1. Pick a spot and stay there long enough to count.

   Editors hate it when you give them a brilliant shot that’s not long enough. Once you get into position, hang out there for at least ten or fifteen seconds. Longer would be better. This all depends on the nature of the interview, of course.

2. Keep your paws off the zoom controls.

   No, seriously. I know, you see zooming all the time on TV and in theatrical documentaries. But zooming in is a poor alternative to actually walking closer if you can. If you must zoom, don’t do it like a rocket taking off. You’re trying to tell a story, not disorient your audience.

3. Don’t you dare even think about tilting the camera!

   All you’ll do by tilting the camera is simulate a storm at sea… Which comes packaged with free seasickness for your landlubber audience.

4. Get some coverage on both sides of the tripod-locked A-camera.

   If you keep the 180-degree rule in mind while doing this, it’s almost like having an extra camera!

5. Walk behind the A-camera, not in front of it.

   Yeah, it’s a no-brainer. Yeah, people still do it. Don’t you make that mistake.

Do you have any other handheld B-roll tips to share?

Until now. Read on to see what changed my mind.

I had heard how on indie films people had used a green or blue screen outdoors. This supposedly had the advantage of even lighting without any real work. I’d always wanted to try it, but I had no frame and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to hang the screen.

My dad came to the rescue last week with a great idea: Grab a few clamps and hang the blue screen from the gutter on our house. Hanging the screen in front of the garage door ensured enough room to back off for a wide shot.

I hurried outside to try it. The day was pretty windy, so the screen was constantly in motion. This is unfortunate, since that messed up the key a little. But still, I got results at least as good as those in iSundae II with about ten minutes of work. Compare that to the hours I spent on a single shot for iSundae II!

Here’s my test video:

I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do when the wind isn’t ruining my shot!

By the way, on the subject of chroma keying, I’ve been messing around with the demo of DVmatte Blast recently. It does a very nice job!

For the most part, my ideas just come. There. Was that helpful? But sometimes I have to go after them (or myself) with a club, especially when it’s just plain easier to do something other than come up with brilliance. So, for lack of really good idea to write in this post, grab your club and come with me. We’re going to hunt some brainwaves.

Just Do It

By now maybe you’ve realized that there’s always some effort to getting ideas. Sometimes (wonderful times) they just pop into my head, but other times I have to really think. And think hard. This is where the club becomes a two-edged weapon. While it may scare ideas out of the bushes, it can also scare the daylights out of me, resulting in complete “idea-generator” shut down. (Read that as: I don’t handle pressure well.)

So here’s my first tip. Learn your limitations. Figure out just how long you can rack your brains successfully, and stop before you fall over the edge. And take what you can get. If amazing ideas aren’t coming, I grab the little ones. They make great jumping off points. And if all else fails, I throw away my club, and get out my little friend the magic rabbit and chase him down some rabbit trails…

Introducing The Magic Rabbit

I’m a very active, visual thinker. I need space, quiet, next-to-no pressure, and writing utensils to be able to focus and play with scenes in my head. Which doesn’t work so well in chats and business meetings. So I rely on what I’ll call (for lack of a better term) my magic rabbit brain. Toss an idea around and, hey presto! see what emerges.

For instance, this last chat we were stuck for a conversation between two characters in a ticklish, but static, situation. Jordan had typed a partial sentence and it hadn’t finished coming through, so all it said was, “The cell was small.” I glanced at the sentence from a ways away and accidentally read “the cell was snail.” I got a chuckle out of that, then started playing with the concept of having a cell that was shaped like a snail. Eventually we wound up with a set design, a way to introduce two characters, a set-up for some neat scenes, more of the villain’s personality, and a way to get the dialogue rolling—just by playing with a misread.

That’s why you play with those little “okay” ideas. Mess with them and things happen. But keep your antennae moving while you’re doing it. If an idea starts going the wrong direction, drop it, or at least hold it loosely. The last thing you want to do is be stuck hanging on to an idea that doesn’t work. One that nobody else likes and you just know it would work if they’d only stop and listen to you . . . and maybe change half the script while they’re at it. I’ve been guilty of that a couple of times. Believe me, it gets messy.

Follow the Scene

Next to the Magic Rabbit my most important idea generator is my “antennae.” Or perhaps I should say “whiskers” to keep with rabbit theme. Anyway, unlike the little bunny these feelers generate and moderate ideas. We talked about “feelings” in an earlier post. Moderating is the ability to tell if a scene is working. If it “feels” right. If you’re in the middle of a hold-up, and there are secret service all over the place, the world is at stake, the victim just found out that the main badguy is their old friend, etc. etc. etc. You don’t want someone to suddenly crack a “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke. It doesn’t fit! This applies to sets, props, costumes, dialogue, action, just about anything in the filmmaking world.

