Micro Film

I mentioned in the notes for Episode 8 why it has taken so long to get around to the notes for this episode.  If you really need to know and actually are reading this episodes show notes, but haven’t read last episode’s notes, then you now know where to find out.

Additionally - I will try to post episode ten this weekend, but the ‘busy-ness’ has not ended yet and won’t for a while… as a result it’s going to look a LOT like I’m pod-fading.  I assure you I am not actually pod-fading.  It’s pretty likely I’ll slow to once a month for as much as the next three months - but as the end of the summer rolls around I should pick it up again.

There is news on Derby since I recorded this episode.  The shooting has been postponed.  I’ll address this in more detail in episode ten.  Suffice to say that between being sick at a crucial time and the sudden up-swing in necessary effort to be put into post-production on “Beast of Bottomless Lake” it’s jsut not feasible to continue at the moment.  Perhaps by the end of the summer?  We shall see.

Speaking of “Beast…” we have a significantly updated website which includes an updated trailer.

Believe it or not, thanks to the fact that I ramble about notions and no specifcs, that’s all the notes for this episode!

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Hi Everyone,

Apologies.  It’s taken a long time for me to get around to the show notes on this episode (and Episode 9).  A number of factors - 1) I got REALLY sick.  I could hardly sit at the computer for more than twenty minutes at a time twice a day or so - and I had to prioritize that time severely.  2) I DID to the show notes on this episode, but the damned interface timed out, I forgot that that was a problem, and it’s a LONG episode (The longest yet.) with a fair number of notes.  It was the one window I had to get the notes done in.  (This time I’m prepping the notes in notepad first.)  3) I hit a window of extreme busy-ness.  I knew that the busy period was coming and that was in part why I posted two episodes so close together… but I hadn’t accounted for getting sick, which really only compounded the issue.

Anyhow - hopefully I’ll get through all the notes for both these episodes today in this window of opportunity.

Additionally - I will try to post episode ten this weekend, but the ‘busy-ness’ has not ended yet and won’t for a while… as a result it’s going to look a LOT like I’m pod-fading.  I assure you I am not actually pod-fading.  It’s pretty likely I’ll slow to once a month for as much as the next three months - but as the end of the summer rolls around I should pick it up again.

And now on to the notes… they are a bit cursory.

This episode is comprised almost entirely of a conversation I had with Tracy D. Smith, director of Taming Tammy.

The majority of the discussion surrounds the subject of what to do after you’ve made your film - festivals and distribution.  I call this the fourth Everest.  The first being development and pre-production, the second is filming, and the third is post-production.

Her first two short films. 

Some of Tracy’s Sponsors on Taming Tammy:

Technicolor. 

Sharpe Sound.

Bright Lights.

1-800-Costumes.

Paladin Show Services.  (It genuinely appears as though Paladin doesn’t have a website!  Which seems strange ’cause Ed Brnado has totally made himself a star of the local Vancouver industry.  In any case this link does have the Paladin contact info.)

Taming Tammy premiered at the Vancouver Film Festival.

And as she tells us in the interview, she didn’t get into the Whistler Festival.

But it DID get into the Beloit Film Festival.

And the Women in Film Film Festival.

Here is the the Film Festival Survival Guide by Chris Gore, which Tracy recommends.

The NSI Film Exchange.

Don McKellar’s “Phone Call From an Imaginary Girlfriend: Istanbul”  and “Phone Call From an Imaginary Girlfriend: Anakara”

A link that keeps coming up… Telefilm.   I’m going to have to make it a permanent link!

The Crazy 8s Festival/Contest.

We speak briefly about Cabin Movie. 

Here is Tracy’s current project - Living Vancouver. 

And for the record… here’s Eduardo Sanchez’s credits.  Shane Carruth of course has nine of credits… all for the same film.

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This isn’t the episode I had planned to do, but it was a fun one to put together.

I had promised to bring an interview with Tracy D. Smith, director of Taming “Tammy” but things didn’t come together (I am, as it happens interviewing her later today – Good Friday.) and I didn’t want to be any later getting the episode up than I already was.

I get into this in the episode, but by a piece of good fortune I ran into Murray Gable who wrote the theme song for the podcast, and also wrote a song specifically for a scene in ‘The Beast of Bottomless Lake.’  His band, The Pucks, were playing a gig in town so I ran out to see them.  It was good fun.  They saw me in the audience and said ‘hi’ from stage… oh how I like feeling like a celebrity.

