By Greg Pak
So I finagled my way to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival this year by snagging a job as a videographer for one of the festival sponsors. No pay, but they hooked me up with a plane ticket and accomodations. I’ve just returned and I’m chock full of practical hints.
Cold weather clothing
I wore long johns and sweaters every day, and my knit cap was essential (although I managed to lose it before the week was out). However, I did not need the eight pound insulated snow boots I hauled out to Utah. My leather Redwing hiking boots served me just fine, worn with heavy wool socks and liners.
Some folks dressed up for some of the parties, but cold weather casual ruled the days and nights.
Self promotion
The festival is aggressively flyer-unfriendly. Park City actually has an ordinance prohibiting people from handing out flyers on the streets and annoyingly officious Sundance volunteers quickly throw out any publicity materials unrelated to festival films which are left on tables or posted on kiosks. So much for the scrappy independent film spirit.
Transportation and Lodging
Shuttles to and from the Salt Lake City airport cost about $25. The company I used was Park City Transportation, 1-800-637-3803. The airport is about half an hour from Park City, without traffic.
The festival venues are spread out widely — unlike Telluride, where almost all the theaters are within walking distance of each other. But Sundance runs an efficient shuttle bus service which trucks filmgoers from theater to theater. I never had to wait more than fifteen minutes for a bus.
But be careful where you stay — not all of the surrounding condos are on the shuttle circuit. I stayed in several different places, with my level of convenience and luxury decreasing as the week wore on.
First I was at the Lodges at Deer Valley, a pretty nice ski lodge which has its own shuttle to and from Main Street. It’s also on the Park City shuttle circuit. Very convenient, but expensive. My tab was picked up by my employers — I think it was around $250 a night.
Then I stayed a night at the Best Western, which was 6 miles out of town. Only (!) $169 a night, but considerably less convenient. The hotel ran an hourly shuttle to Main Street, but it stopped running around midnight. After that, I had to catch cabs ($12).
I spent the last few days in a shared condo with friends of friends. A mere $100 a night, but there were no convenient shuttles. I ended up taking cabs in and out of town, at $8 a pop.
Food
The Japanese restaurant on Main Street is terrible — congealed rice, sugary udon broth, tempura vegetables cut too thick. Ugh.
The Thai and Vietnamese restaurants were pretty good, but wildly overpriced. One of the best little meals I found was the soup special at Burgies — tasty and good for cold weather.
Warning — the condos and lodges don’t have adjoining restaurants. To get food, you’ll have to shuttle or drive into Main Street. For general provisions, take the shuttle to the Holiday Village Cinemas — there’s an Albertsons supermarket a few doors down.
Swag
If you get into any parties, grab the free stuff early. I was working plenty of swanky parties, shooting video, but invariably I’d forget to make my way to the swag tables until it was too late. Missed out on some nice stuff, too — people were walking away with free pagers and backpacks and whatnot. Ah well. We all have enough junk anyway, right?
Video equipment
I brought my camera along as back up and then had to use it for my gig when my employer’s camera turned out to be broken. So at the last minute, I had to scramble to find a video light on a Saturday morning. I ended up going to Salt Lake City — I found a camera store called Inkleys which helped me out. 127 S. Main Street, 801-328-0561.
For extra batteries, try the Radio Shack next to the Holiday Village Cinemas. The theater shuttle will take you right there.
Schmoozing
I didn’t have a film in the festival, so I wasn’t there in maximum self-promotion mode. But the streets are full of Los Angeles and New York film industry people fairly itching to toss their business cards your way. If you’re even marginally friendly, you should be able to meet producers or managers or agents or fellow filmmakers — they’re sitting beside you in the theaters, sharing taxis, and standing next to you in line. Bring business cards.
Getting screened
When I found out I was going to Sundance on a videography gig, I promptly submitted “Asian Pride Porn” to TromaDance, one of Park City’s supplemental festivals. There are a slew of alternative festival screenings going on — and although no one’s offered me a three picture deal on the basis of my TromaDance screening, it was nice being able to tell people I had a film showing during the week.
