Paul Zadie

I’m as much of a camera nut as the next filmmaker, and I am ecstatic about the giant leaps that camera technology has been making of late. Like so many others, I’m on the Amazon.com waiting list for two Canon 7D bodies, and they just can’t get here fast enough. But I have been noticing a trend in the independent film community lately. It seems that the most important thing to filmmakers theses days is the latest, greatest camera. Even worse, we speculate and obsess over the latest camera features and specs. The accessibility of high quality tools and the democratization of production is enabling filmmakers to do what was only a dream just a few years ago.

What is that dream for most filmmakers? Telling stories. Story is the reason that I got into this business. What is storytelling? Story is a combination of entertaining, informing and most importantly, manipulating and evoking an emotional response from an audience. Storytelling (the filmmaker’s dream) is not depth of field, sensor size, cameras, editing software, faster computers, microphones, codecs, camera stabilizers, or anything else. These are just the tools that we use to create our art . Surely, Salvador Dali didn’t sit around with other painters for days on end and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the latest canvas and brushes. Photographers are even bigger gear heads than filmmakers(debatable, but bear with me), but their discussions always come back to the photo. I have never seen a comment thread on Flickr that focuses exclusively on the camera that a photo was shot with. The critique usually runs much deeper than that. So, why is it that filmmakers endlessly discuss, debate, and lust after these items that are nothing more than our paint brushes and canvas? The tools are important, we use them to guide our audience, but what we make with these tools is infinitely more important than the tools themselves. What defines you as a director, editor, writer, cinematographer? Is it your camera, NLE, writing software? No. It’s your story.

There is a fantastic short film on Vimeo called “Perya” that’s getting a lot of attention the past few days. But I think it is getting the wrong kind of attention. This film has been blogged about over and over, and the only thing that anyone cares about is the Canon 7D that it was shot with! Yes, the images are stunning, but there is a substantial story there as well. It is a really great short documentary. Not because of the shallow depth of field or the 24P frame rate, but because of the story.

After viewing Perya the second time with a technical eye, I scrolled down the page to leave a comment. As I read the long list of comments I found myself having another emotional response. I was shocked that not a single comment on that page complimented the filmmakers on the story or the subject matter. Why isn’t anyone talking about that?

A recent post on ProLost, Stu Maschwitz coined the term Bokake for the all too common, slick, yet devoid of story, camera tests like Reverie. Perya is unfairly being treated like Bokake, but it is so much more. Perya is not a good film because it was lensed with a Canon 7D. Look a little bid deeper. Are filmmakers blinded by technology? If so, I think we need to make a conscious effort to try and focus on story, structure, character, tension, drama, lighting, action, dialog, location, pacing, performance, composition, and all of the other important things that make a good film.

If your dream has alway been to own a 7D or a Scarlet, more power to you. If your dream is to make a movie, you should start paying attention to the things that are hidden by the technology blinders that I think we have all been wearing lately.

“Perya” – a Canon 7D Short from Bob Nicolas on Vimeo.

“Perya” – a short doc entirely shot with the new canon 7D camera. 108024p/premiere pro CS3

I have never directed a film before so when my assistant editor Adam asked me to direct an entry to the National Film Challenge, I agreed. Who in their right mind would turn down a fun, sleep deprived weekend of filmmaking? Not me, that’s for sure. And fun it was. We had a weekend of DV Rebel style filmmaking with a one day shoot that took place at a small carnival, and a day of intense post-production.

The weekend started with a brainstorming session with most of the crew present, then our writer, J.M. Moeller, went off and wrote the script that Afair is based on. Then we shot for a full day at the carnival, arriving before it opened to shoot some or our scenes, and staying until after dark to take advantage of the visually rich backdrop of the colors and  lights available to us. Speaking of light… This film was shot entirely with available light and a bounce board. This caused us some problems with shadows and noise, but with a bit of attention in After Effects, I was able to remedy some of the issues. It’s not perfect, but I’m satisfied.

