Full writeup of the dailies from week 7 of Ladies and Gentlemen are now up on PhotocineNews. We’re wrapped now, barring a few pickup shots and it’s only just starting to dawn on me what a privilege it’s been to have an opportunity to shoot eleven days of drama. It might have been on the edge, underfunded, and borderline mayhem at times but I’ve learned the most insane amount from doing it. There really is no substitute for time on the ground when learning to direct and, more than anything else, I know this is what I should be doing with my time, full time. Just a question of putting myself in the mix. Oh, and the small matter of the edit, which will throw up all manner of problems, I’m sure. They always do.

Writeup here:

And here are those dailies once more….

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – WEEK 7 DAILIES from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

I’m a sucker for eighties parody videos. Never has a decade brought us such inifinitely laughable culture and it’s still rich pickings. Charles Son is a young guy who made one of the earliest 7D with sound videos with his behind the scenes epk for Mat Kearney. A lot of people, myself included, learned a huge amount from Charles after that vid so it’s with a great deal of amusement that I present this latest work of his. It’s an idiotic music video but it’s great and it looks as good as you’d expect from the 7D. Nice work Charles and thanks again for your help in the early days.

Grum – Through The Night from The General Assembly on Vimeo.

So this is the very last of the Ladies and Gentlemen dailies cuts. We’ve wrapped production now and the full write-up will be available on Photocinenews very soon. I think this is the best one yet, and shows once again how much you can get done in a very short space of time if you’re flexible. This was tough but I think we’ve got away with it. Plenty of lessons learned from the shoot to share with you once the dust has settled so I’ll be sure and write everything up when I get it all straight in my head. Enjoy.

PS: We don’t bother shooting 720 50i on the 7D to do slow mo anymore. And yet, this is riddled with slow mo.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – WEEK 7 DAILIES from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Yes, he's booming with a broom. 'S how we rollz.

If you’re interested you can find out how we shot the last set of dailies with my usual writeup on Photocinenews, this time with added idiocy.

Apologies for being so slack with the posts recently but I’ve been away in Italy with the missus getting some sun and working hard to develop a couple of short film ideas and we had no internet out there. A week or so I got into a debate about whether the short film medium was an anachronism these days. The debate arose out of an article written by Mike Jones for Nofilmschool and he was pretty forthright in his denouncement of short films as a means for aspiring feature film directors to gain experience and demonstrate their skills.

There are two ways of looking at how a Short Film serves the emerging and aspiring filmmaker.The first is as a Learning Exercise, the second is as a Calling Card. The short film seeks to be a learning experience by providing a paradigm for engagement in film production within viable financial and resource constrains. Simply put, the short film allows you to gain experience without the overhead. Similarly, as a calling card the short film aims to serve as a demonstration of the filmmaker’s abilities. It has the express purpose of convincing financiers and funding bodies of the filmmaker’s worthiness of trust to make a longer project. The theory is that a good short film is a large flag to wave in the air saying “this is what I can do in 10 minutes of screen time and no money, just imagine what I could do with 100 minutes and a ton of cash!”

Learning Experience and Calling Card. This is what short films are for…. and at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, the short film fails pretty dismally at both.

I kind of agree and disagree with Mike. My experience on Ladies and Gentlemen has been invaluable and given me an opportunity to do long-form. It might have been desperately underfunded, but that doesn’t matter. I had to churn through 40 setups a day and be creative in how I shot and blocked the scenes. Many problems I have no idea about will emerge in the edit and I’ll learn a ton more as I try and craft it into a decent piece of drama. These are lessons I would never have learned making a short film. However, the project bears very few of the unusual details that I like to bring to my work. It doesn’t really show you what I’m about as a filmmaker, my point of view and what makes my work uniquely mine. I’m only really going to be able to demonstrate in a short (and a properly funded one at that) where I have control over what I’m doing. To that end I’m developing two short projects Damaged and Concierge - both very different types of films, but which possess all the elements I value in cinema. My ambition for these films is big wins at major festivals. For Damaged I’m aiming high, I’m aiming for a BAFTA nomination – that’s how much belief I have in the projects. I set up my own production company at 23 and used it as a platform to work in television, music video, commercials, corporate and extreme sports but my goal was always drama. After eight years working my knackers off I’d completely stagnated within my own company and was going nowhere, I’d just run out of juice, so I went freelance with the express goal of pursuing drama. Two years on I’m now in the thick of it and learning so so much about just what it takes to create that astonishing feeling that truly great cinema is capable of producing. My career goal is to be able to produce that feeling in audience members regularly and exquisitely, whatever the material. I’m a long way off. But I’m making progress and from working on Ladies and Gentlemen have a much sharper sense of what works and what doesn’t. It’s been a relatively risk-free experience and so I’ve been able to approach it with a fair amount of freedom and objectivity which I would never have been able to do on a short film project.