I ended up having dinner that night with the other two members of the band, Cindy and Lloyd Larsen.

The next day I was conducting auditions for ‘Derby,’ the short film I’m producing this summer.  Murray came out and auditioned (and, I can now add, earned a small role in the film with a refreshingly honest performance.)

Murray and I had a chance to sit down while I was taking a lunch break and have a quick discussion which I recorded and it became my feature interview this episode.  You can actually hear me eating during the interview – apologies for that.  Multi-tasking.  I wish I’d had a chance to prep for the interview so I could have asked more and better questions, but we did organically drift into a discussion about a potential future collaboration.  It struck me as interesting so I’ve included it in the interview.

I also give some post hoc thoughts on the auditions in this episode.  And there is a preview of sorts of the song “More than Just a Woman” (it’s an early mix still) from “The Beast of Bottomless Lake.”

I have three interviews set up for the next week or so, so for the next little while I’ll be back on track as far as accurately predicting who my next interview will be… I may even go back on my promise to bring you my interview with Iris Quinn next week and bring back my conversation with Tracy D. Smith that I’ll be doing in a few hours.

Anyhow…

THE SHOW NOTES!

Murray’s website Gable Music doesn’t exist anymore, but in lieu here’s a link to another show that featured one of his songs.

We shot the scene in question at one of my favourite local watering-holes, Falconetti’s if you’re in Vancouver go and have their Yucatan Chicken sausage and tell them you heard about it on my podcast.

And of course, for the umpteenth time (and, I swear, the last for a while as I’m running out of excuses to plug them) here’s a link to The Pucks.

Next Episode:  Acting Coach, Iris Quinn?  Director, Tracy D. Smith?  I SWEAR it WILL be one of them.

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This episode features more elaborate answers to 12 questions I took at the How to Start Lecture I did in January.

For starters, the lecture took place at Biz Books. I’ve linked to it three times now… I promise I’ll let up a bit on plugging them for the time being, though I should give a quick shout out to owner, Catherine Lough Haggquist who is being honoured with the Special Jury Award by Women in Film this month at the Spotlight Awards.

For my fellow Canucks, here is the Telefilm site, and since I recorded the episode, the link on the site to the Low-Budget Independent Feature Film Fund has been fixed. The guidelines DO say ten weeks as I stated in the podcast. You’ll find that on page 9 of the PDF under section 4 - Notification of Decisions.

The camera we used for ‘Beast…’ was the HVX-200.

If you’re incorporating a business in British Columbia, here is the link to Small Business BC.

…short notes this episode.

Here’s the feature website, the Filmakers.net FAQ.

- Kennedy

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Okay, yes, bad pun for the title… I suspect that that is something we are all just going to have to get used to.

If you are streaming the podcast, the first thing you will notice is that it plays at ‘chipmunk speed.’ Apparently this isn’t a problem if you download it either directly or via feed. Yet another hiccough along the road – the never ending number of technical blips that plague any fledgling podcaster it seems.

If you care (perhaps you too are or will be a fledgling podcaster some day) it apparently has to do with incorrect mp3 encoding so far as Micromedia Flashplayer is concerned (But what does it know?). Though I haven’t been able to check into that yet – and if/when I do it should prove to be the actual cause, then I will fix it, thus rendering this note irrelevant. It seems to me that there ought to be a different explanation though… ‘cause I haven’t changed a single setting and none of the previous episodes suffer that problem. Weird.

Okay… so SHOW NOTES!

This isn’t the first time I’ve written up the show notes for this episode. My first set disappeared into the ether upon uploading, which was particularly galling – this is a huge episode. Nearly twice the length of my longest previous episode, and my guest Sam Dulmage and I threw out an outrageous number of references to give links to. The first upload of notes took hours to assemble… and then disappeared. (Yes, I should have kept a copy. Fuck you.) It has taken several days for me to find both the time and the will to undertake the job again. But that’s actually for the best – if I would have delved into it again after the disheartening disappearance it would have been a singularly cursory effort.

First up, here’s my guest, Sam Dulmage’s personal website. He’s also been primary in the creation of Steam Powered Films.