I met another TromaDance filmmaker who was even more savvy about getting his work shown — upon arriving in Park City, he talked to the organizers of NoDance and got himself a screening in their festival as well.
Seeing films
I got very lucky with tickets — a friend hooked me up with a number of comps and I was able to get into a few press screenings in my capacity as the editor of AsianAmericanFilm.com. If you don’t have an inside angle and don’t want to pony up the bucks ahead of time, I’d recommend going to the matinees rather than the evening screenings. Almost every evening show I attended was sold out. The matinees were very well attended as well. But screenings begin as early as 8:30 a.m. — if you’re willing to get up early, you oughta be able to see something on short notice.
Tip of the Day: A nifty trick for enlivening Q&As
By Greg Pak
I caught a clever trick at the Sundance screening of the Korean film “The Isle” last week. To encourage a lively Q&A session, the producers handed out free CDs of the film’s soundtrack to everyone who asked a question. Clearly, this could get expensive if you did it every time your film screened. But for critical screenings where press and distributors may be present, this kind of gimmick might be worthwhile… After all, the more questions people ask you about your film, the more favorable an impression you may be able to make about the film and yourself.
Final Cut Pro Sound Remix
By Greg Pak
Challenge: I needed to remix parts of my 16mm film “Fighting Grandpa” in order to replace some music for which I couldn’t afford to pay licensing fees.
Discoveries: I couldn’t afford the prices charged by sound mixing studios to remix the film from the original 16mm mags. But I found a way to achieve the same effect using my Final Cut Pro digital editing system.
Upshot: For remixing small parts of my 16mm film, Final Cut Pro was the best solution.
The Gory Details
When my short film “Fighting Grandpa” played on Cinemax in 1999, I paid about a thousand dollars for sync rights to two church songs which I’d used on the film’s soundtrack.
Now my contract with HBO/Cinemax is expiring and I’m beginning to license the film to other television venues. But I can’t afford to pay the licensing fees which would be required to get the rights to the original songs in perpetuity. Even for these obscure church songs, I would have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars.
So I needed to replace the music with original music from my brilliant composer, Rick Knutsen.
The problem was that I’d built all of my original sound tracks using 16mm analog mag, the standard at the time. But most of the more affordable mix houses in New York can’t handle mag at all. I’d have to transfer all of my mag sound tracks to DAT or BetaSP in order to mix from them.
After considerable calling around, I finally located an affordable place to transfer my 16mm mag to DAT. They did a fine job transferring six mag tracks to DAT for under a hundred bucks. A great bargain. Check ’em out:
Trackwise
123 W. 18th St. 7th Floor, NYC
212-627-7700
Contact: Fran
Once I had the transferred DAT in hand, I realized I could probably do the remixing work myself on FCP. I transferred the DAT to MiniDV using my old, reliable Teac DAT player and my Sony GVD-900 MiniDV deck. Then I input each track into my Final Cut Pro system from the MiniDV. I already had a MiniDV copy of “Fighting Grandpa.” So I loaded in the picture from that tape. And I began editing.
First, I sunk all of my original tracks and the original mix to the picture. Then I cut out all of the sections of the original mix which didn’t run beneath the music I needed to replace. Then I created a new track with the replacement music and cut out the parts of the original mix which overlapped the new music. Then I fine tuned, setting levels and using FCP’s 5 band equalizer audio filter.
When I was happy with the way everything sounded, I exported the entire program as an AIFF file. This gave me a mono soundtrack, which I then imported into the project as a sound clip. I copied the project, stuck in that mono track in tracks 1 and 2, eliminated all the other tracks, and checked levels.
Then, my friends, I exported to MiniDV and had a dub house make my BetaSP copies to send to television stations.
