I imagine the barriers are even worse for filmmakers given the cost and enormous effort it takes to get a film made, and not many outlets aside from the gatekeepers.
In the literary world it’s not enough to belong to some minority group; you have to make that the point of your story. I wonder how much of this content shift is going on in film?
By the way, you can always set up a button to collect tips using something like PayPal or Buy me a coffee. Or if you want the paywall you could set the yearly subscription cost to the price of a ticket (unless there’s a limit to how low you can make this?)
It is surprising that Substack hasn’t set up a one time payment option. Especially since the workarounds people come up with are losing them money.
Yeah, it's next to impossible to make a film entirely on your own. So far as production is concerned, documentary can be an easier process than narrative, because it's not immensely difficult to shoot a two camera interview with two people, as long as you've got adequate time to set things up and pack them up afterwards. I've found that it can even be done with one person, although I wouldn't recommend dividing your attention between two cameras, an audio recorder, how the room is lit, and the person you're interviewing if you can avoid it. On the flipside, the real difficulty with documentary comes in post-postproduction, during which you have to find a way to carve down a great many hours of footage into a comprehensible story, and do your best to make it a true story while also constructing a compelling narrative.
Still, I guess I should be proud that I made something that rivals some films that were made with far more adequate resources. Many, if not most, successful documentaries involve a few dozen people who are actually getting paid, so managing the process with a few people who were paid peanuts and a handful of volunteers who just threw in a little time to help out because they like me and thought the project was interesting is not nothing (arguably this is a quixotic thing to try to do in the first place - even without all of the concerns about identitarianism/social justice culture being involved with the funding/exhibition process - but if you can find a way to buy yourself the time, the basic gear, and whatever travel might be necessary, it can be done).
It does seem as though it's now become very important to make the struggles of minority groups the point of your story in the context of grants and festivals; if nothing else, it's a way of going about the process that's very favored by nonprofits and festivals. I've even seen a couple of white guys manage to have some success by pandering hard enough to these implied incentives (well, whether they were consciously pandering or were simply very effective and toeing the line intuitively/spontaneously is unclear). What I think my film demonstrates in relation to all of this (like with your novel, of course there's no solid proof, but we can make some inferences) is that even if you do cover "minority issues," if you don't cover them in a way that fits very neatly into simplified social justice narratives, you'll likely still be turned away at the door to the club (well, assuming you're not already thoroughly established anyway).
I'll look into the paypal link option. I'm not sure how regularly I intend to post on substack, but certainly there's some good will out there, and if people want to donate, I may as well make the option readily available to them.
Edit: Thanks for the suggestion! I've added a donate button to each of my four essays.
I know just from putzing around on iMovie how difficult it is to make a film. Here is my most serious attempt—it took forever!—and it still just kinda sucks:
I still feel like it could have been a nice film if I had tightened up the story and if I actually knew what I was doing. I enjoy video editing, tedious though it is. Sound, however...ugh. People have no idea how difficult just that part alone is...they take most of their entertainment for granted. Editing, as you say, is especially hard. So really, I hear you. And all I know is the simple iMovie stuff I've been doing. I have no idea what it would be like to coordinate actors and get all these different people working together. It sounds really hellish to me!
Have you thought about making short films for Substack? Simple ones? That might go over well since you could share them on Notes.
That was a pretty charming short. Better than most first serious attempts, I think.
One note that comes to mind quickly: if you jump into another project like this, maybe consider working with the pacing a little bit more, giving certain moments more room to breath, deliberately speeding things up, slowing things down. The story feels a little bit rushed to me, which is maybe a little bit more noticeable as it's a kind of abstract fairy tale/myth sort of story about a couple of cacti (what all of this might mean maybe takes some time to sink in for the viewer). Listening to a story and imagining it is one thing; watching accompanying visuals with a story is another. Of course the visuals are mostly just a sort of video-collage with some basic animation, which means they generally won't be construed as "serious cinema," but there's nothing wrong with that in my view. Makes sense to work with what you've got at your disposal, play around and experiment with the form. I thought the stop motion bits with the paint were pretty cool. Try that with a higher frame rate and come up with ways to make it more sophisticated and you might have something impressive (of course all of that gets time consuming, though).