A friend of mine is about to quit the industry completely after an absolute horror show experience on his self-funded short film. Crippled by the ambition of the project and the shortage of funds to pull it off he had a huge barney with his crew and his lead actor resulting in him having to sack himself as director. He was too close to the project and every tiny setback just killed him. That’s the risk you take as a director every time you step up to the plate on a project you care about – there’s always that chance that you’re completely deluded and the beautiful gem in your head won’t work in the real world. In a way Ladies and Gentlemen was an advanced, on-the-job graduation for the film school I never went to and I’m very thankful for it. These two shorts I’m developing will test me to the absolute limit because I have such high hopes for them. But they’re very important because they’re going to be the first pieces of work I’ve ever done that demonstrate what I’m about as a director, and exactly why I’m worth investing in for a career in feature films. The web series, as predicated by Mike Jones, simply can’t offer that. So, for me, you need both. You need the space to be objective and learn the basic craft, how to mechanically get round a scene quickly and efficiently, developing the way you handle actors. But you also need the focus of the short film to set your work apart from everyone else. If you have a vision then that’s where you show it.

I’m an obsessive self-educationist. I like learning. That makes me a geek and I don’t care. For me directing demands that you be the equal, if not better of your Heads of Department in assessing the merits of the decisions you make. That means having as good an eye as your Cinematographer, understanding the cut as well as your editor and being a better amateur psychologist than your actors. I’m going to acting classes now, I’m buying books on production design, I’m reading fashion magazines, I’m even working on improving my memory so I don’t have to refer back to the script constantly. As with my BAFTA ambitions I’m deadly serious about being a feature director and I want to be in this business for a long time, not just making up the numbers, but challenging for honours on a regular basis. I’ll be laying bare the process of bringing these two shorts to productions on this blog, hopefully sharing some insights along the way which should provide an interesting contrast to Ladies and Gentlemen.

One more thing: I never really enjoy watching short films and that’s mainly because I don’t have the patience for them. That sounds completely nonsensical, but If I sit down with a piece of one hour drama then I know I’ll be entertained for a good stretch of time and that’s exactly what I’m after. Similarly with a feature film. With short films I always fit them in around work, or at other times of day when I’m not really in the mood for them. And that doesn’t really help me watch them properly. For me the best way to watch short films is at festivals as part of a programme where you get to watch a bunch at the same time. Sitting in a cinema watching your own short as part of a series of other work is actually pretty fun. On their own, online, I don’t enjoy them, but I do think there could be a real opportunity online to create virtual festival collections where respected viewers are invited to curate a selection of shorts, say an hour and a half. It’d be great to make them appointment to view, with a Ustream introduction by the curator and a chatroom available throughout the process so people can comment on them. That, for me, is where shorts get interesting online. Rather than sitting isolated on their own we should actively group shorts into collections and try and create a similar community feel to that experience at festivals. Just a thought.

Here’s a list of great, recently produced (I don’t actually like them all, but that’s just me) short films compiled by John at VisualRebel (trainspotter’s badge for you John!)

Also, Philips Parallel Lines competition.

Finally, a link to a film that I didn’t like at all but which was heavily supported by the UK Film Council. I leave you to judge for yourselves.

Alex and Her Arse Truck from Dan Cheetham on Vimeo.

