Posts Tagged ‘The Reach Film Fellowship’

10/11/2011

»  Crowd-funding a Short Doc: How Reach Film Fellow Nancy Schwartzman raised $8,538 for xoxosms

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a post by Nancy Schwartzman

a post by Nancy Schwartzman

Back in September 2010, I was selected to participate in Cinereach’s Reach Film Fellowship, a program for emerging filmmakers making short films. I wanted to explore technology and its impact on our intimate relationships, so I developed xoxosms, a documentary about two awkward, introverted teenagers from two different worlds. The subjects of the film, Gus and Jiyun, found each other and fell in love on the Internet (see prior Cinereach guest post for how I navigated my delicate access to their love life). The film is about to premiere at the New Orleans Film Festival this coming weekend, but as I reflect back on the early days of the project, I think one of the most valuable things I can share is what I learned from my experience crowd-funding to raise a significant portion of my film’s budget.

The Reach Film Fellowship provided mentorship and a grant towards making the film, but we needed more money for post-production because we shot in multiple  formats and needed motion graphics sequences to illustrate Skype and chat scenes. I chose to do a crowd-funding campaign to bridge the financial gap for a few reasons. First, I wanted to try online fundraising, which requires a new kind of trailer and telling the story of my film outside the immediate film and film-granting community. I felt that the topic of love and the Internet would catch peoples’ attention and help generate energy, excitement, and perhaps a community around the film.

Before production, we started a Tumblr blog called, “Without the Internet, we never would have met…” which drew inspiration from stories of long distance relationships (“ldr”) and Internet love that we found in online communities. The blog was not intended as a marketing site for the film, but as a place to highlight and explore relationships like Gus and Jiyun’s. We hoped people with a natural interest in the topic would find us.

TumblrLOVE

I made a list of friends, family, and colleagues to see if I felt comfortable asking them for money—I did. I assessed the community around The Line Campaign (the multi-platform outreach component of my first film, The Line) to see if I could possibly migrate the community to support this new film. The Line Campaign includes an active blog and a crew of bloggers, 2600 twitter followers, a Tumblr blog, 2 Facebook pages with about 3,000 fans, and a newsletter with 3,000 subscribers. I had interns who could help spread the word about xoxosms, and a community of friends and colleagues in the sex-positive, youth media, new tech and feminist blogosphere that I hoped would be interested in the film. So, with a decent size network, plus a healthy dose of shamelessness, I was hoping to get the money needed to finish the film.

xoxosms on kickstarter - home

I chose Kickstarter as my crowd-funding platform because I knew it would be a good tool to rally potential supporters that were already in my network, but I was also drawn to the sense of community on the Kickstarter website. I spoke to Justin, who handles PR at Kickstarter about the “stumble upon” factor of their website and learned that over 100,000 new backers to Kickstarter campaigns return to support other projects. Additionally, 44% of all projects launched through Kickstarter reach full funding. There is also a weekly newsletter and snappy blog that highlights projects, and helps them stand out.

There have been some stunning success stories for documentaries and independent films on Kickstarter. For smaller projects like mine, these heights can seem insurmountable—the bar is so high. Don’t be intimidated! There is room for you, and you don’t need a full-time team or thousands of followers to get it done.

Below I’ll present some tips based on how I navigated my Kickstarter campaign as a case-study. If it captures your imagination, I invite you to comment and ask questions about how I did it, or share tips from your own experience.

1. Study Kickstarter!
How did the successful projects conduct their campaigns? What is the language and tone of the site? How do people structure their rewards? What kind of video do they use?

While I was studying the site, I looked at a diverse bunch of projects – books, theater, art, film, and tried to gauge what attracted me to them. I was trying to find the right balance between intimate, aesthetically pleasing, descriptive and urgent. The breezy and familiar tone of Coming and Crying, the “Awkward Erotica” anthology, impressed me. The writing spoke to the reader like a friend, or a diary, and you felt invited to participate in the making of the anthology. The community of writers and supporters were sure to follow, too. Disclosure: I know the gals who created Coming & Crying, but with their 785% funding rate, you didn’t have to know them to feel like you wanted to, or already did.

2. Get Ready for Your Close-up: why you have to be in your Kickstarter video
Because your passion for the project is a critical selling point, you need to put yourself in the video. Every successful Kickstarter campaign for a film (and pretty much any project) had a video featuring the person heading up the project talking about why they were passionate about making the film. The word passion comes up a lot on the site, including here in the FAQ. It was clear to me that successful Kickstarters knew a good video was an opportunity to engage with site visitors directly about why they were making the film, show some beautiful and compelling footage, and explain why they needed the Kickstarter audience to help them complete their visions.

I scoured the site for documentary videos, and decided to merge the Angela Tucker and Jacob Krupnick approaches. In her (A)sexual pitch, Angela Tucker intros the piece and then lets the footage from the film speak for itself too. In Girl Walk // All Day, Jacob gives a brief intro, and then narrates throughout (over footage from the film, explaining what the film will do, who the character will meet along the way, and what the audience will see). Both filmmakers come off as direct and honest, with compelling film subjects. My take-away: be real, speak the truth, and keep it short.

3. Start The Presses: how/why you can get some
For xoxosms, a 21st century love story about teens, the Internet, and relationships, I targeted my existing list of sex bloggers, tech lovers and teen-culture folks, hoping they’d take interest in the story, and direct traffic to our Kickstarter page once we launched. For an extra hook for the media, I launched the project on Valentine’s Day. I sent a general press release about the film with a link to the video on our launch day to a large list of journalists who write about tech issues and young people. I also sent personal letters to folks that I know, either because they wrote about The Line in the past, or through other professional channels.

