So, back in college, when I still entertained the thought that I would one day be a great filmmaker, I used to make stuff....
My friend Zayna and I ran the campus tv station, TVMcGill, which by the way, is awesome to this day (due to my legacy, i'm sure)
Anyway, we use to misappropriate the resources to create our own projects... and this one time, we made a music video for a friends band, by editing it for three straight days during the run up to finals in our last year of school. Holed up in the student union for 72 hours we thought we were creating genius. we were actually creating this:
Now, about five years later, I found it on an afternoon of youtube googling phrases from my personal histopry to see what comes up.... I have absolutely no idea how it got there... as the master miniDV and Beta tapes are somewhere in a box in my apartment collecting dust with my books by Kant and Derrida. But I am happy it did.
Maybe not so my viral internet fame can begin, but definitely because watching it brought back the memories of making it, and those were some of the best days in all the ones I have spent toiling away in the movie industry.
And so I thought I might provide a little how to guide on how to make a horrible music video and guarantee a locked in love for filmmaking and future internet embarassment
DO: Create a dummy production company and change your cell phone answering machine to reflect it, thus giving you a home base to secure corporate sponsorship, thus ensuring you do not run up your parents credit card to make your masterpiece
DO NOT: Answer your cell after you have started drinking at night, or before you aare fully awake the next morning, inspiring your sponsor contact to ask "are you really a professional producer? are you a student?" and causing you to have to do a lot of grovelling and finance most of the video with the credit card your parents don't know about (yet)
DO: Figure out your concept and storyboards early, stick to it and follow through.
DO NOT: come up with a narrative that no one is EVER going to understand like... say... I don't know... a guy who wakes up on the roof in a kiddy pool and can't remember where he was or what he was doing the previous evening, causing him to recall it in flashbacks as he walk the streets of Montreal, only to realize that he had stolen the band's mojo and all the flashbacks were actually the aforementioned band chasing him through the streets, and when he finally puts it altogether he just happens to have mentioned the bands practice space, where they are currently practicing in pajamas, causing yet another chase down the block..... Trust me, you will get it, it won't be clear to anyone else.
DO: Prepare as much of the wardrobe, makeup, props, locations, extras, etc in advance
DO NOT: back down from any last minute challenges or changes. Some that we dealt with here were:
-you aren't actually allowed to shoot in the montreal metro, which we did... so it was my job to distract any and all approaching subway cops while the band shot with the DP. I played stupid lost anglophone about 15 times, french subway cops are mean
-The purple footie pajamas for one of the band members were too bright through the camera, we threw them in a mud puddle, then into a drier at the local laundromat, and they were good to go
-we had NO shots of the dickies clothes or logo when they finally came through with the funds on our last day of shooting... we just went back and reshot some dickie's beauty shots... corporate selling out was ingrained in us early
-we couldn't actually get our hands on a smoke machine to create a "smoke rising from an open bag" to signify the bands mojo... instead we had friends take turns hauling down smokes and breathing out the plumes through a hose we inserted througha hole in the bottom of a knapsack.... we killed a lot of brain cells for our art
DO: Always keep food and snacks on hand to keep everyone happy during the day
DO NOT: Let your main talent get loaded and show up 15 minutes before his call time... The coffee and breakfast burritos you have on hand will sober him up and entice him enough to shoot, but you will end up having to make him look that haggard and hungover for the rest of the shoot
DO: do this... its a once in a lifetime opportunity to be this self-indulgent and have this much fun with almost no consequences....
DO NOT: take yourself to seriously.... in the end, the only thing that will happen is a few hundred people seeing it on youtube a half-decade later, just have fun with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment