We (Do Not) Have the Technology

"It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you of how powerful they are."
-Clive James

Once the technology to do something exists, there is nothing more frustrating than it not doing what you want it to do.

In preparing a short series on a software I truly like, Jungle Software, the makers of of Gorilla and other production systems, I was reminded of those instances of what happens when technology does not work to your advantage.

Case in point: On my last feature, the script was written in Celtx.

Yes, Celtx is free, and, as Stan used to say, oh, the high cost of free.

Understand that for many years,scripts were typed, schedules typed, call sheets hand-written, and stripboards were really strips of cardboard. That is all well and good, but once we moved on, we should never have to move back.

For me, the prime example of the "never go back" principle is the coffee cup lid.

One day, some bright person figured out that instead of having to tear open a portion of the lid randomly, the lid could be perforated to offer the perfect opening from which to drink.

Surprisingly, this patent suggests that the technology was created in 1980 - exactly 11 years after we put a man on the moon and thirty-five years after we harnessed the atom so we could kill more people more quickly. It seems the boys at NASA and/or the Manhattan Project, respectfully, could have figured this one out during one of their, well, coffee breaks.

What does this have to do with making movies, or Celtx, you ask? Making revisions and sharing.

I am not going to get into comparing every software option for screenwriting - and certainly there are a number of ways that work, including simple templates in Microsoft Word, but I think most people in the business would find Final Draft the most convenient software from both a script creation and, more importantly, production-friendly standpoint.

I have previously discussed the role of script supervisor and script revisions, so I won't repeat that here. On his wonderful site lineproducing.com, Stephen describes how to do revisions using Final Draft.

In the internet age, making revisions to any document and being able to share that document and those changes is important. Celtx made both of these difficult, even after we moved out of free mode and "upgraded" to some of their "premium" tools.

I am no tech whiz, and if it were just me, then I would concede a lack of sophistication with the software. However, the process stumped me, my production coordinator, my producer, and my First AD. It seemed at every step along the way, you could not, as they say, get there from here. You could do one thing but not the other You could do it on your computer but not share it. When even my aforementioned genius script supervisor could not do it, I broke down and hired a PA to retype the script into Final Draft, after which the revisions were simple and share-able.

This is not an attack on Celtx. This is the same frustration every time you discover that any advanced program (and I am not accusing Celtx of being an advanced program) does not do precisely what you want it to do, and it takes you longer to figure out how to do it than to have, say, just done it the old way. We encountered similar (but not nearly the same) frustration with Dropbox, and, to a lesser extent, Google Drive.

At one point, the director's email account was not properly receiving or sending emails, "eating" them, as we like to say.

Then there was the junction box we rented, which did not seem to get us wifi in some of the places we needed wifi.

These are, to be sure, Third World Problems. To use one of my favorite Hitchcock quotes, a child did not die. On the scale of progress of Mankind, these aberrations would have produced barely a glitch.

Still, once one gets accustomed to having these conveniences, being deprived of them seems all the more painful.

On the production side, there are certainly a number of companies that offer great software that save us time and effort, including EP Movie Magic, which I used to teach at New York Film Academy.

However, for a number of years, I have enjoyed using Jungle Software, which initially was just Gorilla, but has now grown to a larger family of production-related software. There are many reasons why Gorilla is the software I prefer, and I will explore those in a few posts where I interview Aaton Cohen Sitt, the President of Jungle Software.

Here's hoping that, until then, your version of Hal 9000 never says to you:

"Im sorry. I can't allow you to do that."

The Unattainable - Part 3 - The Seat of Wisdom

Scripty Extraordinaire Melissa

"She comes in colors everywhere,

She combs her hair

She's like a rainbow.

Coming, colors in the air

Everywhere

She's like a rainbow."

-She's a Rainbow, Rolling Stones

My admiration for script supervisors was made clear in a previous post. When it came time to hire a script supervisor for The Unattainable, I reached out to Andrea, who is pictured in that post.

She was not available. I explained the complexity of the script; that we would be shooting in digital and 16MM, that the script would be broken down into present, past and voice-overs that were part of the lead character's imagination.

She gave me one name - that of our scripty above, Melissa.

