District 9

I had no expectations of District 9 really - I had not seen any promotional material for the film (did I have my head under a rock? Maybe.) and I had heard mixed accounts - some people loved it, some people didn't. I knew it had something to do with aliens, but that's about it. It's good going into a film with no expectations, I think - everything is a surprise.

The first thing to hit you about the film is its very distinctive style; it's made as a mockumentary, in order to seem more real and more relevant. The word mockumentary has always implied, to me, that the documentary genre and style is being mocked, made fun of, satirised. As it turns out, the word actually means that the film is a mock-up documentary; a fiction film made using the conventions of documentary.

I really enjoyed the style choice - to begin with, it was novel - it got me excited about the film. Then, through the use of mock interviews commenting on the action, it gave a sense of objectivity - it suggested to me that I should view the events of the film somewhat critically. At first all of the shot choices supported the mockumentary style, but as the film continued and the story and its hero became clearer, the style gradually fell away, allowing the audience to become absorbed in the story-telling. As the film reached its conclusion, the style was again emphasised, through interviews and titles, reminding the audience once again of their responsibility to think critically about the film. Awesome! The only times where I think the film fell down a little bit stylistically was the use of some shots that tracked with some gunmen where the camera was obviously attached to the front of the actor. I feel that these kinds of shots give a fantasy, computer game-like quality that did not sit well with the rest of the film.

As for content, and the story was interesting and fast-paced but comprehensible. The unlikely hero was extremely unlikely, and very real in his flawedness. Most of all it's great to see a film tackling huge issues of human rights and prejudice without necessarily foisting any conclusions on the audience. I'm sure Peter Jackson does not regret putting his name to this one.

City of God

I watched City of God on Friday night. My boyfriend has been urging me to watch it for a while - it's his favourite movie, and I can see why. He's a cameraman, and it is magnificently shot.

The colours are intense and moody and the angles really take you inside the story and inside the world, while not blatantly revealing everything on camera. Often the visuals will tell you just enough, and the cutting and sound effects paint the rest of the gory picture. It's obviously a very well-made, clever film, and I found it quite a gutteral experience. The story matter was quite hard to swallow for me - the film is full of murder, rape, drug use, abuse, corruption and poverty - everything that could make the world of the film hell on earth, rather than a City of God.

One thing that got in the way of my appreciation of the film though was a problem with the subtitles. This is such a pity, because it is surely a simple thing to fix. The film is entirely in Portuguese - the language of Brazil - so as an English speaker I was totally reliant on the subtitles to properly understand the plot. Normally it takes only a few minutes of watching a film with subtitles for me to get into an easy habit and reading speed that allows me to take in all of the visual and aural information and subtitles at the same time. With City of God, this could not happen because many of the subtitles were out of time with what was going on on the screen. Sometimes the title would appear before a person spoke, or sometimes after. Because of this, it was impossible for me to get into that easy habit and rhythm, which made it hard to keep up with the story at times.

This was also made more difficult by the similarity in the appearances of the characters. I think that in films aimed at a white audience, the casting director usually puts some effort into distinguishing characters of same sex and age from one another by choosing actors with different hair or skin types, or at least by choosing actors with distinguishing features. This helps the audience identify characters more quickly. In City of God, this was not the case. Almost all of the characters were male (the only female characters were peripheral to the story) and all of them had black skin and black fuzzy hair. And because we were following the stories of a group of characters as they grew up, they were also the same age as one another. For these reasons it was hard to identify characters in the beginning, and therefore hard to associate later adult characters with the child versions that had previously been shown.

Fifth week excluding Monday because I wrote about Monday on Monday.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent editing - hurrah! I love editing. I'm so glad being a director also means I get to keep working on the editing side of things, without having to know and worry about all the technical details that an actual editor has to take care of!

