So here it is, a shot from the ending location of my short film in the making. Out of the hours I spent scouting locations, this is the one I spent the most time framing. No surprise that this is the shot where someone saw me through their window and reported me. I know because I got a glance of them peeking from behind their curtain. A few minutes later a black-and-white cruiser pulled up to the curb, its spotlight on me as if this were a prison break.

I think it was worth giving up my discretion, don’t you? Try to imagine an actor standing or sitting somewhere in the frame. I would’ve posed myself, but I didn’t want to leave the camera.

Yes, several elements of this shot are post-processed; the same as what I did to The Thing at the End of the Hall, only less so. I recall the reaction of my cousin’s girlfriend when she saw the pictures of my trip to France. How did you get them to look so good? she asked. I tried to explain composition, exposure, the leading of the eyes, the staging of the subject and in general the rule of thirds, but when I topped it off with Photoshop she went Ohhhh Photoshop! as if that explained everything and nothing else was relevant.

By now it has become second nature of me to expose shots explicitly to raise the black levels, and I am getting better at estimating what the shadows will look like. I adore high contrast; it adds to the sensation of depth. You see, I don’t expose shots by adding lights. I expose them by adding shadows. I just think they’re more interesting and, for an amateur like me, much easier to control. Of course in a location like this I must deal with what I am dealt, and in this case, after rejecting three other locations, I finally found a parking lot with the right kind of lights: florescent, balls of florescent as opposed to tubes. They cast a diffused glow that, depending on the white balance, will give off a sickly green hue, which is what I did in an earlier short; but in one setup I had a warm lamp on the subject’s face, so their skin was preserved a fleshy pink.

Time to shop for a portable warm-toned light. In a close-up or a medium I can throw the warm tones on their face while the rest of the shot remains green. Solid separation without mutating the actor’s face into a Ninja Turtle.

I shouldn’t concentrate too hard on how it will look because that is a separate and altogether difficult process on its own (though it hasn’t stopped me from terrorizing suburban cities with a PMW-EX1). I do by the way have more of a lead on my story, and because I have included a shot of what is likely the ending location then clearly I have come a long way. The tone of the short is laid out, as is the subject matter. It will be a romance of some sort; though it will be more truthful to say that this is drama laced with romantic elements. Hmmm. I feel iffy about the word drama, possibly because it comes off as too highbrow for my abilities.

I read this Edith Wharton short story called “The Letters.” I won’t bore you with the details (even though Edith Wharton is not boring), but I admired the plotting. Everything is peachy and right as rain until the final few pages, where the protagonist’s life is suddenly flipped upside-down and everything dear to her is revealed to be a sham. The neatness of this revelation and the surprise that it delivers is a pleasure to experience, not due to the singular twist in and of itself, but due to how Wharton orchestrates the con: it is clean and bloodless, like yanking off a tablecloth with such swiftness so as to not spill the drinks.

Chaos is drama, and don’t assume that it is all bad, like negative energy, or, to use the layman’s word of choice, depressing. There is this essay by Philip K. Dick, written just before his death (and before Ridley Scott screened a workprint of “Blade Runner” for him) called, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” This is what the man had to say:

I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.

So there you have it. Everything falls apart in this story. Because I want it to. Because I want my characters to mean something. Because I dislike happy stories that begin happy, plow through a second act of more happy, and then end happy. Perhaps it is because they are afraid of what lurks out there in the banality of real, authentic life. Perhaps it is because they are the filmic equivalent of a stoner, so high on its own agenda that it numbs itself to pain. Or perhaps it is because they just don’t try very hard at being human. I am reminded of the wisdom behind Harris K. Telemacher, who said, “Let us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.”

And here is where I leave you with what I think will be the end music.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I think I’ve got it! My idea! My story idea! But I’ll just dish out a tiny morsel because I hate ideas that are incomplete. I don’t even know if I like it. I’d feel like the boy who cried wolf. Hell, I already feel ashamed for using exclamation points.

Story goes like this: two friends, one night, a bit of backstory and bickering, some broken romance, and a lone plot device to trigger all the anomalies required in a narrative. “Anomalies” are what I now like to call the-things-that-happen-in-a-story. I guess you can stick to calling them Plot Points, but anomaly has a certain ring to it; a word you’d toss around in a room full of nodding scientists, stroking their chins in applied wisdom.

