The Beauty of the Dinner Scene

Jack Nugent takes a look at how films use the dinner scene to show much more than people eating.

8 Mistakes Filmmakers Make

Elliot Grove is a Canadian-born film producer who founded the Raindance Film Festival, the British Independent Film Awards, and Raindance.TV. He has produced over 150 short films, and five feature films; he teaches writers and producers in the UK, Europe, Japan and America; and has written three books which have become industry standards—Raindance Writers' Lab, Raindance Producers' Lab Lo-To-No Budget Filmmaking and 130 Projects to Get You into Filmmaking.

From all that we can deduce that he knows a few things about filmmaking. Here are some of his thoughts on the common mistakes filmmakers make.

________________________________________________________________________

As your filmmaking career starts to grow, it's crucial that your actions don't strangle it in its infancy. By avoiding the mistakes that so many filmmakers make you have a far greater chance of succeeding well beyond the first two years of the launch date of your career.

1. Doing Too Much Yourself

Business owners as well as filmmakers fall into this trap, as they attempt to minimise costs. It can mean that you will get bogged down in the day-to-day nitty gritty, keeping you from stepping back and taking a good hard look at the future. Future planning and, with it, the ability to anticipate problems, are two important areas successful filmmakers have to keep control of. Doing too much can mean that the fire-fighting cycle just keeps repeating over and over again.
     Coupled with that is the guilt associated with neglecting family and personal relationships. This often leads to exhaustion and collapse.
     Why not call for extra help before you need it, and not after the cracks have begun to show, and usually, it is too late.

2. You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Most filmmakers start their career because they are really good at something. Some are really good at directing action, others have a flair for working with actors, and others are just good solid all-rounders.
     What many filmmakers forget is that it is a business which involves a host of different skill sets. They forget that filmmaking requires the basic business management skills such as: sourcing new clients and work, marketing and publicity, recruiting new crew and staff, and managing the cash flow questions that any small business has. Add into this the creative mix and you have the potential for a meltdown.
     Running and, more importantly, developing and expanding your movie career is like growing and developing any type of business. It is unlikely that you will have the expertise to do everything needed yourself.
     Successful filmmakers learn to recognise their own skills and knowledge and take action to fill the gaps in their career plan.

3. Quitting The Day Job Too Quickly

A filmmaker or screenwriter's passion in what they are doing is usually so high that they enjoy some initial successes and revenues. They then quit their day jobs and hire premises and staff—only to face psychological and financial ruin when their early successes have been a minor blip on the long hard haul to a successful career.
     Everyone needs money in order to survive. Make sure you are able to cover your monthly expenses before you ditch your day job.
     Done correctly, you might be able to apply for funding or enjoy certain strategic tax benefits depending on your personal profile and the geographical territory you live in.

4. You Haven't Got Anyone To Talk To

Filmmakers have career issues which often require discussion and debate. The difficulty facing most filmmakers is that it's very difficult to find anyone they can relate to.
     Certain legal and technical challenges can be discussed with an accountant or lawyer. But issues of creativity are not the issues you want to discuss with inappropriate people.
     Having no network is potentially very damaging. Discussion with a trusted advisor or friend is where one finds new ideas and perspectives. Having your project and ideas endorsed is also nourishing for one's ego. Lukewarm receptions can indicate that your ideas are not developed enough. A small network of trusted people able to 'get' you, and will listen and discuss ideas with you, is an essential part of a filmmaker's success.

5. Working With The Wrong People

Filmmaking is a passionate business. It is also almost always very last minute. Add on top of that, the chronic fatigue. Under these circumstances it is tempting to hire people for production and other jobs quickly without properly interviewing and checking references. Remember, no matter how good someone is, if there's a difference in values, then the only questions that matter are "When will the row happen?" and "On what subject will it be?"
     Always be asking yourself: how much real experience do they have? Is it relevant to what you need? Are their skills and experience complimentary to yours? Do you have mutual respect? How important will you be to them? Do they know their own limits? What networks and contacts do they bring? Will they let you talk to their previous employers/collaborators to get a feel of how they work?
     As always, don't agree to work with anyone until you feel comfortable. And make sure you have written contracts in place for any creative collaboration.