So here’s the latest batch of dailies, suffering from some sketchy focus, some sketchy low light, but all in all an interesting set, and a nice counterpoint to our last set.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – WEEK 6 DAILIES from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Pulling focus from Kevin and Chris to Bunny and Fran

A couple of weeks ago we had a complete shocker. Our location was horribly compromised… but it wasn’t horrible. Our problem was that we needed a big open space where we could reveal characters behind other characters and depth is always good in shots to give you a sense of a character’s place in the scene. As a result everything happened on one very slim plane of action and there was no room to show a lively bar, and give a sense of the world around them. Last weekend we reshot the scenes in a new bar and I thought it’d be interesting to post comparative shots to give an idea of why on earth we did it. Obviously with no way of judging performance it’s hard to know which plays better but just judging the shots, which do you prefer?

Vincent Laforet loves his toys. I mean really loves his toys. He even has a section on his site called ‘toys’. You’ll often see him in a steadicam vest or with a 5D attached to a helicopter gunship with another couple of DSLRs daisy chained to a 60ft pendulum swinging over a cliff. No. I exaggerate. Still, he likes to add stuff to his DSLRs. And who wouldn’t? That’s half the fun, and for me it’s been one of the great appeals of this garden shed bodge technology. I must admit, I like my toys too, and have been fortunate to be able to film with huge jib arms, steadicams, gyro-mount helicopters, underwater cameras but sadly not motion control yet. Vincent got a lot of shit for posting pics of his DSLR rigs with billions of parts attached, but I’m not ashamed to admit I knew what they all were and have used them myself. I’ll also say that when you’re shooting high-end work (as the big V tends to do) then all of those bits, every single one of them, is vital to retaining control over what you’re doing, to the satisfaction of very demanding clients. And so, Vincent, this post’s for you, as we put our own little toy rig together to shoot the opening sequence of Ladies and Gentlemen. On Saturday night we took the 5D out into the heart of buzzing Soho at kicking out time attached to a Steadicam Flyer rig. We would have had a full rig, but my operator has literally just sold his. Shame. Anyway, here’s the monster we created. Zacuto rails, Redrock DSLR baseplate, Zeiss ZF 35mm, fully modified by Duclos (you need lenses with stops on the barrel to calibrate the follow focus properly), a wireless transmitter and a Bartek wireless follow focus. We were abused by drunks, interfered with by jobsworth production folk trying to tell us how to do our work, and generally messed about by the public in general, but you kind of have to expect that! We had no lights so it was just au naturel and we’ll have to see how it turns out but all in all, for a complicated sequence, I think it’s worked pretty well.

Toys are supposed to be fun. And this was.

Whoops

I had to wait over a month for my Snapgears to arrive from the US and I was sort of excited to see how they worked out. However, I did have ever so slight misgivings about them. Those misgivings centred around the fact that the snapgears form a complete circle. You get five sizes of gear when you buy them from Indisystem and there’s no flexibility or adjustment to be had from them, just the size and that’s it. With the Redrock gears, they’re very simple, and we use an elastic tie, rather than the screws they come with, simply because it’s a lot faster to attach them and reattach them when you change lens. We had the Snapgears on set this weekend, and almost immediately ran into annoying problems with them. We simply couldn’t work out which gear would fit our lens choice and even when we found one that was close, it wasn’t close enough and the magnets didn’t hold it in place. So, instead of saving us time they actually slowed us down. We went back to the Redrock gears, little piece of elastic, swift on, swift off and that worked just fine. Zacuto have their Zipgears but according to our friend at the Editman, Shoot35′s solution is very nice indeed and a lot cheaper. I have a lot of time for Shoot35, they’re a small company but they make nice, affordable products. Still, I’ve bought a follow focus from Redrock, it comes with gears, they work, easy. I got suckered by the gimmick of the Snapgears and I’m not sure I’ll use them again. I’m an idiot. But we knew that already.

So, today’s the day. We’re going to be broadcasting from the set live, pretty much all day today. Updates on what we’re going to be doing and when will appear on this site, so keep checking back for the link to the uStream content which will be posted here as soon as we’re up and running. Big day. 45 setups. Didn’t get to bed till half three last night. Ouch.

Ustream link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ladies-and-gentlemen-live

Live Streaming by Ustream.TV
We will be going live at around 11am BST.