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.

The first week

So the first week of uni has finished and the second has begun, and if I don't write an entry about week one now then I never will.

Monday:

I was late for the first class, which was listed on the timetable as "screening or physical class". I was a little bit disappointed to find that we will not be having either screening or physical classes; instead we will be having lectures and seminars. Never mind.

I have enrolled in NZ & Contemporary Theatre this semester, as opposed to NZ Film like the rest of my classmates. My class consists entirely of actors except for one writer - Joe - and I. The morning consisted of going to the library to research and decide who we felt were the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century. I have to admit that I wasn't wholly committed to the task; I paired up with Caroline and found myself at a table of girls all catching up following the holidays, and I ended up joining in many of their conversations. The afternoon was a drag, as we all shared our lists with the class. Nevertheless, I did benefit from it, as so many names that I'd never heard before and I began to realise how much I don't know. Going into the morning session, I had thought that I had a pretty good knowledge of 20th century theatre practitioners already, and it's true that I did know many of the names, however seeing all the ones I didn't know opened me up a lot more to the work. The focus of the course is going to be on reading and research, and we are to keep a research journal each week, documenting our reading and findings. I have to say, I find this task very daunting. Discipline is not necessarily my strong point, and I also have a tendency to take each task far too seriously. I can imagine that the journal entries, which will presumably take everyone else about 2 hours per week to complete, are likely to take the entire week for me, every week. I guess I'll just have to try to train myself.

Tuesday:

The morning session, talking through our studio films with Milton and Elizabeth, was far easier than expected. It had seemed as though we would need a lot of preparation for the session, but in fact I was fine with minimal preparation. I did catch myself out a couple of times though, although always too late. I think I sometimes exhibit a certain arrogance and attitude problem, which makes me cringe to even think about. I caught myself speaking reacting to certain problems that other directors were having as though the problems were really very simple and they should not worry about them. The truth is, I am glad I am not in some people's position, and I certainly have no right to act as though I could handle anything. I am neither very knowledgable, nor very experienced. I have no idea where my sudden ego came from. Whatever the case, I am now resolved to learn to keep my mouth shut until I am sure I want to open it.

Wednesday:

I was supposed to have a team meeting for the studio films in the morning. I had no idea what this meant, but worked hard storyboarding the night before to ensure I would be able to answer most questions about the shots at least. Actually, hardly anyone turned up to the team meeting, and certainly no one actually seemed like they wanted to be there. It was very informal. I think I did well though; having the informal situation and the essential people present gave me the chance to speak informally about the project and finally get people excited to work on it. I was very demonstrative and energetic, and asked for people's ideas and opinions, and was able to answer most questions, or work around the ones I couldn't. Finally, it seemed as though people might actually care. Usually I would hope to get everyone very excited about the project at the first pre-production meeting, but the fact of the matter was that at the first meeting at the end of last term I had very little excitement myself. In fact I just flat out didn't care, as I was drowning in looming assessments. Now that I am interested though, it wasn't hard to get the crew to that point too.

The afternoon session involved four directors each getting up in front of the whole directing and acting classes, plus Milton and Elizabeth, and conducting a rehearsal. I felt very sorry for Chris having to go first. He's very softly spoken, and Elizabeth kept asking him to speak up, which of course made going first that much tougher. I took during notes during Chris's rehearsal, as we had been instructed to do, but after that I just gave up as each director copied Chris's exact methods. I felt embarassed for our directing class, that everyone was so uninteresting! And as I watched everyone else's rehearsals, all I could think of was "this would NOT suit my script. What on earth am I going to do?!"

Thursday:

Pre-production meeting. I got my shot list to Lisa on time on Thursday night and it was duly handed out. Larry estimates that my first shot is going to take about two and a half hours to shoot. Ouch. I guess I will have to change it, but what to? I already have too many shots so I don't want to cut it up into multiple shots - it's just not worth it. Also, it's the opening shot. If I don't have a fantastic opening shot, why bother? But if it's going to take that long to shoot then I pretty much sacrifice the rest of the film, so once again, why bother? Argh, it's going to have to change - I just don't know what to. Apart from that, the meeting went well. There were plenty of questions, but I was able to answer most pretty easily, and everyone seemed pretty calm. This is the bonus of being the last shoot scheduled. Larry even said he thought I was a good director - hurrah!