Another advantage of documentary is that sound can be relatively simple, at least if you have interview subjects who are able to mostly keep still while they're talking (and if what you're doing largely revolves around sit down interviews in the first place). One static, well placed shotgun mic and a decent recorder can do that trick as long as the mic remains properly aimed at the subject's mouth and isn't too far away. Lavalier mics can work just fine too, but you have to be careful about them rubbing against clothing. I like to use both when I can just so I have a backup to work with if the track from the shotgun doesn't turn out well at any particular moment.
Of course all of this gear costs hundreds of dollars at a minimum, but if nothing else the equipment needed for filmmaking is much cheaper than it used to be. It's less necessary to take Herzog's advice and "steal a camera" than it's ever been.
As for coordinating actors, it's really only something I've done on a small scale, and mostly just with amateurs I already know for fun, less serious projects, but I'd like to get back into it and improve those skills.
Maybe just getting into simple short films for substack and/or youtube is a good idea. It's been a notion that's been on my mind lately. There's a certain allure to working on big, ambitious projects (even without the resources necessary to do them in a sensible manner), but if even festivals can turn in a direction that will suddenly shut me out based on the cultural whims of the moment, then maybe small projects that go direct to whoever's interested is a more tenable route, at least for the time being. While I think there's a lot of artistic value in work that involves real time and dedication, at least a few people out there have managed to make producing a lot of simple short films into a full time career. Surely something is lost when you feel like you have to crank things out at the rate the internet demands, but what's the alternative these days?
I told my writing group that I planned to enter. They were all familiar with this contest, so I asked them for tips: "Make it as short as possible." "Bring everyone you know." "Keep it fast paced. Attention spans are short." So I took my original and started cutting. I managed to get it down from 10 minutes to 7 minutes. What a nightmare that was. I mean DAYS of editing just to cut 3 measly minutes! People have no idea! Anyway, yeah, I agree, it definitely needs more air to breathe, and I think that was true even at 10 minutes. You know how I did that wonky stop motion stuff? I painted on a transparency over my laptop screen and filmed with my GoPro in my closet. Every time I did a brush stroke I had to hold my breath to avoid knocking things around (and I didn't always succeed). I discovered Canva's video AI sometime during the making of the film. Pretty funny stuff.
I didn't end up winning the contest (surprise!), but the objectively best film, an amazing hand-drawn animated film, didn't win either. It really was a popularity contest, which explains the advice "bring everyone you know". The film that won was terribly schmaltzy, but they had a bigger production and therefore a bigger crowd. Still, it was really neat to see my movie on the big screen. The way the contest works is that the audience can yell 'gong!' to stop your movie, and others can yell back 'let it play!' to keep the movie going. For some reason my dumb little cactus movie had the whole theater screaming at each other. It was gratifying to hear total strangers very vocally sticking up for my movie. Thanks to them I managed to avoid getting gonged—barely. I think with everyone yelling all at once it wasn't clear which side was winning, so I got the benefit of the doubt. I'm just glad I didn't get gonged!
By the way, the guy who did the voiceover for Brother Saguaro is in my writing group—lucky for me, because he's an actor and has a great voice. The woman who did Sister Saguaro lives in my neighborhood. I recorded them separately; they met for the first time the night of the contest.
I don't have much equipment, but you're right, you don't need much money these days to get some impressive results (assuming you have patience, which I don't). I requested a Tula Mic for my birthday a while back, mainly because it's cute, but it does a great job with noise cancellation all things considered:
And I bought a GoPro7, which is pretty much all I use other than my very old phone. I am totally impressed by the GoPro. In this little home movie I'm holding it on a stick (monopod?) and it somehow looks like I'm above the tree. I still don't get it. I'm only 5 feet tall and the stick is only about 4 feet long. It makes no sense. Something about the wide angle?
Since you're on Substack, you should find it easy to find writers to collaborate with you. After you put your full movie up and get things ready to go, you could contact a writer whose work you admire and ask if they'd like for it to be turned into a short film. I bet they would! I would suggest shooting high. Why not? Find someone famous right here on Substack. They post the video of their writing, your video and Substack get promoted. If that fails, you could even put out some Notes asking for short stories or even nonfiction pieces that can easily be turned into films, then you and the writer would benefit from sharing your work with your audiences. That's the advice these days for writers: collaborate. You never know where that can lead. For you I think it could be even better since you have skills writers generally don't have.