If I had paid a sound mixing studio to do the work for me, I probably would have a marginally finer final product — their mixers have more experience and better machines, after all. But I’m fairly picky about sound, and I’m very happy with the result of my do-it-yourself job.
And it saved me from having to spend several thousand dollars which I didn’t have…
Shoot those Stills
By Greg Pak
Everyone will tell you this, and it’s so true: Make sure you get good 35mm publicity photos (a.k.a. “production stills”) during the shoot.
Ideally, you should shoot both color slides and black-and-white. In practice, I’ve mostly shot black-and-white and had nary a festival complain. But if you have excellent color stills, you’ll no doubt have them used more and in better venues — some magazines, for example, will run someone else’s mediocre color photo before your excellent black-and-white.
Even if you’re making a MiniDV short, shoot those stills on film.
I’ve just made this mistake myself — in the scramble to shoot “The Penny Marshall Project” (a Blair Witch spoof from the Pollyannas) in a single day, I let the shooting of 35mm stills slip by. For publicity, I’ve made do with frame grabs from the video.
The photo on the right depicts Lisa Jolley in “The Penny Marshall Project.” This is a frame grab from a video image displayed in a Final Cut Pro window on my computer — not a 35mm still. Online, it looks okay. Blown up for a festival program, newspaper, or magazine, it’s a little less than ideal. I’ve gotten away with it, but 35mm stills would give better results.
With certain productions, you can shoot stills after the fact — I’m fairly confident, for example, that I can get a few good stills for “The Penny Marshall Project” if I can get an actor or two in costume in a dark corner of Central Park. But for most projects, if you don’t shoot the stills that day, you’ll never get ’em (’cause the actor’s moved to L.A., the costume’s gone back to the rental shop, and the location is now a parking lot, etcetera).
Regarding the content and composition of stills, avoid wide shots of ten people — those will seldom get reproduced. Go for simple but striking images of one or two actors.
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 Seung-Hwan Han in “Mouse” |
My most successful still is the image at the right for my short film “Mouse.” Almost every festival that ran “Mouse” included this photo in its program. “Mouse” may not have been the best film in a given program of shorts, but it had the most striking photo and as a result got the most graphical attention.
Final Cut Pro Upgrade (1.0 to 1.2.5)
By Greg Pak
Challenge: I wanted to upgrade my Final Cut Pro digital editing system from Mac OS 8.6 to OS 9.04
Discoveries: I also had to upgrade from FCP 1.01 to 1.25 and from Quicktime 4.01 to 4.1.2.
Upshot: After the trials and travails of upgrading, things run better, thank you very much.
The Gory Details
I’ve been using Final Cut Pro 1.01 on a 350 MHz G3 Blue & White Power Mac running OS 8.6, a nearly top of the line system — last year.
I decided to upgrade, having heard that the program runs more smoothly with OS 9. So I coughed up a hundred dollars to buy OS 9.04, the latest fully working version of the Macintosh operating system, and installed it. All went well until I tried to digitize new material — the computer gave me an error message saying it could not initialize my deck, that a “required resource” of some kind was missing.
I figured that the problem was that FCP 1.01 probably isn’t entirely compatible with OS 9.04. So I searched the Apple site and found that I could download the FCP 1.25 upgrade — for free! A half hour later, I’d downloaded the upgrade onto my Powerbook, then transferred the installer to my desktop via zip disk and installed it.
But now I was unable to open the FCP program — a dialogue box told me I needed the latest version of Quicktime, 4.1.2. So I went back to my laptop and downloaded what looked like a remarkably tiny Quicktime installer — only 380k or so. Upon transferring the document to my desktop, I learned that what appeared to be an installer was actually a small program which would download Quicktime off the web. (Strange, huh? You have to download an installer to download the installer.)
This presented new problems. As recommended by Promax (the company from which I bought my FCP system), I’ve kept the disk partition dedicated to FCP — without ever using it to access the internet. But in order to install Quicktime, I had to set up the partition for internet access. I copied my Earthlink access number, username, and password to the Remote Access panel, then had to go into the Modem control panel and select the Powermac internal modem.