Sam briefly mentions Joseph Campbell early in the interview. I should probably do an entire episode on Joseph Campbell, his theories – if you don’t know – have been hugely influential to cinema since George Lucas used Hero with a Thousand Faces to help craft Star Wars. Cambells’ ‘Hero’s Journey’ ultimately became as digested by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey.

At about the 9 minute mark Sam mentions Jeff Kitchen – there will be a link to him further down, and FTX West which I’ve linked to before… and I suspect I’ll link to it again.

Here’s the crappy photo I took of Sam’s wall chart. I really should know better. It’s a camera phone and the light was mediocre – I should have taken a few shots just to be sure of a good one. I think this manages to illuminate the basic idea though if you compare it to Sam’s description. You can kind of see how the post-its are arranged in horizontal lines – the further left they are the later in the screenplay the corresponding events are – and each line represents a different plot thread.

The writing events backwards technique was traced back to William Thompson Price.

A quick video by Ron Becks outlining 3 act structure (so much as one can in 2 minutes) – we mention it, but don’t really break it down. This will help. (In fact, the entire series of videos are of some use, as abbreviated as they are.) I promise I will spend an entire episode on this at some point in the future.

We make passing reference to Stephen King’s process. Don’t take our word for it – go to the source himself, his book on writing called, appropriately, On Writing.

Here is Jeff Kitchen’s site – Development Heaven and his book Writing a Great Movie – not Writing a Great Script.

If you’ve been clicking the links all along the way, you’ve noticed that I’ve sent you to the same site for the books about writing every time, The Writer’s Store. I shall do so again. It’s a good source in general.

Interestingly, I can’t find Richard Walter’s book, The Whole Picture on the Writier’s Store site. Though you can find the DVD there.

Lajos Ergi’s The Art of Dramatic Writing is more about playwriting than screenwriting, but not too surprisingly there is a valuable amount of wisdom that ports over.

Karl Iglesias is the writer who I tend to evangelize about the most – specifically Writing for Emotional Impact. For the record, I think Sam takes my point rather more cynically than is the intent of the process, and I didn’t quite get to the meat of the matter in our discussion.

I do agree with Sam that writing with the intent to affect the audience in a certain manner is creatively corrupt, but once you’ve laid the ground-work and know the direction that your work is going to take your audience, it behooves you to tweak your content – the individual moments, the character arc, the dialogue and so forth to as to get the most mileage out of the emotional journey which you have organically begun to send the audience upon. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is your obligation as a screenwriter to do so. Nobody wants to go see a film that doesn’t affect them, and everyone wants to see a film which affects them profoundly.

It would be intellectually dishonest of me not to mention Blake Snyder here. It’s got to be perfectly obvious that I don’t think much of him from what I say in the podcast – and rest assured I shall take the opportunity to break down the problems I have with his book Save the Cat at some later date. To be fair there are two or three notions in the book that I do genuinely feel are valuable, but talk about a cynical approach to screenwriting… yeesh! The entire premise is to write a screenplay that will formulaically fit the Hollywood mold and thus make oodles of cash. If that’s what you want – go for it, but it flies directly in the face of one of the most beautiful aspects of independent film making… being free of the constraints of the Hollywood machine. Oh and, to be fair, Save the Cat is one of the best selling screenwriting books of recent times… ever, even. God help us all.

Syd Field. Gotta give him props. He’s practically the original screenwriting guru, and Screenwriting is the book that started it all.

Robert McKee is the legendary author of the dense and analytical epic writing tome, Story.

Sam’s pick for best beginner’s book on screenwriting is Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434. And my apologies to Viki King I really should have been able to recall her name when I chose How to Write a Screenplay in 21 Days as my pick for an easy reader’s digest like version of Syd Field’s concepts.The Pucks, deserve another shout out for providing the music for the podcast. The Feature Website is Wiki Books Movie Making Manual. Next Episode – More detailed answers to questions from my How to Start lecture from last month. Lastly, here’s a list of the various films Sam and I referenced in our discussion – several we never mention by name, so I’ve added some context from our discussion in parenthesis:

• Short Cuts
• E.T.
• As Good as it Gets (Helen Hunt & Jack Nicholson)
• Shoot ‘Em Up
• Con Air
• The Rock
• Armageddon
• Duets (Huey Lewis & Gwyneth Paltrow)
• Adaptation (Brian Cox as Robert McKee)

- Kennedy

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It took a while to get episode four up as I had a heck of a time finding a chance to chat with my guest - my FIRST guest, director Craig March.