Yeah, I know that sort of pressure. I think I ended up caving to it with my first feature-length documentary, "Who is Vermin Supreme? An Outsider Odyssey." There are some good things about that one, and it does some things that no other films do (and in a strange way some of it feels like a sort of precursor to what Andrew Callaghan and others have been doing consistently for years now), but I also ended up cutting it down in such a way that I tried to make every scene as rapid as possible, when in retrospect I really should have kept some more breathing room at certain points and then cut certain scenes wholesale (at the time I guess I was a little too attached to these scenes).
With this new one, I think I've done a better job with that, although it is a long film (even though it can technically function just fine as a kind of three part series as well). It actually has almost exactly the same runtime as Todd Field's Tár, but also Tár is much less dense, and doesn't overwhelm the viewer with so much intense information throughout. They're just very different movies. A certain type of person really appreciate No One Left to Offend, though, so I guess it's good, and of course it's nice that a guy who's been watching thousands of the best movies produced each year for almost twenty years (the Sundance guy) liked it, even if none of the big festivals want it.
If you want to try more stop motion like that I bet you could build a simple light table of some sort, and then secure a camera in place above it somehow. Some of the old masters of this sort of thing, like Yuri Norstein, used multi-plane light tables so they could move cutouts around frame by frame and have things in the foreground move while things in the background move. Hedgehog in the Fog is a good example of this technique:
Your description of First Friday Shorts was pretty peculiar for me to read because I've been attending the Minneapolis version of this show off and on for years now. For a moment there I thought you must be a twin cities local (which was surprising because the short is so clearly set in the southwest). I didn't even know the same sort of thing was happening elsewhere. I think you've described what just about always happens with these sorts of shows. The best films rarely win. Instead, it's usually a competently enough done crowd-pleaser that takes home the prize. These shows largely revolve around hooking the audience quickly, which is a test of something, but not exactly a test of which film is objectively "best," in my opinion anyway. Still, my friends who run "Scream if off Screen" around here do a great job with their short film gong show, and they usually include some interesting, funny, off the wall stage antics between films. Sometimes there's even a whole theatrical narrative arc of sorts the plays out between all of the shorts.
I'm not sure how tall that tree is, but those underwater shots of the dog are a lot of fun.
There's something to your collaborative substack idea. Maybe I could even ask writers to submit short scripts or short stories specifically designed around being produced for basically no money - you know, stories that would involve one to four actors, written around not requiring locations that are difficult to secure or costuming/props that are difficult to get together, that sort of thing. So far as I can tell it looks like you run the substack for a short story literary magazine, so maybe we should talk about it more through direct messages, if it's something you're interested in being a part of. Of course I'm not sure I could guarantee that all of these shorts would necessarily be excellent (at least right off the bat), as I would have to work with some mixture of non-actors who I think could pull off a performance and local actors who are willing to work for free (and would likely have to schedule around at least having one volunteer to handle audio for dialogue), but if nothing else it could be an interesting exercise, and a way to experiment with navigating around all of the old institutional gatekeepers.
Interesting, I didn't realize the gong show thing was widespread either! Tucson is a weird place, so I just assumed a weird thing like that would be specific to Tucson. What you describe about the host's antics in between sounds similar too.
That hedgehog movie was so beautiful. Geordie (my dog) loved it as well. I don't think I could pull something like that off, not without a great deal of patience.
A lot of the stuff you're talking about with film editing seems parallel to writing fiction. It's really tricky knowing what to cut, how to control pacing, etc. The same rookie mistake of cramming info in at the beginning and speeding things up in the hopes that interest will magically be generated—that's the same mistake I see over and over with novice fiction writers. It's interesting to think about the similarities and differences. It's almost impossible for me to talk about point of view without using filmmaking terms.
I'm not good at judging these things, but I'd say the tree is about 20 feet? It's about the same height as my one-story house (which I know doesn't tell you much). It's strange that a ~10 ft tall camera (my height plus the monopod) can create this effect that you're looking down at the tree from above. I had no idea a wide angled lens could make that much of a difference.
I think it's a neat idea to collaborate on the ADC short stories. You would have to talk to Kolby, the guy who started the magazine, about that. He's the one who would know about author rights over the work. But I seriously doubt any of the authors would mind...we all dream of having our work turned into movies! Of course, many of the stories are sci-fi or fantasy and I imagine that would involve a lot of special effects, but there are others that aren't. Anyway, Kolby's contact info is here:
it's the same in the literary world; we who have to put up with it can only count ourselves lucky that writing, while time-consuming, isn't very expensive in a material way - certainly not as expensive as it is for a filmmaker such as yourself. similarly, there is some hope for writers who are prepared to cut their losses and go it alone, perhaps setting up alternative publications (or, indeed, starting a substack). but what is a filmmaker supposed to do - start his own *film festival?* it seems insurmountable (in the short term).
in the long term, we can only hope that influential organisations will drop identity politics the moment it becomes unfashionable and/or unprofitable, which I'm pretty sure will happen (arguably the latter is already happening, judging by ratings for shows like the acolyte and rings of power). the question is: when?
