STUDIO GOALS, AIMS, DESIRES
My choice to participate in this studio relates to the fulfilment of the goals and aims which I hope to achieve through the completion of the Bachelor of Communications (Media) at RMIT. The degree, which I selected for the option to participate in a Cinema Studies minor, I hoped would provide me with an opportunity to develop my theoretical skills in cinematic analysis while also gaining some experience in film and media production. Upon the completion of my degree, I hope to be comfortable enough in my skill set that I could comfortably apply for work opportunities involving film and television production.
To date, however, while I have had some experience with production, various limitations have led to the vast majority of my experience involving remote production techniques. Where in previous years similar units and courses would have provided the opportunity to gain practical skills with equipment in hands-on environments, my experience of these units has involved me using iPhones and lesser quality recording equipment in hope of achieving similar professional outcomes.
While the remote production experience has allowed me to develop other technical skills, particularly post-production skills, in order to achieve my portfolio aims I now feel the need to pursue projects independently of the university course offering. To gain practical and genuinely professional short film-like content for my portfolio, I will need to endeavour to achieve such in my own time. The experience which I have acquired, however, has not allowed me to become familiar with the pragmatic aspects of production. I do not have an understanding of pre-production and production processes adequate enough to be able to execute portfolio tasks in my own time.
I hope that my participation in this studio will fill that gap. Through this studio and its focus on the pragmatic elements of film and media production, I am seeking some insight into the processes required of me in order to be able to effectively plan and pursue future projects, particularly where these projects will most likely be self-funded and therefore have considerable financial constraints. Further to this, I hope that through workshopping a hypothetical project I will be able to complete the studio with a near industry level script that I can continue to develop in my own time and, eventually, put into production as a project for addition to my portfolio.
RECENT LEARNING
I had a very limited view of what micro-budget film production would present itself as prior to engaging with the exercises of the studio. My expectations were such that the professional quality and overall standard of micro-budget productions would be considerably lesser than that of the cinema that I was familiar with. These preconceptions were developed as a consequence of my interactions with the exploitation cinema of the 1960’s, which was generally of a very minimal budget with which I struggled to engage with or have an affinity to.
As part of our tutorial exercises, the participants were invited to watch micro-budget films and consider what the production processes of these films might have entailed. It wasn’t until we watched and unpacked Chloe Zhao’s film, The Rider (2017), that I came to realise the extent to which my preconceptions of the micro-budget film were misinformed. Prior to viewing the film, I had assumed that micro-budget productions would always bear an amateur-like quality. Not only did this film not have said quality, but I found myself deeply engaged with the film as a viewer, to the extent that I forgot I was supposed to be watching with an awareness of the fact that I was watching a micro-budget film. In addition to this I had not prior to our tutorial committed myself to any further research into the budget and financial constraints of the film, nor the measures taken by Zhao in order to minimise the production expenses of the piece.
Upon my realisation of the budget of the piece, my expectations of micro-budget cinema were drastically reshuffled. It was revealed that the ideas I had pertaining to the micro-budget had me holding onto the belief that the produced films would possess an amateur quality which would inevitably make the film appear unprofessional and therefore would not be able to sustain an audience’s engagement as a serious cinematic and/or artistic piece. Thus, I realised in watching and inspecting the production of the film that a small budget is not synonymous with an unprofessional film. There is a point at which a budget may be small enough that the technical aspects of a film may need to be subject to some sacrifice, however there are many available affordances which allow one to maintain the professional integrity of a film without the budget that is provided to larger productions.
Further to this, I hadn’t anticipated that single-location films may still afford a wide array of creative liberties and opportunities. Another film we were invited to watch as part of the studio was Rodrigo Cortes’ film, Buried (2010), however in viewing this film we were also asked to consider the ways in which the film could have been produced within a micro-budget. While the actual production budget ended up being two million dollars, the initial production models saw the film costing roughly five thousand.
