Jim Keller

If getting paid well is all that's important, then by all means, take the janitorial job. The reason janitors are paid better than many other professions (not just film and television jobs) is simply this: Who wants to do that job? One needs to be able to take heart that one is at least being well compensated in order to put up with the ick. Unfortunately for all of us who choose a career that is more fulfilling (if not actually cleaner) -- and then seek out the training to do it -- is that there are a lot of people who don't want to be janitors and do want to do what we do. The basic laws of economics dictate that wages will be forced downward in our chosen profession, and that is true for us individually right up to the point where our work is guaranteed to generate more income than we cost the producer (or, in my case, the investor). Sadly, that means there is a very long period in which we "pay our dues" for very little money (or, frequently, no money at all). My advice is to be creative about how to survive building your resume. Until the unions all go to being "open shops" and dry up the pool of cheap, trained talent, no one truly has any collective bargaining strength, so the problem will persist. Assuming you don't have a wealthy parent or spouse supporting you, you've got to learn to live on what you can earn or find a "survival job" that loves the fact that you run off to make movies from time to time (and, yes, they do exist). I wish I could bring lightness and cheer to this discussion, but that's the real world as I see it. Also, I personally wish everyone who wishes there was more work to go around would produce something, anything... :)

If you don't mind working with SAG, once you sign the student filmmaker's agreement, they'll provide you with a standard form that the actors can use. You may want to check out the SAG Indie website for specifics.

Your second roll seems to also have the issue. I noticed the same ghosting at 4:31. It's just doing a better job of hiding in a more complex scene with fewer broad swaths of subtle gradiation. To me it looks like a lens aberration. I'd suggest trying another test roll with a different lens on the camera.

Oh, I'm totally with you there. When I was still actively teaching, I always told my students to happily work on any project, no matter how awful, because someone on that awful project is going to climb the food chain and know you've got the skills to deliver what they need on a bigger and better project.

The goal with any interview is to make the subject relax. When they relax and stop being aware of the camera, you'll get much better interview footage. Here are a few suggestions: Talk about something they're interested in, unrelated to the interview. Do a little research into your subjects hobbies and interests, and do just enough research to be able to chat. Remember, most people are most engaged in a conversation when they get to do 60-80% of the talking, and you're engaged enough to ask intelligent questions, agree organically with their statements, and make connections to other things. Once they're comfortable having a conversation with you that isn't anything related to the subject at hand, they're more likely to keep going in that mode for the actual interview. I know some producers who casually turn the camera on during the "chat" beforehand, and segue into the actual topic. About 10 minutes into the actual interview, the subject suddenly realizes the camera is rolling, and either gets really mad (why I don't do it) or realizes this isn't so hard after all. Asking about kids/family, photos they have on display, their jewelry, etc. is a great conversation starter when you don't have the ability to do the research first. Ask the same question a few times. This, of course, works best if you've warned them you're going to do so, but the second answer is usually both better considered, more concise, and more relaxed. I also find it's best to ask the first question again at the end of the interview, after they've had all the other questions go through their heads. Explain what you're doing. Remember that most interview subjects don't have a lot of experience. By talking them through what you're doing and why as you set up the camera and lights, wire them in for sound, etc., they'll both trust in your abilities more and be more inclined to relax into a "learning something new" mode. Tell them you will be editing the interview, and reassure them you won't let them look like a fool. Subjects who know they can say, "You know what? Don't use that. Let me answer that again," are far more likely to speak off the top of their heads, naturally, than subjects who are terrified of everything they say being taken out of context. Having a reputation for good ethics helps a lot here. Dress similarly to them. Now, I don't mean to do the "Single, White Female" thing, but if you're interviewing a blue-collar farm worker and you show up wearing a $3,000 suit, the interview subject will have a harder time feeling comfortable with you, because you've immediately created a class difference, and put him/her in a position of perceived inferiority. Similarly, if you're interviewing a hotel heiress and you show up looking like you just crawled out from under the car, she'll have a natural tendency to treat you like the hired help. People are most comfortable talking to people they perceive as their equals, so you want to encourage that with how you dress, how you speak, and how you carry yourself. Yes, there's some acting involved in interviewing. Somewhere there's a great shot of me crawling around the floor of a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat's office running cable in my best suit... Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are many, many more.

We have no idea if we're ever going to attempt to make more of these (it'll depend on how this one goes over), but if so I'd love some input from those of you who know more than me about how we can ratchet up that "old primetime TV" look. We're shooting on a Panasonic HVX200, and our lighting kit consists of a handful of tungsten lights and a couple of soft boxes. (Most of the live-action stuff we do is a basic on-camera presenter, so the gear is well suited to that application. We were seriously improvising to try to get this look.) Thanks!