There have been a few filmmakers who've been able to get away with making a decent living repeatedly cranking out short films and building an audience on Patreon. Some of them are even pretty inspired. Joel Haver is a good example.
Still, Haver is mostly doing very small scale projects that are basically comedy skits. He's a funny guy and he's very good at what he does, but also a lot is lost when one is producing "video content" at the pace of the contemporary internet for subscribers, instead of putting real time and attention to detail into a proper movie.
I see no reason why a similar model wouldn't be possible with Substack. @Tinaforsee and I were even discussing such possibilities in the comment thread above.
But it's a limited model that only allows you to do so much, and unless you're having a hell of a lot of fun with every project, I'm sure the risk of burnout is very real.
Admittedly many great filmmakers working today still work other jobs. I know that Kelly Reichardt and Guy Maddin, for instance, have both done teaching gigs at colleges.
Still, I don't think any particular demographic group should accept being institutionally discriminated against, and I don't think we should accept institutions that are so ideologically constricting in terms of the sorts of stories they're willing to accept as legitimate.
Ideally we could have an arts system that's fair to everyone, that's not defined by the diktats of any overly-constricting ideology. So far as I can tell things were comparatively good on this front fifteen to twenty years ago. Of course art will always be in large part subjective, but I think any of the old bias against women and people of color was gone in the world of the nonprofits and festivals by then (if not earlier), and with a certain amount of nepotism and the whims of programmers and judges notwithstanding, it sure looked like films and filmmakers were largely being selected for these opportunities, for the most, based on the quality of the work.
If any old heads with the inside scoop on how things were playing out back then happen to wander through and want to correct me or clarify with regard to this, I'm sure it would be interesting to hear from them.
'So far as I can tell things were comparatively good on this front fifteen to twenty years ago' - this is what's so maddening; hardcore progressives already won the battle for representation years ago. good! but what they've done since is swap one kind of overrepresentation for another
The battle for equality of opportunity was won some time ago, but it seems now that we've got a powerful push for equality of outcome on our hands.
Presumably the rationale for increasingly cutting younger white guys out of the picture rests upon the way that there are still a lot of old white guy filmmakers, and a disproportionate amount of top grossing films have still been directed by white guys in recent decades.
Whether you agree with (neo)racist and (neo)sexist discrimination enacted in the name of achieving sexual and racial parity at the top or not, another question arises: will the Hollywood blockbuster as we know it even still exist by the time perfect parity in top grossing films can be achieved? People are not going out to theaters like they used to, and the major streaming services were all established through blizscaling.
Audiences have been conditioned to see movies as worth less and less over the past 15 or so years, so how can the blockbuster model remain sustainable?
With regard to gender, I think we also have to ask: are there as many women as there are men who are willing to work in the context of the intense environments in which some of these top grossing directors have worked? Maybe George Miller is an extreme example (and his most recent Mad Max film didn't even do very well at the box office), but it seems likely to me that men are simply more likely to be willing to work long hours in the desert, day after day, to get something like a Mad Max movie made. I'm not sure whether or not I could hack it in those conditions myself.
If we get a female Herzog some day, then great, but it just seems like women are significantly less likely to be dispositionally amenable to making films like Fitzcarraldo. As it stands, almost nobody is.
Nailed it: “narratives that primarily function to make the professional managerial class feel good about themselves, while benefiting a small number of women and people of color who are willing to play a particular rhetorical game”
Goes without saying that nothing original or interesting gets made this way.
I imagine the barriers are even worse for filmmakers given the cost and enormous effort it takes to get a film made, and not many outlets aside from the gatekeepers.
In the literary world it’s not enough to belong to some minority group; you have to make that the point of your story. I wonder how much of this content shift is going on in film?
By the way, you can always set up a button to collect tips using something like PayPal or Buy me a coffee. Or if you want the paywall you could set the yearly subscription cost to the price of a ticket (unless there’s a limit to how low you can make this?)
It is surprising that Substack hasn’t set up a one time payment option. Especially since the workarounds people come up with are losing them money.