But the cool part is that, for me, this method can also generate ideas. I get into the general mood of the scene and see what comes. Maybe this works because I’ve watched lots of movies and read lots more books. Maybe I’ve just had too much sugar. I don’t know. It just works. If I can get in the moment and visualize what the characters are trying to do, look out! Stuff happens.

It’s Not Personal

No, I’m not going to go into how to make the audience connect with an idea. I’m talking about you. About your ideas. Your ideas that you have slaved over, polished, perfected, and joyously presented them to whatever group you’re working with, only to have them shot down. Blown up. Stuffed in a box and sunk in the Pacific somewhere about fifty miles off the coast of California.

What do you do?

If I’ve had a rough day I tend to take the easy way out and go “sulk” in the corner. No more ideas from me! You didn’t like the last ones so, humph, catch me giving you any more.

This is the wrong response.

It hurts, yes. But you’ve got to be able to keep coming up with ideas or you’ll spend the next hour trying to get somewhere, and then have to start over. Sulking is not worth it! People say to not think of someone’s reaction to your ideas as a reflection on yourself. With me, that’s much easier said than done. In fact, I don’t think there really is a three-step process to growing an instant thick skin. (Something between armored plating and a rhinoceros, preferably.) It comes slowly and with practice. And you don’t learn to let go of good ideas without, guess what? Letting go of ideas. Ouch.

But remember this. You have a brain. And it works. (With me so far?) You come up with ideas every day. Whether other people like them or not is not something to lose sleep over. (And believe me, I struggle with this a lot.) You’re part of a team. You bring ideas to the table that no one else there has thought of. It’s this mix that makes movies so unique. Anyone can come up with an idea. But it’s how you work with each other that counts.

After, “How did you do that?” the question I get asked the most often is probably, “Where do you come up with your ideas?” My idea generation process is at times crazy. I’ll start with a couple that aren’t too off-the-wall and work up to a crazy one.

Without being too psychowacky, one of my biggest idea generators is the fact that I can’t ever seem to sleep in. I find that when I’m lying in bed waiting for a decent hour to arise is a great time to just let ideas float by until something interesting comes along. This works better when I’m actively wondering about a place in my story I’m stuck on.

Ask Rebekah anytime, and if cornered, you might get her to say that when we collaborate on a script, a huge portion of my ideas are off-the-wall silly. Now, we made a movie based on that, but when you’re shooting for a dramatic production, silliness doesn’t always help. For me a big means of coming up with good ideas is to ignore the first three or four things I think of. Those are the silly ideas, and then I usually start getting serious. Your silly-milage may vary.

Okay, I said I had a crazy way of getting ideas. Here it is:

I know you’re going, “What in the world…?” but let me explain. This is a story. All of those little guys are characters. Some of them are good guys, some are bad guys, some will change “sides” at whim. At many times during the day, my siblings and I will walk by this shelf and make a few changes. Then we explain what’s going on to everybody else. The story changes and the plot twists almost daily. It sounds crazy, but I really think that this helps me to think on my feet while writing a script.

So there are three ways I get ideas. Stay tuned for Rebekah’s idea generation techniques.

Seriously, though. Recently, I learned about a very neat transition in Final Cut. Introducing… The Gradient Wipe!

(Disclaimer: Remember when I talked about cheesy transitions? A gradient wipe can be just as cheesy if you overdo it. Don’t.)

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s jump in. First of all, what is a gradient wipe? My local dictionary says nothing on the subject, so you can make up your own definition based on the explanation. Let’s play with a gradient wipe.

Add a gradient wipe between two clips just like you would any other transition. Now, for basic experimentation, find the second clip in your browser and drag it into the slot I’ve pointed out in the picture. Drag the softness slider up a bit, play the video, and you should see something pretty interesting. Here’s what I got:

Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Pretty neat, huh? Let me explain how it works. When you added the clip to the slot, you added a matte. Final Cut uses this matte to decide which areas of the shot to transition first. Darker areas at the beginning, lighter areas last. We can use this to our advantage to make a very artsy transition.

You’re going to need Photoshop or some similar photo editing application for these next examples. Launch Photoshop and create a new image the size of your video. Make sure your foreground and background colors are black and white, then do Filter>Render>Clouds. Save that image and bring it into Final Cut.