This is also my first attempt to use my new mini digital recorder. Honestly the sound isn’t great. But it lets me get out and do interviews in the world. I’ll have to do more experiments - and probably get an outboard microphone.

It’s my biggest episode yet in size, ambition and engineering… though I know I still have a ways to go before I can really claim proficiency, I do feel proud of how far I’ve come since episode one. I actually regularly tell people to skip episode one due to the sound… and the fact that it’s pretty much just my mandate and credentials. But at this point I’ll suggest that you go back and listen to a minute or two for comparison and yuks.

SHOW NOTES: (Sorry they’re a bit late.)

First up… what the heck? I’m not sure what happened. The music sounds like heck! I’ll have to look into that. Sounded fine when I originally tested the file… hmmm. If I can fix it I’ll adjust it and re-upload.

(Okay, I’ve fixed that now, but I’m leaving up the original note as a record of where I have come from… which may be a bit presumptuous!)

I’ve already posted these first two links in association with another episode:

My company, co-owned by this episodes’ guest, Craig March: Provost Pictures… and the blog to our project “Beast of Bottomless Lake.”

The Okanagan Film Commission – who were very helpful to us in producing ‘Beast…’ and we mention in the interview.

For the record… a day later I called the telemarketer who called during the interview (They called six times in one day!) back and it turned out that they had a fairly straight forward system for getting me removed from their calling list… you’d think that never answering the phone might have given them the clue, eh?

And this week’s link: nycresource.com

And of course… the music was provided by The Pucks.

And a link to info in Biz Books’ “How to Start…” series.

- Kennedy

P.S. If anyone has a notion what might have gone wrong with the music, let me know - sound is really not my area of expertise (if that is obvious).

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Episode 3 – Education (“We Don’t Need No”)  

This episode makes me laugh.  Editing it down was hysterical.  I cut eight minutes worth of ‘uh’s and re-takes out of it.  I thought I was going to get better at this!  Most of it’s pretty seamless, but holy heck was I a mush mouth this week.

Ah, but I am getting better at this.  For instance – here’s my first real attempt at Show Notes! Hopefully next episode (including my first planned interview (with Craig March)) will be even better.  I bought a digital voice recorder today, so I’ll be able to record away from my computer.  This will allow me to get away from the damned hum of the fan.  It’ll also allow me to get out and interview people out and about.  I know this is pretty much de rigueur for many pod casters.  But it’s a new horizon to me.  Whee!Okay – the show notes:Here’s the only like I can find to Bob Hume (Writing from the Bones) at the moment.  So you’ll still have to leave a message for more information.Chris Jones is the author of The Guerilla Filmmaker’s Handbook, author of The Guerilla Filmmaker’s Blueprint and the teacher of The Guerilla Filmmaker’s Master Class.  Check out his movies, White Angel/Interview with a Serial Killer and Urban Ghost Story (Really DO check out Urban Ghost Story.  Good stuff.) made by Living Spirit Pictures.  And as an update… he has NOT shot another film, but  Rocketboy is coming up soon, and Transplant will follow on it’s heels.The FTX West conference. The DV Expo conference.  And for the record, I was talking out my ass about ‘HD Expo’ it was DV Expo that I was thinking of all along.And here’s the Biz Books website – I’m sure info about my ‘How to Start…’ lecture will be posted there soon.  They will fill orders on specialized film, theatre and TV books all around the world.  Check ‘em out no matter where you are located – they are tops in their (OUR!) niche.A bunch of places to find opportunities to volunteer on films:The IFP.Indie Access.

Indie Film maker’s Alliance.

The Cineworks Forum.

and of course… the mighty Craigslist.

This week’s feature website: Filmmaking.com Oh and… yes I know.  I recalled later – I was trying to say ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ Remember January 30^th at Biz Books in Vancouver I’ll be doing one of their ‘How to Start….’ lectures.  “How to Start Getting Off the Couch and Make that Independent Film You’ve Been Saying You’re Going to Make.”  6pm.  302 West Cordova, Vancouver, B.C.NEXT WEEK: “Partners” with guest, Director, Craig March. 

 

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