Within a week of our launch, we were profiled on IndieWire, Social Times, Break-up Girl, Kickstarter Blog, and About.com. We were also project of the day on Kickstarter (but see #8 on how we may not have maximized that opportunity). The press attention lent credibility to the project and attracted some donors that were not already part of my circle of contacts.

4. Three Touches: timing, and roll out
30 days is the average time it takes to get a Kickstarter project funded. It’s also a long-enough-but-not-too-long period that gives you enough time to email blast and pester friends, family and lists about three times (do you know that creepy marketing term “3 touches”?) without overwhelming them. I recommend personal emails first, then group emails.

30 days is also short enough to provide your potential supporters with a sense of urgency about making their donation. A 90-day campaign would just be torturous. You’d have to pester people for a longer amount of time, and wait with your stomach in knots for that much longer.

The 3 touches is very important. Be prepared to ask everyone you know and love AT LEAST THREE TIMES THROUGHOUT THE MONTH. We are busy, flakey, cheap, procrastinators.  Most of us need to be kicked and nudged. In the FAQ of the Kickstarter site, it talks about average time and duration of campaigns. Notice, in the chart below, how large numbers of backers kicked in towards the end:

xoxosms Kickstarter Tracking

Here’s what I did during my 30 days to make the most of the time:

Day #1
I begged my close friends/family first so when I launched the counter wouldn’t be at zero.

Week #1
Facebook blasts – driving friends to my Kickstarter from my personal page and xoxosms page
Twitter blasts – direct messaged everyone, asked explicitly for RTs.
Rolled out the ask on our Tumblr blog
Emailed friends w/blogs or podcasts an abridged version of the press release with the critical details, video and link.

Week #2
I recruited a friend who had offered to donate a generous sum to the project to set up a funding challenge to inspire others to give. I gave her a key list of friends, close ones, and she emailed them offering to match their contributions. She nudged and pinged and kept them engaged in funding, and got them to ask their friends.

Week #3
I blasted The Line Campaign newsletter, a group mostly focused on healthy relationships and preventing violence, about my newest project and how the film relates to their work. I was concerned that the topics were too far apart, but we received a great response from the list.

Week #4
I begged my crew to reach out to their networks as we approached the home stretch. I got an awesome intern to re-email everyone on Facebook and round out the final asks. Late in the game the Documentary Doctor (Fernanda Rossi) offered a consulting session as a gift for a $150 donation and another friend donated a photograph for $250. Both got snatched up immediately, fetching high prices.

During all of these new pushes, I continued to reach out to friends, family and networks. I sent personal emails three times, Facebook emails three times, and twitter blasts three times, at the beginning, middle and end of the Kickstarter campaign. I made sure to use multiple platforms because everyone uses these platforms differently. Putting it everywhere (three times!) makes it hard to ignore. I promise, the self-loathing does subside! Remember to give yourself time to make the asks and do the pushing, and don’t get mad at people that don’t give. They are just overworked and/or broke, like you are.

5. Backer Updates: how to say thanks, ask for more, and keep backers engaged

People who back a project get backer updates from the filmmaker through Kickstarter. These are little messages about the project they supported, its status, screenings, and events. I kept mine short and snappy. I included comments from new backers, about how the story reminded them of their lives, and also frame grabs from the video footage of the film as we were editing. I tried to give a blow-by-blow of where we were in the editing process, and how the money coming in was actively helping. My goal in crafting these updates was to keep an authentic connection with them alive. I wanted them to continue to feel invested and proud of the thing they were helping to make as it built momentum. I wanted to make it fun and rewarding.

6. Attitude and Mental Health: how to be pushy and zen
Be prepared to go under for those 30 days while your Kickstarter campaign is active. You don’t roll out a Kickstarter campaign while your’re in the middle of tons of other stuff or really burned out. Kickstarter is not easy. I did not follow my own advice (I was editing my film while Kickstarting), and it was exhausting.

Warn friends and colleagues that you are about to be the most annoying person they know – but it will be worth it. Get excited and people will get excited. Be “that” person – the one always asking for posts, re-posts, tweets, re-tweets, and money. It will be over soon, and you can throw your backers a fun thank you party.

7. What Worked, What Didn’t and Metrics
What worked: Our trailer. Everyone loved it and got excited. Invest time and energy in pitching your project well.

What didn’t work: Image choice. My initial thumbnail photo for Kickstarter was way too dark to pop off a busy Internet page. When we were project of the day on Kickstarter, the image was too murky and had a sad vibe, I think we got lost:

xoxosmsKSR pic

I swapped out my initial shot for something bright that would leap of the digital page. Red was a better choice:

JiyunRed

Overall Backer Metrics:
188 backers donated. We surpassed our goal of $8,000 and hit $8,538
132 of the backers were friends, family, and colleagues from The Line Campaign, twitter friends, and friends of my partner, Isaac Mathes.
56 were friendly strangers; 54 of them were backing several other projects.

Status Update:
We wrapped, locked and onlined xoxosms, in the months following our campaign. As I mentioned above, we’re excited for this weekend, when we’ll screen at the New Orleans Film Festival (opening for Angela Tucker’s feature doc (A)sexual). We can’t wait to share our Internet love story with a larger audience, and see what kind of conversation gets sparked. We plan to gather responses using Storify.