I spoke to Melissa briefly, and then sent her out our latest copy of the script at the time.

At the time, we had not published a script, which was undergoing constant revisions, and continued to do so right up until and after filming.

In order to keep track of changes in all paperwork, starting with the script, a color code is used to distinguish revisions. In the case of the script, the line producer, AD and script supervisor will confer on whether the changes are few enough to just color code certain pages, or go to a new color entirely.

The guide we used was: white, blue, pink, yellow, green and goldenrod. The standard color code includes more colors, but in order to save us the cost of buying even more reams of different colors (remember, this same code is used for paperwork such as schedules, vendor and crew lists, etc) I cut it off at Goldenrod.

Coming, colors everywhere. It is, indeed, like a rainbow, with a wash of different colored paperwork.

This being a very low budget project, I had originally budgeted one day of prep for script supervisor, which clearly was not going to work with our complex script.

For one thing, there was establishing a timeline. Designers needed to know what happened when, hair and makeup needed to know if this was our leads now or five years ago, the AD needed to schedule so as to not constantly having us change set dressing and the rest during the middle of the day.

The director had a very clear timeline, and it was laid out on index cards along one of her walls. She would show it to anyone who wanted to reference the timeline. When I say it was laid out on a wall, it was an entire wall, floor to ceiling.

The prospect of carrying around the wall was, well, not very enticing. We needed something simpler.

We needed the right person. After getting Melissa's initial response to the script, I knew she was the right person. I knew we had to have her, and looked to get her together with our director as soon as possible.

Below is a somewhat edited and redacted (national security, proprietary information, and all that - very hush hush as they used to say in the spy movies) version of her first email explaining how she broke down the script.

I have attached my Short Form Breakdown by Scene Number below.  .  Everything after Sc11 is supposed to be chronological 

A few notes: 

1952 = Harry's birth year

1970 = Harry goes to Vietnam

1956 - 1975 = Vietnam War

10/1/2000 = FEMALE & Kevinbegin dating

10/15/2003 = Our story begins (Sc31)

2004 - 2006 = FEMALE & KEVINPAST

2010 = FEMALE & Harry's PRESENT

I will fill in the other details later.

Please let me know if you have any questions/comments/etc.

Best,

Mel

Here is the chronological list that (directors assistant) made yesterday:

LIST OF SCENES BY TIME

PAST: (x)scenes

PRESENT:(x)scenes

ATEMPORAL/IMAGINATION: (x)scenes

TOTAL: 124 scenes

The Short breakdown she refers to starts like this

Scene Location Characters D/N Date Time 1/8s ERT

Scene Location Characters D/N Date Time 1/8s ERT

Scene Location Characters D/N Date Time 1/8s ERT

1 EXT. DOCK BY THE SEA (FLASHBACK) - AFTERNOON D10 Sat-10/08/2005 12:36P

1 EXT. DOCK BY THE SEA (FLASHBACK) - AFTERNOON D10 Sat-10/08/2005 12:36P

1 EXT. DOCK BY THE SEA (FLASHBACK) - AFTERNOON D10 Sat-10/08/2005 12:36P

2 INT. PRISON VISITING ROOM (FLASHBACK) - DAY D11 Sun-10/09/2005 2:10PM 2 5/8 2:37

2 INT. PRISON VISITING ROOM (FLASHBACK) - DAY D11 Sun-10/09/2005 2:10PM 2 5/8 2:37

2 INT. PRISON VISITING ROOM (FLASHBACK) - DAY D11 Sun-10/09/2005 2:10PM 2 5/8 2:37

3 EXT. DOCK BY THE SEA (FLASHBACK) - DAY D10 Sat-10/08/2005 1:43PM 2/8 0:15

3 EXT. DOCK BY THE SEA (FLASHBACK) - DAY D10 Sat-10/08/2005 1:43PM 2/8 0:15

3 EXT. DOCK BY THE SEA (FLASHBACK) - DAY D10 Sat-10/08/2005 1:43PM 2/8 0:15

4 CREDITS OF FILM Z 1/8 0:08

4 CREDITS OF FILM Z 1/8 0:08

4 CREDITS OF FILM Z 1/8 0:08

5 INT. APARTMENT, EAST VILLAGE, NYC - DAY D17 Mon-09/20/2010 3:43PM 7/8 0:53

5 INT. APARTMENT, EAST VILLAGE, NYC - DAY D17 Mon-09/20/2010 3:43PM 7/8 0:53

5 INT. APARTMENT, EAST VILLAGE, NYC - DAY D17 Mon-09/20/2010 3:43PM 7/8 0:53

6 INT. BAR (IMAGINATION) - NIGHT Z16 Sun-09/19/2010 10:33P

6 INT. BAR (IMAGINATION) - NIGHT Z16 Sun-09/19/2010 10:33P

6 INT. BAR (IMAGINATION) - NIGHT Z16 Sun-09/19/2010 10:33P

7 EXT. HALFWAY HOUSE - NIGHT N16 Sun-09/19/2010 11:28P

7 EXT. HALFWAY HOUSE - NIGHT N16 Sun-09/19/2010 11:28P

7 EXT. HALFWAY HOUSE - NIGHT N16 Sun-09/19/2010 11:28P


This is a small part of the work Melissa did.

As we moved forward, Melissa's understanding of the script became crucial to every aspect of the shooting, and I have to say she was more involved in helping to get coverage and tell the story than most supervisors I have had the chance to watch work.

One day in particular that I remember was our Day 2. It was all meant to take place INT THEATER. At one point, the DP got the idea of shooting one section EXT in order to break up the shots and give us an intro the those scenes.

What time of year was it? Was she wearing a coat? If so, how heavy?

As our first team was discussing it, Melissa calmly looked at her notes and said, "It's January 20th, 2011."

End of discussion.

Her daily notes continued to not only help for editing, but helped me know details about what was happening during the day that would have been impossible for someone else to keep up.

I've waited some time for script supes to get me notes in the past; Melissa's were usually within two hours of wrap. She gave credit to some software she said she was using - I think she secretly created the software and just didn't want us to know. After my AD, she was the second person I would seek out when I came to set to get a sense of what was happening.

As with most movies, the color wheel kept on turning, with schedule revisions necessitated by actor availability (we were sharing our male lead with a TV show filming in LA) and locations.  My small but incredibly efficient production office kept us constantly with the proper color, as "Megan, what color vendor list are we on?" would be answered with something like "Pink, but don't publish that one yet - we're still revising it."

I often wonder if we make making movies too hard, if we secretly enjoy it more if it's more of a challenge. Somewhere, people work with those simple, boring scripts I referred to in the start of this series. As my long-time AD once said when we were doing a complicated dolly shot through every room in a house on an Indian-American co-production a few years back, "JB, remember when people used to point the camera and shoot? What ever happened to that.?"

Maybe it's me, and I'm just drawn to more challenging scripts, having become numb to the endless stream of scripts that just regurgitate the same, worn-out plot lines and characters.  Indeed, sitting through trailers for upcoming films the other day, I wondered if I was in a revival house, watching movies that were just remakes of older movies, either clearly or inferred.

What I do know is that on this film, on this script, I was glad to have this lady.

"Have you seen her all in gold(enrod - my edit)
Like a Queen in days of old
She shoots colors all around
Like a sunset all around"

For this shoot, no, I have not seen a lady fairer.

How To Be an AD in B.C.

or How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Computer

You know the stories.  No matter how old you are, and what generation you're from, you've heard the stories.  Your father had to walk five miles to school in the snow.  Your mom learned math with an abbacus.  We used the old math before the new math, and then we did the new math by hand - long division and all that.

There are no singers these days like when we were young either Rudy Vallee or  Frank and Billie, or, for a different generation, no one like Janis and Grace Slick.  Ok, the latter is absolutely true and I don't want to hear any discussion on it.

In any of these stories, two things remain unquestionably true; first, that we had it harder, and, second, for some inexplicable reason, that somehow harder meant better.

One of my mentors stared producing in the 1950s, and did so up until his death in the late 90s.  When I would complain that we needed more of some technology, whether it was computers or cell phones (back when there were production cell phones and it wasn't just assumed that everyone had one) he would meet me half way, understanding that time never stopped.