Yeah, it's next to impossible to make a film entirely on your own. So far as production is concerned, documentary can be an easier process than narrative, because it's not immensely difficult to shoot a two camera interview with two people, as long as you've got adequate time to set things up and pack them up afterwards. I've found that it can even be done with one person, although I wouldn't recommend dividing your attention between two cameras, an audio recorder, how the room is lit, and the person you're interviewing if you can avoid it. On the flipside, the real difficulty with documentary comes in post-postproduction, during which you have to find a way to carve down a great many hours of footage into a comprehensible story, and do your best to make it a true story while also constructing a compelling narrative.
Still, I guess I should be proud that I made something that rivals some films that were made with far more adequate resources. Many, if not most, successful documentaries involve a few dozen people who are actually getting paid, so managing the process with a few people who were paid peanuts and a handful of volunteers who just threw in a little time to help out because they like me and thought the project was interesting is not nothing (arguably this is a quixotic thing to try to do in the first place - even without all of the concerns about identitarianism/social justice culture being involved with the funding/exhibition process - but if you can find a way to buy yourself the time, the basic gear, and whatever travel might be necessary, it can be done).
It does seem as though it's now become very important to make the struggles of minority groups the point of your story in the context of grants and festivals; if nothing else, it's a way of going about the process that's very favored by nonprofits and festivals. I've even seen a couple of white guys manage to have some success by pandering hard enough to these implied incentives (well, whether they were consciously pandering or were simply very effective and toeing the line intuitively/spontaneously is unclear). What I think my film demonstrates in relation to all of this (like with your novel, of course there's no solid proof, but we can make some inferences) is that even if you do cover "minority issues," if you don't cover them in a way that fits very neatly into simplified social justice narratives, you'll likely still be turned away at the door to the club (well, assuming you're not already thoroughly established anyway).
I'll look into the paypal link option. I'm not sure how regularly I intend to post on substack, but certainly there's some good will out there, and if people want to donate, I may as well make the option readily available to them.
Edit: Thanks for the suggestion! I've added a donate button to each of my four essays.
I know just from putzing around on iMovie how difficult it is to make a film. Here is my most serious attempt—it took forever!—and it still just kinda sucks:
https://youtu.be/onWkkooAcr8?si=LVRhLDF_Akt50aKA
I still feel like it could have been a nice film if I had tightened up the story and if I actually knew what I was doing. I enjoy video editing, tedious though it is. Sound, however...ugh. People have no idea how difficult just that part alone is...they take most of their entertainment for granted. Editing, as you say, is especially hard. So really, I hear you. And all I know is the simple iMovie stuff I've been doing. I have no idea what it would be like to coordinate actors and get all these different people working together. It sounds really hellish to me!
Have you thought about making short films for Substack? Simple ones? That might go over well since you could share them on Notes.
That was a pretty charming short. Better than most first serious attempts, I think.
One note that comes to mind quickly: if you jump into another project like this, maybe consider working with the pacing a little bit more, giving certain moments more room to breath, deliberately speeding things up, slowing things down. The story feels a little bit rushed to me, which is maybe a little bit more noticeable as it's a kind of abstract fairy tale/myth sort of story about a couple of cacti (what all of this might mean maybe takes some time to sink in for the viewer). Listening to a story and imagining it is one thing; watching accompanying visuals with a story is another. Of course the visuals are mostly just a sort of video-collage with some basic animation, which means they generally won't be construed as "serious cinema," but there's nothing wrong with that in my view. Makes sense to work with what you've got at your disposal, play around and experiment with the form. I thought the stop motion bits with the paint were pretty cool. Try that with a higher frame rate and come up with ways to make it more sophisticated and you might have something impressive (of course all of that gets time consuming, though).
Another advantage of documentary is that sound can be relatively simple, at least if you have interview subjects who are able to mostly keep still while they're talking (and if what you're doing largely revolves around sit down interviews in the first place). One static, well placed shotgun mic and a decent recorder can do that trick as long as the mic remains properly aimed at the subject's mouth and isn't too far away. Lavalier mics can work just fine too, but you have to be careful about them rubbing against clothing. I like to use both when I can just so I have a backup to work with if the track from the shotgun doesn't turn out well at any particular moment.
Of course all of this gear costs hundreds of dollars at a minimum, but if nothing else the equipment needed for filmmaking is much cheaper than it used to be. It's less necessary to take Herzog's advice and "steal a camera" than it's ever been.
