CHAPTER 37

MONITORING PROGRESS

A director's recurring nightmare is to discover that a vital angle or shot has been overlooked, and it is impossible to reconvene the crew and cast. Such catastrophes are more likely in low-budget filmmaking, where too few people cover too many tasks. Working fast and hand-to-mouth, intentions must often be modified, and crossing intended shots off a list can easily go awry. The list may be so rife with changes that the list itself becomes a hazard.

When a film's story proceeds by a series of images or when the narrative is carried by nonverbal actions, directing and keeping track of what you have covered is relatively simple. The mistakes and omissions begin to appear when scenes involve several simultaneous actions, such as crowd or fight scenes that involve a lot of people in frame whose relativity must match from shot to shot. Even complex dialogue scenes, especially if characters are moving around, can spring unpleasant surprises when shooting crosses the axis or reaction shots get forgotten. Fatigue and last-minute changes increase the odds of error in all situations.

If the script supervisor and cinematographer really understand editing, their attention or that of the editor (standing in for script supervisor) can provide vital checks and balances as shooting progresses.

CUT TO SEAGULLS

You should, in any case, provide every sequence you shoot with safety coverage such as reaction shots, cutaways, or insert shots that can be used to bridge shots that don't match. The saying in the industry used to be, “When in doubt, cut to seagulls.”

MONITORING YOUR RESOURCES

Many inexperienced shoots are liberally covered in the first stages and stretched thin toward the end. The resulting coverage often can be edited only one way, if at all. Your production must budget and monitor its resources as they are expended or your shoot will be like an expedition that eats steak upon leaving home and then has to boil its shoes in the wilderness to stay alive.

No matter what order you shoot in, your production manager (PM) should be able to compute from day to day whether the production is over or under its projected budget. Knowing early that a complicated sequence has consumed more resources than intended will signal that you must either raise more money, economize to get back on track, or be ready to drop the least vital scenes.

DRAMATIC AND TECHNICAL QUALITY

There are various levels of oversight to monitor dramatic quality, which is top of the list so far as your future audience is concerned.

Film without Video Feed: To see no dailies until the final wrap (end of shooting) means relying on limited and subjective impressions as you shoot. For a low-budget film unit away on location, this may seem the only practical solution, but the risks are manifold. Without dailies you have little or no check on the following possible faults:

• Camerawork (inaccurate viewfinder, focus problems, negative scratching, unsteady image or inaccurate camera movements, exposure inequities)
• Lighting (inadequacy or mismatches)
• Sound (quality, consistency)
• Action (continuity)
• Performances (level, credibility, consistency, relativity)

Running dailies silent on a projector is better than nothing, but you should see them with sound synced up. A cassette copy of the dailies made via telecine at home base and viewed on a videocassette player at the location is best when no portable double-system projector is available on location. Both camera and sound crews will take a dim view of this representation of their work, but it will provide you with essential feedback on acting, coverage, continuity, camera handling, composition, and so forth. Lighting and sound quality will be harder to judge.

Digital Video or Film with Video Feed: A feature unit should see its dailies every day (hence the term dailies for dailies) so that any reshooting can be done before the set is struck or lighting becomes difficult to reconstruct. Even a dog-tired unit can summon enthusiasm for seeing its own work. You must, however, politely but firmly exclude the actors. They will almost certainly be thrown by seeing their own performances. Tell them it's a technical check for the unit only.

Quality of the Edited Piece: Truly significant quality-monitoring is now available to low-budget independents. Because computerized editing is now possible anywhere, the editor can accompany a location unit and digitize taped dailies as they become available. Once all the material is captured, a day's work can be cut together in an hour or two. The unit then sees its latest work in rough outline, at least before the set is struck. Many additional aspects show up in edited form, such as inconsistencies in acting, lighting, framing, sound, or continuity—all of which may be improved on or even corrected in subsequent shooting. Most importantly, the director can see whether performances are consistent and pitched right and whether stylistic intentions are working out. Because the editor can be continuously assembling and revising the whole film as its parts become available, a rough assembly should be available within days of the end of shooting. This avoids what used to be a delay of weeks or months as the production scraped together money for a workprint (single light-positive print used as the working copy by the editor). The camera crew alone will lack final proof of their work until the camerawork has been viewed in film form.