Similarly to how I approached my viewing of Zhao’s film, upon reading the premise of the film I hadn’t anticipated that I would be able to feel a sense of sustained engagement with the plot on account of the fact that I’d imagined the cinematography, plot and other cinematic techniques to be repetitive and uninteresting. My expectations were low but far exceeded. Despite the spacial confinements of the film, it undergoes a progression in the filming techniques used that replicates a change in setting – stating with predominantly extreme close-up and point of view shots, before moving into some panning and zooms within the box and eventually even a pan away from the box so that it recedes into field of blackness, each change in the filming technique refreshing the viewer’s perspective and understanding of the space.
This has revealed to me that, while I had assumed single-location films and shoots would come with unavoidable cinematographic hindrances, the diversity of the cinematography that is available to the film-maker is not actually subject to limitation, but can still be both creative and interesting should one have some flexibility in their creative thinking. This realisation was furthered by later viewing of the short film Krista by Danny Madden, in which the film features a bathroom scene where a character speaks to themselves in the mirror, shot with the camera slightly canted, close-up and at a low angle. The shot is unusual for the film conventions, particularly of that kind of location, and reveals in a less extreme environment the potential for visual diversity in locations that may seem to be difficult to create sustained visual interest within.
RESEARCH – RELEVANT FILM THEORY
I began my research seeking out further information on production, however eventually found myself reading on film theory and critical understandings of what it means to make an amateur film, the line which distinguishes an amateur film from a professional film and how an audience’s engagement is affected by a film’s perceived professional quality or lack-there-of. My learnings in this process I think have prompted me to consider theoretical questions which will later guide my thinking in pre-production considerations as we move forward in the studio.
The majority of my reading related to the film theory of Andre Bazin and a philosophical discussion of what it is that a film seeks to achieve. For the purpose of the essay which I focused on, Andre Bazin of the Ambiguity of Reality, writer Pierre Solin focuses his analysis of Bazin’s critical work on the notion of realism on account of the fact that Bazin’s cinematic philosophy was such that he believed photography and film to be the only means by which reality could be adequately captured and translated. Consequently, Bazin often determined the value of a film on the basis of the degree to which the film met the standards of realism. This notion however is difficult to consider in a black-letter sense due to the fact that it assumes that there is a definitive and definable ‘reality’ and rejects ideas of subjective experiences of reality.
While this discussion is largely anachronistic, as Andre Bazin wrote predominantly on French cinema during the mid-century and the modern cinematic landscape, common themes/genres, and technical practices produce cinema that does not necessarily perform mimesis, it brings to light questions of how one can achieve a film that feels realistic, and explicates the importance of a sense of cinematic reality in creating a film. For the purpose of this blog post, I am going to focus primarily on film which is designed to feel as though it is taking place in our real world as opposed to a fantasy world. People who produce films for the purpose of creating a realistic environment have the ability to “modify the real” (Solin, 113) and therefore have the responsibility of determining what is required in order to replicate a reality effectively.
Where later philosophies of reality and film theory relating to the cinematic experience acknowledge the subjectivity of the experience of reality, one is left wondering how best to recreate a biassed representation of reality so that it not only feels genuine but also is able to be appreciated by the masses. Low-budget film may be at a particularly high risk of falling into representations of reality that are not quite adequate enough to create a believable cinematic environment, due to the fact that limited financial resources may lead to sacrifices and shortcomings in production. Those shortcomings lie in sets, actors employed, audio quality or any other aspect of production and may ultimately impact the overall quality of the film, the ability of the film to create a sense of real and therefore audience engagement.
While this particular vein of my research didn’t provide me with any practical knowledge that I can apply to upcoming projects or script writing throughout the course of this unit, it has led to my being more acutely aware of just how important it is to be aware of the fact that, as a film-maker, I act as a modifier of a reality, whether that be mimetic or not, and it is important to make considered choices in this modification process in order to create a sense of reality that is engaging and believable.
REFERENCES
Buried. (2010). [Film]. USA. Rodrigo Cortes.
Krista. (2020). [Film]. Danny Madden.
Solin, P. (2016). Andre Bazin, or the Ambiguity of Reality, In: The Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology [online]. Edinburgh University Press, pp 110-122. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1bh2k1w.
The Rider. (2017). [Film]. USA. Chloe Zhao.