Marty is my editor on this project. We had never worked together previously, and I was worried because he is always so quiet and reserved - but as it turns out, I think he's wonderful! He is still quiet, but he's very patient, very competent, and a perfectionist. When I work with him I hardly ever have the urge to grab the mouse and do it myself, even though he does occasionally get a bit stuck with trimming. He's very easy-going too; this is a god-send because it means that if I want to I can sit with him and pour over every little frame with him, or I can leave him alone and he's perfectly happy to work on his own, and so far I have done both. As far as I can tell he has neither felt stifled or neglected, although now I am wondering whether that is just because he's quiet and isn't expressing those feelings... hmm. Interpersonally, the only problem I can actually pinpoint comes entirely from me. I can be very vocally critical of my own work, and sometimes I just flat-out complain about it. This is a problem because my work is never isolated - my work encompasses the work of everybody on the team. If I complain too much, it hurts other people because I make them feel that they have done a bad job. This may have happened yesterday with Marty... I'm not sure, but I hope not.

As for the actual material itself, it is awful. I'm rather ashamed. Although I have to say here that the film is still going to turn out MUCH better than I expected, because Marty (and I) have done a really good job in pulling together the best bits to make a good cut. I'm quite pleased.

Anyway, I have two major gripes at myself, and both come from not double-checking and being absolutely thorough. The first is that my planned side-on close up of Trevor was supposed to pan to a poster on the wall of the elevator when he exited the elevator, however when it came to capturing the shot I forgot about the poster and we just cut the shot once he exited. Dammit! I should have double-checked my shot list! I had it written on there. Secondly, I do not have any footage of the Courier holding Trevor's briefcase, and so the audience can't possibly tell that he has stolen it. All of my shots from the point of the steal are too tight to show the briefcase. This is such foolishness on my part, as I evidently completely lost track of capturing the basic plot of the scene, and therefore lost the punchline. What I am hoping to do now, to fill the hole, is to actually find a location on campus and shoot the little scene where the courier steals the briefcase, even though the original script says that this happens off screen. I always hated that.

Other smaller gripes include making the shot on Sarah before she enters the elevator a bit too tight, and not spending enough time on the floating two-shot that is basically the most important shot. If I could do it again I would definitely spend more time on that, although even now I cannot think what I would give up to do it, as we have used and needed everything. Wait, scrap that statement. The shot that I had planned to use as my opening shot was never going to work - that's the one I would scrap.

One problem that I can't really blame myself for is the way the art department let me down a bit. I think I chased them as much as anyone could expect me to, but the fact is, my shoot was the last of eight, and I think by that time they were tired and did not care very much. It's such a pity.

Other things this week:

I had a rehearsal with Chloe yesterday, and one for Gypsy today, for their scenes in New York. I say rehearsals, but actually I mean meetings for discussions. We focused on parts of the text that required research, and tried to draw conclusions about characters' backstories from the text. They were good sessions, but it's going to get harder from now. The next thing I plan to do with them is to have them tell me the results of their research, and tell me their backstories, not as actors but as characters, as though the facts are part of their own memories and experiences, rather than simply research. I hope I can keep up with all this - I'm still finding it very difficult to know how to work on these monologues, and I haven't found the hook that makes me fall in love with the play yet. I just need to work on it more I suppose, and soon I'll find that moment of magic. I'm rehearsing with Chloe tomorrow - perhaps I will find it then.

Week 4

The journalling is slipping! Week 5 has already begun and here I am writing about week 4.

I did have one small victory last week: I finally finished one journal entry for my theatre theory class. The entry was on Stanislavsky, and ended up being 10 pages long. Obviously I need to work on being more concise! Now I just need to tackle Meyerhold, Copeau and now Artaud as well. Phwoar, the list is growing... :-( Today's discussion on Artaud was interesting though - I have better understanding of what is actually meant by "Theatre of Cruelty" now. I feel so sorry for Artaud though. He lead such a frustrating existence - such total inner chaos that he was incapable of expressing. After all, the medium over which he seemed to have the most control was words - yet he writes about the incapacity of language to express higher truths and the need to break verbal language down. Last week's lesson was on Copeau, and once again I think I will reserve comment until after I've done the theatre journal.

To be honest, not much of last week really struck me as anything special or new - we're not working on any projects at the moment and I spent most of the week doing paid work to keep afloat. The one thing that did strike me though was doing a couple of acting exercises in Milton's class. I don't know if I've talked about this on here before but I actually love acting. It's not that we were actually doing any acting at the time, but we were doing exercises that have value for actors and they felt good. I miss acting a lot sometimes, when I'm working with actors or watching performances. I want to study it, and know about it from the inside. The more I think about it the more I realise that it's something that I'm going to have to do, otherwise I will just get more and more frustrated. I think I will join a community theatre or something.