Still, when the moment was right, he would come up along side me on set and start a discussion that went something like this:

Him: Gunga Din
Me: Great Movie.
Him: It really is, isn't it?
Me. Absolutely.
Him: No cell phones then, you know.

The movies changed.  The modern device changed.  The haiku remained the same.

I worked regularly with an AD a little older than myself who right up until a few years ago used to argue for hand-written call sheets, argue that with a blank call sheet, a clipboard and a pen everything was quicker than doing it in Excel.

I'm not that old school.  From early on, I embraced early versions of Movie Magic in helping to break down, schedule and budget a script, and I would never go back to trying to write a script in Word with pre-set tabs rather than use something like MM or Final Draft (no less the old typewriter and crumpled paper days).

 I'm far from a tech whiz - my first "smartphone" was too smart for me the day I bought it and my younger assistant had to show me how to answer the phone.  Still, I do not miss the "old days" before computers (B.C.) became a staple on every set.

However, as we are about to go into a period where I was AD on a number of projects that shaped my career, I thought it an appropriate time to explore some of the ways, in those early computer days, we used to approach the work in the A.D. department.

Rumors to the contrary, I'm not old enough to remember the very old days when all of this was done on manual typewriters, though let me say this.  Anyone who has been around a set, or more so, a production office, knows that one of the promises of technology, that it would reduce paper or paperwork, just ain't so,  If anything, I think the ease of making changes has led to us making more of them, and creating more paperwork.  If you watch very closely on set as the third draft of the call sheet is circulated for approval, or the second set of sides are handed out after key crew loses the first one, you will see a tree in the background, quietly weeping.

So, how I used to approach a project as A.D, with many of the things I do still similar.

First, I read the script numerous times.  First read was just to get the story.  Second read would prepare me to start numbering the scenes.    Then, and this may be a little anal, I would go through the script for each element for one pass and highlight it in the appropriate color.  Highlighting in color was standard, but I would do one pass for characters, one for art department, one for special effects, one for stunts, etc.  This meant I went through the script numerous times.

Then, I would hard-write out breakdown sheets with those elements.  The next step would be for a 2nd AD to take the breakdown sheets and create a stripboard.

Now, stripboards are still used today, at least in name, but they mostly just exist in cyber world.   We might print them out, but few in the indie world actually carry an actual stripboard.

Then, and for many many years before, stripboards were actually wooden charts with cardboard strips of many colors that would represent a script's production schedule.

Here is a good video of most of how the old process was done - watch if you're really interested - its less boring than me describing it:

How to Make a Production Board? -- powered by ehow

Below, from a film museum website (which I am not affiliated with - buy at your own risk).  It shows some of a handwritten board from Close Encounters:

The modern version, whether you use EP or Gorilla Software (my preference) is infinitely easier, and I don't think you lose anything, in fact, the linking gives you more information more quickly in the end.

If you look closely at the above Close Encounters cast header, you will see lots of movement, arrows, and, yes, that marvel of yesteryear's technology, white out.

Ah, do I remember fondly being the 2nd AD, sprawled out on a floor, trying to write tons of information on tiny strips and, if you got them wrong (or things changed, as they are known to do), using white-out or white strips to correct (which the AD always hated).

You rarely saw a 2nd AD without white-out on their fingers.

No, I don't miss the old days.  Yes, computers and the new software are better - by far.  If there was something to be said for the old days, it is that after going through the script all these times, I really believed the AD knew every aspect of the script and the scheduling inside and out.  I believe to this day that I knew the specifics of scenes better in those days than the director did.


In the next few blog posts, I will get into the gigs in the early 90s that really set the table for what these low-budget indies were for me.  I just wanted to give a little overview of the process, then, so you would appreciate.

Of course, some things NEVER change, as is evident from the wonderfully clever video below, made by a current frustrated AD (language warning!).  No matter how you get out the information, people have to READ it!




(A note.  It is totally coincidental that while I had this blog post in my head for some time, I wasn't able to get to it until yesterday, when I was running around without my laptop.  The ironic result is that the first draft of this was written, by hand, in a notebook.  I can only look at it and realize how many poor production members will be spared having to decipher my illegible handwriting).