Director of Photography, Ryan Krause, shot Afair on my HVX-200/Brevis35 camera rig. Editor, Adam Lee, composer/sound designer, Justin Sisley and myself did all of the post in Adobe CS3. While this final version of the film is not exactly what was completed over that weekend, it is pretty close. After our entry was submitted to the contest, I went to work fine tuning the edit, color grade and titles while, Justin worked on refining the music and sound. 

You can view Afair in HD at the official Afair website, or on Vimeo. Or watch in low resolution below. I recommend the HD version. While you’re at the Afair website, you can download an iTunes version of the film, an Afair logo wallpaper for your computer or the script. There is also a flickr photo set, and an Afair Facebook Page, so please become a fan.

I am interested to hear your thoughts on Afair, so leave a comment below or comment on Vimeo. Thanks and enjoy!

AFAIR from Paul Zadie on Vimeo.

If you are involved in post-production, or in filmmaking in general, you should lend an ear to That Post Show. Host John Flowers invited me and Scott Simmons on this week’s show to talk about some post-production goodness. John, Scott, and I have a great discussion about the current state of the NLE software landscape. We talk about some of the projects we use Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro for, and why we choose one program over another based on the needs of a particular project. We all take turns airing some of our major grievances with some of the software and hardware that we use. It’s a good show, so give it a listen.

I’m starting pre-production on my next short film project called Broken Promise. In addition to being Director of Photography on this one, I’ll be producing. That means in reality I’ll be serving as the Producer, Production Manager, Production Coordinator, and Catering. I guess I’m really going to need a good 1st AD.

So my first step is doing a script breakdown. I typically use Final Draft Tagger for the breakdown, Showbiz Scheduling (formerly Company Move Show-Planner) for scheduling, and Showbiz Budgeting for uh… budgeting.

Most scripts are written with Final Draft, so this method works. But Final Draft gives me a headache with activation issues. I swear that the people who pirate the software don’t have to deal with the issues that legit customers put up with. DRM and copy protection suck, and only cause problems for the users who pay good money for software and media. I think this has been proven time and again. When are these companies going to learn? I digress.

Showbiz Budgeting works fine, so I’ll be sticking with it for now. Showbiz Scheduling on the other hand doesn’t run on my MacBook Pro because I use File Vault to keep my home folder encrypted. This is the only application that I have any issues with. For some reason, it is unable to find the user’s library folder to write application support files to when File Vault is in use on the system. But whatever. This is a fantastic piece of scheduling software. It runs fine on my Mac Pro, but I need to be mobile, and I’m not going to sacrifice the security of my documents and all of my hard work just to use Showbiz Scheduling.

I have been writing with Celtx and I have had very few complaints. So I decided to give Celtx a try for prep on this project. With the recent release of Celtx 1.0, I figure it’s time to put it to the test as a real pre-production tool. It makes it easy that Broken Promise is only seven pages. If it works out smoothly, I’ll do prep on my upcoming feature with it.

The first step to ridding yourself of the inconvenience that is Final Draft is to open your script in said inconvenient application. Then save your script as an RTF file. Import that file into Celtx, and it should recognize all of your formatting. Here’s where I ran into a small glitch. There were a few instances where an action line got caught at the end of a line of dialog. It was formatted properly in the RTF, but went a little wonky on import. No big deal this time. It only affected the last two pages of the script, and was an easy fix. This may be a bigger issue with a feature length script. Or may be no issue at all. It could have been a formatting error somewhere else in the pipeline. I’ll have to test it with a longer script. I’ll get back to you with the results.

That’s it for now. The next step is the script breakdown.

This is my video camera all dressed up. It is constantly evolving, but for now it consists of a Canon XH-A1, the Brevis 35 Flip adapter, a Redrock Micro follow focus, speed crank, carbon fiber rod support system, Cavision handgrips, shoulder pad, matte box, French flag, 7″ LCD monitor, and a selection of fast Canon FD lenses.