Back in high school and college I made joke movies – parodies for class projects. If you want to go all the way back, I did my first at age 12. This was as low-tech as it gets – usually a consumer-grade camcorder from the late 80’s or early 90’s and a couple of VCRs for editing. Still – chutzpah!
When I got to Hollywood and started working with the professionals, I decided early on that I wouldn’t do any of that nonsense but rather focus my efforts on developing as a writer. Since I had not gone to film school, I was way behind the curve in technical knowledge, but with my job working for a Real Hollywood Producer, I thought I would pick up a few things along the way.
Unfortunately I didn’t – I spent only a few days out on set during my entire development career; I spent most of my time witnessing and trying vainly to affect the creative content of the films on their way through the sausage factory. This was of great benefit to me as a writer, but, again, left me behind the curve technologically. Which is not entirely a problem anymore, since the explosion of digital technology that was happening at the time sort of leveled the playing field.
Still, it would occasionally distress me that the “filmmaker” me hadn’t resurfaced with some zany scheme to take 50 bucks, a skateboard, and a broom handle and make a movie. I didn’t feel very strongly about my network of contacts for crew, and it never seemed to align that I had the time, money, or resources to set out and MAKE something I could ask people to take seriously.
So I wrote, and wrote, and sold and optioned scripts. I wrote and directed stage plays. And then, in a time of great personal discord in my late 20’s, I signed up for a couple of classes at a local community college in order to finally make up some of that technical gap. I shot a couple of simple exercises, built some basic Avid muscles, and then…still didn’t make anything.
My community college miniDV opus, Brett Finds Some Money, complete with unlicensed soundtrack
That knowledge helped me land crew work on some short films, which made me a little money and saw me rising higher up the food chain each time out. I turned down two chances to be 1st Assistant Director on ultra-low-budget feature films, nearly produced one short, nearly wrote/directed a block of two webisodes; a whole lot of almost.
But it was still opportunities put out there by others. I still wasn’t oomph-ing my own stuff into reality.
That is now changing.
I have written a short film, and I am preparing to produce/direct it this summer with the intent to submit to some festivals in the fall. It’s going to be tiny budget, tinier crew, and about as simple as simple can be, technically. I figure, if I can’t make one actor and a locked-down camera interesting, where do I get off trying to do complicated scenes and all this fancy After Effects sh*t people do?
My senior project as a theater major was a play about two people trapped in an elevator. That was stripped down to the basics, too. It worked then and I’m excited about this now. At the moment I know that I have as much funding as I need, a quality script draft, and the actor I want is available and gung-ho. There is much to do, but it doesn’t feel blank or mysterious. I have done all this before in bits and pieces. But this time – it’s for my own work.
The working title is Samantha Gets Back Out There. I really, really hope this is not the only blog entry I ever post about it.