Finally I was set. I signed onto the internet, fired up the pre-installer program, and began the process of downloading Quicktime. The installer then automatically required me to restart my computer.
And finally my FCP system was working again — and working much better. Specifically, the program used to lock up from time to time at the beginning of batch digitizing sessions — everything would stop and my mouse would freeze for a long minute or two before the digitizing would begin. I no longer have that problem (wheeee!).
My renderings of dissolves also seems to go faster than before, although that might have more to do with the fact that I recently upgraded the processor to 466 MHz than with the OS 9.04 and FCP 1.25 upgrades.
My final verdict: An upgrade worth the hassle and the hundred dollar pricetag of the OS 9.04.
Working with Actors: Action Verbs
By Greg Pak
The most important job of a director is to get good performances. To put it another way:
Nothing matters but your actors.
Audiences will forgive almost any technical inadequacies as long as the performances are strong and true (just one example: “The Celebration”). Yes, great directors have a total command over the language of film and labor long and hard to nail the perfect camera angles, camera movement, mise en scene, and lighting. But great directors also understand that the most glorious beauty shots mean nothing if the performances suck.
My methods of working with actors come from years of doing improv comedy, from hands on experience working with actors for film projects, and from excellent Directing Actors classes I took at NYU from people like Sam Schacht and Ted Hannen.
Here’s the chief principle I’ve learned:
Direct with action verbs rather than adjectives.
The same broad concept drives dramatic writing — the goal is to tell a story dramatically rather than didactically, which means characters do things rather than explain things.
Bad directors tell actors: “Be more happy” or “Be more sad.” This kind of direction encourages actors to make faces, demonstrating rather than experiencing the emotions at hand. It looks false because it is false, and audiences sneer when they see it.
The challenge for directors is to stop talking about results and start talking about process.
Directors who talk about results speak in adjectives — “Now be real angry at Bob.” When you direct like this, you make your actors think about trying to achieve these results, which means that instead of inhabiting their characters, they’re forced to remain in their own heads, fretting about whether they’re achieving the results you’re expecting.
In contrast, directors who talk about process use action verbs and direct objects — “Make Bob stop laughing at you.” With direction like this, the actor no longer has to think, “Now I’m supposed to be getting mad.” Instead, she can concentrate completely on her life as her character, pursue her objective, and actually get mad.
Adjectives lead to general, false behavior — making faces.
Action verbs lead to specific action through which actors discover and experience emotions — resulting in dramatically compelling performances.
People like to make fun of actors for asking “What’s my motivation?” But that’s the essential question and directors must help actors find answers or risk having lame, one-dimensional performances sink the project.
A Director Prepares
As should become apparent, directing with action verbs requires much more thought and preparation from the director, which is perfectly appropriate.
The simple truth is that most problems between actors and directors are caused by directors who simply don’t know what they want.
As the director, you must know what the point of the scene is. You must know the essential moment this scene describes in the emotional lives of your characters; you must know what your characters want, what they get, and how these experiences set them up for the next scene.
I’ve seen directors who have no idea of the point of the scene working with excellent actors who grew more and more agitated as the rehearsals wore on. Good actors are hungry to be directed; they long for action verbs and direct objects they can sink their teeth into — and nothing is more frustrating to them than treading water doing meandering, pointless improvisations and exercises for directors who simply haven’t figured out the point of the scene.
In short, in order to direct your actors, you must be clear in your own head about what your story is and what this scene is doing in the telling of your story.
Uta Hagen has a list of questions actors must ask in order to prepare for a scene. Here’s my spin:
Six questions a director must be able to answer for each actor in a scene:
Who am I?
Where am I coming from?
Where am I?
Whom am I with and how do I feel about him/her?
What do I want from this person?
What am I doing to get what I want?