Please, steal away. It's not the sort of movie I'd ever make. But I'd love to come to the premiere! :lol:

Suddenly I have the title "Frat Boy Film School" running through my head...

I've seen actors do incredibly convincing barfing scenes. The problem is, when they do, the audience gets sick as well. (It's the natural physiological reaction.) In most situations actors, directors, and producers will err -- consciously or unconsciously -- on the side of not making the audience puke. After all, that's the job of the hand-held camera. :)

Fair enough. But if I'm digging that deeply into his background during my hiring check, I'm going to find out anyway. ;p

I'll start with the disclaimer: I have a (weak) financial interest in this project, as I did a one-day guest role on it and will therefore get paid if the creators ever succeed in monetizing it. I am not a producer on the project, nor am I being paid to promote it. Now that that's out of the way, here's what I think everyone on this board should take a look at: And Boris: The Web Series The story behind this project is that the creators -- a husband and wife team -- were both laid off from their day jobs in the same week. Rather than collecting unemployment and whining about how they can't find anyone to fund their $1 million feature, they assessed what capabilities they had (a number of friends who are actors, training from USC School of Cinema and Television, a garage full of... uh... props, and a cheap still camera with a movie mode) and spun a story that they could tell with what they had. The first "season" was produced for, literally, no money. The second "season" saw someone interested enough to loan them a consumer-grade HD camera, and they spent a little money (under $700) feeding and costuming actors. I'd love to hear what all you out there think. Are they helping or hindering their futures as filmmakers by doing a project like this? Do you consider this useful as a technique of showcasing, and hopefully building your momentum into bigger projects? Speaking as a producer, here are the things I think they're doing very, very right: Conspicuously admitting to how low the budget is. When things look cheap or badly produced and someone is trying to pretend they've spent $10,000 on it in order to justify a bigger return or a bigger investment in their next project, I frankly wonder about their abilities. When this project looks cheap or badly produced, I'm amazed that it looks as good as it does. Delivering it on the web. Being able to watch it conveniently, and for free, makes it far more likely that I will see it. If I have to drag myself off to some obscure festival or hope I get mailed a screener to watch it, I'm almost certainly not going to. Also, since the web has such low standards, this team is coming in a cut above a lot of their online competition, as opposed to looking pathetic at a festival. Keeping it fun and short (for the most part). Yes, they haven't always stuck to this (there's at least one episode that is predominately heavier drama rather than lighthearted action), but I'm far more likely to watch when I'm laughing rather than when the project is making me want to slit my wrists. Other reactions?

It's extremely challenging, especially early in your career. An awful lot of jobs come up very last-minute. You may be able to get yourself down from Fresno, but getting yourself in from Europe in time to take an interview/accept a job is back-breaking (especially since not all those interviews will turn into work). From a producer's point-of-view, why would you be hired when there's someone just as desirable right down the street, who isn't at the mercy of transportation infrastructure? If you're going to do this, my advice is simple: DON'T BROADCAST IT. Get a cell phone with a Southern California area code, and a Southern California mailing address. You can have two sets of addresses and phone numbers on your business cards and folks will assume you're primarily in the one where they're talking to you, but they're very unlikely to even try to contact someone who appears to be from out of town unless it's someone who's work is really THAT good.

Most any community college with a theatre program should have a basic lighting design course. Many larger colleges make their beginning and advanced lighting design classes available through extension programs. Talk to the professor if possible, and if not the counselor, about your background to make sure you're being placed in the right class (you probably won't need the fresnel vs. ERS class). There's nothing quite like studying with someone who does it to teach you the ropes. It's far more complex than just pointing some lights at the stage, and the techniques you learn for the theatre will enhance your skills at lighting for the camera more than I can describe.

Well, in my defense, it wasn't actually a parade, it was the annual 5k run-walk for breast cancer. But it did completely surround my location, making it impossible for my cast to get there...

I think I concur that this shouldn't be a binary, either/or discussion. For every point you raise, there is a valid counter argument. Film vs. digital should be about choosing the right medium for your project, not wanting one to triumph over the other. Instead of presenting film as superior, I'd suggest clearly exploring the differences between the media, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each in different situations, and when one is the appropriate choice over the other. For example: For every lab technician put out of a job by digital cinema, there's a digital imaging expert not getting work because film hasn't died yet. The broader economy and ideals about which is "better" shouldn't drive the consumer. The quality of the finished product should. Make a good movie, and audiences will buy tickets. And the costs of a film-out can be reduced if planned and shot correctly, too. However, if you're working far from a city with quality film labs, working on digital becomes much cheaper very quickly, because you don't need to transport your exposed film to a city with labs, and then transport your dailies back. Again, it's about understanding what the costs are going to be ahead of time, and making a choice intelligently based on that. And you can do some very cool digital effects that cannot be done in-camera, without generation loss if you choose to acquire digitally. Depends on the film and the digital camera. I would argue that a high-speed 8mm negative cannot compete with a native 4k digital cinema camera in terms of resolution, and as digital resolution improves this argument loses validity with each subsequent generation. We're already capturing digital at a higher resolution than we used when generating digital visual effects to cut right back into our finished films just a decade ago.

