I’ve been lurking on this forum for a few years, and always preferred to read rather than post. Some of you really helped in the push to full-on ancap, so thanks for that. I made a movie and I figured I’d come on the forums and build up some reputation first by posting on various topics, but honestly I didn’t have much to contribute.
So I’m just going to throw my project out here and see if anyone is interested. It’s mostly a drama about the friendship between an old guy and a young guy, and their pursuit of beauty. But there are some comedic elements and a bit of politics thrown in as well.
You can all check out the trailer here to see if you are interested: artifactsofidealism.com
If it is to anyone’s taste, you can download digital copies from the store for free. Just enter “0” in the price field.
If there are any cinema buffs here, the movie is somewhat in the style of Eric Rohmer / Jacques Rozier.
Would love to hear what you all have to think about it!
I’m intrigued by the trailer - and I like the thoughtful cinematography apparent in scenes like where the old guy and young guy are taking to each other while sitting on a bench, but neither is in the other’s frame. Seems like interesting dialogue too. I’ll check out a digital copy in the next day or so and see what the whole film is like - thank you for making this available!
BTW, is this your first movie? From what I’ve seen in the trailer it looks very well done.
This is my second feature-length movie, but the first one was a few years back and it didn’t see much play. Those were the days when I thought one could just ship it off to a few festivals and sit back and wait for the plaudits to come in.
Canon T2i (or 550D, whatever you like to call it), with some really interesting older Soviet lenses. What they lack in sharpness and control they make up for in the tactile (and unique “chalky”) quality of the images. Just a one-camera shoot; tried to keep it as simple as possible.
Mostly wireless, which was a big scandal to the sound people I know. If you want to get more technical or go into more equipment detail without boring the others on an economics/politics forum, feel free to PM me. It’s a pleasure to discuss this kind of stuff.
Ha. I’ve thought about it, yes, except those kinds of movies bore me, so I suspect others would do a lot better job at it than I. Also, to the best of my knowledge, most of Rohmer’s movies made a nice profit, as did the major works of Fellini and Bergman. Or to put it in American terms, Frank Capra did pretty well with no gunplay. You could argue that audiences today wouldn’t support that sort of thing, but it seems to me it’s just a matter of controlling the budget and playing to a few niches. That’s why I was hoping with the inclusion of some attractive actresses and the titillation of some libertarian politics I could appeal to this crowd.
I finally got a chance to watch your movie. I thought it was pretty neat.
There were two times during the movie when I laughed out loud. Movies rarely make me do that. I usually just acknowledge in my head that something was funny. During these two parts, laughs came out of my mouth uncontrollably:
When “Robert”? (the retired guy who hires the detective to get information about the girl) is finally sitting next to the gal in the greenhouse.
“I look like your mom?”
Especially cool was the ending scene in the cafe.
The only suggestions I could make for next time would be to try different sound equipment. I don’t know what it is about the sound production of digital movies that sound so different from that of filmed movies. (I’m not just talking about Hollywood-level filmed movies, even Clerks sounds way different than digital movies. Maybe it’s too much background noise? I don’t know.)
And I think Charles was a little too well-dressed. I get that it’s a part of his character, but at some points it was way too obvious that…I don’t know how to put this other than “…that you could tell he was just a guy in a movie.” Too wardrobe-y.
And I didn’t understand how the irredeemable aspect of Marileen’s life (Marileen was the name of the girl they were interested in, right?) was that she was a leftist. Besides, it’s not like that group was really calling for anything drastic. “Education for all!” I actually don’t see anything wrong with education for all, but the leftists think that means state-funded formal schooling for all. I thought that the older guy would be aware of that distinction. Maybe a couple of more lines of dialogue could have cleared it up (e.g. “What do you mean ‘education for all’?” It would have made your political point better, as well).
Anyway, I thought the scene where they find out that the girl is in the lefist group fell flat, and it needed to be something more shocking. Maybe the group she was in would be planning to vandalize the city or something. But even that, why would the other parts of the girl’s lifestyle be forgivable by the two guys and not this aspect of the girl’s life?
But all-in-all, like I say, I think your movie was pretty neat. Nice to look at, too.
