The Yoga Fly Experience – Part 2 A
Let’s do this.
I wrote a fair few words in Part 1 of The YogaFly Experience, but if you haven’t read it and don’t wanna (tsk) here’s the necessary info: three high-school buddies were about to leave college and enter the real world and they wanted to make a movie together; around March or April of ‘08 they settled on a roughly treated, underdeveloped, unwritten story called The Yin of Gary Fisher’s Life; they would shoot it in July; come mid-May the script was still unwritten and all subsequent details were undetermined; and it didn’t matter because they had one mindset.
“Let’s do this.”
THE PRE-PRODUCTION
There are often many different things that need to be hashed out, talked over, discussed, rehashed, fought over, declared as vital!, dismissed as trival, and almost nearly overlooked about a movie long before the movie moves into the realm of production. These include such things as casting, location scouting, art direction, story-boarding, scheduling, and (sometimes) having the script written.
Okay. Maybe a little more than ’sometimes’ for the script.
Our pre-production was a bit different. Admittedly, it was amateurish, but I think that’s alright because we were amateurs. We were three guys who wanted to make our grad school film without having to pay to go to grad school. This was our hard-knock, learn-by-doing education.
…You get what you pay for I guess. Anyways.
WRITING
I am a writer in so much as many hobbiest filmmakers claim to be writers. So to say, I’m not really a writer. I kinda, sorta took a narrative writing class during my time at the university, but I certainly was not practiced in the art of crafting a well-structured story arc with insightful, emotionally compelling dialogue. Also, as may be obvious at this point, back then I wasn’t great at holding myself to self-imposed deadlines. And so Matt, Paul, and I arrived at May 10th, 2008 without a script as I was flying off out of country for five weeks. This caused numerous problems which I will write on shortly, but the main point to note for this section is that I don’t really know how I was able to get past security and onto the plane because there wasn’t just a fire under my ass, there was a billowing inferno of fiery doom beneath the spot my butt cheeks had formerly resided.
But I did do one thing right. I had treated the story and developed the characters before I tried to write the script.
I really can’t begin to imagine how much time would-be writers have wasted in libraries, book shops, and coffee stores while sitting in front of their word-processing programs with the cursor flashing in and out and in and out and in and out and in while sitting in rapt, frozen concentration as they try to come up with some insightfully-funny-yet-dramatic dialogue that will simultaneously resonate deeply with the reader’s own experiences and give them a completely new view of the world! and yet the writers don’t even know the name of the character whose mouth they’re attempting to put words into. It just does not work.
A construction crew doesn’t just show up and start building a house. They don’t start nailing framing together with the mindset, “Let’s see where this goes.” Surgeons don’t walk into the operating room, make a random incision, and say, “Let’s see where this goes.” And that’s because those people take their profession seriously. But perhaps that’s too non-liberal-artsy for you. How about…authors. Do you know what they do? They outline their stories and develop their characters before sitting down to write. And most screenwriters do as well. So if you are a filmmakewriter who has clocked hours and hours and has three paragraphs to show for it, stop it. If you claim this as what you do, stop it. Either start taking your craft more seriously or stop claiming it as your craft. Mozart and Leonardo could create master pieces without planning, BUT THEY WERE MOZART AND LEONARDO! And on the reverse, Sure!, Tolkien and Patrick Rothfuss didn’t outline their very good books, but they also spent their entire lives writing them. For everyone in between the instant genius and the single, life-long masterpiece, we must outline, develop, treat, draft, get feedback, revise, and finally realize that we’re gonna have to make a lot of questionably decent stuff before we will know how to create really good stuff. – [end rant]
So, yes, I had the story treated. I knew who each of the five characters were, I knew where the movie was going, and I knew what scenes I needed and what needed to happen within each to get from one to the next. It was the dialogue that remained, and that’s still a big hurdle by itself.
I was in Poland through my university’s study abroad program to take two courses – one a study of the Holocaust with visits to half a dozen concentration camp sites, the other a study of the historical rise and modern impact of nationalism – each of which lasted a little over two weeks with a five day do-whatever-ya-want break in between. But heavy subject matter and expedited course schedule aside, having nothing but one class to worry about was moist lemon cake compared to, in polite terms, a ‘rather unenjoyable’ academic (mostly extra-curricular) year. It. Was. Great.
Didn’t have a computer. Great. Beautiful surroundings. Great. Beer. Great.
