Go Make a Movie
by Kieth Merrill
Francois Truffaut, the famous French film maker. once said, “film lovers are sick people”. That means of course that I should be in therapy all of the time. I love movies; I loved watching them. I love making them. I naturally assume that everyone wants to make a movie of their own. WARNING – Unless you have no lid on your imagination and have- at least once in your life – thought, “I could have made a better movie than that!”, you will find the musings that follow outrageous at worst and tedious at best.
Proceed at your own risk.
Writing the great American novel may well have been the epitome of creative expression in the first half of the 20th century. Making movies could emerge as the ultimate personal expression in the opening decades of the new Millennium. When I say “Go make a movie,” I am not really kidding.
Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and a fraternity of inexplicable talent that showed up on the American scene changed the literary landscape forever. These works dominate the classic tales of the last 100 years. The Sound in the Fury, Old Man and the Sea, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, Ulysses… the list goes on.
Haven’t we all, at one time or another, believed that there is a great novel hiding somewhere in our imagination? You have, right ? Is it not possible therefore that you just might have a movie “in there” as well? You have probably allowed yourself to fantasize about being John Grisham, Stephen King or even Gerald Lund, but making a movie? I can’t be serious, right? Oh, but I am.
In one sense, writing a novel and making a movie are very much the same. Each is a tangible extension of the heart, mind and imagination of the author or auteur.
In spite of this whimsical kinship you know without being told that writing a novel and making a movie are vastly different adventures. They are a universe apart.
Writing is Cheap
Pencil and paper are ubiquitous. Writing is an essential skill we learned as kids. Film, cameras, and chemicals are not easily available. Making movies is a mysterious art.
Writing is cheap. Making movies is prohibitively expensive. Everyone can write. Only the privileged few are allowed to speak make movies. Not any more!
CUT TO: CLOSE UP – . MiniDV Camcorder. $795.00.
“DV” stands for Digital Video. Digital technology is the core of all computers. It has been around since 1947. Wait a minute! Didn’t computers show up with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? No. Those guys were not yet a twinkle in their daddy’s eye when ENIAC was born. ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer] – rooms full of wires and tubes – received patent No. 3,120,606 on June 26, 1947.
You’ve got more power in your Palm Pilot than ENIAC had in the whole building. It took half a century, but what happened was inevitable. Once computers managed to crunch the biggest numbers into submission they took on LIGHT and SOUND, converting them – in all their lengths and waves – into digital information.
Applied to mainstream movie making – think special effects – digital imaging has brought us to an almost unimaginable place. If you can imagine it, you can put it on the screen. No image, no depiction, no illusion or effect of movie magic is beyond our technical capability. Remember your delight and amazement watching The Lord of the Ring? Call it exhibit A. It is in a digital word, AWESOME.
And now, the promise of that power is in the palm of your hand. Mini DV camcorders have made the potency of the digital imaging revolution accessible to a kind of aspiring proletariat of suppressed creativity. The tools to make movies – a new kind of personal movies – are now in the hand of the majority who live and work outside the gilded gates of Hollywood.
The Tools
Suddenly, from the standpoint of the tools, making personal movies is as easy – and almost as cheap – as writing that great American novel. This puissance and a little personal passion may well give rise to a new genre of communication emerging as the ultimate expression in the opening decades of the new millenium.
Let’s give it a name. PERSONAL CINEMA.
A good movie is story, story and story. You must both write and see. Even the earliest of the 256 K computers began to replace typewriters, By now personal computers on desk top or lap have forever abolished the pencil and pad as the writer’s tool of choice. Oh, I know, a few “purists” remain who scratch out their tomes with a Ticonderoga 2/HB insisting that a writer must be “in touch” with the medium. It is likely that actress, Judi Dench’s, stunning portrayal of acclaimed writer, Iris Murdoch, in the notable film, Iris, will send a throng of wannabes back to pencil and yellow pad. [Great performance. Interesting film.]
But for the vast majority of writers, the tools of the trade have become powerful personal computers loaded with sophisticated software that process their words, outline their thoughts, format their scripts, check their grammar and spelling and link them to a million research sites on the internet. On balance, a serious writer has more invested than $3.95 for pencil and pad.