As for coordinating actors, it's really only something I've done on a small scale, and mostly just with amateurs I already know for fun, less serious projects, but I'd like to get back into it and improve those skills.
Maybe just getting into simple short films for substack and/or youtube is a good idea. It's been a notion that's been on my mind lately. There's a certain allure to working on big, ambitious projects (even without the resources necessary to do them in a sensible manner), but if even festivals can turn in a direction that will suddenly shut me out based on the cultural whims of the moment, then maybe small projects that go direct to whoever's interested is a more tenable route, at least for the time being. While I think there's a lot of artistic value in work that involves real time and dedication, at least a few people out there have managed to make producing a lot of simple short films into a full time career. Surely something is lost when you feel like you have to crank things out at the rate the internet demands, but what's the alternative these days?
You are so spot on about the film being rushed. What happened was, I wanted to enter it into this crazy contest:
https://loftcinema.org/film/first-friday-shorts-tuesday-edition/
I told my writing group that I planned to enter. They were all familiar with this contest, so I asked them for tips: "Make it as short as possible." "Bring everyone you know." "Keep it fast paced. Attention spans are short." So I took my original and started cutting. I managed to get it down from 10 minutes to 7 minutes. What a nightmare that was. I mean DAYS of editing just to cut 3 measly minutes! People have no idea! Anyway, yeah, I agree, it definitely needs more air to breathe, and I think that was true even at 10 minutes. You know how I did that wonky stop motion stuff? I painted on a transparency over my laptop screen and filmed with my GoPro in my closet. Every time I did a brush stroke I had to hold my breath to avoid knocking things around (and I didn't always succeed). I discovered Canva's video AI sometime during the making of the film. Pretty funny stuff.
I didn't end up winning the contest (surprise!), but the objectively best film, an amazing hand-drawn animated film, didn't win either. It really was a popularity contest, which explains the advice "bring everyone you know". The film that won was terribly schmaltzy, but they had a bigger production and therefore a bigger crowd. Still, it was really neat to see my movie on the big screen. The way the contest works is that the audience can yell 'gong!' to stop your movie, and others can yell back 'let it play!' to keep the movie going. For some reason my dumb little cactus movie had the whole theater screaming at each other. It was gratifying to hear total strangers very vocally sticking up for my movie. Thanks to them I managed to avoid getting gonged—barely. I think with everyone yelling all at once it wasn't clear which side was winning, so I got the benefit of the doubt. I'm just glad I didn't get gonged!
By the way, the guy who did the voiceover for Brother Saguaro is in my writing group—lucky for me, because he's an actor and has a great voice. The woman who did Sister Saguaro lives in my neighborhood. I recorded them separately; they met for the first time the night of the contest.
I don't have much equipment, but you're right, you don't need much money these days to get some impressive results (assuming you have patience, which I don't). I requested a Tula Mic for my birthday a while back, mainly because it's cute, but it does a great job with noise cancellation all things considered:
https://tulamics.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorilPQWfw-4jWNBQRpwgQT0VdYHU__hgXNVKPYybt2vVj_xIzdG
And I bought a GoPro7, which is pretty much all I use other than my very old phone. I am totally impressed by the GoPro. In this little home movie I'm holding it on a stick (monopod?) and it somehow looks like I'm above the tree. I still don't get it. I'm only 5 feet tall and the stick is only about 4 feet long. It makes no sense. Something about the wide angle?
https://youtu.be/OxzgJXWq6H0?si=Ndq75h-o0_6Xavld
Since you're on Substack, you should find it easy to find writers to collaborate with you. After you put your full movie up and get things ready to go, you could contact a writer whose work you admire and ask if they'd like for it to be turned into a short film. I bet they would! I would suggest shooting high. Why not? Find someone famous right here on Substack. They post the video of their writing, your video and Substack get promoted. If that fails, you could even put out some Notes asking for short stories or even nonfiction pieces that can easily be turned into films, then you and the writer would benefit from sharing your work with your audiences. That's the advice these days for writers: collaborate. You never know where that can lead. For you I think it could be even better since you have skills writers generally don't have.
Yeah, I know that sort of pressure. I think I ended up caving to it with my first feature-length documentary, "Who is Vermin Supreme? An Outsider Odyssey." There are some good things about that one, and it does some things that no other films do (and in a strange way some of it feels like a sort of precursor to what Andrew Callaghan and others have been doing consistently for years now), but I also ended up cutting it down in such a way that I tried to make every scene as rapid as possible, when in retrospect I really should have kept some more breathing room at certain points and then cut certain scenes wholesale (at the time I guess I was a little too attached to these scenes).