The afternoon session was once again four directors conducting rehearsals in front of everybody, and this time that meant me. As I watched the first three directors I jotted down a rehearsal plan, but when I got up all I really knew was that I couldn't be like them. Over the course of the two afternoons the routine that Chris had started had gradually evolved into a strange talk-show format. There was nothing genuine left.

I had one assignment for myself: get the actors excited about the film. Having taken a long time to become excited about it myself, I assumed that they might feel similarly about the script to me. I am also aware that when you're not excited about a project you will procrastinate, but when you are excited you will work hard. I think for most actors, the first reason they choose to do acting is because it is fun. So to convince them to choose to work hard on my film, I need to take them to that place of fun that sparks their love of acting and therefor their energy, even if it's just in the first rehearsal.

Happily, I think I succeeded. Funnily enough, the biggest hindrance I found was the tutors. I was moving through my rehearsal quite happily and all was going to plan, when the tutors chimed in. This was to be expected - they were there to give feedback to the directors and help them with their rehearsals, however instead of giving me feedback, the tutors spoke directly to the actors, giving them offering after offering on their characters, and inadvertently beginning to direct my film and my rehearsal themselves. I have to say, I sat on the floor fuming and thinking that they were ruining my plans. I was even going to address the problem with them afterwards, but fortunately I had to sit through a feedback session with the other directors, and this gave me time to put it in perspective. After all, the rehearsal certainly did end well and I did feel that I had achieved my goal. And some of the discussions that the tutors had with my actors were helpful. And they certainly had not seemed to realise that they had jumped in and started to direct the film. I decided to take it as a compliment instead. Perhaps they got so excited too, that they couldn't help themselves and their director/actor instincts just came bursting out and got carried away :-) This probably isn't true, but it helps me to think it is! At the very least, I'm glad that I kept my mouth shut in this case, as I would have ruined a good mood and a good afternoon if I had opened it.

Friday:

Friday afternoon was time set aside for us to rehearse with our actors. Having gotten them excited about the film, I decided to use the time to do the serious text analysis work that the other directors had used their previous rehearsals for. I think it went very well with Ashton and Sarah. Both of them brought creative ideas about their characters to the table, and we were able to have a good laugh over the possibilities and eventually make some valuable decisions about the characters. Unfortunately though, I did not have as much success with Felix. Felix is also acting in Ian's film, and therefore I had to share Felix with Ian in the rehearsal. Unfortunately, this meant that Felix missed out on our original discussions about the characters, and also the good mood and good ideas that were flying about. When Felix was able to join us, many decisions had already been made and Ashton and Sarah tuned out as I talked to Felix. Since they were not strictly necessary to the conversation I found it hard to retain their attention. As a result, Felix had less creative freedom with his character, and the mood was not quite right to promote the fun exploration that was really required. I think that through the discussions I was eventually able to help him see the possibilities and the choices available to him, however his enthusiasm seems considerably lower than I would like at this stage. I always expected that I would have to work hard with him - I've often noticed a tendency towards negativity and resistance in him - I'm just disappointed at the extent, and frustrated as I know the shared time will continue to cause a problem through the whole process.

On Friday night I decided to enact an idea I had had the day before; to make a website about my studio film. Basically, I get sick of chasing people all the time, sending emails and text messages, handing out paperwork, etc. I wanted a central point where people could find all the information available. So I have made a website to do just that. I have been thinking of making a website for a while actually - just to try it out - so this was an excellent opportunity for the experiment. Anyway, I think it is a success so far, although I haven't had much feedback. (This is the one bad point - I always like feedback, and if I put out information on a website then people can access it without actually having to speak to me. Mind you, they don't reply to emails half the time anyway so it's really not much different). Anyway, the site is loveinanelevator.weebly.com. Here's to its success!