Thelma & Louise

I had been wanting to see this film for a long time and finally watched it last night, courtesy of Chris.

I don't exactly know what I was expecting from Thelma & Louise, but I guess it wasn't that. I knew it was a road movie, but I had no idea they were on the run from the law. I knew there would be a lot of landscape shots, and because of this it seemed there weren't really that many. The characters were very likeable. At times it seemed their transformation was too simple, yet that was also one of the most appealing things about them. I was surprised to see Geena Davis completely outshine Susan Sarandon, and it's not hard to see why Brad Pitt's career took off after this film!

The ending was a bit hard to take though. I never expected it to end in glorified suicide, and at first my reaction was to be appalled at what I was seeing. The shot freezes with the car gracefully flying through the air, and everything about the music says that what we are seeing is a kind of victory. It really clashed with my values, as I've always seen suicide as a weak way out. Only a minute or two beforehand I had said to the person I was watching the film with, "Will they take the suicide option? Nah, they're too tough for that shit." I was so disappointed to find I was wrong. With a bit of time and space though, I see the sense in it. The problem is that my cultural context is different to theirs. The setting of the film is the deep south of the USA. The girls would have been facing the death penalty. The attitude towards their rape defence probably would have been, "She was asking for it". Growing up in Australia, the death penalty didn't cross my mind, and fortunately I also live in a time where sexist attitudes that blame victims for rape are far less prevalent. Once I put myself into the cultural context of the characters I do see the happy ending. They died because they had to, but they died free because they chose it.

Lessons learned: People interpret films according to their personal knowledge and experience of the world, therefore people's interpratations cannot be fully controlled by the filmmakers.

Week 3

Once again, I didn't have any classes scheduled this week except for the Monday theory class, as the Studio 2 shoots were still in progress.

I'm ashamed to say that I did not complete my Stanislavski journal entry in time for the class - not that it was necessary as preparation for the class, but it was something I really wanted to get on top of before the week began. I did do some hours work on it, but found that the approach I was taking was probably too thorough and time-consuming. I had to abandon finishing the entry in order to do the preparation required for the next class on Meyerhold. Once again a week has gone by and I have not done my journal entry on Meyerhold (or finished the one on Stanislavski!). I think I will put my thoughts on Meyerhold in this journal once I have actually had a moment to collect them in the other.

To be honest, there's no good excuse for not having done the entries yet. There is only the issue of balance. This week, my personal life got in the way of my schoolwork a lot, and messed with my time management, focus, and motivation. I have a theory that the reason for this is because I'm not busy enough - last semester my personal life didn't seem to get in my way at all, and I think the reason for this is that I barely allowed myself to have a personal life. Whenever there was the possibility of it becoming problematic I just pushed it aside with the huge abundance of work I had to do. It was easy to be strong and put my studies first because I absolutely had to. Now that there isn't very much work to do (or rather not much urgent work to do), having a personal life becomes important, otherwise things get boring. And herein lies that problem! The more important the personal life, the more important the problems in that life become. It's no longer possible to push them aside and simply focus on schoolwork.

So now that I have located the problem, I am faced with finding a solution. The solution will certainly have to come from me, as when I look at my timetable for the next month I can clearly see that I'm not going to get much busier for at least another month. Work on the New York play with Milton has begun, and my own work on my documentary continues, but is it enough? I think I need to push myself harder and faster on the documentary, for one thing. Maybe set a deadline. But still... I think I need more pressure.

As for everything else...

There was a production meeting scheduled for Monday morning, which almost nobody turned up to, including my DP. There's almost no point having a production meeting without a DP, so that was very frustrating, and very unfprofessional of him. I had Felix and Ashton try on costumes for me at lunchtime - it was much easier than expected. Sarah's fitting was on Tuesday at lunchtime - as expected it is quite difficult to find shirts that are a good fit for her, but fortunately we found a white shirt that fitted well. On Tuesday afternoon we were supposed to have a rehearsal from 4pm-5pm, however I received texts from the actors during the afternoon saying that we had to cancel as their teacher had told everyone off for leaving classes and decided that classes would go until 5:15pm each day that week. I was furious, as we desperately needed the rehearsal, and went directly to Heath to try to have the issue sorted. Heath was very helpful, but was unable to get the actors out of class. He did show me their timetable for the following day though, and pointed out that an SDL had been added in the morning and therefore I would be able to have a long rehearsal with them then. I was greatly relieved until Felix told me that Ian had already booked him for the rest of the time that I had been hoping to fill.