It is fair to say that the digital revolution has increased the cost of high-end tools of choice for writers. At the same time it has collapsed the cost of low-end tools for filmmakers.
In making this curious comparison it is important to note my careful use of the word “movies” rather than “films.”
A Little Background
“Movies” is a silly word really, a kind of abbreviation derived from “pictures in motion” or “moving pictures”. The only way to capture images in the very first moving picture camera – an optical lantern projector called Kinetograph – was film based emulsions. Edison filed the patent, but it was young Billy Dickson, Edison’s lab assistant, who designed the prototype back in 1893 and gave birth to the motion picture industry.
The Lumieres of France exhibited the first commercial motion picture to a paying public . They called their revolutionary technology “Cinematographe” and “cinema” has been with us every since. So, “PERSONAL CINEMA” has a kind of prestigious connection to the very beginning of movies
Film has been the medium of capture for moving pictures for over a hundred years. With the advent of TV and the development of electronic imaging, that began to change. Visionaries like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas could see the proverbial “digital writing on the wall’ and the ultimate implication to the motion picture industry decades before Hollywood caught a glimpse of what lay ahead.
I met Francis Coppola several years ago. He was in the middle of making a movie called Tucker. He had invited me to come to the location, a classic old Victorian house in the rolling hills of Napa Valley. Renowned Cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, was shooting the picture. I arrived on the set with producer, and long time Coppola collaborator, Fred Roose. We watched the take. I couldn’t see Francis. Then I heard the director’s command echo across the set.
“Cut”. The voice came from a series of speakers placed strategically out of sight. Coppola was not on the set.
“Let’s do one more,” the disembodied voice was saying, “only this time I would like you to…:” The instructions went on. Fred nodded his head and I followed.
Coppola was in a customized air stream trailer 75 yards from the camera. The interior looked like a movie set from an early Star Trek movie or broadcast central at NBC. Coppola stared at an array of TV monitors and spoke quietly into a microphone. His voice was amplified and broadcast to the set. The boom mike brought every sound of the scene to his head set.
An editor assembled the scenes, recorded on video tape through the video tap plugged directly into the ground glass of the camera. I didn’t realize it then – having failed to be among the visionaries – but looking back I was at the edge of history seeing the first movement of a shifting paradigm that would forever alter the industry.
Not long afterward I spent several weeks at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. I was working with 4-time Academy Award winner, Ben Burtt. We were editing my film, Alamo, the Price of Freedom. We were among the first to use a revolutionary editing system created by George given the Star War’s name of Editdroid .
Impatiently teetering on the threshold of the digital revolution. Lucas couldn’t wait. He instructed his innovative team of energetic engineers to create an editing system that utilized the revolutionary new technology of laser discs.
With DVDs a part of our lives it is hard now to imagine that we were so impressed by that early technology. Editdroid used the computer to search and select our footage which had been burned onto an array of laser disc machines. It was primitive compared to what you can do on your lap top today. But even back then, the buzz about Skywalker Ranch was the digital revolution ahead.
Digital Cameras and Creativity
The new Star Wars film is being shot with digital cameras. No film is involved. Tests made during Phantom Menace persuaded George the time had come to abandon film and capture his imaginative world on high definition digital tape. He used a system called, 24P (24 frame per second progressive scan) .
The digital data will be manipulated and enhanced by computer then output via a film recorder to 35 & 70 mm film for theaters. It will play in digital format in theaters converted to state of the art digital projection systems. Billionaire Philip Anschutz is converting 20 % of the screens in the US to digital projection systems.
State of the art digital projection is remarkably good. The Testaments, the film we created for the Legacy theater in Salt Lake city, was converted to digital format for the marvelous Legacy-like theater at Washington DC temple visitor center. The fidelity is remarkable.
Digital image capture and editing have been used professionally in various ways for several years. Only recently, driven largely by Apple Computer’s development of fire wire, has the domain of digital movie making been brought to the desk top. Almost over night you have the power of a $100,000 professional editing system on your personal computer for a few hundred dollars.