Be aware that it's not an uncommon practice to conform the final draft of the script to the completed film. Getting your hands on various earlier drafts will be more informative for what you're trying to do.

Always make sure there isn't a parade the day of your shoot. I laughed when my one prof. in college said this, and then made the mistake on my first feature...

Well, if it's true that starting up the lamp in the MIN position shortens its life, I can think of at least one reason why a manufacturer would recommend doing it that way... :)

There are two broad categories of actors you'll encounter today, which I'll call "psychological" and "technical." The psychological actors believe that if they create in themselves the psychology of the character, it will manifest itself physically. The most famous of these schools is the Stanislavski "method," due to its popularity with beginning acting teachers. I find very few serious professional actors who actually use the method (especially since what is taught as the method has little relationship to Stanislavski's actual writings and is instead the result of some of his early students reinterpreting his theories when they came to England and the U.S. to teach), but its vocabulary ("emotional recall," "objective," "beat," etc.) has become ubiquitous, and most actors can translate a methody director's words into the technique they actually use. Method actors tend to focus on trying to fool themselves into actually feeling what the character would be feeling. What you need to watch out for with them is a tendency to disappear into their own heads and put out nothing to the camera or their fellow actors. Meisner is probably the next most popular of the psychological schools. His emphasis was on being in the moment, and the mantra "acting is reacting" is a popular hallmark of Meisnerian acting. While they're very good at being real and natural, Meisnerian actors have a problem repeating action, and have a bad habit of not delivering the performance the script calls for because it's not what they would do. Hagen, Adler, and the majority of other well-known American acting teachers tended to use some variant of the above, and nearly all the psychological schools trace their roots back to Stanislavski at some point of his career. Chekhov is really a hybrid of the psychological and the technical. Chekhov was also a student of Stanislavski and agreed that the character's psychology drives the action, but felt that the manifestation of that psychology had to come from physical action (and the internal "feeling it" would sometimes follow and sometimes would not). Chekhovian actors tend to emphasize "psychological gestures" and other arm-wavy things. Their greatest weakness is that since the entire technique is built on identifying how a character is unlike you, they tend to be incapable of playing themselves. They're also the group most likely to be guilty of chewing the scenery. Purely technical actors also come for a variety of different schools. They all emphasize training the body to do what audiences respond to. Remember that psychology is a new science, so before Stanislavski started polling his actors and trying to understand what was going on in their heads when they acted, this is what everyone did. Historically these schools include commedia dell'arte and clowning, Greco-Roman mask theatre, and the various Renaissance gesture-based schools and even the recent "elocution" training programs. But they have a surprising number of modern offshoots (most of which don't have formal names). Some technical actors remain gesture-based, in that they carefully study how a person behaves physically -- down to the smallest facial tic -- and then train their body to do it on cue. These are the actors you see working in front of a mirror all the time. Another group of technical actors are language-based. They go through their script, diagramming sentences and underlining important words. If an actor asks you, "Which is the most important word in this sentence, 'run' or 'not'?" you're probably dealing with such an actor. Technical actors are wonderful in that they can truly turn it on and off, repeat action, and are basically programmable like robots. Their great weakness is that it's extremely easy, if even one small element of their performance is off, for the whole thing to feel very artificial or insincere. Now, all that said, the ultimate complication is that in all my time I've met maybe two dozen actors who truly belong to one and only one of these schools. Most actors have a concentration in one school (or sub-school) and a smattering of training in most of the others. Ultimately most actors use their own unique hodgepodge of techniques to pull off their performances. Acting techniques are constantly evolving as actors share tips and training. So, ultimately, my advice is always to direct by sharing your interpretation with the actors. Since the dawn of the art form, actors have also done a breakdown of the script and interpreted it, so if the actor is a solid, professional actor and you're not getting the performance you need, the disconnect isn't probably in the acting technique but more likely in that you're reading the scene differently.

Auditions for non-dialogue characters are quite common, so no professional actor should be fazed by not having any lines in an audition situation. As for what to have them do, that depends on your directing style. You need to see them do something that lets you know that they can give you the performance you need. For many directors, that would be to have them do one of the key non-dialogue scenes in the piece. For others, having them improvise something would be better. For me, I like to have a conversation with them and give them some direction to follow to see how well we communicate (and, yes, for a non-dialogue role I would give them silent actions, as it's actually quite challenging for many actors to perform without having words to use as a crutch). Just be up-front in your breakdown that these are roles with little or no dialogue, so no one feels deceived when they get the audition materials.