Drop your new cloud picture into the matte slot on your gradient wipe. Play it and see what happened. Here’s mine:

Cloud Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Let’s make this even more interesting. Remember the movie National Treasure? When Riley is explaining to Ben the security surrounding the Declaration of Independence, there’s a really neat shot of “kids on their eighth grade field trip.” The kids come in first, and then the background fades in behind them.

The filmmakers probably did a lot of motion tracking and matting and such to pull off this shot. Here’s a low-budget/lower-time way to get the same effect with a gradient wipe.

First, shoot some video of your people walking in front of something. Plan ahead more than I did and make sure they stand out against the background. The key to making this work without too much hassle is to have your subject stay still for a few seconds before they start to move.

Bring that video into Final Cut, and then export a frame of the part where your subject is standing still. Open the image in Photoshop.

Do a nice cutout job of your subject and get them on a separate layer. Get rid of the background and make it white. For the foreground, you have two options. You can either shade your subject all black to make them fade in all at once, or, as in the National Treasure effect, paint your subject in gradually lightening shades. Remember, darker fades in first.

Once you’ve saved that, bring it back into Final Cut and drop it in the matte slot. You may have to do some adjustments, but you should come out with something like this:

Complex Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

As you can see, the possibilities are nearly endless. If you come up with anything interesting, leave a comment linking to your video. I’d love to see it!

One of the trials of being an aspiring filmmaker is the small amount of people you have available to work with. We watch movies with casts that seem to rival the population of a small country and sigh. These big productions can put more people in the line behind a main character waiting to buy a box of Tic-Tacs than we have in our entire cast and crew combined!

Maybe our budget doesn’t allow for more people, or we simply can’t find anyone willing to help out. But however it comes about, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma. How can we make the best out of a bad situation?

The trick we’re most fond of here at Phantom Moose is not the most professional, or best alternative, but it works. We reuse people at any opportunity. If you’re ever filming with us, don’t ask for a stunt double because we will probably ask you to be the stunt double. (Except for the time when Stelen stood in for Malfhok, but that’s another story.)

And now, for a practical demonstration of our doubling efficiency, let me refer to the “Cauldron number” scene. Anybody notice that Marelac and Stelen are in there twice? Once as themselves and once as Norse guys. We worked the shots and angles so they would never show Marelac with Marelac Norse, or Stelen with Stelen Norse. It’s easier than blue-screening anyone in and out of the scene.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, Alyah and the Badgal are played by the same actress. Didn’t notice? Blessings upon you. You’ve just encouraged some filmmakers.

The important thing to keep in mind is the realism. Think to yourself, “How would I convince myself that these are two separate characters and two separate actors?” Use establishing shots, good fakery, some slick special effects—whatever you can pull off well—and go with it.

Have you ever been slammed that way? The perfect costume design has to be thrown out because it would cost too much to make. The detailed beadwork that you absolutely loved goes away or becomes fabric paint. The ornate helmet has to be scratched and replaced with a hat. A felt one. With a bright red feather. Situations like this are depressing, annoying, and even downright ugly.

Here are a few things you can do to help bring your ideas to reality.

First: You can design with your budget in mind. I know it’s not fun, unless you enjoy the challenge, but I’m not talking about having a dollar amount looming over you all the time. A basic concept of cost will do. If you only have a little money to work with, don’t plan on using thirty yards of velvet! Look to see what you might already have that you could work with. Anything look promising? If you changed one color, would it save you twenty dollars? Or how about swapping kinds of fabric. Remember the thirty yards of velvet? Swap it out for an old bedsheet or curtain. Be flexible. You don’t have to throw out a good idea; just try to make it better.

Second: Time is money. If you have one week until filming starts, and a hundred costumes to make, don’t plan on hand-embroidering trim on all of the pieces. Find a trim at the craft store that has the same look you want. If price becomes an issue, keep in mind these little questions: “How much time will this save me?” “Is there something else that will work just as well?” and, more importantly, “Will I get in trouble with the other producers if I spend the money?” If the answer to the last question is “Yes,” walk away now. Budget is somthing to be respected by all members of the cast and crew.

Third: If you are lucky enough to actually have money to put through the budget, save the big bucks for a few costumes. The knock-your-socks-off ones. Although, keep in mind that you don’t want to end up with two fabulous costumes and ton of slapped together, bathrobe and towel costumes. Unless you have a really good bathrobe, that is. Which brings us to . . .

Fourth: Modify clothing. You might find an old dress in a garage sale or thrift store that, which a few alterations, would make a good cloak and hood. Or a shirt that can become a jacket. All this approach takes is a little imagination! (And some scissors, of course.) We did this for the Norse, and I hope we can do more of it for the next movie. We’ve received lots of old clothing donations in the last couple years.