We are crafting our Internet outreach strategy with live events and festival screenings to make sure xoxosms reaches a broad audience. Check out our new website, and please to join the discussion: Can online love work IRL? Send us your thoughts about “digital intimacy,” online dating versus in the flesh, and whether technology connects us, isolates us, or both. Use the #xoxosms hashtag so we can find you on twitter.  As I learn from my adventures, I’ll be sure to check back in with Cinereach and share more tips with you.

Nancy Schwartzman made xoxosms as a Reach Film Fellow at Cinereach, working with mentor Francisco Bello. Recently named one of the “10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2011” by Independent Magazine, Nancy makes work that explores the intersection of sexuality, new media, and navigates the complexities of modern relationships. In addition to xoxosms, she is the director and producer of the documentary film The Line (Media Education Foundation, 2009). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Daily News, Gawker, Jezebel, Alternet, MTV and more. The Line Campaign, an interactive, multi-platform audience engagement campaign, has been highlighted by the Center for Social Media in Designing for Impact and by the Fledgling Fund in From Distribution to Audience Engagement. In addition to Cinereach, Nancy’s work has received funding from the Fledgling Fund and the Playboy Foundation. She is currently developing a feature documentary about young women in Kabul, Afghanistan, among other projects. Nancy lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with her partner, Isaac Mathes.

08/03/2011

»  Rolling with the Punches: Reach Film Fellowship Alumna Kaz Phillips Safer Reflects on Forced Flexibility in Indie Film

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Cinereach’s 2011 Reach Film Fellowship concluded in April. Now that the fellows have had a little time to reflect on their experience making their films during the program, and because we miss having them around, we’ve asked them each to share something that has stuck with them. The first to report back is Kaz Phillips Safer, whose Jolly Friends Forever More is currently being submitted to festivals.


A post by Kaz Phillips Safer

Kaz during an RFF workshop at Cinereach

Rolling with the Punches
a guest post by Kaz Phillips Safer

One of the defining moments for me in my relationship with my mentor Karin Chien, was a somewhat frantic meeting during the final weeks of pre-production for my Reach Film Fellowship short, Jolly Friends Forever More. I was in the middle of a fairly typical and yet typically terrifying pre-pro crisis. Jolly Friend’s lone location was a public park, and I had a location in Prospect Park in Brooklyn that I really wanted to use.

Having shot in Prospect Park before, I knew that permitting could be tricky, and that due to our low-budget, fee-waivered status we’d be pretty low-priority (read: if the only motivation the parks folks have to process your paperwork is that you handed it on time and properly filled it out, it may well not happen). You have to bug them and bug them, and show up in person and pester and plead until someone signs or stamps or does whatever it is you need them to do. I am not hating on the parks, this is just what my experience has been.

As a preventative measure, and to give us both peace of mind, my producer Christina King and I had reached out to the Parks Department literally months before with our shoot dates and desired location. We were told we should be fine, and that we didn’t need to actually submit the paper work until a few weeks before. A week and a half out, while making what seemed like a routine call to check on something in our permit form, we were unceremoniously informed that our location was absolutely not available for the dates we needed it, as there was a parade through the park that weekend. They weren’t sure why anyone had ever told us it would be fine to shoot that weekend, but it certainly wasn’t, and there was nothing they could do for us.

A week and a half out we had no location, and the very stomach-sinking situation I had been working for months to avoid was suddenly all up in my face.  However, it was made even worse by the fact that, literally the day before, Christina had gotten a call for a short paid producing gig, working on a commercial. Being a multi-tasking freelancer type myself, and knowing that as much as you love any project you’re working on for free, when a paid gig comes around sometimes something has to give, I gave her my blessing to go MIA for a few days. After all, everything for the shoot was pretty much in place.

So suddenly I found myself with no location AND no producer in those critical final days when we needed to re-scout, re-lock, re-shot list, etc. a brand new location. Suffice to say, we did, which is a testimony to Christy’s stellar, nay, near-supernatural producing skills, but in that moment, trying to keep myself together as I enjoyed a nerve-jangling coffee with Karin, I was feeling the weight of working on a low-budget project where the Parks people give you the run around, and your producer has no choice but to say yes when a conflicting paying gig comes up because you don’t have enough money to pay her.

Producer Karin Chien on set with mentee Kaz Phillips Safer

Producer Karin Chien on set with Kaz

And I said to Karin, you know, I know it’ll be fine, but oh man, do I long for the day when I’m working on a project that everyone involved can be 100% focused on, and I don’t have to worry about folks having too much other stuff on their plate.  And Karin just kind of looked at me and was like, Kaz, that’s never the case.  People always have too much on their plate, always have three other projects going on the side, nineteen other places they ought to be, regardless of the size of the project. And I immediately knew she was completely right.  I had been looking at Karin as someone who was blissfully free of this kind of pitfall, and in that moment she reminded me, you’re an indie filmmaker.  It’s always like this.  Success means the MIA producer comes back, not that they never leave in the first place.

And in a weird way, it kind of gave me a bit of a thrill.  To be reminded, yes, you, for whatever combination of reasons, have chosen a career—an entire lifestyle—that is actually sort of designed for disaster.  Built to spill, as it were. And that actually, if you consider the way industries and art forms work as having a sort of evolutionary existence—having the shapes, patterns and tendencies they have for a specific reason—then it’s reasonable to say that the volatile nature of indie film production is actually quite adaptive. It can actually make for better projects, not worse ones.

Jolly Friends set: Owl Creek Park, Brooklyn

Jolly Friends Forever More set in Owl's Head Park

Case in point, my location disaster did in fact require my team to shift into location hunting overdrive, but the park we ended up finding, Owl’s Head Park in Bayridge, Brooklyn, was a vastly superior location than the spot in Prospect Park that we’d initially settled on. The upheavals may not be fun in the moment, but ultimately, they make you think harder, look further, and consider more possibilities.

And I guess it’s a good thing, because as Karin reminded me, there’s no end of the tunnel where it suddenly gets easy. Thank goodness, right?  Where would be the fun in that?

Kaz Phillips Safer is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker & video designer. She studied writing at Princeton University while also taking select filmmaking courses at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  She is the video artist in residence for internationally acclaimed NYC-based dance theater company Witness Relocation. Her video work has been presented in France, Denmark, Poland, Russia, Australia and across the United States. In 2009 she was accepted into the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women where she developed and directed original HD short, Megafauna. The film went on to win AFI’s Jean Picker Firstenberg Award for Excellence and was released by IndiePix in October 2010. Kaz is currently developing several feature scripts, one of which is the recipient of a 2010 Jerome Foundation Development Grant.

Karin Chien, Kaz’s RFF mentor, has produced eight feature-length films, including Circumstance (2011), The Exploding Girl (2009), and The Motel (2005), which have won over 75 festival awards, premiered at Sundance and Berlin, and have been distributed internationally.

04/26/2011

»  Cinereach Celebrates the 2011 Reach Film Fellows

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On April 13, 2011, Cinereach celebrated its outgoing Reach Film Fellows at the fourth annual Reach Out event. We screened all four Fellowship films for cast, crew, family and some friends of Cinereach, and surprised the fellows with bonus grants of $1,000 to put towards festival campaigns.

We’re so proud of the stunning finished films, and of how the fellows navigated the intense seven-month program, taking their films from concept to completion. For an overview of the 2011 Reach Film Fellowship, check out the behind-the-scenes video here. Our first album of photos from the event is up on Facebook (more to come).

Pictured above are the 2011 Reach Film Fellows with their mentors (from left to right) Marshall Curry, Matt Bockelman, Nancy Schwartzman, Nick Paley, Francisco Bello, Jay Van Hoy, Kaz Phillips Safer, and Karin Chien.

Pictured above are the 2011 Reach Film Fellows with their mentors (from left to right) Marshall Curry, Matt Bockelman, Nancy Schwartzman, Nick Paley, Francisco Bello, Jay Van Hoy, Kaz Phillips Safer, and Karin Chien.

The four 2011 Reach Film Fellows and Films are:

YHRTA

Matt Bockelman, You Have the Right to an Attorney (nonfiction)

You Have the Right to an Attorney enters the daily grind of two young public defenders in the South Bronx as they strive to resolve hundreds of client cases in a system they consider fundamentally broken. » More

OH_sm

Nick Paley, Open House (fiction)

In Open House a  young man visits his grandparents and is the first in his family to realize the  pair of them should no longer be living on their own.» More

JFFM_sm

Kaz Phillips Safer, Jolly Friends Forever More (fiction)

Jolly Friends Forever More tells the story of a homeless man who is befriended by a mysterious little girl that seems to appear and disappear at will. »  More

xoxosms

Nancy Schwartzman, xoxosms (nonfiction)

xoxosms follows the courtship of a young  couple that falls in love via Skype, chat and Facebook and relocates to be  together. » More

The four fellows were selected through an open application process and, once accepted, given a grant, production resources, access to the Cinereach staff, and help from a community of highly invested colleagues. The  mentors met one-on-one with the fellows at critical points throughout the program. Advisors led workshops on topics such as crowd funding, social media, festival strategy, post-production workflow and pitching, and consulting producers were on call to help throughout.

We look forward to seeing what the future holds for these talented filmmakers and sharing it with all of you.

Congratulations to Nick, Kaz, Nancy and Matt!

01/28/2011

»  Strategy vs. Spontaneity: Notes on Documentary Storytelling by RFF Fellow Matt Bockelman

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a post by Matt Bockelman

A post by Matt Bockelman

Make a Plan. Forget the Plan.  Make a New Plan.  Forget That Plan.

Producing a verité documentary is challenging work, and it can often feel like all the forces of the world are conspiring to keep you from realizing your vision.  If you’re shooting outside, it will rain.  If you’ve booked a car to drive six hours to film a scene, your subject will cancel.  If your story is contingent on having access to a specific location, you’re not going to get in. If you think you know what your film is about, but you haven’t shot it yet, then you’re probably wrong.

It can be a frustrating process, having every creative idea fall flat, get rejected, or simply not pan out.  But what I’m learning (or rather, forcing myself to believe) is that this is not a hitch in the creative process, it is the creative process.  And it seems to be a lesson I’ve learned before.

My day job is working as a freelance cinematographer.  As a cameraman it’s unusual for me to walk into a situation with much more than the synopsis of the story that the filmmaker is trying to tell.  Normally, I’ll have a pre-production discussion a day or two before the shoot, where the director and I discuss the project in broad strokes before getting into the details of the upcoming shoot.  The director will tell me what to expect and what he hopes to come away with.  I get notes on shooting style.  I get brief character descriptions.  I get location logistics.  Then, I am set loose.  On most days, although I shoot what was asked for, I almost always come up with something else as well.  That “something else” is typically a result of things not going exactly as planned or due to my own curiosity and reactions to the subjects.

I’ll give you an example.  I recently worked on a documentary entitled Gimp, about a dance group that integrates dancers with physical disabilities and conventional dancers. A major theme of the film revolves around questioning when it is acceptable to look at someone – and specifically what parts of that someone.  The director had asked me to get up close, to really zoom in on the performers and dissect their bodies, to force viewers to see things that may normally motivate them to avert their eyes.  I did that.  But soon I felt myself wanting to look away, feeling guilty about watching so blatantly.  So, I started flirting with the concept of looking away. I’d point the camera toward the corner and wait for a performer to pass through the frame.  I’d start a shot on a dancer’s face and then subtly creep down to see his “disability.”  These shots, while not as in-your-face as the director had asked for, echoed the sentiments that were expressed by the audience during a Q&A after the dance performance.  Their impulses and reactions to the performance were in-line with my own.  And as a result we had the imagery to support their experience of the production.

In Gimp I was conscious of executing the director’s vision, but my impulse to look away allowed me to cover the scene in a different way.  It was the difference between forcing the footage into a perspective and letting the natural response shine through.

Now, as I make a film of my own, as director and cameraman, I find myself tempted to plan out each detail.  I want to pre-interview each subject, block out shots, control the flow and topic of scenes, to know more than I ever asked a director for when working as a cinematographer.  The more I think about these things, however, the farther I move from that openness that I have developed on the sets of other people’s films.  I’m finding that I need to make a conscious effort to approach directing this film more like I approach shooting one. Yes it’s important to visualize what I think could or should happen, but I also need to be ready to submit to what actually does.

Matt Bockelman on location shooting You Have the Right to an Attorney

Matt Bockelman on location for You Have the Right to an Attorney

My new film, You Have The Right To An Attorney, is about public defenders and their clients in The South Bronx.  Much of the story hinges on the tenuous relationships that develop between public defenders and their clients.  Much of that development takes place in institutions notoriously difficult to access with cameras (courtrooms and correctional facilities) or under the protection of attorney/client privilege. Arraignments, the process in which defendants are first introduced to their court-appointed attorneys, were high on my list of scenes to shoot.  I intended for the arraignment scenes to illustrate the unstable ground on which the relationship begins, as well as introduce the massive caseload that the attorneys carry.  Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more likely that I won’t get the access to film in this context. This is disappointing but not terminal to the story.

Instead I’m now looking into using the police reports filed for the clients and finding visually compelling ways to base scenes and sequences on the text of these documents.  This approach, based upon what we are able to access, will introduce the clients as the court system sees them, as statistics on a page. From there we’ll cut to our attorney back in the office as he combs through stacks of files, sharing hints of detail from one after another with us. Then, when we meet the clients later in the film, it’s a rewarding reveal because we get to see them as human beings for the first time.  Effectively, we’ve taken a roadblock and turned it into an expression of a key reality of the world in which the film is set.

By spending the time to develop ideas of what the film should be, I’ve created the mental space to see what the film will be.  And as ideas fall through, new ones are born to replace them. The more I’m able to do that, the better prepared I will be in the field when I’m shooting.  If something unexpected happens, by this point I’m practiced in dealing with the unexpected and can quickly adjust.  That’s the theory anyway.  I’ll let you know how it works out.

Matt Bockelman is a New York-based cinematographer and producer.  His most recent projects include The Unofficial House Band, about a music and arts program at Sing Sing Prison (commissioned by Rehabilitation Through The Arts), Communitas, an experimental documentary about theater director Richard Schechner’s famed performance workshop, and Meet the Gardeners, a series profiling the employees of Madison Square Garden. Matt founded Fly’s Eye Films in 2010 with the goal of creating substantive documentaries, objectively rendered but with a strong visual aesthetic.

Matt’s mentor during the Reach Film Fellowship is Marshall Curry, is the Director, DP and Editor of the feature documentary Racing Dreams, which won Best Documentary at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, and the Academy Award and Emmy-nominated Street Fight.

11/23/2010

»  Reach Film Fellow Nick Paley on “HR” for Filmmakers: Making a Good Crew Great

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Keeping an Underpaid Crew Happy

A post by Nick Paley

A post by Nick Paley

When you’re the director of a low budget film you wear a lot of hats and test many skills that are far removed from the actual craft of filmmaking. People management is maybe the most important of these skills and definitely the most difficult. While I’m reluctant to take any position of authority on the topic, as I’ve made a good number of HR mistakes on my previous films, I’m hoping that articulating some of the below will help me (and perhaps you) remember best practices for dealing effectively with the people who are actually making our movies.

So what makes a good crew member? The simplest answer is people who care. These are the kind of people who call you at 3am because they thought of something overlooked at the production meeting, the kind of people who check that the doorway dolly you’re renting won’t start squeaking after one use, the kind of people who volunteer to help in capacities outside their official job description.

It’s safe to say that 99% of young people working in film have an interest in doing their jobs well and are working in film because they enjoy it. These are the qualities of a great crew member. This means that when you encounter, say, a sound guy with a nasty attitude or a crafty PA sleeping on the job, it may be useful to look again at how you are interacting with crew members during prep and on set.

No matter how many things you’re juggling, the names on your crew sheet remain human beings that require attention and courtesy. Take Jim the Gaffer. Jim’s probably as busy as you are and although he’s agreed to work on your set (probably for less than he’s worth), it’s not occupying his every thought. Not even close. This means whatever momentary encounters (emails, phone calls) he has with you, or your producer, must be pleasant, helpful and efficient – even more so than he might be accustomed to. This starts in prep, when he gets the map to your location’s fuse box a day before he asks for it or when he’s emailed the catering menu plan before he has the chance to ask if there will be be vegetarian options. On a low budget production you will have so little control over so many elements, it’s important to show your crew you’re doing all you can to make their lives easier with the things you can control. This makes them feel appreciated despite low pay, and sets a standard for thoroughness that they’ll want to meet when they get to set. It means that when Jim turns on his hero key light (rented from the cheapest house in town) and the bulb is burnt out, he’ll consider it an unfortunate fluke as opposed to a piece of supporting evidence in the case for why your shoot is going to ruin his weekend.

Beyond the obvious reason to treat people well before and during production–because it’s a good thing to do–it’s also good for your footage. If you’ve ever crewed on a poorly run film production, you know how quickly work ethic can fall apart. Whatever task you’ve been assigned immediately takes a back seat to your sleep-deprived, malnourished brain’s efforts to recall the original reason you agreed to work on the shoot. The minute your crew starts thinking like this on set, the quality of your footage is going to decline. Booms will fall into shots, focus will go soft, late-arriving props will force you to combine shots.

On my latest short film (we wrapped production this past weekend) I faced some challenges in keeping my crew content. Our shoot was three days in upstate New York. For the meager rates we offered, that’s pushing it for an NYC-based crew. We made it up to them by paying close attention to their needs and allowing for small amenities that upped the quality of their experience without killing our budget. When they got  to set, they saw that an unusual amount of care was put into our crafty and catering. They weren’t staying in a hotel,  but they were handed a bathroom kit replete with miniature toiletries, a set of sheets, towel and pillow.  These measures required a little extra spending, but you can’t put a price tag on what it means to your production to have a well-rested AC, a well-fed PA and a nicely-groomed gaffer.

Nick Paley studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His thesis short, Picture Day, produced with the support of the Warner Bros. Film Fund Award, was a national finalist for the 2008 Student Academy Awards and has played at festivals across the country. Nick has continued making shorts since graduation along with web content for FremantleMedia, CBS Interactive and the Upright Citizens Brigade theater. He hails from Vermont. Nick’s Reach Film Fellowship mentor, Jay Van Hoy, established the production company Parts and Labor with Lars Knudsen. This year, they premiered Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather at South by Southwest and Cam Archer’s Shit Year (starring Ellen Barkin) in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes.

11/22/2010

»  Reach Film Fellow Kaz Phillips Safer stops over-explaining and learns to love child actors

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Learning to Shut Up:  A verbose director prepares to work with child actors

A post by Kaz Phillips Safer

A post by Kaz Phillips Safer

So, I would say that my biggest flaw as a director, the thing that I’m constantly working on, is that I tend to over-explain things to actors.  I’m a pretty cerebral, nay, nerdy person.  And I love ideas and I love words, and these things all come in super handy when I’m writing a script, especially since I tend to traffic in concepts and source material that are fairly esoteric and intellectual.  So being able to pull something out of the abstract and put it in literary form is a useful tool.  But when I get on set, I am always tempted to present the motivation or context of a scene to my actor in the form of a sort of diatribe.  A long-winded, highly convoluted thesis as to why they’re going to have this reaction and not that reaction to whatever’s going on. Not good.  I know this. I know I need to work on it.

A great piece of advice I once got from a very wise woman was, if you have fifteen notes, give two and the other thirteen will fall into place.  Her point being, drowning someone in “fixes” is not going to transform their performance into the nuanced, subtle, compelling nexus you were dreaming of, but just make them over think it, try to do too much, second guess what were probably good instincts in the first place, and feel overwhelmed and tighten up.  I completely get this intellectually, but have always found it hard to put into practice.

So, I have to think there was something fighting it out in my subconscious when I wrote a script in which one of the two main characters is a six-year-old girl. Didn’t occur to me until after I’d found out that I got the Reach Film Fellowship and started really gunning into the pre-production process that not only did I have no experience working with kids, but that I’d better get over my over-talky syndrome FAST because there is no better way to get a kid to clam up than to yammer at them about stuff they don’t understand. I mean, this has a negative effect on grown up actors who are used to dealing with crazy neurotic directors!

So suddenly I find myself in this self-imposed learn-to-shut-up boot camp.  How to proceed?

Going into this project, I knew what I was looking for in my young female lead. There is very little dialogue in my film (aside from a few brief lines at the very end). There is also some choreography, when my characters break into a simple, synchronized dance. So I wanted the girl I cast to be able to “play” and be un-self-conscious in front of the camera.  I didn’t want a peachy keen toothpaste commercial kid, but she did need to be kind of magnetic, not cute, but like you couldn’t take your eyes off her. I need the audience to fall in love with her and be rooting for her. And honestly, I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, in terms of what I was looking for in an audition, I just kind of knew I’d know it when I saw it.

The audition process was going to be critical, but how to draw out these girls’ potential without suffocating their every impulse with over-explaining?  I decided to take some cues from a source that was more dance-based than dialogue-based.  It made sense for what I needed to see, and was also going to be a good exercise in keeping my direction lean and simple.

I’m the resident video designer for an experimental dance theater company.  I create and implement the multi-media elements of their performances—projections, live feed video, etc. In the process of working with them I have observed a thing or two about non-conventional forms of directing, and getting performances out of people. The artistic director of the company has a pretty remarkable ability, which I admire on a daily basis, to keep his direction founded in lean, task-based, uncomplicated instructions.  No lengthy contemplations on motive or emotional landscape (*sigh*) just clean, simple, cut to the bone type stuff.  Rather than getting bogged down in motivations or more method acting type approaches, he physicalizes everything and the performances are simpler, the performers can get there via more direct routes rather than having to think their way to a pre-determined emotional conclusion. Love it.  Working on it.

I realized, my audition needed to be very task based. So in addition to the more traditional “read these sides with the friend I have wrangled into donating their time for three hours” audition element, we also did a more unconventional exercise.  Basically, I asked the girls to come in to the audition prepared to tell me a story—could be true or made up, happy or sad, etc.  I would have them tell me the story.  Then, I would have them tell it to me again, but this time I gave them a bag full of toys and asked them to act out the stories using the toys, like puppets.

This was a very interesting and fun exercise.  There’s something quite delightful about presenting six year olds with a bag of toys and telling them to dig in. Their little faces kind of light up.  And for the most part, it worked.  Girls that had been a bit nervous or rigid when they walked in suddenly opened up like little flowers, doing voices, asking if they can use the toy bag as a character too, etc. Other girls had more difficulty with it.

It was the girls who “didn’t get it” that posed the biggest challenge for me, because suddenly I found myself in the position of having to “explain.”  I had boiled it down to what I thought was a pretty simple, basic explanation but when they’re still staring at you blankly, you have to improvise and that’s where I started getting nervous, because, sure, this was just the audition.  And if some little miss is having such a hard time understanding that I just want her to play, she’s probably not right for the role anyway.  But what about on set?  Losing light?  Flirting with over time?  What about when this little face is looking up at me not understanding why I need another take of her running to the bench and I’m struggling with the words rattling in my own head saying, she’s sort of in love with him, but in this platonic way, and even though she wants the whole cookie for herself, she sees that he’s hungry and wants to share it with him, but… have you read any Cormac McCarthy? Disaster.  Panic.  How am I going to get the finely shaded and layered performance if my actor if I can’t explain what I want from them???

And that’s when I remembered a great story, maybe apocryphal, though I like to think not, about the making of Casablanca.  And there’s some shot where Bogart’s standing at the window, and like, the Nazis have arrived, and he turns, brow furrowed and surveys the dark city and it just encapsulates the tone and tension and tragedy of the entire film.  And apparently someone asked Michael Curtiz later what he had said to Bogart to prepare him for this moment, to capture so perfectly that moment in time, what motivation or explanation he had given that resulted in such a charged, poignant performance.  And Curtiz apparently said, “I told him to stand there, count to ten, then turn his head to the left.”

The girl I ended up casting, Arden Truax, is a non-actor, though her mom is an acting teacher who works with my husband.  She’s this amazing elfin creature who went about her audition and callback very seriously.  At first I wasn’t sure, because I wanted the Penny character to transmit a sense of joy.  But then I realized it was just like the Casablanca situation.  It’s not her job to make the joy, it’s her job to walk to the bench, sit down, take the cookie out of her bag and hand it to the guy.  I just have to construct the world around her so that the end result is incandescent.  All she needs to give me is a big eyed freckle nosed canvas to paint on.  And that, I can do without saying a word.

Kaz Phillips Safer is a 2011 Reach Film Fellow. HIn her film RFF supported film,  Jolly Friends Forever More, the boundary between imagination and hallucination are tested when a homeless man is befriended by a mysterious little girl that seems able to appear and disappear at will. Kaz’s previous film Megafauna was directed and developed at AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. It won AFI’s 2010 Jean Picker Firstenberg Award for Excellence and is distributed by IndiePix. Kaz’s RFF mentor, Karin Chien, has produced seven feature-length films, including The Exploding Girl (2009), The Motel (2005) and Robot Stories (2002), which have won over 75 festival awards, premiered at Sundance and Berlin, and have been distributed internationally.

07/09/2010

»  A Conversation with Tze Chun Part II: Working with Child Actors on Set

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Independent writer/director Tze Chun gave an advising session for the Reach Film Fellows during the 2010 Reach Film Fellowship at Cinereach. Tze shared some advice based on his experience making a short film, Window Breaker, and a feature, Children of Invention, in which children are the main characters.

This video (shot by Miranda Rhyne and edited by Stephan Greil; additional editing by Nicole Woo) is the second of three with Tze, and includes advice about directing child actors on set.

Key Points from “Working with Child Actors on Set”

When working with child actors, it’s important that they trust you and feel encouraged when they do something right. At the same time, you and your crew must maintain a professional relationship to them, rather than going overboard with affection or being overly indulgent.

Keeping the relationship within these boundaries creates an environment where your child actors can feel comfortable speaking up when they aren’t happy about something, but will do so in a professional manner.

If a kid freezes up on set, there is usually a direct cause that you can attribute the behavior to, and there is often a simple solution. Giving them a choice between two options can help if they are tired or cranky, for example, offering the option of working for another hour and being done for the day, or taking a short break before continuing for a longer period of time.

Kids might assume they’ve done something wrong when the director calls cut, or calls for another take. It is important to take a moment to explain to them the reason you are cutting (microphone noise, blocking, lighting, whatever it might be).

Just like with adult actors, child actors can have trouble delivering lines when they don’t have enough context for them. It can be helpful to ask the children questions about what is happening in the scene so you can deepen their interpretation of the actions and emotions.

Dialogue written by adults can seem unnatural when coming out of a child actor’s mouth. Tze suggests including the child in the process of making subtle changes to the lines so that they are more natural.

Being open to surprises or additional layers a kids might bring to a moment can be beneficial and create a more natural experience. It also lets child actors feel like they are an integral part of the process.

Be sure that kids are comfortable enough with the story that they understand the “big picture” of the film and can deliver their lines accordingly.

When directing child actors, don’t put too much emphasis on one action. They may become overly anxious about it, or focus too much, and create an unnatural performance. Instead, give them a sequence of a few different actions so the important ones don’t get unnatural emphasis.

Always have a backup plan for how to cover an important scene or action when shooting with kids. If something is not working after multiple takes, instead of continuing to repeat it, try another tactic.

Watch more videos from inside RFF:

A Conversation with Tze Chun Part I: Casting Child Actors
A Conversation with Mike Simmonds: Working with a DP

06/30/2010

»  A Conversation with Tze Chun Part I: Casting Child Actors

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Independent writer/director Tze Chun gave an advising session for the Reach Film Fellows during the 2010 Reach Film Fellowship at Cinereach. As the fellows prepared to go into production on their short films, Tze shared some advice based on his experience making a short film, Window Breaker, and a feature, Children of Invention, in which children were the main characters.

This video (shot by Miranda Rhyne and edited by Stephan Greil, additional editing by Nicole Woo) includes some excerpts of the session during which Tze touched on the casting process.

Below we’ve also listed some key points from the video.

Key Points from “Casting Child Actors”

For a film that is highly improvisational and naturalistic, and in which a large emotional range is not required, prioritize looking for children who are outspoken and natural in front of the camera. Try asking children to play games with each other or adult actors during auditions, rather than reading from a script.

For a more tightly scripted film, and/or one that calls for a large emotional range, actors who are old enough to read from the script should do so. Look for actors who are comfortable in front of the camera and can also emote and understand the character, rather than just being good at naturalistic reactions to real situations.

Actors should audition with the most emotional scenes, to make sure the right notes can be hit. One of the largest challenges of working with children is helping them portray dramatic emotions like crying or a tantrum believably.

Make sure actors who will appear on screen together can give performances that match in style and tone, and can be cut together, so they seem to inhabit the same world. Actors should be similarly naturalistic or ‘big’ depending on the director’s needs.

In addition to auditioning acting ability, you are also looking for a child’s stamina and concentration. If they get frustrated quickly, or can’t put up with having to repeat something multiple times, they aren’t cut out for your set.

When you’re casting a kid, you’re also casting the parents. Look for parents who are going to be understanding about the process, willing to commit all the time and energy that is required, and who are on board with the project in general.

It is also advisable to be very clear and direct with parents regarding expectations and what will happen, otherwise you may lose their cooperation.

Watch more videos from inside RFF:

A Conversation with Tze Chun Part II: Working with Child Actors on Set
A Conversation with Mike Simmonds: Working with a DP

04/21/2010

»  Reach Out 2010 Recap

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Monday night, Cinereach held its annual Reach Out event, a private screening and celebration to honor its 2010 Reach Film Fellows.

Current Cinereach interns, Laura Elliott, Kristin Esposito and I joined an audience that included the fellows, their families, friends, crews, and casts, along with Cinereach grantees, fellowship alumni, and representatives from all areas of the New York independent film community.

Philipp Engelhorn, Margaret Shafer, Courtney Hope, Gabriel Long, Reva Goldberg, Anthony Morrison and Michael Raisler (Photo by Nicole Cordier)

Philipp Engelhorn, Margaret Shafer, Courtney Hope, Gabriel Long, Reva Goldberg, Anthony Morrison, Michael Raisler, Adella Ladjevardi (Photo by Nicole Cordier)

In a packed theater at Sunshine Cinemas in the East Village, Cinereach’s Reva Goldberg and Philipp Engelhorn introduced the program, which commenced with a behind-the-scenes video. The video provided glimpses at the experience the fellows had working with their mentors, and tracked their progress through the intensive seven-month Reach Film Fellowship program. It gave the evening a warm, personal prelude (try to imagine it on the big screen):

All four short films were screened: Wild Birds by Courtney Hope, Bye by Anthony Morrison, The Drawing by Gabriel Long and Love Lockdown, by Nadia Hallgren. The films explored a diverse range of topics, from autism to incarceration, and each film was, in it’s own unique way, insightful and engaging. Following the final film, Anthony Morrison was presented with the Reach Out 2010 Award.

Anthony Morrison, Reach Award recipient, and his RFF mentor, Marilyn Agrelo (Photo by Nicole Cordier)

Anthony Morrison, Reach Award recipient, and his RFF mentor, Marilyn Agrelo (Photo by Nicole Cordier)


Audience reaction was extremely positive, and the films sparked a lively discussion among guests as they headed to Rayeula, a nearby restaurant, to toast the four fellows over tapas and sangria. For more photos from the evening, visit the Cinereach facebook page, and stay tuned for updates on where the four fellows go from here!

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