You do not need me to tell you that VHS and Hi-8 have been eclipsed by DV and are now in the inevitable shadows of “old technology”. Apple Computer’s iMovie for everyone, and Final Cut Pro 3 for professionals. I have made movie making machines out of G-4 Macintosh computers.
Believe it or not, MAYA, the high end 3-D graphics and animation software used by Hollywood professionals to create effects for Star Wars, Mummy Returns, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter , etc. is now available for G-4 Macintoshs. Once the exclusive domain of professionals using high end and very expensive Silicon Graphic work stations, Maya, like all of the tools of the digital movie making revolution, are now available to everyone. [Don’t rush out and order Maya until you’ve made 3 films, know for sure you’d rather make personal movies than ever go bowling again, and have confidence in your infinite patience. ]
Because my former bishop and dear friend works for Intel, I must add a note. While most professionals in film and graphics environments prefer Macintosh computers, there are Windows applications for video editing. That said of course one must be willing to endure that unbearable interface-saved only by its efforts to emulate Mac-and suffer the significantly slower rates of the mother board. [In a future article I will discuss the LDS church discrimination against Macintosh owners so hold your thoughts.]
What Does It Mean?
What does it all mean? That you can run out and make a full blown Hollywood Blockbuster with your mini DV and Macintosh ? No, not quite. In fact, no, not possible. But if you love movies and think “personal cinema” you may be surprised what can happen.
There was an unfathomable chasm between W. Somerset Maugham scribbling Of Human Bondage on a pad of old paper with a $2.00 pen and Cecil B. DeMille spending $20,000 an hour to film the Hebrew’s exodus from Egypt. The distance in cost and complexity between Clive Cussler hammering out Atlantis Found and Kevin Reynolds recreating the Count of Monte Cristo remains enormous.
The context of my preposterous suggestion – that making movies in the early decades of the new millennium can somehow be equated to writing the great American novel in the first half of the 20th century – is a vision of a vast collection of personal movies. Many of them will be important. Some will be great. A few will burst across the final barriers that separate “personal cinema” from main-stream Hollywood.
Manage your expectations by differentiating Titanic from the personal movies you can make with your DV Camcorder, fire wire and G-4 Mac with iMovie and Leonardo Di Caprio from the kid in your ward who will “star” in your epic.
Manage your expectations but do not limit your dreams. Consider a little movie called, Blair Witch. Whatever you may have thought of it – if you bothered to think of it at all – and for whatever purpose it was made, it was born in the revolution of personal cinema. It blitzed beneath the radar of conventional movie making, breached the barriers of Hollywood and became an enormous success. By some estimates it cost less than $50,000 to make and earned over $200,000,000. It began as an experiment. A brilliant idea. A personal movie that in the beginning could not have dared such expectations.
It was a movie that would not have been made ten years ago. It was a movie of the new millennium. It was only possible because for the first time in a hundred years the access to the tools and the cost of the process have dropped into the hands of the masses. The challenges remain great, but to a large extent, the barriers are gone.
Increasingly the numbers of films submitted in the documentary categories for Academy Awards consideration are shot on digital video. Young directors are making feature length narrative films on digital video. Film festivals have categories for digital “films”.
Next Monday night I have the great privilege of hosting the winning directors of the first annual LDS Film Festival for a showing of their short – and mostly digital – movies. If you are anywhere near Northern California Monday, March 4th please join us for this event. I would love to have you come and share the contributions of young LDS film makers to the inevitable digital revolution in film making. [Mesa Verde High School Performing Arts Center, 7501 Carriage Drive, Citrus Heights, California. 7:00 PM.]
[ For more information about Monday night contact Dana Sanders, da*******@ea*******.net . For information about the Young LDS Film Festival contact Christian Vuissa, fe******@ld****.com.]
Making personal movies in the Millennium head is about a whole new kind of individual expression. It is about awareness and access. It is about the average person being able to seriously consider – for the first time in over a hundred years – that they could make a movie, and so perhaps they should.
When I use the term “movie” or “personal movie making” I am not talking about shooting video of your high school graduation, your kid’s birthday party or 16 hours of “shoot everything and never stop the camera” video reeled off in Disneyland. [I always wonder when those people will EVER have time to watch all that footage?]