Fifth: Don’t be afraid to reuse things! Particularly on extras and sub-characters. This is a really quick way to come up with a costume. The work is already done. Lydia’s costume is Somindeo’s robe from the first movie. All we did was add a rope belt and a scarf. If you have something laying around, use it. Put last movie’s hero’s puffy shirt under a coat for the herald. Make a cloak into a skirt. If you want to modify them a bit so they won’t be as recognizable, remove distinctive trims, or change colors. Just keep an eye on the fine line between minimal work and not disguising the piece enough. If the audience catches on, your realism is toast.

So get out there with your designer sketches! Scrounge, sew, tape, glue, modify, and substitute your way into a great bunch of costumes. Let the idea become reality.

A good friend of mine (another movie-maker, and she’s made some really great stuff) recommended these books to me, and I want to share them with you. They’re great for learning the basics on modifying clothing into costumes.

Costuming Made Easy by Barb Rogers

Instant Period Costumes by Barb Rogers

“Sure, a sea-faring adventure movie is great, but if all you have is two plastic ships and a bathtub, you might want to reconsider.”

“Crashing through a window? Nice touch for an action sequence, but if it’s done wrong it looks really cheesy.” (iSundae anybody?)

“Spaceships whooshing past the camera would look cool, but not if the animation is poorly done, or the blue screen gets fuzzy.”

Does he sound familiar? The Voice that warns us when we’re getting in over our heads. Why is it so easy to block him out? We stuff him in a can and stick it in a dark corner somewhere and rush on ahead. How come we don’t listen? Well, I can’t answer for every person, but for me, I get stuck thinking, “Just enough hot-glue, cardboard, and effort will fix it.” Yeah right. Our imaginations can come up with way more than we can do well. Let me give you an example.

For iSundae we wanted a long, dramatic cave sequence. The original script called for some enormous interior cave shots, an arrow trap, an avalanche trap, a lava lake, a chasm spanned by a narrow board, a wall with swords and inscription, a monster fight, a collapsing tunnel, a giant rolling boulder, and the cave exploding. Pictured in our minds, it was the coolest sequence ever.

When it came down to the nitty gritty details like HOW we were going to film this in three weeks and WHERE we were going to get a cave, we ignored the Voice. “Sure we don’t have a cave,” we told ourselves, “but we’ll use someone’s garage and lots of props. It’ll look great!” Ha. Ha. (Keep in mind, we were going for high-quality, realistic sets.) As you can tell from the movie we had to cut several sections and change the existing ones just to get it filmed, let alone filmed well. What got done looks anything but believable. The cave is a really dark garage, the monster is a giant puppet, the green screen is fuzzy. Are we proud of it? Not really. Granted, it was our first attempt, and it didn’t turn out all that bad, but we still look at it and wonder, “Why didn’t we think that out ahead of time?”

Now. Lesson learned. When we set out to make a movie, we need to decide if what we have created on paper is do-able. This involves keeping in mind how much time you have to spend on filming and effects, what effects you can do well, and what materials you have to work with. Maybe you have a really great scene in your script that calls for a duel on a collapsing bridge. Cool! The Voice speaks: “You don’t have a bridge.” Okay, you can either find a bridge or move the scene to another location. Found a bridge? Great! Hark! I hear the Voice again: “It’s a public bridge. You can’t have it collapse.” Alrighty, recalculating.

You could change the scene so the bridge doesn’t collapse, use a different situation to create tension (like having one character nearly push the other off the bridge) or just cut the duel entirely. What I wouldn’t recommend is trying to use camera angles, movement, and spare bridge parts to make it look like it’s falling unless you have tested it and are happy with the result. Sure, you can film the duel and tweak and edit it to your heart’s content, but the chances of your making something you’ll be happy with are rather slim. Consider carefully, especially if you’re a beginner. One well-done, believable scene is better than an hour and a half of bad special effects. Listen for the Voice!

“The script calls for this character to have a dramatic scene, but Jack does comedy better than drama. . . maybe we should re-write or re-cast.”

“That window is going to be in the way. Should we cover it or change locations?”

“The storyboards show a giant hall, but we only have an average size one. How should we re-work that?”

“If you build it, they will come.” (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

There is no better way to keep boringness and stress from setting in than planning ahead. Storyboarding is the easiest way I have found to plan. It’s quite simple. Prior to filming (Or even before the whole filming schedule commences) you take a section of the script. Say. . .

