Binger Directors Lab – Week 11

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

This year’s festival was a great form of professional development for me, not because of the red-carpet premieres or the fragmented meetings with over-caffienated producers, but rather because of a conversation I had with a fellow Binger alumni, Indian writer/director Urmi Juvekar.

Since meeting her about a year ago in the Writers Lab she’s become my fairy-godmother of sorts, someone I can confide in about my project’s status and my fears and she in return shares her wisdom and her own tribulations.

Immediately upon seeing me at a Binger party she read my mind, saw my obvious frustration with Cannes & my meetings so far. Instead of pulling me close and telling me it would all be alright she slapped me silly – figuratively of course. While the cocktail party raged on, we found a corner on the balcony and she began to light a fire under my ass:

She gave me exact strategies for moving my project forward without a producer and explained that my top priority now is to act less as a writer and more as a director of my story – to get out into the real world, into the locations and streets of where I want to shoot and begin preparing for the next stage.

Through acquiring visual material, initiating scouts and conversations with local collaborators the project could start to build its own ‘gravity’, become something tangible and less of an idea on the page and begin to slowly pull in what it needs to grow, to stay alive.

Hearing that advice was a great tonic, it made me feel less frantic about the future, and made me appreciate all the things I can do on my own.

Recently, I took her advice and began initiating a series of research trips. I’ll be going back to Beirut & Northern Iraq in September for more visual material as I put together a look-book for my film.

Towards the end of our conversation, we discussed our careers and philosophies of work and she said something great, that she “can’t afford to make art.” She explained that her reality, as a working writer and director, is that she has bills to pay, and she can’t wait for inspiration to hit or permission from others to get work done. She can’t be driven by the sole aspiration of making a ‘masterpiece’.

This idea struck a chord with me, as if she articulated a philosophy for working I had been considering as I plan my career. How is one able to grow and develop as a feature-length director if you’re only making a film every 3-5 years? How quickly could you improve if you were making a film every 1-2 years?

If we approach this profession like a job, like a craftsman, and less as an artistic, inspiration-driven endeavor we would produce more. And would the side-effect of this larger body of work be more art, more ‘masterpieces’?

My own recent experiment with regards to art and productivity in the form of 100 Poems/100 Days demonstrated to me my capacity for work is substantially higher than I give myself credit for – and that the more I worked and created, the more confidant I became with expressing an idea through a medium.

I don’t think it’s an exclusive choice between quantity versus quality but if I had to choose between being a prolific filmmaker, that makes a ‘passable’ film every 1-2 years (with hopefully the occasional ‘home run’) versus the filmmaker that makes a ‘masterpiece’ every 5 years I think I would rather be the prolific ‘craftsman’ .

But that kind of production turnaround requires one to be less dependent on complex financing packages and the permission of several partners that can take years to put together and inevitably affects the film’s content.

She was advocating more financial independence, less bottlenecks to the process and ultimately more hard work.

Again, the idea she was proposing wasn’t a theory, or something she read about in a magazine, but rather her reality; she was actually putting it into practice and evaluating her projects by how quickly and independently she could complete them and get them into cinemas.

This urgency of minimizing the turnaround from inception to production echoed something I heard the Iranian director Rafi Pitts discuss two years ago during a Berlinale Talent Campus panel discussion. With regards to his then recent film The Hunter, he mentioned how critical it is for him to produce his scripts as quickly as possible. If too much time passes from when he conceived a story to when he’s actually on set shooting it, he might no longer be interested in the story, he may have actually outgrown his original interest in the film. So he works quickly to get himself and crew on set, before he loses that initial hunger to make the film.

Overall a great, inspiring talk with a good friend that gives me some strategies for moving forward with my project and career.

Thanks again Urmi for the slap and the fire!

Binger Directors Lab – Week 6

‘Finding Your Voice’ :
w/ Arne Bro & Lotte Mik-Meyer

1. SUMMARY

This intense but short workshop has been the highlight of my Binger experience so far. Arne & Lotte were genuinely interested in developing our true directorial voices through a combination of shooting, analysis and lectures.

On day one, we were all given video cameras and asked to shoot exercises and video diaries constantly. There was no time to plan and the directors worked from early morning into the late evening, sometimes until 2 or 3am. The idea being that work done in this state is more authentic and coming from the subconscious mind.

The husband-wife team examined what is the true aesthetic of each filmmaker. They analysed each frame of the director’s work & diaries in front of the group. It was a very precise analysis and slowly the directors began to see what they are really interested in exploring in the frame and their deep subconscious truths. While simultaneously acknowledging our ‘faults’ or marks of personality and uniqueness that give our work strength and power.

During the course of these six days, the camera became an extension of the pen, and in a strange way I found I was able to explore my project with a tool that has a life of its own.

2. SAMPLES OF THE VIDEO DIARIES

So with great reluctance I’ve uploaded two of the diaries.

These aren’t meant to be ‘samples of work’ but rather raw explorations that might prove to be useful material for my writing & filmmaking (or not).

At the very least, I hope it inspires you to try out these techniques yourself.

Diary 2 – The assignment was for us to find three places in Amsterdam that reminded us of three people related to our main character. We then had to ‘include ourselves’ in the frame to comment on these place-relationships.

Based on my previous blog post about what I’ve been slowly realizing about Stefan, I choose to use him as my ‘main character’ and speak about his great-grandmother, his daughter and his mother.