If you can give your actor answers to the first four questions, you’ve provided her with the necessary background to the scene. If you can answer the last two questions, you’ve found the point of the scene and the key action verb and direct object.
A little advice on dealing with character background (the first four questions): You can go into as much detail as you want with these questions — some actors will want a great deal of information about their characters’ histories. And some directors love to talk for hours about characters’ pasts.
But remember that everything you discuss should be geared toward giving the actor the necessary information to tackle the scenes at hand. Choose the material you discuss accordingly — you usually have a limited amout of time and thus should concentrate on what information is essential for the actor to experience the emotional moment of the scene you’re rehearsing.
The above just scratches the surface of working with actors.
Put Your Logo at the Head of Your Film
By Greg Pak
In several of my shorts, important images and sounds jump off the screen the instant the film starts. Many, many times I’ve seen these first few seconds spoiled during screenings because of bad focus or slow sound adjustments by sleepy projectionists.
So now I always put five to ten seconds of logo at the very head of my films. This is what business school geeks call “basic branding,” and is nice for promotional reasons. But more importantly, it gives the projectionist a few seconds to correct the film’s focus before the film itself actually begins.
I suppose the next step would be to put a trill of music behind that logo so sound levels could be checked as well, but I haven’t yet put my composers to work on my personal theme song just yet.
Maybe next week…
Equipment Specifics
By Greg Pak
I’ve recently received a number of emails asking for specific production and post-production equipment advice. What follows is a list of different equipment I’ve used to shoot each of my films with links to additional pages detailing the pros and cons of each piece of equipment. Hope it helps.
The Penny Marshall Project
Format: MiniDV
Camera: Sony TRV-700
Sound: Sennheiser K-6 series with ME64 capsule, plugged directly into the camera
Lighting: All available light
Editing system: Final Cut Pro
The Informed Consent Zone
Format: MiniDV
Camera: Sony VX-1000
Sound: Sennheiser K-6 series with ME64 & ME66 capsules, plugged directly into the camera
Lighting: Omni light kit, Japanese lanterns with Photofloods
Editing system: Final Cut Pro
Asian Pride Porn
Format: MiniDV
Camera: Sony VX-1000 and Sony TRV-700
Sound: Sennheiser K-6 series with ME64 & ME66 capsules, plugged directly into the camera
Lighting: Cheap lamps and Photofloods
Editing system: Final Cut Pro
Po Mo Knock Knock
Format: 16mm
Camera: Eclair ACL
Lenses: Angeniuex 12-120 and Switar 16mm prime
Sound: Sennheiser K-6 series, recorded on a non-timecode DAT recorder
Lighting: Omni Light Kit
Editing system: 6 plate Steenbeck (analog)
Fighting Grandpa
Format: 16mm
Camera: ArriSR for the main shoot, Eclair ACL for pickups
Lenses: Angeniuex 12-120
Sound: Sennheiser ME and K-6 series recorded on Nagra 4 tape recorder
Lighting: Cheap lamps and Photofloods
Editing system: 6 plate Steenbeck (analog), AVID
Mouse
Format: 16mm
Camera: ArriSR for the main shoot, Eclair ACL for pickups
Lenses: Angeniuex 12-120 and Schneider prime lenses for the main shoot, Switar 16mm prime for pickups
Sound: Sennheiser ME series recorded on Nagra 4 tape recorder
Lighting: Babies, inkies, Japanese lanterns with Photofloods, one HMI, color balanced practicals
Editing system: 6 plate Steenbeck (analog)
Mr. Lee
Format: 16mm
Camera: ArriSR
Lenses: Angeniuex 12-120
Sound: Sennheiser ME series recorded on Nagra 4 tape recorder
Lighting: Babies, Inkies
Editing system: 6 plate Steenbeck (analog)
Why I Plug Film School
By Greg Pak
People often ask me whether film school is worthwhile for aspiring young filmmakers. My simple answer: Yes.