Even if you’re going about it in a proper way with a treated story and knowledge of your characters, writing ‘on the side’ is just incredibly difficult. If all you can sneak is a distracted 30 to 60 minutes it’s really hard to get mentally into it and get anything worthwhile down in that short amount of time. While over in Poland we regularly had 4-hour blocks of time, sometimes the entire afternoon and evening, to ourselves. It really was quite wonderful. Pictured above is the Rynek, a 10-acre square in the heart of Krakow, Poland. I would make the 20-minute walk, find an establishment, order a 0.5L, light a pipe, and set to writing in my notebook. As I said, I didn’t have a computer over there with me, but computer or no, I would have been writing in my notebook. I write in longhand. I always have since I was whittling out terrible stories in 3rd grade (I still have a lot of those notebooks). I’m actually quite bad about typing cold at a computer. These blog posts (length aside) take me FOR-EV-ER. Plus there’s something irresistibly romantic about flowing words forth from your mind through a good pen onto paper and into the physical world. Doubly so with a beer at hand. Triply so with a pipe in your mouth. I don’t know if that’s hipster or cliche or just plain self-absorbed, but it puts me in a good place mentally. And above all else, you need to be in a good mental state to have any hopes of writing.
And I wrote.
Line after line I scribbled down, scratched out, re-wrote, modified with even smaller scribbled inserts, and scratched out again. The pages of my notebook were slowly filling up as it was taking two or three drafts of a scene to come to something moderately passable. The previously mentioned beneath-butt inferno kept me from using my rapid progress as an excuse to take a break. I was even feeling like I might drain the pen! (It’s always a back-of-my-mind goal to drain a Pilot V5 Precise pen before I loose it…hasn’t happened yet (anyone else? or am I just extra odd?))
I left the notebook in the overhead storage space of one of the many tour buses we rode.
Yes, gut-wrenching. But all was not lost. While I didn’t have a computer, I did have access to the interweb thanks to the fine institution of Internet Cafes where you pay per fifteen minute slot. As I finished a scene I would type it up and email it in notepad and upload it to our production blog so that Matt and Paul could read it and give some feedback. So luckily while I did loose a solid bit of work, it was far from loosing everything. The scenes that had been written but not typed and sent were scenes that I had been working on in those last two days so they were in my mind and I was able to buy a new notebook (this is the only reason I have a notebook with a soccer player on the cover), scribble the scenes back out, and keep going.
That’s how it was written.
CASTING
Allow me, please, to introduce to you Matt Clark, Producer for The Yin of Gary Fischer’s Life.
Like me, Matt graduated from Pocahontas Area Community High School in May of 2004. Unlike me, Matt actually spent some time considering where he as going to go to college and thereby enrolled at Buena Vista University and was able to become very involved in a media production program. From sophomore to senior year he produced the campus talk show and during his senior year he was the general manager of the campus cable channel. Now what this means is that Matt had three years of experience running productions by way of:
- outlining what needed to get done,
- tasking fellow students to get various parts of the project done,
- checking up on the students to make sure they were getting it done, and
- ultimately doing much of the work himself when the work didn’t get done (because it was all extracurricular and many students just don’t care about the field they’re going into).
In brief, Matt knew how to get shtuff done.
One of the stuffs Matt was working on getting done was setting up the auditions. In order to get the casting done Matt knew we would need to be listed on the Iowa Motion Picture Association’s (IMPA…Yes, Iowa has a motion picture association.) -the IMPA’s website so that we could then get on the IMPA’s casting-call mailing list. Trouble was, the IMPA required a copy of the script before they would allow production groups access to their actors-mailing-list. Now if your initial reaction is one of unjust censorship, don’t worry. The IMPA doesn’t discriminate except in perhaps the most culturally/legally unacceptable situations. The reason for the prerequisite was that they want to make sure you have a script done, because without a script, it’s pretty easy for a project to not happen, and they don’t want to waste the time of the actors who have signed up for their mailing list.
It’s fair. It was just very inconvenient because we were not at all properly prepared.
Even if I was spitting the scenes out fast, it didn’t make a lick of difference since the whole script wasn’t done. Terrific. We’ve got a movie we’re planning on shooting and no way to get a proper cast assembled. And I’m just gonna post this because I’m out of time and it’s already overly-long. I’ll hit the second half of Pre-Production in another post shortly. Thanks for readin’.
The YogaFly Experience – Part 1
At present there is one major instance in our video-production past that stands untouched, un-blogged, un-discussed, and relatively underlooked. And that instance is the The Yin of Gary Fischer’s Life. Our movie.