I found this alley in central Amsterdam that felt like a place from my script, that helped inspire me to speak about Stefan & his family:

Diary 3 – The assignment was to do a video diary involving ‘your body’. I choose a painful memory from a street fight:

3. EXPERIENCE IN SUMMARY

You can also hear the full details of my experience in the workshop in my first video blog entry:

Based on studying all of my video diaries this past week, I leave this workshop with a set of five practicing guidelines that I can always reference when I’m unsure of my next move as a storyteller:

My Manifesto, My Guidelines as Filmmaker:

1. The human body is the most important object or graphical element within the frame.
2. Camera work should accommodate human motion, and the character’s relationship with other characters and props.
3. I’m drawn to flat images taken with wide lenses, images close to what the naked human eye would observe.
4. The human voice is the most powerful sound. A character’s confession will draw us close, motivate camera to see more of his/her face.
5. My film language strives to leave room for the audience’s imagination, to trigger their own memories and senses, to guide their hand rather than force their thoughts & feelings.

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RESOURCES

• Lotte Mik-Meyer’s Site
• Article featuring a similar workshop with Arne Bro
• Danish Film School

How to Kickstarter Your Dreams

As a Sundance alumnus, I received an email back in January about a new Sundance-Kickstarter intiative that my feature-length project Shelter was eligible for.

If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter before or aren’t quite sure how it works, some of the basics are covered here. I’ve been following the site for some time now, mystified by the insane success stories like the TikTok Nano Watch that raised nearly a million dollars or the Diaspora social network that exceeded their funding goals by 2000%.

Encouraged by those projects I’ve been offering my help to fellow filmmakers in creating a funding campaign tailored to their project and funding needs.

About a month ago I finally found someone brave enough to take my advice: Sasha Collington, a fellow Binger FilmLab alumnus. She decided to try a Kickstarter campaign to finance her next short film Lunch Date:

I originally planned to write this post as a way to help her get the word out about her campaign. But then she reached her funding goal of $2,100 in less than 48 hours! Since that initial success, Kickstarter featured the project on their homepage which helped skyrocket funding to $5,600!

So instead I’ve decided to write this up as a short case-study to encourage you to try the funding resource yourself and some tips on designing a strong campaign.

I attribute her Kickstarter success to the following reasons:

1. Even though she is an emerging filmmaker, she has a track record as a storyteller.
2. The project has a strong team of crew members she’ll be working with whose bio/work she highlights.
3. A unique pitch video that gives you a sense of the film’s tone and author’s humor in a way that a written description can’t.
4. A unique set of rewards tailored again for the film’s tone and irony. Some of these rewards, like ebooks, actually extend the story-world of the short film in a crossmedia manner (check my earlier post on crossmedia).
5. Adequate amount of time for the funding requested.
6. The campaign was advertised to potential patrons in email-waves: first to her family & friends, and then to her larger network of Facebook contacts as well as those of her fellow crew members.
7. Original campaign goal wasn’t too greedy, rather the bare minimum that she needs to get the film made. And she honestly spelled out how the money will be spent.
8. Most importantly, she’s viewing this as one step towards building an audience of patrons who might want to support future projects.

Again, take a look at her page, you might find her example useful and there’s still 3 days to pledge if you’d like to be a part of this unique gem (campaign ended: she raised $5,871!).

By the way, if you do decide to use Kickstarter for your own project and you need some advice please don’t hesitate to email me at kasem.kharsa@gmail.com

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RESOURCES:

• Why You Need Patrons: ‘1000 Fans‘
• Visual summary of how simple it is to start a campaign: ‘Kickstarter Infographic‘
• Good resource as you prepare your campaign: ’10 Tips for a Successful Kickstarter Campaign’
• 10 more tips: ‘10 Crowd-funding tips for Kickstarter campaigns‘
• Don’t know how to shoot a pitch video?: ‘How to shoot the Pitch Video‘
• Musicians: ‘Musicians Guide to Using Kickstarter‘

For you ‘Amélie’ fans –

New film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of ‘Amélie‘, called ‘Micmacs‘ coming out very soon in theaters – looks gorgeous,

ENJOY:

Neo Middle-Eastern Cinema –

Here’s another short paper I recently wrote for my Cinema Studies class. It’s my attempt to find a filmmaking aesthetic and production model  that is appropriate for the Middle East at this time – especially for new filmmakers like myself.

It still needs a little work, especially towards the end where I need to suggest concrete steps we can take as filmmakers – tell me what you think and give me any advice on how I can make it stronger:

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Neo Middle-Eastern Cinema:
Filmmaking Trends and Possibilities

There’s a new crop of emerging Arab filmmakers who have taken it upon themselves to produce films in opposition to the Middle-Eastern stereotypes Hollywood has produced in the last several decades. While this is a worthy cause, the region and its people are in need of films for their own consumption. We need a cinema that acts as a mirror for the audience, a place of reflection and discussion of one’s culture, history and people. Yet is there a current model for a type of filmmaking that would satisfy these needs? As mentioned in a recent New York Times article [1], there has been a recent revival of neo-realistic films, especially in the US, that derive their strength from their intimate portraits of characters living on the periphery of society. This new generation of filmmakers remind us that the ‘small’ can be large, and the ugliness in the world can be divine.

Berlinale Highlight #4 – ‘Crossmedia Storytelling’

WARNING – this is a fairly dense post -

But I think any storyteller out there, whether you’re a filmmaker or not, will benefit immensely by following some of the links and possibilities mentioned.

Enjoy:

During the Talent Campus there were three separate panels devoted to the topic of Crossmedia Storytelling. Personally, these sessions alone were reason enough to hop on a plane to Berlin for the Campus – hopefully you’ll see why.

Let’s first start with a description of each of the three events taken directly from the program:

The most important film of 2010 – seriously

Now for something a little lighter – a trailer for what could be the funniest film this year:

‘Hot Tub Time Machine’

Great little infographic –

How can 1 in 7 people be malnourished in the modern world?

This beautifully illustrated video shows the causes:

beautiful:

a gorgeous vuvox collage