FULFILLING YOUR AUTHORSHIP INTENTIONS

Some big questions in your mind during shooting are: Am I fulfilling my authorial intentions and, Do I have a film? (see Figure 37-1) Success is hard to measure except in unreassuringly subjective terms. One way to make this easier is to break your intentions into specific goals.

FIGURE 37-1

From one's first film onward, the director is haunted by the question “Do I have a film?” (photo by author).

Dramatic Clarity: Earlier I recommended graphing a scene to clarify the intended changes of intensity and to specify where each beat begins and ends (see Graphics to Help Reveal Dramatic Dynamics section in Chapter 17). Doing this effectively is the only guarantee that the audience will experience the film's dramatic elements, and nobody else but the director can make this happen.

Success as a director of film actors lies in insisting on clear detail in the performances. Of course you must pre-establish what the intended detail is going to be, and ensure it happens each moment of the performances, or your direction will be rudderless. That means watching like a hawk so that detail and clarity of performance are sustained in every take. Never forget that effective performances make you feel, every time you stand by the camera, what the audience will feel. It is something that strongly overtakes you. If you have to search for the feelings you expect, then something important is missing and you must dig into the players' psyches to set feeling in motion. In the end, an effective human presence on the screen is frighteningly simple: When actors truly feel what their character is feeling, you and the audience will feel, too. If they fail or fake it, you must take them to a place where they do experience their characters' emotions.

Professional directors imbibe so much experience with actors that their reflexes become as idiosyncratic and intuitive as a slalom skier's. This is why you cannot learn much about how you should handle directing from observing someone else at work, no matter how good he or she is. Directing is like swimming or dancing. It's something you learn from doing—and doing over and over again. You will find your own true path in rehearsals or from directing a theater play if you can get the experience.

Subtext: After material from a scene has been played, there should be an elusive imprint left on the observer concerning subtext. This, especially if it's a long scene with several angles, can subtly metamorphose from take to take into something different and can compromise the scene's integrity once it's cut together. The enlightened director acts as an extremely aware, uncluttered, and articulate audience member who can give immediate feedback on what he or she just saw and felt. The subtext that actors generate is vital, and your cast will not always know what they communicated. You cannot rely on their sense of it and must extract reliable, coherent impressions from yourself. Sometimes the unexpected can work, sometimes not. To keep yourself focused when you're exhausted, use your crib cards to check the expectations against which to question yourself. Did he convince me he's lost? Is she fooling when she says she will walk out?

To show how self-interrogation works, I have applied some typical questions to two takes of a hypothetical scene set in a bus station. Late at night, two stranded passengers start a desultory conversation. Action and dialogue of each take is identical, yet each elicits different responses from anyone alert who is watching:

Q: What life-roles did the characters adopt?

Take 1: Two of life's losers unenthusiastically size each other up.

Take 2: Two depressed, disgruntled people decide whether they can be bothered with company at this time.

Q: What truth was played out here?

Take 1: One instinctively despises someone else with the same shortcomings.

Take 2: Alienated people tend to isolate themselves further.

Q: What analogy sums up how the scene emerged?

Take 1: Two neutered cats circle round each other.

Take 2: Two exhausted convicts decide it is not worth cooperating to break rocks.

Facing questions that are fundamental to your story forces not just a candid examination of what was planned and expected, but takes you beyond. The answers they elicit are quite typical and reveal subtle differences between the two takes. Quite spontaneously, a slightly different subtext is emerging from the playing in each take. The difference shows how wrong is the notion of a finished performance that some actors confer on themselves. Relationship, both on or off camera, is always alive and in flux. To catch it you must be alert to the nuance of the moment, which is always actual, never theoretical.

Because all takes on all angles of all learned scenes remain unpredictable in terms of outcome, you need a high degree of concentration and sensitivity if you are to interpret nuances accurately. Any director who operates largely from expectations or allows his or her attention to ever leave the players' process will miss the boat. Needless to say, the concentration all this demands is enormous, which makes directing intense and draining work.

Scene Dialectics: Make sure the dialectics in each scene are well evidenced. By this I mean the opposing polarities of will and opinion that set person against person, movement against movement, idea against idea, and the parts of a person against himself or herself. These are the insoluble and irresolvable pressures and the tensions that stand out like spars in a majestic bridge construction.

