About myself, Arctic Sounds

December 2nd, 2009 by Zach | category: on topic |

Now that I’m just about finished making Arctic Sounds, I figure that I should tell you all a bit about myself, about my first feature, and about how we made it.

When I was 10 or 11, I read Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez’s book about how he made El Mariachi, and, like a lot of people, I thought “this is how you make a movie.  You save some money, get a few people, a camera and a microphone and you shoot it and you edit it.  And that’s it.”  After I read that book, I was determined that some day I was going to make a movie using this method.

I drew stick figure comics when I was in elementary school, and when I was in junior high I started making animations in PowerPoint (setting frame times to “0 Seconds” and moving objects between frames like in cartoons).  When I was 16, I stole my mom’s digital still camera and started making stop motion animation using action figures and shooting at 12 frames per second.  I shot about 40 minutes’ worth of stop motion (about 28,000 frames), and then I went to college.

I thought for a long time about going to film school, but decided against it.  I watched a lot of short movies and found that, while the ones made by film school graduates tended to have better lighting, there appeared to be no correlation between whether or not I enjoyed a movie and whether or not the creators went to school for it.  So, I figured that people–though they might get better with experience–were really just born good or bad at making movies, and I didn’t want to spend four years learning only one thing just to find out I was no good at it.  Also, I figured that since the people that were bad at it continued to try, it isn’t possible for a person to tell whether or not he or she has any value as a filmmaker.

And so, with these three things in mind (1: I had to make a movie, 2: going to film school had no effect on a person being an interesting filmmaker, and 3: I was in no position to judge whether or not I was one of the select few with talent), I decided to go to college (the regular kind).  I also figured I’d give digital cameras four years to get better before I tried to make a real movie with them.  When I graduated from high school, I went to Reed College in Portland, OR, and got a degree in physics.  I wrote one short and one feature-length screenplay while at Reed, but otherwise I just put movies out of my mind and focused on my work.

I graduated from Reed in 2007, and got a grant from the College to adapt my senior thesis for an article in the American Journal of Physics.  I had an office at Reed for the summer to write the paper with my adviser, which took about a month and a half to finish.  I used the remaining month of my summer in the office to write my second feature-length screenplay, Arctic Sounds.

After four years of devoting myself completely to physics, I had to stop and decide what I wanted to do with my life.

I finished the script and at the end of the summer I got a job working on a computer simulator.  I liked the script I had written, and decided I had to make it.  From August 2007 to August 2008 I worked during the day at my first ever full-time job, and I worked at night to put together what would become my first ever feature-length (and live-action) film.

Casting took forever.  At that point, almost all of my friends had degrees in physics, and none of them knew people that acted or made movies.  I spent nights researching cinematography techniques and going to local plays.  I got a book about sound recording for digital video.  I used craigslist to find local actors and auditioned them in empty classrooms in the Reed physics department.  I wrote emails pretending to be my friend Dewey so that it would look like there were more people working on this movie than just me.

I started securing locations (the script took place half in Portland and half in Seattle), and I wrote an email to Connor, my friend from high school, about looking for a place for me and my very slowly growing cast/crew to crash in Olympia (on our way to Seattle).  He put me in touch with his friend Sophie, who I had met once and who occasionally did media production with people in Olympia.  I talked to Sophie over email, and she agreed to come down and do sound recording for my movie.

In August 2008, having assembled a cast and rehearsed all the scenes, I quit my job (after giving notice a few months earlier), and shot the film.  I directed and did all the camera operating and lighting for the movie while Sophie recorded sound.  Basically, Sophie and I worked like a two person documentary crew (though the style of the movie is more like the New Hollywood films of the 70s or the independent movies of the 90s).

After an exhausting 21 day shoot (during which time I got more exercise than ever before while getting 4-5 hours of sleep every night), we finished the production on September 1, 2008.  Since then, I’ve spent over a year doing the editing, color correction and sound design for the film.

During my time working as a computer programmer, I managed to save around $20,000.  I spent about $10,000 of it on the production of the film, and have been living off the remainder of my savings while I finish the movie.  That money’s pretty much gone now, although I’m going to start working at a new job on Monday to begin replenishing it.

These days, editing is pretty much done (I say “pretty much” just because I might make some minor changes as I watch the movie with different people and get feedback), and we’re finishing off the sound.  It’s taken a long time, but I’m happy with the end result.  I still don’t think that people are capable of really judging their own work, but I don’t really care any more.

I’ll be glad to be done with AS, although I’ve worked on it so long that it’s oddly depressing to stop.  I don’t know what else to do.  I’m writing another feature right now.  I’ll let you know how that goes.  I’ve had the goal of making a movie for most of my life, but I never really thought about making two of them.  It should be ok.