6. Lack of self awareness

Many filmmakers are afraid of admitting their fears and inadequacies because they don't want to lose the mantra of praise that they want to follow them everywhere. They won't take any criticism from anyone because they don't trust them and because they believe they know better. When confronted they usually nitpick ridiculously fine details and refuse to entertain the creative or practical suggestions from anyone else.
     This makes it very difficult to develop a team and, as the word spreads, they find fewer and fewer people willing to collaborate with them.
     Successful filmmakers are brutally honest about themselves. Get some vital feedback from that special and trusted friend.

7. Staying In The Comfort Zone

Most filmmakers work with the same team members over and over again. There is nothing wrong with this, except—who is challenging and testing you and your ideas?
     It's an easy trap to surround yourself with 'yes' men. Working with people who challenge you may be uncomfortable, but it's a whole lot easier then attending a disastrous screening of your movie because no one around you had the courage to say, "Hang on a minute—what about XYZ?"'
     Hip, innovative filmmakers pick up those cool ideas from outside their conventional thoughts. They learn to accept constructive criticism and learn how to deal with negative criticism. Mixing with others will increase your chances of doing this. The more diverse your contacts (whether by sectors/age/ethnic group/gender), the more you'll also be able to "narrow the angles" on potential incoming problems; someone in your group will have had experience of issues that you haven't—better to learn from others' mistakes than get extra battle scars yourself! 

8. Not Knowing Why You Want To Make Movies 

Filmmakers make movies for many different reasons. It doesn't really matter why you want to make a movie. Some make movies because they want to make money. Others make movies to get a message across. Others make movies because they are attracted by the allure and glamour. Decide what your ambitions are before you head off and attempt a career in filmmaking. Realise that your real reason for making movies will predetermine much of what you try and achieve. 

By avoiding, at least to some degree, these eight common mistakes, your filmmaking career has a much more decent chance of success. Analyse each of these eight areas and take appropriate action.

First posted:  13 July 2012

The Drop Off - Episode 1

You, of course, don't know any people like this, so think of The Drop Off as an educational tour of modern Australian suburbs...

Breaking The Rules - The French New Wave

Lewis Bond takes a look into the influence of the New Wave and how it managed to become the cinematic bridge between the classic and the modern.

Composition In Storytelling

Lewis Bond takes us on an exploration of the cinema screen as just another canvas for an artist to create images. Composition is the tool that gives those images structure and purpose.

Press the CC button to see a list of the films.

The Lateral Tracking Shot

Tony Zhou takes us on a survey of the uses of the lateral tracking shot.

Book review: "The Television Plays"

The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Television Plays was recommended to me by Brian McDonald. My query related to screenwriting, but rather than suggesting one of those by-the-numbers,-make-a-million-overnight bestsellers, his answer placed the emphasis on story-telling, the "how" of putting an effective story together.

To start with: Who was Paddy Chayefsky (1923-1981)?

Only five people have ever won three Academy Awards for screenwriting. Three of those (Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder) shared the credit with at least one other writer. Only two have received three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay. One is Paddy Chayefsky—Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976)—the other, Woody Allen. Chayefsky wrote songs, plays, TV series, and feature films. The Writers Guild of America named their award for television writers in his honour.

The Television Plays contains the full scripts of six one-hour TV dramas written by Paddy Chayefsky between 1952 and 1954. The value of the book doesn't lie in the provision of the screenplays, but rather in the comments and explanation he gives as to his mental processes while working out how to tell a given story.

For example, he was asked to write a one-hour drama (Holiday Song) based on a Reader's Digest story about a chance encounter on a train which led to the reconciliation of a husband and wife, both of whom believed the other to have died in World War II.

The incident is not a good one for dramatic purposes. Despite the fact that it involves bringing together a husband and wife who believed each other dead, there is little emotion involved. There is a certain element of suspense, but suspense is a poor substitute for drama. It would be possible to use this incident as the opening scene of a story and then follow the course of events resulting from the meeting of a long-separated husband and wife. But this isn't what the subway incident is about.
     The incident has only one dramatic meaning, and that is: there is a God. The incident is what I call a third-act incident: it proves something. If in the beginning of the play there was a character who didn't believe in God, then this incident could prove to him that there is a God. Of course, the character would have to be someone who would accept such a symbolic interpretation of the incident; and as a writer it is your job to create such a character.
     You open your script showing a religious (person) who has lost his faith in God, and you end your script with this subway incident which restores his faith to him. What is missing is the story or what I call the urgency. Why is it so urgent (he) regain his faith in God? What terrible consequences will occur if he doesn't? As a writer, you sit down and painfully invent a series of circumstances that will be resolved by this incident on the subway.