Don't blame yourself for that. The leading name in how to direct actors is guilty of telling directions not to tell the actors what result they want. I've always found a mix of all the above is the best way to get it. "I want you really angry and to stomp your foot on this line, so maybe it's as if she reminds you of your abusive kindergarten teacher, or perhaps you go from a 'mold' to a 'smash'..." until I learn how the actor is working. But I have the advantage of being both an actor and a director.

I've never done this, but most consumer cameras' night-vision works by having a near-infrared lamp on the camera, which the red chip is sensitive too. When in "night vision" mode, the camera is actually just taking the red information as grayscale, and adding a gradient map (usually green) to it. Therefore, lighting the scene with a single red source close to the camera, dropping to monotone, and adding a green gradient map in post should give you a very similar effect, but at the higher quality you expect from your Red instead of the poor consumer quality. At least, in theory...

I just want to say that personally, as a producer, I will bend over backwards to avoid re-hiring a jerk. I will bend over backwards in the opposite direction to re-hire anyone who maintained a positive, professional attitude in the face of the jerk. Unfortunately, I'm in the minority as far as my fellow producers go, but I prefer to keep the drama in front of the camera. Ultimately, it saves me time and money. So my advice is to politely register your disapproval. ("I'm here to work, let's work," is a safe answer to most of these situations. So is, "Really, that's not appropriate. Can we just do the job we're here to do?") Then do your best to cope. Even if you're being hyper-sensitive, everyone will appreciate your dedication to the job and learn that you've got different boundaries than everyone else. Also, try to ask who else is on the crew before accepting a job. Even if you end up taking it, having said, "I've had problems with so-and-so previously, but I'm confident I can be professional" before accepting puts the producers on alert to watch out for his/her bad behavior. If we don't know there's a problem, we can't fix it.

One thing you have to be very, very careful when directing actors is that this Meisnerian "listen and respond" school of acting is only one technique. Those who use it (well) give beautiful, naturalistic performances, but, yes, they have a problem repeating action. Directors who like to work with these sorts of actors also like to work multi-camera. However, there are many, many other acting techniques employed by professional actors that are purely technical. Nobody would ever accuse Michael Caine of failing to deliver nuanced, credible, moving performances, and yet he's capable of doing so without another actor in the room, just pretending to hear the other lines. My advice to you is -- assuming you're working with professionals -- is don't worry about how the sausage is made. Hire good actors. Give them direction. Let them figure out what they need to make it happen. Some will say, "it would help me if, in the closeup, you had the actual actor doing the lines instead of the P.A." Believe them. Some will say, "tell me what result you want, and I'll give it to you." Believe them. Now, if you're not working with professionals, you're going to have a harder time, and you're going to have to know how to do some acting coaching. What you sacrifice if you choose to use Meisner techniques is take-to-take consistency. Good editing can hide this. You may also want to study up on Michael Chekhov, whose techniques are frequently very effective at coaching a performance out of non-actors. In any of the above cases, when the acting is working is when you believe it. That's it. It's that simple. If an actor is listening and responding naturally, you'll feel it -- even if they're doing it purely mechanically. As an actor I always find it hysterical when a director says, "Yeah, you really felt it that time, I could tell," and I felt nothing. And very few actors will correct you.

Typically an actor-director is going to be very dependent on the playback, as they will not have seen the take by virtue of having been in it. This will slow you down. But you can help. You're used to watching for technical problems as you're shooting, but if you can be more astute about performance issues, too, you can pick up the pace of the production considerably. That's because if you've noticed that the leading lady lost focus halfway through the scene, you can save the time of the director watching the whole scene back again and noticing for him/herself. When he/she asks you if it was good for you, you can simply request another take instead of saying it was fine for you and waiting for the playback to reveal the acting problem. (The one time I was an actor-director, my one cinematographer got very good at saying, "technically fine, but I think you want another one," and it was much appreciated.) Some actors are very uncomfortable watching themselves and therefore have a hard time being objective, so once the director learns that your opinion can be trusted, a simple, "really, your performance was fine" when he/she isn't happy for no good reason can also go a long way to preventing you from getting mired. Also, be very firm that you want at the very least a comprehensive shot list and preferably storyboards by your call time each day so you can be setting up and lighting the shots even if the director disappears for wardrobe, makeup, rehearsal, etc. You'll find yourself needing to be more self-reliant than usual. The dark side of this is that with some directors, you'll end up doing all that work only to find that they're not happy with it instead of catching it early on as should be the case. So make sure you and the director are communicating well from the get-go. The better you plan, the smoother it will go. Those are the two big issues that I encountered. I'm sure my crew could give you a few more. :)