I used the time when I would have been rehearsing on Tuesday afternoon to continue transcribing my documentary footage, and then went to what was apparently going to be our first New York rehearsal. As it turned out, the 'rehearsal' began half an hour late, and actually consisted of watching the first 18 minutes of a documentary about 9/11, and then a bit of discussion. The documentary, I have to say, was riveting, and even though it was a tough watch I think I will watch the whole thing soon in order to get a better grasp on the people at the core of the play. Some of the discussions after the doco were interesting, but I think the most helpful part of the night was hanging around with Milton (and Romain and Chris, although they didn't say much) afterwards. It gave me the opportunity to talk about my thoughts on acting and rehearsal techniques and hear what he had to say about them, instead of the usual way that it works where he talks about his ideas but I don't get much feedback for mine.

Wednesday morning rolled around and it turned out that Felix was the first one there, ready to rehearse - because he had not been rehearsing with Ian that morning. Ian had cancelled the rehearsal because he had never heard back from Felix to say that he was available! So annoying. Neither of us could rehearse, because Felix can't text, it seems.

Anyway, we began the rehearsal, and worked hard. Because we had such a limited time to rehearse I was quite hard on the actors. I had asked them to do a lot of preparation, and had high expectations. I stopped them every couple of seconds to question what they were doing and why, what they were thinking, what their intentions were, etc. They seemed to find it quite gruelling, as they had to be focused all of the time and I often made them go over the same thing many times. Unfortunately, this approach meant that we did not get all the way through the script, as Felix and Sarah soon had to leave for appointments. Nevertheless, the results were undoubtedly good. The improvement in the way they performed their roles was vast, even just in that small space of time, and as he was leaving Ashton said to me, "From an actor's point of view, the way you direct is very fuckin' helpful and supportive". He made my day!

And finally, my shoot on Friday.

When I turned up the set was nowhere near completed. I was shocked, as I had thought that most of the work would be done on it the night before, and that the morning was our time to use it to rehearse. There was some time wasted as a result; I didn't want to waste time or get in the way so decided to take the actors to another room to rehearse, but Milton insisted that this was our time on set and kicked the art department off. There was some fluffing around and eventually we were able to have some time on set, but I have to say I had been thrown and was hopelessly nervous by this stage. For one thing we were standing in a set that seemed to be nowhere near completion, plus it was far bigger than I had imagined. For another, Milton and Stephen (the DP) were now sitting on seats watching us. And the time was ticking. I started off uneasily and badly - fortunately I was saved by Milton, who had no patience for watching me do bad work. He jumped in almost straight away and began directing my actors. Someone doing my job for me will always be a good stir to action for me, because I absolutely can't stand it. As soon as he began directing the actors I felt freed up again, and was able to jump in and do my work. Milton continued to direct alongside me, but at least he allowed me to stear the scene.

Of course the time ticked over at a horrendous speed, and soon it was time to show the crew the block. The block is quite nerve-wracking for me - I'm always afraid that the actors won't get the blocking quite right and I will have to correct them in front of the crew, and there is quite a lot of pressure on me to give that first good impression that I really know what I'm doing. The block is the moment when the crew decides in their minds whether they want to be on set or wish they were somewhere else and therefore it's absolutely crucial to the success of the day that it goes well. We got through the block, and the actors were fine. My nerves made it difficult for me to judge whether or not I did a good job, but given that the crew didn't seem to immediately jump out of their skins hustling to get the job done, I think I must have been at least a little bit lacking in energy.