With this new one, I think I've done a better job with that, although it is a long film (even though it can technically function just fine as a kind of three part series as well). It actually has almost exactly the same runtime as Todd Field's Tár, but also Tár is much less dense, and doesn't overwhelm the viewer with so much intense information throughout. They're just very different movies. A certain type of person really appreciate No One Left to Offend, though, so I guess it's good, and of course it's nice that a guy who's been watching thousands of the best movies produced each year for almost twenty years (the Sundance guy) liked it, even if none of the big festivals want it.
If you want to try more stop motion like that I bet you could build a simple light table of some sort, and then secure a camera in place above it somehow. Some of the old masters of this sort of thing, like Yuri Norstein, used multi-plane light tables so they could move cutouts around frame by frame and have things in the foreground move while things in the background move. Hedgehog in the Fog is a good example of this technique:
https://youtu.be/bFUi7inkAbs?si=J2m2rZjq2Gx7DyBn
Your description of First Friday Shorts was pretty peculiar for me to read because I've been attending the Minneapolis version of this show off and on for years now. For a moment there I thought you must be a twin cities local (which was surprising because the short is so clearly set in the southwest). I didn't even know the same sort of thing was happening elsewhere. I think you've described what just about always happens with these sorts of shows. The best films rarely win. Instead, it's usually a competently enough done crowd-pleaser that takes home the prize. These shows largely revolve around hooking the audience quickly, which is a test of something, but not exactly a test of which film is objectively "best," in my opinion anyway. Still, my friends who run "Scream if off Screen" around here do a great job with their short film gong show, and they usually include some interesting, funny, off the wall stage antics between films. Sometimes there's even a whole theatrical narrative arc of sorts the plays out between all of the shorts.
I'm not sure how tall that tree is, but those underwater shots of the dog are a lot of fun.
There's something to your collaborative substack idea. Maybe I could even ask writers to submit short scripts or short stories specifically designed around being produced for basically no money - you know, stories that would involve one to four actors, written around not requiring locations that are difficult to secure or costuming/props that are difficult to get together, that sort of thing. So far as I can tell it looks like you run the substack for a short story literary magazine, so maybe we should talk about it more through direct messages, if it's something you're interested in being a part of. Of course I'm not sure I could guarantee that all of these shorts would necessarily be excellent (at least right off the bat), as I would have to work with some mixture of non-actors who I think could pull off a performance and local actors who are willing to work for free (and would likely have to schedule around at least having one volunteer to handle audio for dialogue), but if nothing else it could be an interesting exercise, and a way to experiment with navigating around all of the old institutional gatekeepers.
Just subscribed to your YouTube channel. :)
Interesting, I didn't realize the gong show thing was widespread either! Tucson is a weird place, so I just assumed a weird thing like that would be specific to Tucson. What you describe about the host's antics in between sounds similar too.
That hedgehog movie was so beautiful. Geordie (my dog) loved it as well. I don't think I could pull something like that off, not without a great deal of patience.
A lot of the stuff you're talking about with film editing seems parallel to writing fiction. It's really tricky knowing what to cut, how to control pacing, etc. The same rookie mistake of cramming info in at the beginning and speeding things up in the hopes that interest will magically be generated—that's the same mistake I see over and over with novice fiction writers. It's interesting to think about the similarities and differences. It's almost impossible for me to talk about point of view without using filmmaking terms.
I'm not good at judging these things, but I'd say the tree is about 20 feet? It's about the same height as my one-story house (which I know doesn't tell you much). It's strange that a ~10 ft tall camera (my height plus the monopod) can create this effect that you're looking down at the tree from above. I had no idea a wide angled lens could make that much of a difference.
I think it's a neat idea to collaborate on the ADC short stories. You would have to talk to Kolby, the guy who started the magazine, about that. He's the one who would know about author rights over the work. But I seriously doubt any of the authors would mind...we all dream of having our work turned into movies! Of course, many of the stories are sci-fi or fantasy and I imagine that would involve a lot of special effects, but there are others that aren't. Anyway, Kolby's contact info is here:
https://www.afterdinnerconversation.com/customer-service
I'll let him know we've been talking and see what he thinks about the idea.