I went to New York University’s much-lauded graduate film program. Like any film student, I had gripes about my school from time to time. But for several reasons, I’m greatly indebted to my film school experiences.
A place for real criticism
First, film school was the first place I got rigorous criticism of my work. Before film school, I made several films which friends and family told me they enjoyed. But no one ever told me this shot is too long; this scene is too didactic; this sequence doesn’t work.
In contrast, my professors and classmates in film school clearly and coldly told me what they thought about my work. It was seldom pleasant. But without clear analysis of my work’s strengths and weaknesses, it would have been much more difficult for me to grow and improve as a filmmaker.
A place to aquire specific skills
Second, film school gave me solid tools for directing actors. I had worked with actors for years as a director of various improv comedy groups. But directing for the screen is a unique undertaking which my professors at NYU helped me understand. Similarly, film school gave me a strong grounding in other essential crafts such as editing, cinematography, and most importantly, dramatic writing.
A place for contacts and professional advancement
Third, film school provided me with contacts and venues for professional advancement. I’m still in touch with many of my classmates — we help each other out from time to time, tossing each other info about jobs, lending each other equipment, working on each others’ films.
Professional benefits have come from the festival venues available only to students. I got several big boosts from student festivals and awards, including the Student Academy Awards and the NYU First Run Film Festival.
People often argue against film school by pointing out that a person can make a micro-budgeted feature instead of spending $60,000 on film school. True enough, particularly now that MiniDV and Final Cut Pro have made the costs of making features on video much, much cheaper.
But it’s also true that most of these micro-budgeted first features disappear, never to be seen by anyone except the cast, crew, and the filmmaker’s immediate families.
Before I went to film school, I made a sixty minute superhero spoof on Beta SP called “Random Man.” I have no regrets about making the film — I learned a huge amount from the experience. But the film didn’t really work, despite having a great first ten minutes. It played in only one film festival.
If I had skipped film school and put the money right into making more films, I suspect I would have made several more interesting but ultimately amateurish feature length films which nobody would have seen.
Instead, going to film school gave me the training and rigor to make each of my projects as good as they can be.
In short, film school helped me live up to my potential.
I know that film school is not for everyone — in particular, it’s not affordable to everyone. But even if you can’t afford film school, I’d recommend trying to create a network wherein you can get some of the benefits of film school. Specifically, I’d recommend joining or creating a community or workshop of filmmakers who can provide you the rigorous criticism and advice you need to grow.
One example of such a group is the Workshop, or the Asian American Filmmakers Collaborative.
The DIY Shockmount
By Greg Pak
As I was leaving my apartment on a recent trip to Alaska for my documentary “Brother Killer Wolf,” I left my boom pole and shock mount in my entry way. When I returned for it (after realizing in the Holland Tunnel that we’d left without it), it was, of course, gone.
I grabbed a microphone clamp on my way out the door and mulled over my options as we flew to Alaska.
Circumstances prevented me from getting a replacement shock mount — we were heading into the bush pretty much as soon as we got to Alaska. But I was able to borrow a little collapsible monopod from the Anchorage outfit from which we rented camera equipment. The monopod, which extended about four and a half feet, was designed for 35mm still cameras. But the small screw on its head fit the screw at the bottom of the microphone clamp I’d brought from home. Incredibly, it looked like I’d found my solution.
But of course without a shock mount, the mic picked up every bump and jostle I gave to the boom.
Luckily, I had a shock mount holder I’d made for use with my microphone clamp. As you can see from the photo, it’s just a short piece of wooden broom handle with a hole drilled in it for a bolt. The piece of broom handle fits into the mic clamp; the shock mount then screws onto the bolt.
My challenge was to make a shock mount which could screw onto that bolt.
After experimenting with a cut-up plastic water bottle, I ended up using a wire hanger. With a few twists and kinks made with my Leatherman pocket tool and a couple of big rubber bands, I rigged the nifty li’l dude you see in the adjoining picture.