The shooting itself was quite fun for me. I have to say that the acting frustrated me, and I seriously wished we had had more rehearsals (or maybe that I'd done an ordinary rehearsal instead of the one in the elevators?). I constantly wanted to get better performances, but once you begin shooting you do have to let it go, to a certain extent, otherwise you will never get through your shots. The thing that I found fun, though, was responding to the time pressure. I have to admit, I probably over-stepped my mark a little bit, as I was often more of an AD than the AD herself - constantly trying to get everyone to be faster, and changing the schedule according to the needs of the day. I cut two shots quite early on, realising that they were not as important as I had initially thought, and when the art department screwed us over I quickly changed the schedule to work around that too. Even though I frequently had to move on without getting as many takes of things as I wanted, and the compromise was quite painful, I still enjoyed the rush of the urgency of the decision-making. I loved the high energy all day, and lovely organised chaos as we hurtled through. Sadly, the thing that made the compromising less painful was the fact that I had to accept, early on, that the film never had a hope of turning out well. The script, I felt, was decidedly average, I was not getting the performances necessary to pull it off (and I'm not sure that the actors, no matter how much rehearsal we had, would have been capable of it at this stage anyway), and the set was very very ugly. Nevertheless, I may not come out of this exercise with a good film, but I have come out with a much greater level of confidence in my ability to be adaptable as the situation demands.

If I could have made a change, though, it would have been that the space between receiving the script and meeting with the art department should have been greater. We were allocated the scripts in the last week of last semester, at a time when we were frantically, desperately trying to get many assessments finished. We immediately had to meet with Brent so that the sets could be built over the holidays. In hindsight, I see that this really hurt our chances of making a good film, as there was no time to do any preparation and research. Since that time, I have specifically taken the time to look at as many elevators as possible, and I have also watched some scenes from other films that have been shot inside elevators. If I could have done this before meeting with Brent I may not have ended up with such a hideous set (although I was still last on the schedule, which still would have had an effect) and I also may have had a set whose dimensions were more appropriate to the action of the script.

Heavenly Creatures

I watched Heavenly Creatures with Chris last night. I was pleased to be able to watch it, as it is part of the film theory class that everyone else in FTV is taking but I am not. Now I will be able to join in conversations about it, if there are any.

The film was bizarre, I must say. The acting from the two girls was very over-the-top, and a bit jarring at first, however I eventually began to accept it and their oddities. It did make the first half of the film quite hard to watch though, as not a lot was happening to distract me from the weirdness. One thing I certainly did like though was the sense of drama created by the shot choices. Jackson never shied away from laying all of drama bare to the naked eye and heightening everything. I loved a lot of the edits as well, most particularly the transitions between scenes. The ending was also amazing in the way that everything was suddenly drawn out, compared to the rest of the film where just about everything was heavily compressed. The tension was electric, and I felt sick to my stomach in the lead-up to the murder, knowing perfectly well it was going to happen, and simultaneously begging the characters not to go through with it. Even after the first strike to the head I still had the slightest hope that they would pull back, which made the rest even more gruesome to me.

The film makes me desperate to make a feature. There are just so many more opportunities for building style, characters and tension in a feature than in a short. Features are so much more complex, and so much more magnificent as a result. I'd love to write one and get to work straight away, yet where does one find ideas?!

The second week

The second week of term has flown by unbelievably quickly, despite the fact that I wasn't especially busy as, apart from Monday's theory class, there were no classes scheduled due to the Studio 2 shoots.

Monday's theory class on Stanislavski was quite interesting, although it wasn't very specific to Stanislavski. Milton made a guest appearance, and so most of the time was spent discussing Milton's ideas about acting (and some class members' as well), rather than Stanislavski's. As I expected, keeping up with the work for the Monday class is proving difficult for me; I didn't finish the reading in time for the class, and I have been procrastinating all week over writing my theatre journal entry. I will definitely do it tonight though, as if I do not it will probably get left until the end of term, the night before the journal is due. I need to get into good habits, and that means getting on top of this journal NOW.

Apart from a visit to Gayle about the studio 2 costumes, Tuesday was unproductive, however Wednesday saw me finally beginning the transcribing of my Cannabus documentary. Sai Yin set up the tape player in the year 1 editing suite, and I was finally able to review the footage that I shot so many months ago. Between both Wednesday and Friday's transcribing sessions I have done an hour and thirty-four minutes worth of footage so far, so there is still a lot more to go. There was a lot of rubbish on the tapes - but you expect that with documentary - however there was enough good stuff as well that I think we have done very well. Watching the footage, much of which was too shakey or too dark or bright, makes me appreciate just how difficult documentary camera work is. The camera student who helped me with the footage I have looked at so far is excellent in my opinion, however she clearly struggled to make the camera respond quickly enough to events as they took place.

Thursday was an interesting day, as this was the day when I had a rehearsal with my actors for studio 2. I had decided to take them into the city to rehearse in actual elevators so that they could get a feel for how the unique environment of the elevator impacts on people's behaviour, and so that they could rehearse the scene in front of the general public and hopefully convince them of the reality of the situation, rather than revealing themselves as actors. I felt that this was important, as I am finding that they frequently over-act. I was hoping this would encourage them to pull it back a lot.

The day didn't start off too well, as we weren't able to leave on time. Felix had to give a presentation at 1 o'clock - not that he had thought to tell me this himself, despite knowing for more than 24 hours in advance. So of course I turned up at 12, ready to go, and Ashton and Sarah told me about Felix's presentation. I was so annoyed that he hadn't told me in advance, and that he was nowhere to be seen! Nevertheless, we agreed to meet and leave after the presentation; about twenty past one. Once the presentation was over, however, Felix took out his lunch and sat on a bench, refusing to leave with us until after he had had his lunch and a break. What was he doing at lunch time if not eating his lunch?! Since we had already been delayed by almost an hour and a half we asked him to please come with us and eat in the car on the way, but he would not budge. Meanwhile, Ashton and Sarah stood by dressed in clothes that they felt that their character might wear, as they had been asked to do, while Felix wore his normal clothes.

Eventually we drove into town and set about pursuing elevators to rehearse in. Typically, Felix was skeptical and reluctant about the idea, while the other two were happy to discuss challenges and solutions. Similarly, Ashton and Sarah knew their lines - Felix did not. If I had been in the position to do so, I would have kicked Felix out of the scene instantly for his self-indulgent behaviour. Unfortunately though we were not in control of our own casting on this project.

Anyway, eventually we were able to rehearse in elevators. There plenty of mishaps involving people getting stuck on floors they were not supposed to be on, or missing the elevator altogether, however I still feel all in all that the day was quite productive. For one thing, they were certainly able to feel the effects of the environment. For another, they succeeded in the challenge of maintaining their focus despite various things being thrown into the middle of their scene. There was also a small confrontation, when Felix said a line and someone else in the lift thought he was speaking to them and got antsy, so they were able to feel the intensity of what having a confrontation in that tiny little box really feels like. They were also able to observe little details such as the fact that they automatically leaned against the walls of lift. Furthermore, it was all very good fun. The rehearsal wasn't as long as I would have liked, but a good experience for all of us. If I were to do a similar exercise again the future, I would probably do it at a later stage of rehearsal though, when the actors know the text more instinctively.

Friday was quite interesting as we had the first read-through of the 'New York' script. In order to give us more practise working with actors, Milton is helping those of us (directing students) who are interested to put on a play called 'New York'. It is a series of duologues between a psychiatrist and number of people who are traumatised by the events of September 11th. Reading the play on Friday I felt that it was very interesting on the page, but not too sure that it would be very engaging for an audience on the stage because it was so static and reflective; the action was all in the past tense. Nevertheless, I think it will be a very good experience for me as far as working with actors to achieve a performance goes. The read-through with the actors themselves was quite interesting. Some had obviously already done quite a bit of work on their characters beforehand, while some clearly had not. There were also some stand-out American accents around the table, and some very poor ones too. I'm not sure how many scenes we are doing each, but I have listed my preferences and will send them to Milton soon. Fingers crossed that I get good scenes and great actors!

Another thing that I did on Friday was observing Romain's studio shoot. I was there for the first shot of the day, and popped in a couple of times afterwards too. The set looked great, although inappropriate to the script in my opinion. I was also unsure about Sarah's costume as she closely resembled a nurse, without clearly being one. The thing I was most interested in though was the actinng. It was quite difficult not to whisper in Romain's ear all the things I would have told the actors if I had been him. As I watched them I felt that the actors knew what was going on in the scene on paper but were not actually applying that to how they acted. They were acting the lines too much, and not the subtext and certainly not the circumstances. They were also acting too hard - over-pronouncing their Ts etc. In the end I did end up talking to Romain about one aspect of the performance as he took a quick bathroom break, and he incorporated my suggestion into the scene. When I saw it played, however, it still appeared not to be fully understood. So frustrating! I hope I can get more out of my actors, although it will be no small challenge.