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Producing with Passion. Dorothy Fadiman
Читать онлайн.Название Producing with Passion
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781615930449
Автор произведения Dorothy Fadiman
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Издательство Ingram
Time
Given the urgency (in 1991 there was the danger of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade), I planned to finish in less than a year.
Money
To interview people from different parts of the United States, I needed to add travel costs into the budget (in addition to a videographer, an editor, appropriate music, and other basic costs).
Aiming for national television and PBS meant that I needed high production values. The camera work, images, and audio had to be broadcast quality.
Distribution
My goal was to get the film out to as many people as possible, so I aimed for national television, PBS, educational markets, and private screenings — all of which happened.
(What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t have put on the list as a goal, is that When Abortion Was Illegal would be nominated for an Oscar and would win the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Medal!)
With my thumbnail sketch of project requirements, I was able to assess what I might need to complete the film. The list enabled me to get started without feeling overwhelmed. As I worked on the film, my needs changed, but I had a place from which to start.
Framing the Idea
The potential for doing background research, searching for interviewees, and tweaking a script is unlimited! If, for example, you have too much information, or too many interviewees, your goal begins to get fragmented. Some filmmakers never finish because they never feel they’ve done enough.
How do you know when to stop gathering material, doing interviews, or researching?
You have to ask yourself, “What do I actually need?”
Taking stock is necessary at every stage of your film, including the stage when you are shooting footage. (See Chapter 12 for a description of field production.) When we were shooting location footage for Woman by Woman, we became enchanted with colorful, dramatic, poignant images of India. We shot tape after tape of street scenes and villages. We could have made do with half of what we gathered. But we were drawn deeper and deeper into the mysterious beauty of India. We finally did run out of money, and then stopped. If I had been more judicious — or spent more time on preproduction — I would have stopped much sooner and still had more than enough footage. Logging the footage took months! (See Chapter 15 for a description of logging.)
Limiting your idea to a focused premise gives you a yardstick. Ask yourself, as well as you can early on, does this B-roll footage, this interview, or this research, support the point of the film?
THE PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Early in the process of making your film, you may find it useful to create a “one-sheet” for your film.
A one-sheet is exactly what the name implies: one sheet of paper, on which information is provided about the filmmaker and the film.
The one-sheet typically serves as a way to introduce a particular film or a series of films. It will often contain a variety of information, both images and text, about the film. The name of the filmmaker and the title of the film should appear prominently.
Begin by writing a single sentence that describes your project and then expand on that sentence until you have a concise description of your project that fits on part of one sheet of paper.
This first pass should include full contact information.
As your project evolves, some common elements you might add to the one-sheet would include:
The description will eventually evolve in two directions: one for publicity as a flyer, and one into a detailed treatment, which can be used for everything from press releases, to giving new interns an overview of the project, to an introduction to a funding proposal.
Developing Your Idea
Once you have your subject in mind, and have a sense of where you are going with that idea — even though you might not yet have raised any money or shot any footage — you should take a crack at laying out possible scenarios for your idea, to see how it might look.
Three Ways to Map a Project
A mind map is a graphic way to organize information and reveal relationships. One way to make a mind map is to write a key word in the middle of a blank piece of paper, and then to draw branching links to other key words.
Poster boards are very, very useful ways to see, at a glance, the possibilities of a storyboarded progression at the beginning, or the shape of a film partway through. I often use different colored Post-Its to represent different types of information (interviews, narration, archival footage, vérité synch sound scenes, etc.).
When you are really stuck, doing a “mind dump” can break through mental logjams. To do a mind dump, just list everything you can think of on a piece of paper or on the computer screen, then organize it in different ways showing how the pieces might fit together.
MAINTAINING A BALANCE
The eventual success of your film will depend on your ability to find and develop a basic premise that sustains from beginning to end, while allowing for change. Whether you are profiling an individual, documenting a current event, or delving into history, filmmaking requires finding and keeping a balance — somewhere between staying focused and being flexible around the central premise.
Throughout production, ask yourself, “What is this film really about?” Asking that question, letting go of “old pictures,” and listening attentively to the answer as it grows, will make the film uniquely “yours.”
KEY POINTS