OK, so it's obviously taken me way too
long to chronicle this IFP conference, which was a month and a half
ago now.
I actually wasn't around for all the
panels on the final day, as I had a train to catch. However, I still
managed to snag a few final pearls of wisdom.
#5. The Internet is the opposite of
movies in many ways.
This observation came from “interactive
art director” Jeff Soyk, one of the contributors to a panel on
Hollow, an interactive website devoted to sharing stories from
a struggling West Virginia community. He said that film and the
Internet were “contradictory experiences,” pointing out that the
web is a more information-driven medium with a shorter attention
span. He added that developing the Hollow
project meant getting away from the auteur approach, and developing
the story as a team. (Hollow
also involved giving camera equipment to the community members, and
training them in how to use it, so that they could tell and record
their own stories for the site.)
#4. Sound is an overlooked and
underappreciated aspect of film.
This also came up during the Hollow
panel. The project's creators found that sound design and music was
essential in contributing a mood to the experience. One of the
contributors named the addition of the music as marking the point
when the project finally felt “real.”
My extreme delay in completing my IFP
write-up means that this ties in with a similar point I heard
yesterday at the Buffalo Dreams film festival, during a talk from
Paige Davis of the distribution company Alternative Cinema. When an
audience member asked about common mistakes that low-budget
filmmakers make, she stressed the importance of good sound. She said
that filmmakers are often so caught up in the logistics of getting
the movie made that they don't give audio the attention that it
needs.
You may have already heard it said that
audiences will forgive a crummy picture (and even accept it as a
style) but are less tolerant of crummy sound. But it's worth
repeating anyway.
#3. If you've already shot your
movie, think of a pitch that describes what you know you have.
Nancy Abraham of HBO Documentary Films
said this during a panel on the art of pitching documentary films,
but I suspect it applies equally well to narrative films.
This point is actually somewhat dear to
my heart. I've met people who can come up with a catchy-sounding
one-word premise, but don't know how to develop it into actual
characters and scenes. Whereas a lot of my ideas come from something
a bit more esoteric – a theme or mood I want to express, or a genre
I want to play with – making it a challenge to figure out how to
explain the story to people in a simple way that makes it sound
compelling. I did several drafts of Saberfrog
before getting to the point where I could easily sum up the premise
of my little road movie: “An aging slacker goes on a road trip to
find old friends because voices in his head tell him to.” (And if
memory serves, the voices in his head weren't even in my original
outline.)
#2. Anyone doing any sort of media
needs to collaborate with people in different disciplines.
This came from Brent Hoff of the new
Made in NYC Media Center, a venue that was on the verge of opening to
the public at the time of the conference.
That point is something else I've been
learning through experience. Being a filmmaker isn't just about
knowing how to write a script, block a scene, or choose lenses. You
need to know about business. You need to know about the Internet and
social networking. You need to know about promotion. And while I've
enjoyed wearing a lot of hats on my past films, I've found that not
all of these areas are strengths of mine.
#1. Filmmakers should look at other
measures of success besides box office and Facebook likes.
This came up during a curious talk by
Debika Shome, representative of a big-data organization called the
Harmony Institute panel. Shome introduced her talk by discussing
several possible measures of success and impact – not just box
office and Facebook likes, but also awards, critical response, and
the number of press articles covering the movie.
Shome was promoting the idea that you
should think about “optimizing” your work, and evaluating its
effectiveness in tangible terms. This seemed to be a potentially
controversial area: One audience member criticized the idea of
equating impact with popularity and performing statistical
number-crunching when developing a project, saying “This is what
Hollywood does” and implying that this approach was incompatible
with the indie spirit of doing something original and personal.
Shome responded by discussing the
documentary film Waiting for Superman, about the problems in
the U.S. educational system. She said that the Institute studied what
“frames” and metaphors did and didn't resonate in audiences and
press. If you pick an approach that doesn't resonate with the public,
she said, then even a hard push might not be successful.
General thoughts …
Whenever I return to NYC for one of
these events, I'm always struck by how the artistic community's
attitude has changed since I was a student there in the 1990s.
The idea that being unhappy or helpless
makes you deep was mercifully absent. It was smarter to be clever and
to do something and make a difference.
Obviously not everyone has changed with
the times. During that week (but not while at the conference), I
overheard some nerds complaining – only half-jokingly – that
being able to look stuff up on the Internet makes it harder to have
arguments about trivial knowledge. To me that says something: some
people would rather feel that they're right, rather than take the
effort to learn and correct themselves. Today, I feel like the old
snobbiness of “I know something obscure that you don't, I'm part of
this exclusive scene” has sort of vanished in the Internet age,
when theoretically anyone can know anything if they bother to look it
up.
(Of course, maybe the new challenge
will be to try to reintroduce value-through-scarcity. As of this
writing, I am possibly the only person who has seen both the
rediscovered Orson Welles film Too Much Johnson
and the new Troma film Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 1,
because I attended exclusive regional premieres of both.)
Everything at this conference was very
positive and high-functioning. No one really gave in to the
low-achiever pastime of complaining incessantly about conservatives –
and those who did were motivated to make documentaries! Even the
criticisms of Hollywood were fairly low-key and determined to find
the silver lining – discussing what we as indie filmmakers can
do, not what we can't do.
Being in NYC, among smarter and more
creative people, did a lot to recharge me. Years after leaving
school, I've encountered more and more people who complain about the
status quo without ever quite seeming to consider that anything
better could be possible. It's easier to bitch about how your
favorite franchise isn't satisfying you than it is to show interest
in anything new.
But it seems that younger, smarter,
niche audiences do want something new. They want compelling
ideas. They want community. Everyone at this conference assumed –
perhaps naively? – that the web is a place where people are
positive and constructive. It's only dumb “mainstream” stuff that
is dependent on old or aging brands, aimed at an ever-more-arrested
audience that only wants more of the same.
But maybe these themes are
region-specific. In cities like New York, the emphasis is on being
big and important and influential and cutting-edge. In Rochester,
there's more of a middle-class culture of learning the existing rules
and following them, and being grumpy when someone doesn't. In
rust-belt areas like Buffalo or Pittsburgh, there's more of a gritty
underdog attitude, in which artists either embrace horror and
exploitation genres or become underground and avant-garde.
So it's been quite the learning journey
this fall.
But now it's time to move on to what I
should be doing – which is developing some new stories. November is
National Novel Writing Month, and I had planned to spend it finishing
the writing of these damn novels. The month is now one-third half
over and I haven't had the time to do much. So time to buckle down
and do some writing...