Interrogating your psyche is the only way to break into that sealed room where your consciousness lives, your intuitive self that already knows and recognizes the scene's underlying qualities and meaning. It will resist unless you are merciless. Once you access it, you can set about remedying any shortfall between intention and execution. Your cast will also know instinctively when you are right, and their respect for you will rise.

MEASURING PROGRESS

Keep nothing in your head that can be dumped onto paper as a checklist. Lists save your life when you become too tired to think—that fatal fog that descends during sustained shooting. Keep your intentions for each scene handy on an index card small enough to fit in your shirt pocket (see Crib Sheets section in Chapter 30). Check the scene list so you waste no energy searching in memory to call up your goals. Check them at the start of the scene, and check them again at its conclusion. Did you cover them all? Are there fresh consequences for scenes that follow?

At each juncture, assess whether you have won or lost each of the individual battles. This is hard and lonely work because you are often underwhelmed by what you see taking place before the camera. During the shoot, just when you expect to feel creative, you often suffer a gnawing doubt, an emotion you cannot share with anybody. But the dailies generally reveal a lot more present on film than you were able to realize at the time. There is a negative aspect to this: A bravura performance seen live comes across as hamming it up on the screen. Should you suspect this while shooting, call for more takes and direct the actors to seek more contained and sincere emotion. The less confidence you have in your judgment, the more you should provide yourself with alternatives for editing later.

MOVING BEYOND REALISM

When film moves beyond the literalness of recorded realism, cinema begins linking up with forms pioneered in its sister arts, such as music, dance, theater, and literature. There is no set formula for achieving this and you cannot know if your design, worked out in writing, rehearsal, and preproduction, is succeeding until the film is on its way to being fully edited. Your film's inner life ultimately comes from the life and spirit of the players, from the mood of the company's chemistry together, from the juxtaposition of materials, and from assembling them into a provocative antiphony. It also emerges through expressive lighting or settings, sound composition, music, or by other approaches germane to your piece. This complex identity the production somehow achieves for itself is something you hope for, but never something you can control or feel coming into being during shooting.

If complete control is what you want, become an animator. But if you are ready to gamble with metaphysics and accommodate the unexpected, you'll like making fiction films. If you really love the idea of serendipity and improvisation as ingredients in storymaking, do some cinéma vérité documentary in preparation for a more improvisational approach to fiction (see my book, Directing the Documentary, 2nd ed., London and Boston: Focal Press, 1992). Giving priority to your actors and to chance will put you in very distinguished company.

CEDING CONTROL

Artistic control is a paradoxical notion because it requires that somewhere during the postproduction process, or even earlier, you find yourself yielding control to some higher truth that the film begins to emanate. It works like this: Your assembled piece will begin to make its own insistent demands, dictating to you and your editor what it wants its final form to be. Like a growing child, it begins to assert its own nature, to have its own imperfections and integrity, and even to start asserting its own autonomous decisions. With shock and delight you find you are assisting your film to make itself.

Similar capitulation may be required during shooting. A typical situation is an actor producing an unexpected and arresting quality that affects the character's potential or skews a certain situation you are shooting. You must decide whether to rein it in or to acknowledge the new direction and let the consequences luxuriate. Whatever you decide will have an impact on the other players and may put your authority on the line if they don't like what is happening. Yet to deny these emerging, elusive truths would be to choose security over the living, breathing quality of true drama. Directing is never free of moral and ethical dilemmas, or of compromise.

KEEP THE STORYTELLER ALIVE

The elements of authorship are analyzed in some depth in Part 4: Aesthetics and Authorship. When you author a movie, you are probably using it to recreate some aspect of your own inmost experience and vicariously to extend and further that experience. My friend Lois Deacon once said, “Nothing is real until I have written about it.” Had she been a filmmaker she would have said, “Nothing is real until I have made a film about it.” Whatever our medium, we use it to extend the boundaries of our own experience and make that earlier journey real—first for ourselves, then for others. Perhaps it only becomes real when others see and believe. Group psychotherapy certainly works that way. Because others are moved, they confer recognition on some aspect of our inmost selves that we could hardly believe in until we could share it with others.