Well said and thanks for sharing. I look forward to watching this film when it’s available, paying the “tip” or “coffee price”
it's the same in the literary world; we who have to put up with it can only count ourselves lucky that writing, while time-consuming, isn't very expensive in a material way - certainly not as expensive as it is for a filmmaker such as yourself. similarly, there is some hope for writers who are prepared to cut their losses and go it alone, perhaps setting up alternative publications (or, indeed, starting a substack). but what is a filmmaker supposed to do - start his own *film festival?* it seems insurmountable (in the short term).
in the long term, we can only hope that influential organisations will drop identity politics the moment it becomes unfashionable and/or unprofitable, which I'm pretty sure will happen (arguably the latter is already happening, judging by ratings for shows like the acolyte and rings of power). the question is: when?
There have been a few filmmakers who've been able to get away with making a decent living repeatedly cranking out short films and building an audience on Patreon. Some of them are even pretty inspired. Joel Haver is a good example.
https://youtu.be/UulEsFPhIjY?si=luQQkUa9Fhb7A7cM
Still, Haver is mostly doing very small scale projects that are basically comedy skits. He's a funny guy and he's very good at what he does, but also a lot is lost when one is producing "video content" at the pace of the contemporary internet for subscribers, instead of putting real time and attention to detail into a proper movie.
I see no reason why a similar model wouldn't be possible with Substack. @Tinaforsee and I were even discussing such possibilities in the comment thread above.
But it's a limited model that only allows you to do so much, and unless you're having a hell of a lot of fun with every project, I'm sure the risk of burnout is very real.
Admittedly many great filmmakers working today still work other jobs. I know that Kelly Reichardt and Guy Maddin, for instance, have both done teaching gigs at colleges.
Still, I don't think any particular demographic group should accept being institutionally discriminated against, and I don't think we should accept institutions that are so ideologically constricting in terms of the sorts of stories they're willing to accept as legitimate.
Ideally we could have an arts system that's fair to everyone, that's not defined by the diktats of any overly-constricting ideology. So far as I can tell things were comparatively good on this front fifteen to twenty years ago. Of course art will always be in large part subjective, but I think any of the old bias against women and people of color was gone in the world of the nonprofits and festivals by then (if not earlier), and with a certain amount of nepotism and the whims of programmers and judges notwithstanding, it sure looked like films and filmmakers were largely being selected for these opportunities, for the most, based on the quality of the work.
If any old heads with the inside scoop on how things were playing out back then happen to wander through and want to correct me or clarify with regard to this, I'm sure it would be interesting to hear from them.
'So far as I can tell things were comparatively good on this front fifteen to twenty years ago' - this is what's so maddening; hardcore progressives already won the battle for representation years ago. good! but what they've done since is swap one kind of overrepresentation for another
The battle for equality of opportunity was won some time ago, but it seems now that we've got a powerful push for equality of outcome on our hands.
Presumably the rationale for increasingly cutting younger white guys out of the picture rests upon the way that there are still a lot of old white guy filmmakers, and a disproportionate amount of top grossing films have still been directed by white guys in recent decades.
Whether you agree with (neo)racist and (neo)sexist discrimination enacted in the name of achieving sexual and racial parity at the top or not, another question arises: will the Hollywood blockbuster as we know it even still exist by the time perfect parity in top grossing films can be achieved? People are not going out to theaters like they used to, and the major streaming services were all established through blizscaling.
https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU?si=pEnD5QGBqJw2FFhB
Audiences have been conditioned to see movies as worth less and less over the past 15 or so years, so how can the blockbuster model remain sustainable?
With regard to gender, I think we also have to ask: are there as many women as there are men who are willing to work in the context of the intense environments in which some of these top grossing directors have worked? Maybe George Miller is an extreme example (and his most recent Mad Max film didn't even do very well at the box office), but it seems likely to me that men are simply more likely to be willing to work long hours in the desert, day after day, to get something like a Mad Max movie made. I'm not sure whether or not I could hack it in those conditions myself.
If we get a female Herzog some day, then great, but it just seems like women are significantly less likely to be dispositionally amenable to making films like Fitzcarraldo. As it stands, almost nobody is.
https://youtu.be/uL99NDUWJ0A?si=lwUreWxmcLPHMGty
Nailed it: “narratives that primarily function to make the professional managerial class feel good about themselves, while benefiting a small number of women and people of color who are willing to play a particular rhetorical game”
Goes without saying that nothing original or interesting gets made this way.