Here’s a shot, captured from when I was loitering the city for locations that I suspected would look interesting. Not all of them were. But this shot had an emo vibe going for it. Combine this with the song I plan to use in the skit and POW! instant combo; like peanut butter and bananas. It’s a mood setter.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Exterior locations are a go-go. They’re so liberating compared to interiors. The only problem is the general public: residents, pedestrians, traffic, and oh yeah cops. I was interrupted last night, scouting locations. Somebody must’ve spotted me through their window. Yeesh. Not a big problem; the cop pulled up to me when I strolled across an intersection. He had those fierce, dagger eyes of a dangerous jock. I wished he wore sunglasses, the way most cops do so you can’t really know what they’re thinking when they pull you over for a ticket, if they’re bored or enjoying it, or if they think you’re smokin’ hot jailbait. You just can’t know.

When he confirmed that I was a film student at the nearby CSU Fullerton, he asked what my short film was. I didn’t know what that meant and if he was just killing time, so I told him it was a skit. A what? he asked. A skit, I repeated, and for some reason he said “Thank you” and I said “You’re welcome,” and he spun off with his buddy riding shotgun, who at this time of night, midnight, donned a patch of black sunglasses.

Truth is that I have been bored since Sean and I went on hiatus with Take Zer0; which forced me, coerced me, blackmailed me to be creative week after week, shooting and editing and writing long-ass posts. To anyone who knows what Take Zer0 is and miraculously also happens to read this blog, yes, Take Zer0 is on break. A very tentative break. Our website kind of broke (Sean dropped it, don’t look at me) and that roused us out of a filmmaking trance that forced us to ask an uncomfortably adult question: what are we going to do with our lives? And so, as a creative diversion from our money-making schemes that could inspire an episode of The Honeymooners, I present to you this potential short film, which isn’t even written yet and yes I do feel guilty like the boy who cried wolf for writing this post.

Even the premature thought of a short film inspires me. I meant precisely what I wrote in this Tweet, which is kind of disturbing as I read it (haha). Apparently I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that’s not all bad, but it does make me think of asparagus. If a thief had stolen all my stories and my ability to relate stories, then I would surly be without hope and become a sociopath. Or a journalist. Because without the ability to tell stories–even the crappiest of crappy ones, in a manner as well as I could tell them–it would be as if I were stricken with Scarlett fever all those years ago as an infant, deaf and blind and forever feeling with the fingers for a way to understand the world.

I may as well post this. It’s an end segment for a never completed episode of Take Zer0. Shot in a little over twenty minutes, the gimmick is that Sean uses DeShaker (a stabilization plug-in) to stabilize his handheld shots; except in this video, the joke is that DeShaker comes in pill form. As an aspiring steadi-cam operator, Sean ends up becoming dependent on the drugs. Clearly this is a play on athletes and steroids.

I think both Sean and Drew deliver pretty solid performances (as in not terrible), especially when you consider that I dumped the script on them only a half-hour before. Not bad, not bad at all.

The pacing is a bit slow, even for only a minute long; but it was to be used as an epilogue, after all (i.e. the denouement). I’m pretty satisfied with the reflector and how it lit up Sean. As for the strobing of the light, the location was chosen because of it; though I’ll admit that it gets a bit pervasive in the first shot of Drew. All in all, the entire video could use more sound mixing—ambient effects here and there—but heck, it’s good enough for being a video that was never used.

There are locations dotted up and down the whole of Southern California that I’d like to test, but this one park caught my attention. Not because it stood out for any excellent reason, but simply for the fact that it is there and near to a place that I am familiar with: Downtown Fullerton.

I asked Sean if I could borrow the camera for the night. What do you need it for? he asked. Location scouting, I said, to which he cautioned me about the potential of being mugged. Not for my own personal safety, mind you, but for the sake of the camera, which I think costs more than me. I don’t know what I cost my parents all these years, but I like to think I’m pretty expensive.

Fact: real-world lighting is like the flash bulb on the digital camera you got at Best Buy. It is out to make you look as ugly as possible. Oh sure, in a vague Michael Mann sorta way, the shots in the video could be mistaken for intentional urban romanticism, in which I’m out to capture the soul of city life by incorporating conflicting color temperatures. But I am not Mann (I am Men) and I’d rather stick to traditional modes of lighting.

The key problem is the lack of separation of the subject from the environment (which can be avoided by placing the subject in front of a darker background). But the Eww! factor comes in the form of chiseled shadows: depending on where the coincidence of light falls on the subject, it renders most of the facial detail as flat or unseemly. Shots like that have the clumsy appeal of shining a flashlight off camera and onto the actors. No thanks.