Thus, when you direct a story with special meaning, you carry responsibility for the voice of the film; that is, your final responsibility is to keep vividly alive the observing witness who rises up to become the proactive Storyteller. The Storyteller, in his or her humanity and intelligence, is the crucial guide who mediates between the surface reality of the fiction and its underlying significances. Your poetic intelligence, feeling its way, often in doubt, seeks to fit the seemings of the film together into a humane statement about the human condition and to move the audience, with whose hearts and minds you are playing in the most purposeful way. A story exists to make a point, or maybe several points. Will yours?

As director, you covertly play the most important role: that of the unseen but ever present Storyteller. If you lose your vision of why the story exists, of what the film could be and should be, you lose your storytelling identity, and the film loses its way. This is why it matters intensely to have a clear idea of this functional hierarchy: the Storyteller's point of view, then the main character or characters' points of view of the story's purpose and its premise. Whom should we see into and whom should we see through at every stage of the movie? Who should make our heart bleed, and at what points in particular? What must the audience know and feel at the end?

Dialogue sequences are the quicksand where this identity most easily sinks from sight, which is why so much of this book concentrates on handling the interaction between characters. If you fear this is happening, make sure you shoot enough to allow shaping options in the cutting room. Single-setup coverage for any part of a scene means that no changes in point of view, pacing, or reaction are possible. Always provide yourself with alternatives in case your plans don't work out.

COST REPORTS

As the director you handle the human, the spiritual, and the ineffable, but there are always bills, costs, rates, schedules, and business matters to bring you down to earth. Every day during production, your PM will want bills to keep track of costs. Is the production under or over budget? If you've overspent, what will you do? Maybe you can shoot the last scene without the crane. …

AT THE END OF THE PRODUCTION

Just as it's nice to have an icebreaker party before shooting begins, you should have a get-together at the end of shooting to thank and congratulate everybody. If money's low, have a potluck in which everyone makes their favorite dish or brings drinks or desserts. Someone should coordinate this, so you don't get five pasta salads and no dessert.

CHECKLIST FOR PART 6: PRODUCTION

The points summarized here are only those most salient. Some are commonly overlooked. To find them or anything else relating to the production phase, go to the Table of Contents at the beginning of this part.

Planning on Paper:

• With the script supervisor, turn the screenplay into a final shooting script.
• With your director of photography (DP), draw a floor plan for each sequence showing characters' movements.
• Mark in the scene's axis (or axes) and camera positions.
• Mark up the script to show coverage from each camera position.
• Plan an establishing shot to clarify scene geography and character placement.
• Use movement to link angles at action match cutting points.
• Make sure there will be plenty of overlap between angles so you will have adequate choice of cutting points.
• Use characters' eyeline shifts. Follow them with a camera movement or with a point of view shot.
• Decide where the scene will profit from changes between subjective (near axis) and objective (far from axis) camera angles.
• Cover any regrouping of characters in a comprehensive shot so that spatial changes can be made evident.
• Show relatedness through composition wherever possible so you do not have to manufacture juxtaposition through editing.
• Sketch a storyboard frame for each camera setup to make sure screen direction is maintained.
• Make up crib sheets for each scene with “must not forget” points listed.
• Cover important moments of the scene from more than one angle.

Scheduling and Reconnaissance:

• Be pessimistic when scheduling; you will never have too much time to shoot.
• Schedule the early shooting for a slower pace.
• Arrange contingency alternatives (in case of bad weather, etc.).
• Crews need a typewritten schedule with map details and contact phone numbers.
• PM should double-check lodging and dining arrangements for locations.
• To conserve time, bring food to the unit, not the unit to the food.
• Check location with a compass to assess available light's direction.
• When everyone is in transit, make sure there is a central phone contact.
• Map out electrical supplies, permissible loadings, circuits, and their fuses.

Getting Ready to Shoot:

• Remember to include tools and spares.
• For locations, bring first aid and basic medicine kit.
• Locate nearest toilets and emergency medical facilities if on location.
• Research nearest point for repairs, spares, and dealers.
• PM should prepare daily cost projection.
• Make sure everyone knows his or her responsibilities. Every area of the undertaking should fall within someone's responsibility.
• Establish crew protocols for dealing with actors or the public.
• Hold a potluck party before shooting so you start out with good morale.
• Warn actors that shooting is slow, and they should bring books, chess, a yoga mat, whatever.

