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February 14, 2005

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Ask a Screenwriter	Ask a Director	Ask a Cinematographer
by John August	by Penelope Spheeris	by Oliver Stapleton
When starting out, did you ever have trouble finding motivation to keep working on rewrites? Doesn’t the same story lose its interest after about four drafts? --Brannek Good guess. Four drafts is about the right number. The first draft is exciting, bewildering and fresh. For the second draft, you have all sorts of brilliant new ideas and suggestions to try out, so that keeps it interesting. The third draft is generally damage-control from the second draft, where many of those good ideas ended up not working. The fourth draft, well… The fourth draft sucks. By this point, the intractable problems of your script are readily apparent, and you’re faced with either (a) writing around them, or (b) trying to tackle them head on. In my experience, while you should choose (b), you generally choose (a). It all boils down to two related questions: What script did you sit down to write, and what script did you end up writing? At this fourth draft stage, you have to really decide between Great in Theory and what Actually Works. If you approach it this way, you can sometimes gain fresh eyes on your script. Read it as if some other, lamer screenwriter wrote it. What would you do differently? Then, do that.	I have just funded my own independent feature length film, $40,000.00. How many set ups should I expect per day or per page? I am not exactly sure how to break those down. I am currently breaking down the scenes by location and how much time I have to shoot there. I have estimated 15 days of shooting for a script that is 102 pages long. Am I in trouble? --Kevin A hundred and two pages is a very manageable length for a feature script. A general rule of thumb in determining the length is a page per minute. Highly budgeted studio features shoot one to two pages per day whereas TV can shoot upwards of seven to eight pages per day. So if we’re talking expensive feature, fifty days would be a realistic number of shoot days. If we’re talking TV, fourteen or fifteen days is realistic. As you can well imagine there is a great range in the scheduling of a movie. The way that you seem to be setting up your shoot will require that you somehow have the skill and finesse to shoot with the lightening speed that is required of a TV director. Now there are ways to circumvent this problem, the most efficient of which is to closely examine and find pages that can be either shot with multiple cameras or fewer takes or somehow truncated to allow you to spend your time on the scenes which are really pivotal to the piece.	Wanted to desperately know how one shoots day for night? Would really appreciate if you could answer the same by giving suitable examples (which I could check out hiring DVDs) of how a particular scene that was meant to be night was shot during the day. --Arun The key question is: are you finishing on digital? The amount you can do with “film only” technology is a lot less than with digital/digital or film/digital. I guess we should start using the expressions DDF, DDD,FDF and FFF like they do for CD”s. (day-for-night is well discussed on the CML website (Cinematography.net) so take a look there also): So for FFF, you can shoot 2 stops underexposed with as many grads as you can put in for sky. It only works in the country where there are no light sources, unless you can make lights that look bright in daylight (there’s the sun to compete with…), Use no 85 to make the image cooler/bluer. Light your foreground actors with strong lights or mirrors bouncing the sun. Many old John Ford westerns used campfire scenes shot Day for Night. The fire usually looks weak and overall the scenes look artificial by today’s standards.. but then they are usually badly timed on DV or telly so you can’t really tell how the original looked. For FDF (in other words with a digital Intermediate), you can put the sky in the frame because you can separate it in the timing and make it dark. This opens up a lot more possibilities. The sun can act as a “moon source” by timing it cooler and darker (you can do this in FFF too). You still have a problem with light sources because they might have to be put in digitally (like a lit window), making the process expensive. Still might be cheaper than shooting at night. For FDD or DDD, the same applies. There is still no real way of shooting cities in the day and making them look like night, for obvious reasons. If you take a look at The Van (dir. Stephen Frears) - if you can find it! – you will see a lot of scenes around a Chip Van. These were all done in a studio with the wider shots done “Dusk for Night” on location. Try and see which are in the studio and which are on location!
John August's screenwriting credits include Go, Big Fish, Titan A.E. and both Charlie's Angels movies. His current projects include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tarzan, and Corpse Bride. He also maintains a screenwriting-oriented website at johnaugust.com. Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, John earned a degree in journalism from Drake University in Iowa, and an MFA in film production from the Peter Stark program at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles. Got a question about screenwriting? Send it to Ask a Writer.	Penelope Spheeris made her feature film debut with The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), an energetic documentary about the L.A. punk scene in the early 1980's. She has since directed a number of diverse projects, including Wayne's World (1992), Suburbia (1984), and The Boys Next Door (1986), as well as completing two more films in the Decline series (The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years in 1988 and The Decline of Western Civilization Part III in 1998). Her most recent feature, We Sold Our Souls for Rock 'n' Roll, debuted at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Got a question about directing? Send it to Ask a Director.	Oliver Stapleton, B.S.C. has photographed dozens of critically acclaimed films, including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), The Grifters (1990), The Hi-Lo Country (1998), and The Cider House Rules (1999). He received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his work on Earth Girls Are Easy (1989). He is currently filming Casanova (2005) with director Lasse Hallström in Venice. If you are considering working in the movie industry, Oliver Stapleton has written a brief guide available at www.cineman.co.uk. Got a question about cinematography? Send it to Ask a Cinematographer.