Here are a few quotes from the book.

• Dramatic writing is really nothing more than telling a story, and nobody ever tells a story quite like anyone else.
• I have only one rule that I consider absolute and arbitrary, and that is: a drama can have only one story. It can have only one leading character. All other stories and all other characters are used in the script only as they facilitate the main story.
• Dramatic construction is essentially a search for reasons. That is to say, given the second-act-curtain incident, construction consists of finding the reasons why the characters involved in the incident act the way they do. Each incident must be dramatized by at least one scene, and the scenes laid out so that they inevitably grow into the crisis.
• It's always good to start a dramatization with a crisis if you can get one. For one thing, it promptly tells you what your basic story is and keeps you from getting confused with other story elements.
• The basic story is always the emotional line of the script. Don't ever make the basic line the social comment of the script. Drama is concerned only with emotion.
• It is a common illusion that dramatists sit down and preconceive a detailed biography and character study of each character in the script. To a professional writer, this would be a palpable waste of time. A writer usually starts off thinking with a rough feel of the character absorbed from some experience in his own life. 
• It is inevitable that the preconception of the character will change a thousand times during the course of construction in order to satisfy the demands of the story line.
• Writing is such a confused business of backing and filling, of suddenly plunging into the third act while you are still pondering the first act.
• Writing is unfortunately an emotional as well as a mental trade, and the simplest steps in logic are obscured by the writer's own fears and anxieties, most of which he is unaware of.
• I usually like to start my subplot in the second act.
• Each story demands its own kind of construction, and each writer must construct his stories as best suits his ways.
• The Bicycle Thief, an Italian masterpiece, got about as close to an ordinary day in an unemployed man's life as you can get in a movie; but even this picture required a special urgency of incident.
• There is far more exciting drama in the reasons why a man gets married than in why he murders someone.
• There are all sorts of actors, many of them highly intelligent or amusing, but as a class they have a poor sense of theater. There are very few actors whose opinion of a script I would trust.

Some more Paddy Chayefsky quotes, this time from the book The Craft of the Screenwriter.

• If it should occur to you to cut, do so. That’s the first basic rule of cutting. If you’re reading through and stop, something is wrong. Cut it. If something bothers you, then it’s bad. Cut it. If you can cut inside the speech, you’re really cutting most effectively.
• It’s purifying, it’s refining. Making it precise. Precision is one of the basic elements of poetry. My own rules are very simple. First, cut out all the wisdom; then cut out all the adjectives. I’ve cut some of my favorite stuff. I have no compassion when it comes to cutting. No pity, no sympathy. Some of my dearest and most beloved bits of writing have gone with a very quick slash, slash, slash. Because something was heavy there. Cutting leads to economy, precision, and to a vastly improved script.
• Names are fun. In Hospital I used a lot of mystery writers. Had a nurse named Christie. A doctor is named Chandler. Sometimes I go to baseball box scores and pick out names. Sometimes I keep characters from one project to another — Arthur Landau, a lawyer, runs through a variety of things.
• I always write a prose treatment. I write about half the story in prose to keep order among all the elements of the plot so I don’t get stuck when I do the screenplay.
• My dialogue is precise. And it’s true. I think out the truth of what the people are saying and why they’re saying it. Dialogue comes because I know what I want my characters to say. I envision the scene; I can imagine them up there on the screen; I try to imagine what they would be saying and how they would be saying it. and I keep it in character. And the dialogue comes out of that.
• The best thing that can happen is for the theme to be nice and clear from the beginning. Doesn’t always happen. You think you have a theme and you then start telling the story. Pretty soon the characters take over and the story takes over and you realize your theme isn’t being executed by the story, so you start changing the theme.

First posted:  9 July 2012