Visual FX

I spent three years doing a Film and Television degree at a local university. The first year didn’t really have anything to do with film and television. This was because I started out doing a computer science course. I took electives in multimedia subjects because that was what I was interested in at the time. In one of those classes, we were able to take out a little mini-dv camcorder and make stupid little movies. Our project at the time was to make an instructional video and even though none of us had a clue about cars, we did it on how to service your own car.

The end result of that video was pretty average but I came away from that experience with some fond memories. Memories of a group of people working and bonding over the same goal. Right after that, I changed courses to do Film and Video. The only problem was I was halfway through the 2nd semester of my computer science course and had to wait until next year to become a film student. So in the mean time I absorbed myself in a self learning journey. I visited hundreds of websites and forums and got out ten dvds a week. I lived and breathed film before I had even started my film course.

When the new year began and I was officially a film student, I sat quite bored through the first lecture. The lecturer, even though she was bright and enthusiastic, didn’t say anything that was new and exciting to me. Perhaps it was because of the early morning start of the lecture or my laziness but I didn’t go to another lecture. That didn’t make it easy for me in the workshops as my lecturer was also my workshop tutor so she would always give me grief about not being at the lectures.

The semester went on and it finally came time to do our first short film. Because it was still our first year, we weren’t allowed to come up with our own idea but instead had to pick a script from a list of five that had been done by the previous semester’s scriptwriting class. The script that we had chosen just happened to be written by a middle aged woman who was in our group. Naturally she was the director, my friend the assistant director and I was the D.O.P or director of photography. I felt quite confident in the role, what with all those hours spent reading and asking questions and all the movies I had watched.

After shooting had finished and it came time to edit our master piece, a realisation came over all of us that we really didn’t know f*ck all about film-making. The direction was terrible, the acting was horrendous, the boom somehow managed to get in to most of the good takes and I learnt why “crossing the line” as a D.O.P wasn’t a good thing.

Did I decide to give up right then and there and take up computer science again? Hell no! Me and my mate sat in the editing suite for hours, cutting like madmen, learning all the important functions of Final Cut. If the acting was terrible, we’d just cut to the other actor’s reactions. If the boom was in the shot we’d add widescreen bars to hide it. If the 180° rule had been broken we’d flip the image around. We’d learnt that editing can make a terrible terrible film quite… adequate. And from there I was hooked!

When the 2nd semester came around, I confronted it head on with all the lessons learnt from the previous. This time we were allowed to come up with our own scripts and if our film was any good, it would be shown in a little film festival held at our uni’s tavern. That got me amped, my first film festival!

I joined a new fresh face group and immediately started to think of an idea before anyone came up with one. My pitch went something like… bad guy, who has been bad his whole life gets a magic book about karma that shows him the way to enlightenment. When bad guy figures it out and decides to become good he gets hit by a bus.

That pitch got me some laughs but then I was bombarded by questions. “What do you mean bad, like bush bad or hitler bad?”, “Why’s the book magic, does it talk?”, “How are we going to hit this guy with a bus?”. Being the person who wanted to take this film somewhere I explained that important phrases in the book would magically glow and I’d do the bus hit in post with After Effects. This despite the fact I’d never used After Effects before and thought it would be the answer to everything. Once I convinced the group to go with my idea, I quickly discovered that not only did I need to learn After Effects, I also needed to figure out how to plan and shoot the bus hit shot.

Why did I want to add such amounts of efforts into this short 4 minute film? I wanted to push this film above the others and give it a chance in the film festival.  I wanted to show off and figured no one else would be doing these visual fx type shots. So long story short, I learnt just enough of After Effects to complete the shots I needed. The film came third in the university’s film festival but I entered it into a national short film festival and low and behold it got in. Not only that but it won third place in the audience choice awards. Something tells me 3 is a significant number for me.

Since then I’ve gone on to work on many other short films, docos, and video projects. Some have been accepted into film festivals and won awards, some haven’t but when I think back to what was the most important film of all, it was the first disaster that turned out quite adequate. It taught me some lessons that no matter how much you think you know something there’s always way too much more to learn. Even now after four years I feel I have just scraped the tip of the iceberg even though I am multiples better now.

So begs the question, is film school necessary? When I think back to it, I don’t think I really learned that much from my lecturers and tutors. I’m not saying I didn’t get anything out of them, in fact they inspired me to try harder but everything I know came from mistakes and knowledge that is widely available out there such as the Internet, books and watching behind the scenes dvds. I think the most important of those is in making and identifying mistakes you have made so you’ll know next time to lift that boom a little higher or to never cross that line. Sure film school helps in supplying camera equipment and motivation to complete a film but if you’ve got all that then there is no better way to get better at your craft then to just get out there and do it, learn from your mistakes and other people’s mistakes. Read or watch things you are interested in but don’t get bogged down by stuffing your brain with too much information. Most importantly though is the old cliché… go out there and have fun because if you are not having fun then this isn’t the hobby or career for you.