EXT Sci-Fi Port (Badguy) NIGHT
Bob and Clyde have just escaped from the badguy headquarters, taking with them the secret plans for a fighter plane. The badguys have discovered them and are chasing them. Bob and Clyde have just reached their broken plane and are waiting for their mechanic to fix it.

BOB
Look out! They’re right behind us!

CLYDE
(into walkie-talkie)
Ground 20, have you got the ship working yet?

BOB
(looking at approaching badguys)
We can’t wait that long.

CLYDE
Do you see another way?

Alright. There you have it. (No, that is not part of our next movie.) Now, how do you get this from script to storyboard? Well, there are a number of ways. First, you could draw thumbnail sketches of what you think it should look like. (“You” being the director or official storyboarder) Think about the feel of the scene. What you want to camera angles to look like. What you want to them to show and in what order. Here is how I visualized this section and drew it.

As you can see, I am no drawing master. Stick figures work very well for me. Particularly when I give them some special characteristics to define person from person.

If you don’t want to draw you can write it down.

Wide Shot: Bob and Clyde rush up to side of the ship.
Close up Bob: Bob’s first line
Wide Shot of badguys charging.
Close up Clyde: Clyde’s first line.
Two shot with Bob and Clyde: Bob’s next line.
Close up Clyde: Clyde’s second line.

Now, this way is very handy because it makes converting the storyboards to a filming schedule easier. Do you see the repeat? Clyde has two close ups. On your filming schedule you can put: “Close up on Clyde: both lines” and film it all at once without having to move the camera around and shoot everything in order.

(I’m a little fuzzy on the whole “filming schedule” thing. It didn’t dawn on me until this last movie that such a thing would make it a ton easier. Trust me, next movie I’ll have one.)

How do the storyboards compare with the final film? For us, this varies by scene. Here’s a comparison of a scene from our movie iSundae.

iSundae Storyboard Comparison from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

You can also watch it on YouTube.

So that’s how you do storyboards. I highly recommend them unless you are one of those directors/camera men who can see the whole thing in their heads and mentally check off the angles. That would be so handy. . . I wonder if I can teach myself to think that way. . . But anyway, try a couple storyboards. They can make things run a whole lot smoother.

First: Check, check, and re-check

Never assume that you have all the props and equipment loaded into the car. Once during the filming of iSundae we got all the way to the park and started setting up when we discovered that Somindeo’s wig was still at home. It took twenty minutes for my grandma and me to drive home, find the wig, and bring it back. During that time the others had to film whatever they could.

Second: Know what you’ll be filming

I can not tell you how much time we lost by not knowing what angles we wanted to film. We would check the storyboards, film one angle, then everything would come to a halt while we looked to see what we needed to film next at what angle with which camera and with which actors. Repeat a dozen times and you can see what I mean. I’m estimating that we probably lost ten to twenty minutes out of each hour of filming time by not knowing what we were going to do next.

The easiest way to prevent this is to make a written list of shots divided by angle. It looks like something like this—

—Close shot Anthony:
“But what do we do?”
“Could we try the door?”
“Are you crazy? We’d be creamed!”
—Wide shot Anthony, Miranda, Charles (Zoe in the background):
Run through whole scene.
—Two shot Miranda and Charles:
Dialogue from Charles’ “Do you think we should try it?” through Miranda’s “Even a mouse would think twice.”

You get the idea. Experiment to see what works best for you. We’re still in the baby stages of this.

Third: Bring a repair kit

Things will always break. Whenever possible they’ll wait until it’ll be the most inconvenience to you. I put together a basic kit that always comes with us on a filming expedition.

• A needle and neutral thread colors
• Safety pins
• Tape of various kinds (Gaffer’s, Scotch, etc.)
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks, if you’ll have an outlet handy
• Scissors

You might also want to bring Kleenex, glasses cases if your actors aren’t supposed to wear their glasses during filming, band-aids, and yarn for tying things.

Fourth: Remember that you’re filming out of doors

Plan accordingly. Camp chairs for members of the cast to use when not in front of the camera, sunglasses, bug repellant (I never thought of that, but I wish I had), bottled water, snacks, umbrellas, and a quick getaway plan if it starts to rain.

We were filming a section of iSundae under the threat of rain, so we kept a kid’s wagon ready and gave everyone instructions. Ruth and Jordan would grab the equipment and run for the cars, while the rest of us would pile any loose props on the wagon and follow. The moms were in charge of the folding chairs.

Fifth: The basics

Make sure you’re allowed to film in that location, know where the restrooms are, don’t say you’ll be there for one hour and stretch it into three. Keep the actors and crew happy, encourage as much as possible, and give peppermints freely. You might just have the most fun of your life.