience and to my actors than "the world is controlled by violent sick people."
There's probably still room to be explored with security camera video, particularly if one allows a lot of action to take place outside of the range of the cameras, badly framed or audio only. The best use of this is still the early Resident Evil video games. (The movies dropped the ball when it came to using this technique.) And there's the rise of cameraphone citizen journalist, which could provide some nice montages, and which also really opens itself up for horror comedy - scary event happens and everybody pulls out phones and gets in everybody else's shot.
Oddly enough, it's probably worth looking again at "Aperture" - some of the techniques we used could slot into a found footage film in a compelling way, although altered to such an extent that I imagine few people could tell that's what I was drawing on. And it might be worth giving a re-read to House of Leaves.
Teleconferencing with Schneider on Sunday to start work on the next film, possibly a found-footage piece. Took some snaps for a humorous photo series about gaze and (clothed) body image that will probably stay private for quite some time.
Schneider hasn't pitched his film concept yet, so I'm not sure what direction it's going to take. (Hayseeds is something he pitched to me and I then developed and scripted, which is also something we've done in a smaller way on some shorts that attracted interested but didn't wind up getting produced. It's a style of collaboration I find comes very naturally to us.) All I have to go on at this point is "found footage pitch."
For me, the most successful found footage films are The Blair Witch Project (fiction) and Capturing the Friedmans (nonfiction). Part of what works for me in both films is that the people or characters holding the camera are filmmakers, people who are interested in image and committed to getting footage. In, for instance, Cloverfield, I find the image quality very distracting - here is someone who is not a cameraman, with a nonprofessional rig, who nevertheless beautifully composes shots and keeps the camera steady while running away from things which startle him. I find I can't suspend disbelief; the world is not plausible.
However, I feel pushed away from documentary or mock documentary, probably for the same reason JJ Abrams was when making Cloverfield - it's done and done and done. Everyone's kid has made a fake documentary or fake reality show and put it on YouTube. Some of them are very good - I love the fake news of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, Christopher Guest is a category unto himself, and I wish I Am Not Infected was still updating. And even the worst ones aren't as bad as bad goof-off teenage movies without that structure. But if you walk into any 24-hour video race, 3/4 are going to be fake docs or live TV spoofs. It's safe. It's expected. It's working with a net; you're protected from hitting the ground, but you're limited - you have to keep yourself over that net. It might as well be a standup routine of "men are like this, but women are like this." It's not for me.
Another alternative is your classic "the killer likes snuff films and documents his crime" setup, which does have connection to the real world, and which is upsetting. (Just look at the kill photos some American soldiers have taken in Afganistan, or the recent video that surfaced in Libya documenting the attempted sodomization of a captured Gaddafi.) Funny Games is the fiction pinnacle of this, but the technique is used in parts of Saw, The Cell, and dozens of other films.
I don't like to watch that, though. I don't like the camera as predator. I wouldn't enjoy making that film, any more than I ever want to direct a rape scene. I think it's hard to say with certainty that you're drawing attention to a particular type of vicimization rather than participating in it. I think I owe something better to my audience and to my actors than "the world is controlled by violent sick people."
There's probably still room to be explored with security camera video, particularly if one allows a lot of action to take place outside of the range of the cameras, badly framed or audio only. The best use of this is still the early Resident Evil video games. (The movies dropped the ball when it came to using this technique.) And there's the rise of cameraphone citizen journalist, which could provide some nice montages, and which also really opens itself up for horror comedy - scary event happens and everybody pulls out phones and gets in everybody else's shot.
Oddly enough, it's probably worth looking again at "Aperture" - some of the techniques we used could slot into a found footage film in a compelling way, although altered to such an extent that I imagine few people could tell that's what I was drawing on. And it might be worth giving a re-read to House of Leaves.
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I recently watched Troll Hunter, which is probably the only found footage film I've seen that I'd strongly consider owning. Hella fun.
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Security cameras has never been done well. I was thinking of using the camera set up at my McKinney store to make a short film, strangely enough.
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