I’m gonna cover it in three four different entries; one for introduction, one for pre-production, one for production, and one for post-production. What I will present to you is an attempt at an unfortunately truthful representation of the events that took place, with only so much deviation as attempts at flourish will dictate and only so much wandering as my wandering nature demands. And so, boys and girls,
THE INTRODUCTION
THE SETTING
Instead of digressing later on, I’ll just start off-topic my mentioning Susanna Clarke’s book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It is a very unusual read and either very good or very bad, depending on how you like that ‘unusual’ flavor. In the early part of the book she introduces a society of gentlemen who proudly title themselves as theoretical magicians – they know magic. They do not practice it, but they certainly know it. They get together and discuss the various workings and meanings and effects of this spell and that spell and talk often about great magicians of the past and the interesting ways they used a certain spell here and there. But they do not practice it.
It’s a great analogy for filmmaking. It’s very easy to sit around and talk about the effects that different color temperatures give to a project or the various ways to unfold a narrative and praise this director and boo that director but, while that certainly shows that you know a lot, at the end of the day you’re still just a theoretical filmmaker at best. And there’s a vast difference between theory and practice in filmmaking. I suspect that the same is true for most fields, but I can only testify for filmmaking. And I also think that while it may be true for many fields, there are few fields where it’s as easy and acceptable to never make the move from theoretical to practical. It is very easy to talk. Talk is fun. Talk is helpful. But talk is talk. Talk is cheap. And talk lacks action by its nature. And the realization of that cheapness and that inherent lack of action can either come as slowly and painfully as an orthodontist “adjusting” your teeth or it can come as quickly and jarringly as pulling a tooth out with pliers. Either way your mouth feels different, and every time you open your mouth to talk you can’t not notice the difference. I’m not sayin’ you don’t keep talking. I’m just saying it’s suddenly like eating bologna once, ya know, you know. It’s just not quite as enjoyable.
All that said, it still seems like a lot of film folk are perfectly content with bologna. We were not. It was a constant source of teenage-like angst for an “us” consisting of Paul David Benedict (whom you readers may already know and love through your reading of this blog), Matt Clark (whom you readers will become familiar with through this short YogaFly series) and myself (Chris Cook…please keep your feelings private, I have a fragile ego). The three of us were best of friends during our high school years and we had banded together to create Centaurus Media Group (CMG)!
It was as CMG that, on and off, we spent our junior year of high school shooting footage for our post-apocalyptic action/thriller Redshift. It was bad. An hour and fifty-two minutes of bad. Epic. And bad…
…but not so bad for juniors in a rural Iowan town. It was, if nothing else, ambitious.
Well, Paul graduated early, and a year later the three of us were at three different universities studying the closest thing we could find to movie makings (which was, to one degree or another “Communications”). Though miles apart, our desire for production kept us united (if only in spirit). Each of us tried for production at our own universities, saddened by the fact that rarely did we three meet a fellow student not content with bologna.
This was the setting we found ourselves in and one we did not wish to stay in. We wanted to move to the practical.
THE DECISION
The end of one’s college career is a marking time in a person’s life. Years seems to slip by afterwords and all of a sudden you’re driving to work for the 500th time and you’re hit smack dab in the face with depression because two seconds earlier you were elated by the fact that you had somehow found an open lane! and to see yourself so excited over such a thing just sets you back a few…
That’s the assumption at least, so it’s fairly common for graduates to give themselves one Last Hurrah. Some people go on binges of liver-bursting proportions. Some see the parting-of-ways coming and finally muster up the guts to ask out that someone they’ve had their eyes on for the last two years. Some take the GRE so that their college (hopefully) won’t have to end. Some run off and tour Europe.
What did we do? What was our “Farewell” to book-laden-arms? We made a movie!
. . .Well, I also ran off to Europe. . .It was a good time. Saw a lot of old buildings. Drank some beer. And honey vodka. Mmm, honey vodka. How wrong can communism be if it brought about the perfection of honey vodka… Anyways, that’s not really what I’m trying to get at. Back to the movie.
DEVELOPMENT & GREENLIGHTING
We decided that we were going to make a movie. We didn’t know what we were going to make, but we decided we were going to make something. Project = greenlit. Done deal done.
. . .What? Don’t raise your eyebrow at my blog post like that! You know how it goes. Sometimes you just need to commit. Sometimes you need to have the pressure pushing down on you. You need to have the option of waiting for “the right” thing removed from your table of operations. No more if’s and when’s. Just, “We will.” It makes things wonderfully simple and pulls things into sharp focus.