The heck is all this testing for? For my short film, or something like that, which I have yet to commit to paper. I think I will have Sean do most of the acting, along with perhaps Drew and Lainey, if they’re available. It is narrow-minded of me, as an aspiring filmmaker, to not branch out and work with new people. But in an Ingmar Bergman sorta way, it allows me to focus on the task at hand with folks who I don’t have to struggle to communicate with. And this is a small, personal project, intended to nurture the growth of the baby filmmaker inside me. It’s a practice piece, plain and simple.

To anyone who reads this [still under construction] blog, I am so very very anxious to shoot something. Not in the bang-bang-somebody-call-the-cops sorta way, but in the peculiar way that only filmmakers do it: by writing and recording and editing something that isn’t real and was never real to begin with; but we pretend it’s real because life is so much more interesting that way.

I cooked up an idea about a month ago, but it’s an ambitious little narrative that I’d rather not spoil; a genre piece in the same vein as a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone. Yeah, ideas like that ain’t exactly art. It’s entertainment, so sue me. I come from the school of Sullivan’s Travels. So an hour ago I rummaged through the back burner of my brain and unearthed a new idea. I’ll withhold the plot until I actually have one, but I wanna make it full of exteriors, at night. Ambient noise will put a damper on the dialog, and so I’ll devise a way to place any crucial dialog into a single indoor location.

At about ten o’clock this evening, I parked my car, put on my jacket, and went out for an hour-long stroll. Location scouting. Most of the city lights emit a color that’ll be greenish in post. The rest of the “practicals” cast a red-orange hue.

So this may turn out to be a short film (or skit), or it may fall through. The only variable that will stop me is myself. That is to say that sitting on my ass will get me nowhere. I will not grow as a filmmaker. Anyway, I’m getting too personable (but isn’t that what blogs are for?). To any filmmakers reading this, amateur or otherwise, do not sit on your ass and whine about the routine of everyday life. The moment you start whining about your one passion and don’t even realize it, you are fucked. Solve your own damn problems and fix your own broken schedules (that you broke yourself and were too lazy to fix) in order to make that idea into a script, and that script into a short that strangers can dream about.

Why? Because I am tired of seeing lib-dubs on Vimeo. I spend hours on that site scouring for legitimate shorts that instead turn out to be nothing but montages scored to Sigur Ros and stuffed with shallow focus fetishism.

For reference—and because I felt the urge to see it again—I popped “Taxi Driver” (1976) into my DVD-ROM drive. Holy shit. This is an amazing movie. I’d seen it about three times prior, but that was ages ago. Apart from De Niro’s performance and Schrader’s observant, slow-to-burn screenplay, Scorsese has never been better. Yeah, The Departed and The Aviator are more technically accomplished, but there is a sharp contrast between directing a film and designing a film. His latest films look great, but they don’t “feel” as much as his earlier accomplishments. And they don’t look any better, either. They’re just more varnished. Michael Chapman’s cinematography in “Taxi Driver” is gorgeous—Wait, no. Gorgeous is not appropriate for this movie. It’s more than that. It is poetic, which is allowed to be ugly yet still be beautiful. It is all technique with little gloss. All the better to witness the technique.

Here is one of my favorite moments in the film, a rather revealing scene that uses diegetic music and mise-en-scene (notice the shoes). This is before Scorsese went all-out on a non-diegetic soundtrack, apart from traditional scoring. Even Travis’ voice-over can be said to be diegetic, as it physically shows him scribbling in a notebook. And to anyone who hates zooming because they were told it is unnatural, take note of its transparency in this scene. Robert Altman also employed a lot of zoom in his movies.

On the beeeed,
Where we both liiiiieeee,
Late for the skkyyyyyy…

Afterward, I decided to revisit yet another nineteen-seventy-six film about madness: Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant” (1976). It certainly was weird when I first saw it. And even now it still stands as a weirdo of an experience. But having dived a bit into Gothic Literature, I can now rationalize how well Polanski taps into the doldrums of insanity.He did it before in “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” but those were exercises in intelligible Jungian psychology. “The Tenant” taps into a netherworld that modern psychology has yet to put into words. And as always, Polanski directs it all with such transparency of control that we experience the movie more than we observe it. Which is the purpose of a lot of his films; such as in “Chinatown,” in which we only know about as much as Jake Gittes knows.

Hmmm. Maybe my plot will be about madness? Surly that goes against the feel-good philosophy of Sullivan’s Travels.