Awesome – thanks for watching it and also for giving feedback. That’s funny, the “mom” line is also the favorite of my good friend who helped me make the movie. Kudos to Simon (the young actor) on that one, as 95% of the movie is improvised dialog.
Point well taken about the gathering of leftists at the end. It’s a sort of joke I have with my friends, that the only thing that turns us off of a pretty girl is when she is a leftist. I can handle shallow, or boring, and have no problem at all with simple/dumb, but when they post something positive about Obama on their Facebook wall it just makes me kind of disgusted with them. I was really hoping this end scene would be clear that everything they were calling for was for MORE government in all aspects, and also doing it in a shrill manner. “Stamp out inequality”, “we need government who has the power to act and to give us what we need”, the Warren Buffett lie about secretaries and taxes, and then right when Marilee says “why isn’t the govt doing more to control how much people are making” it cuts to Robert, who we have seen before is a pretty wealthy guy. So it’s almost like a direct attack on him.
But yeah, if that didn’t come across then I didn’t do my job correctly. The original scene was supposed to take place within a raging (almost rioting) mob of Occupy Montrealers, and the girl was to have something drastic done to her looks (like that horrible thing when chicks shave one third of their hair and sort of comb around it), and the guys run into her in the middle of that. Sadly, I was not able to pull it off. So we switched gears to more of a mockery of the Elizabeth Warren house-meeting where she popularized “you didn’t build that”.
Might I ask how you did the film with the actors utilizing extreme improv when you were on a single-cam set-up? How one could do something like that has always been a little confusing to me.
We should first define what we mean by improv. I do not mean “actors get to say whatever comes into their heads whenever they feel like it and to drastically change it from take to take”. I do mean “the script contains no dialog and the actors have to use their own words”. So the whole story is carefully structured, and each scene is carefully structured, and the characters are fleshed out in much greater detail than will ever be shown on screen (so the actor knows their past, their preferences, their goals), and (time permitting) scenes are rehearsed. The whole enterprise is also composed in such a way that no individual line is really that essential to moving the story forward (there are the inevitable few, obviously, about time and place that we are seeing or will see on screen, and I did find it difficult managing that, but a director’s assistant or a continuity person would have eliminated the problem).
Then on set we begin blocking out the scene, and in some cases building it up from the written version. After doing a few takes we select some of the elements we like, and we piece them together in a way that gets us from point A to point B. This occasionally results in material covered in close up of person X that was not actually shot for person Y. But a director who pays attention will be able to get all the elements he needs to cut the scene together, and so a habit of shooting “loose” (what I call basic but not excessive coverage of all major players in the scene in as close to a single shot as possible) is helpful. If one is planning to do slow-mo and have a specific song playing in the background and to do a couple tracking shots within the scene, you can’t get away with much improv beyond a throwaway line here or there.
For the “your mom” line in question, the text stated that because the girl was drunk, the boy thought he could get away with staring at her (he is, after all, pretty much in love with her). She catches him staring, and since it is his nature to be judgemental, and since he didn’t really buffer her from her parents as she requested him to earlier in the night, she misunderstands and equates his look to the stress her mom puts on her. So the actress says “why are you looking at me like that… like my mom?”, and the scene called for the actor to change the subject by pulling out his iPhone to take photos. Since we had been shooting all day and it was then 3am in the morning, outside, running around full speed trying to get everything we needed, the actor was just in the zone and his character blurted out the cute misunderstanding line of “I look like your mom?”, and even better they both brushed it off and just went on the the next beat. Of course it doesn’t always work out like this and sometimes the actor is stalled and doesn’t know what to say, but that is a failure of the director for not explaining things in proper detail and also for not giving them enough business (note to non-film types: “business” is all the little incidental stuff that happens in a scene, like “he fiddles with a lighter” or “she can’t take her eyes off of the curtains”).
Just a heads-up everyone. I’ll be taking down the free downloads this weekend in place of a dvd that costs money, so if you want to watch the movie without paying please download it before Sunday.
We are applying to film festivals and they tend to get sad when your movie is available online in full for free.
One of the festivals at which we would really like to exhibit is Anthem at Freedom Fest in Vegas. If anyone feels like helping us out they could email the festival and say “hey, we’d love to see you show this movie…”. We’ve already submitted to them, but any kind words of attention would help I’m sure.