We had a lot of video-chat sessions between January and April of 2008. We tossed around ideas and locations and this and that. We were fairly serious about doing a documentary for first parts of our talks. But we eventually came back to the idea of making a narrative. It was scary. Redshift was really bad, and we didn’t want to go through shedding blood, sweat, and tears to come out the other side with a project we were ashamed of. Again. But narratives are where our passions lie, and at one point or another I tossed a story-concept onto the metaphorical table and Matt & Paul were intrigued.
The Yin of Gary Fischer’s Life was a pitch and treatment that I had put together for a digital narrative class I took during my sophomore year at UNI. It contained a few interesting ideas for scenes, five undeveloped characters, and a “story arc” in the very loosest of terms. Conveniently, it took place in a small college town as so many student films do. It was shootable; a low number of players, character driven, controllable scenes, et cetera. It was a comedy. It wasn’t too complex. Essentially, it had as much potential as we could hope for. Done. It, The Yin of Gary Fischer’s Life, was our movie!
I don’t remember when the decision was reached. I really don’t specifically remember when any of the plans were made. We were going to shoot it from July 6th to the 21st in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Other than that, the only other thing that was known before May 10th was the house that we were going to say in and shoot in. I can say May 10th because that’s when I flew off to Poland.
I can tell you that the script wasn’t written (not Not Finished, but straight-up Not Written).
I know that the cast was not known.
I know that the locations (other than the house) weren’t decided.
Pretty much everything about the movie was unknown except for what the movie was called. There was a lot of planning to do (and not much time). But, hey, that’s what pre-production is for, right?
Right. Well, that’s next time. Thanks for reading.
Indiscriminate Blasphemy of the Utmost Proportions
So who are we and why should you care? Well the more philosophical and ideological details about our individual and collective personalities seems best left to the “About” page, but the primary piece of intriguing information is the fact that there are fairly few folks who do what we do do it the way we do it.
We’ve been producing videos for the better part of this millennium and it was really only a short time ago that we decided to be serious about it. We decided that our stories would be compelling and emotionally convicting. We decided that our sets would be painted with light so controlled that there wouldn’t be a shadow that wasn’t in perfect contrast with a focus-worthy object. Our costumes would either be utterly unnoticeable or capable of engulfing your attention. Our videos would be so well received that we’d be able to work on another feature within a year, this time with a budget…and a sane time frame.
It was a bad decision.
To properly convey why it was a bad decision it seems necessary to share the past that shaped our present. We’ve been making movies for a long time. For many years our troupe was called Centaurus Media Group and under that guise we made Redshift during our high school years and many others throughout our college years (along with a few TV episodes). Many…perhaps most, were not good. In the summer of ‘08 the three of us (yes, CMG was a group of three, and a bitter parting cast it asunder) rushed together to give our hands another try at a long-form movie. Many things went incredibly well considering we shot it in two-weeks and planned it in one. Other things did not (like the dissolution of CMG).
The point? The point is that we have a history of tenacious production…but not a present state of being. We have been nearly a year without making a video and it has been a long one. We have claimed the title ‘Video Guys’ and formed a production company and talked of many a witty plot and critiqued many videos made by others but we ourselves have not created.
So ideals be damned. ‘Tis better to crassly create than wither and wait.
But you, for now, must wait. You have no choice in the matter and please don’t pretend like you do because you’ve read through the whole of this post and so you’re obviously interested. I’m confident in saying that you will find us surprisingly good and confusingly bad as many different points, and my only hope is that it’s not within the same video.
Welcome to Our Blog
If you are reading this, I don’t believe you.
No, I’m serious. I don’t believe in blogs, I don’t believe in bloggers, and I especially don’t believe that anyone cool spends time reading them.
I know, you’re saying: “How could we be having this conversation if I’m not reading this?” That would be a good point, but I’m sitting on my porch writing in the present (your past), and you’re stuck solidly in the future (your present). How do I know you exist?
No wait . . . I’ve got an idea: Come up to me in the present (my future) and say “Robot Ostrich.” Then I’ll know it’s really you.
So why, if I don’t believe in blogs, am I writing one? Well, simply, I intend to be a player in “the industry” within five years. If my partner and I make it, that will be a good story (especially since it will have been written in the past . . . which is now the present). We are both Iowa country kids: no money, no connections, no shortcuts. We’ll need to get there without handouts or favors. If we do, then America still works. If not, well, America probably still works, just not on weekends.
And thus begins the Journey: Hollywood or Bust.