Telares industriales

Financing short films is often really what would be considered “fundraising.” Not everyone gets their script into a lab that un- derwrites the production costs, like I did with Dani and Alice. And even with Fox Searchlight’s foxsearchlab behind me I still spent an additional $10,000 in cash to finish the film. I shot

Dani and Alice on 35mm, whose budget I assumed would run a

little higher than if I was shooting digitally. But shooting digi- tally, as I found out making Happy Birthday, was still a signifi- cant financial investment.

The hype we’ve been hearing for the past several years is that the digital era is the democratization of filmmaking. Shoot digi- tally and cut your budget in half! Save time and money! So I did. And the hype is that you, the filmmaker, are your own produc- tion house. The camera is portable, the stock light as air and cheap as a pack of smokes, the software is user-friendly in post- production, and you eliminate several positions that you would have needed in post if you shot on film.

Not so. Not at all. Not without a significant investment of your time learning the intricacies of the technology.

It was the summer of 2008 and I was standing in the kitchen of filmmaker Joshua Leonard, moaning about making DVDs for festival submissions, and he said, “Babe, all you need is an Eric Escobar in your life and all things become clear.” And he’s right, and I do have one very clever fount of information—Eric Esco- bar—in my life. Whenever Final Cut Pro began blinking its er- ror message, “Roberta you are a loser. If you try to ‘submit’ this one

more time we’re shutting you down. Call Eric.” (Yes, it did), I sent

an SOS text message to Mr. Escobar and magically, within twenty minutes or so my problem was solved.

Filmmaker Eric Escobar (Night Light, Sundance 2003; One

Weekend a Month, Sundance 2005) shares his thoughts on why

you need to understand the process as you are budgeting and rais- ing money for your movie. I talked to most people interviewed for this book in person or on the phone, but there was no way I could ask my transcriber to fully grasp on the page what Eric had to say, so I asked him to write it down. Yes, you may have to read it twice to truly understand what he’s exposing. I did.

“The digital acquisition, manipulation, and distribution of the moving image has fundamentally and irreversibly changed the economics of film and media. More people are making more media, have more places to view it, while completely new types or motion picture media have taken

form on the popular culture landscape (most notably user- generated short form content spread via e-mail, hosted on video sharing sites aka ‘viral videos’). This is not democrati- zation of filmmaking, it’s the post-industrialization of media content creation. Films, whether studio-backed or indepen- dently-financed, and whether short or long form, were made the same way for the better part of a hundred years. An as- sembly line of technology and specialized skills was needed to create and disseminate content. Motion picture films required crews to build sets, hang lights and operate com- plicated specialized film cameras. Film post-production re- quired labs for the chemical processing of exposed film and the synching of sound magazines. Editing was done on heavy, expensive, specialized pieces of equipment operated by highly skilled technicians.

“However, it’s a mistake to think that a P2 solid state memory card has simply replaced a film magazine—it’s not just a swap of the tangible for the virtual. It’s a change from the fixed economics of physical assets to the constant flux of digital data. Once the technology for making films was un- tethered from the world of celluloid and chemicals and hitched to the electronic world, the practice and economics changed.”

Until recently, I would rather have driven 45 minutes to Santa Monica, where my editor lives, than learn how to accomplish small tweaks in Final Cut Pro. It’s not that I couldn’t learn how to use it, it’s that I chose to avoid anything that even smells like technology. I’m an artist, I cry. But as I mention in Ways to Save Money (pages 74–5) my students at Inner-City Filmmakers are the artists near and dear to Eric’s heart. He wants us to understand the technology— from beginning to end—because it’s through this understanding that you can not only be a better filmmaker, thus making a better film, BUT you can also save yourself thousands of dollars.

Eric explains how he managed to create his last short, One

Weekend a Month (again, read it twice, this time be close to your

Web browser so you can look things up):

“In 2004, I made an award-winning short film called

One Weekend a Month shot on a professional HD broad-

cast camera (Panasonic Varicam). What was significant was the workflow I utilized to get the footage from the videotape to a 35mm print. Panasonic has licensed the DVCPro HD codec to Apple and designed a video cas- sette deck with a Firewire port in the back. This simple collaboration between two technology companies made obsolete, a half a million dollars’ worth of video post- production equipment with a simple ten-dollar Firewire cable.

“I didn’t have to make dubs of my HD master tapes, or spend money in an on-line suite capturing my HD footage uncompressed. I was able to ‘ingest’ the original quality image from the HD master tapes onto inexpensive Firewire hard drives and edit in Final Cut Pro. Once I had my locked picture, I was able to color grade in Adobe After Effects and prepare a 35mm film ready image sequence using a free plug-in from The Orphanage called eLin. Adobe has since incorporated this functionality into the latest version of their application. Production, post and film out to 35mm was about $5,000. What’s most significant about this case study is that I was able to shoot and edit HD, and create a 35mm ready filmout for nothing, using off-the-shelf hard- ware and software. The only time there was a lab involved was in the actual transfer of my image sequence to a 35mm film negative, and the subsequent processing. People saw it screen on 35mm, DPs assumed it originated on 16mm, and audiences, even the highly educated ones at Sundance, didn’t seem to care.”

Using all of these inexpensive tools, a single artist, or small collective group of artists, can make a cinematic motion picture image indistinguishable from 35mm film for little to no cost. And this image can be shared instantly with a global audience. There is no need for a giant assembly line, a lab, and an army of specialized technicians. But, my friend, what it does require is that you learn as much about the computer and all its wonders as you know about writing stories and directing actors.

Get out there and find your own Eric Escobar. You will be forever grateful that you did.