Shooting:

• Check scene's important points on your crib card.
• Have your act together. Your leadership and leadership style set the tone for the shoot.
• Delegate directing the crew to your DP.
• Make the decision for a further take quickly so everyone stays focused.
• Make allowances for extreme tension in everyone at the beginning.
• Cater to creature comforts to keep up morale.
• Give credit publicly to anyone who deserves it.
• Use breaks for mending fences and picking up loose ends of information.
• Have personal exchange with all crew members so you are seen as a personal friend.
• Script supervisor keeps strict watch over coverage and matching.
• Sound recordist listens for any inadequate lines and shoots a wild track.
• Sound recordist can ask for silence to pick up any atmosphere or sound effects on location.
• Keep dissent away from ears of actors.
• Ask your crew when you need advice or help.
• Do not wrap without shooting reactions, cutaways, and location presence track.
• Replace locations exactly as you found them.
• Thank everyone personally at the end of each day.
• Director and key personnel should confer at day's end to plan next day.

Mise en Scène:

• Know whose point of view audience should sympathize with moment to moment.
• Use camera for storytelling, not just as a passive observer.
• Decide with DP or camera operator the size and framing of each shot.
• Look through camera often to check framing, composition, and image size.
• During shot, stand close to camera so you see more or less what it is seeing.
• Make the location a character, not a mere container for action.
• Try wherever possible to create a sense of depth in the frame.
• Use characters' eyelines as guides for shooting safety cutaways.
• Use a particular lens for its dramatic revelation potential as well as to cope with limitations imposed by the shooting environment.
• Decide whether there is a simpler technical means to achieve the same effect.
• Consider varying camera height from shot to shot.
• Decide what the camera can legitimately look through to create foreground and background planes.
• Slow down or simplify character movements if the camera is to follow them.
• Decide whether the necessary geographic revelation of a scene is early or delayed.
• Try to tie spatial elements together in same frame rather than manufacture relationship through cutting.
• How is space being used between characters?
• Cover anything important more than one way so you have a choice.
• Leave hefty overlaps between matching shots so editor has choice of cutting points.

Directing Actors:

• Give actors private, personal feedback and encouragement from time to time.
• Be careful to be egalitarian toward actors and not to let your preferences or antipathies show.
• Make each character active in his or her surroundings.
• Each situation must reveal something about the characters through behavior.
• Make sure each character has plenty to do, externally or internally, to avoid self-consciousness.
• Remind actors often where, emotionally and physically, their character is coming from.
• Be relaxed so you do not signal to actors that it is a tense situation.
• Support, question, and challenge. Make lots of interesting demands.
• Feed in the unexpected and side-coach when a scene needs refreshing.
• Be ready to attenuate the speed of action covered in close-up to accommodate the camera.

Location Sound:

• Monitor all recorded sound.
• Try to always get useable location sound even if it takes longer to set up.
• Make room tone and atmosphere recordings to suit sound-design plans.

Script Supervision:

• Make story chronology so material shot out of continuity will match when cut together.
• Make prop and costume list for each scene and liaise with assistant director (AD), property, and costume people to ensure right materials are on hand for each sequence.
• Script supervisor should observe action from beside camera.
• Maintain close watch on what is and isn't yet shot.
• Note all dialogue variations in case they lead to matching problems.
• Watch where actions take place and how they are done so there will be no matching problems.
• Watch handling and placement of props and other objects, so shots will match.

Authorship and Monitoring Progress:

• Try to hear and see the scene's actual subtext, not just what you want it to say.
• Make sure each beat is clear so the dialectics of the scene become evident.
• Cover exposition and other vital points more than one way.
• Examine the imprint a take has left on you: What life-roles were played out? What came from the characters this particular time? What truths emerged?
• Check your crib card to see what is being gained and what needs bolstering.
• Be sensitive to the scene's hidden meaning and energy, and allow it to exert the appropriate control.
• Expect always to have missed something good. What have you missed this time?
• Make sure you have on film the necessary confrontations inherent in your movie's system of issues.
• See rushes as soon as possible and more than once. Let them act on you.
• Make sure cost flow is being monitored and that you are keeping up to schedule.