The movies I am talking about are the ones that visualizes the novel that lies within you – or perhaps indeed your tome of destiny is non-fiction or documentary in nature. I am talking about picking up that miniDV and creating a collision of images and ideas that say something that you’d like to say, even need to say, in a way it’s not been said before. I am talking about you making a movie that captures and extends that unique blend of experience and imagination that gives birth to ideas and images, to characters and conflict, of places and plot, purpose and passion.
Making a film is a wondrous process of assembling ideas, images and sounds then connecting them like intricate interlocking pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. And when it’s done the lines separating the pieces disappear leaving your audience with a magnificent revelation of where it is you have been taking us to experience a perspective that we’ve never had before.
And for the first time, you can really do it.
My excitement over this sudden, unprecedented access to digital imaging tools is actually very simple. It allows experimentation and creation at a very personal level. It provides a means for self expression and creativity unrivaled in the century past. It is also a lot of fun.
Moreover, it will allow hundreds and even thousands of youngsters – who might otherwise never dare to dream or give expression to some inner instinct – the opportunity to discover their aptitudes and talents.
If you have read anything I’ve written, you have heard me quote President Kimball. I carry his words with me and have for twenty years. He foresaw the day when the great stories of the Restoration and the culture of the gospel would be told in the great movie centers around the globe. He foresaw that,
“The full story of Mormonism has never yet been written nor painted nor sculptured nor spoken [nor filmed]. It remains for inspired hearts and talented fingers yet to reveal them selves. They must be faithful, inspired, active Church members to give life and feeling and true perspective to a subject so worthy. Our writers, our moving picture specialists, with the inspiration of heaven, should tomorrow be able to produce a masterpiece which would live forever.”
[From Ensign Article quoting address given to BYU faculty and staff 1967-68)
Until recently there were relatively few Mormons in the movie business. That is changing rapidly. The field of candidates to fulfill Kimball’s’ vision are increasing. The “inspired hearts and talented fingers” are stretching themselves, experimenting, practicing, making little films, discovering “personal cinema”, learning the art and craft and dreaming of the day they will reveal themselves and take part in the inevitable destiny of projecting our values, our testimonies and the joys of our lives on the giant silver screen.
I believe the rise in what some call “Mormon Cinema” has been encouraged by early access to inexpensive imaging tools. Film schools shoot 80% of their “films” on digital. The ease of use, open access and low, low cost provide significantly more and greater opportunities for aspiring hearts and anxious hands to discover if they are among the “inspired hearts and talented fingers.”
I encourage all of them and all of you and hope a whole new generation of will climb the long stairway to a time when they can make films that go beyond personal cinema, films that will reach the world – rivaling, as President Kimball has said, the classics.
“Can we not find equal talent to those who gave us A Man For All Seasons, Dr. Zhivago, and Ben Hur? My Fair Lady and the Sound of Music have pleased their millions, but I believe we can improve on them. ” [From Ensign Article quoting address given to BYU faculty and staff 1967-68)
My son-in-law, who happens to be a Vice President of Apple Computer -as the result of being a brilliant programmer and selling them his company for a Gajillion dollars – called me with a computer question. I loved it that he needed me. He had decided to make a movie. He bought the best that Apple had to offer – Mac G-4 with dual 1-Gig processors, 22″ Cinema Screen, Final Cut Pro 3, Adobe After Effects, a DV deck, and a stack of black box peripherals.
He had the tools but discovered that creating personal cinema is about time, tenacity, temperament and maybe even talent. If he applies his brilliance he will create something marvelous in the digital domain of movie making.
The best tools in the world are of little consequent when used without purpose. Unlimited access to technology is fruitless without talent. Talent without passion yields little. And passion without purpose only produces more of the drivel and dazzling refuse that pollutes our popular culture.
“Pencil and pad no more a novel make than Sony and Mac a movie create.”
Our vision should be lofty. Our aim should be high. Our goal should be stories told in great films without compromise. If any of this stirs your heart then it is time to begin. Go ahead, make a movie. Make it personal. Make it with passion. And when it’s finished, let us know. We’d love to share a glimpse of your vision.
2001 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
