Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The World Through A Lens

Seeing life through a viewfinder, as usual.
It's the end of a photography day, and I'm sitting with my laptop on my knees with the intention of sketching out how I eke a living from this particular endeavor. Tomorrow I have a video shoot scheduled; two for Friday.

Photography is always something I've enjoyed, although somehow I felt like it was a cheat as an art form. You just point the camera and snap - light and chemicals do the rest. That view gives very little credit to the critical role played by the consciousness that framed this particular slice of reality and found some sort of unity in it. Aesthetics is one of those airy, vaporous concepts that, like Quantum Mechanics, defies all efforts to pin it down.

Most of what I photograph is Real Estate, particularly residential. Could be anything from a city penthouse to a suburban McMansion - I've done them all. Today was a commercial property and a row house in west Philly whose residents didn't let the fact that a photographer was coming over stop them from throwing garbage and old clothes on the floor. The real estate agent seemed visibly embarassed.

Center City Urban Deluxe
It's actually a pleasure to shoot a nice property. Often - particularly in higher-end apartment and condo complexes - the model will have been quite fashionably staged, and shooting it can seem like shooting a magazine spread. My prefered method is to get a shot from each corner of the room. I use a 10 mm lens: extremely wide angle, but stopping just short of fisheye perspective.

This way, you not only get the widest view of the space, but you see everything at an angle, cutting sharply across the frame. These strong diagonals give undeniable energy to a frame, and are particularly useful devices for leading the eye from one region to another, from foreground to  background, of a composition.

Balance is another aesthetic principle I try to keep in mind. I imagine the frame divided into quadrants, and the task is to form some kind of symmetry between the opposite, diagonal quadrants. Say, for example, the lower right-hand corner of a shot is of a beach. Leaving the upper right-hand corner blamk sky would seem unbalanced.  How about putting some striking clouds there? Or a flock of birds? Or some structure in the foreground, like a boardwalk? Before long, you begin visualizing scenes not only as the scenes themselves, but as diagrammatic collections of shapes that must be held in balance with each other.

This is the easiest of the things I do to make a living, but also the least lucrative. Face it - it's just as easy for the agent to take shots of the property themselves. You have to convince them that you bring added value to the process taht's worth spending money on. Equipment helps - having a lens your average hobbyist wouldn't, for example. Or, of course, having a drone, which is becoming de rigeur for real estate photographers who want to stay competitive.

It's a tough, uncertain way to scratch out a living sometimes, but I am forming a goal to make it all seem worth it. Stay tuned.




Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Amazon Aestheticians of Princeton

Yes - Amazon Aestheticians of Princeton: formidable women wielding as their weapon the mighty laser abraser. I did a video - actually two - for these ladies today.

The video was for a new client of StudioNow's, who over the years have sent me a considerable amount of work. I'm always exceptionally excited to get a StudioNow job, because the pay is inevitably better, even if the video is essentially the same as a Yelp video.

This new client provides marketing and website-building services to doctors - sort of like iMatrix, except it pays a bit more. The job today was to shoot two videos for the same doctor, a plastic surgeon in Princeton, one for each of her offices. My friend Josh Staab came along to run sound and provide general assistance, a role he's been filling for about a year-and-a-half.

Now, not all the women were Amazons - just the office manager: a six-foot, dark-complexioned siren with a thick Serbian accent. A "real woman," as Josh said. The shoot was built around an interview of the doctor plus B Roll of the practice's machinery in use. There were more lasers there than you'd find in any two installments of either the Star Wars or Star Trek franchises combined. Plus, the office staff stripped down and took their places on the treatment table as stand-ins for patients while we shot the different procedures being performed on them. So basically, these ladies spent the workday primping and pampering each other while I filmed it. Not bad work if you can get it.

The day's shoot acted as a bit of a tonic to the bad news I reecived late last week: Destination America passed on the paranormal pitch that I made to them a week earlier. That was a bit of a surprise. When I spoke by phone to the manager of development at The Discovery Channel (which owns Destination America) a week or so ago, she seemed very enthusiastic about the concept. It fit right into their "space," she said, which is high praise indeed. Yet, in the end, they had a "limited number of time slots" to fill, and had to be "very selective" about the content they choose to take to the next stage of development. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

No matter. Jesper, my partner in Reel Stuff Entertainment, is adamant about going forward with a 10-15 minute pilot we shoot and distribute ourselves online. We demonstrate that there's an audience for this show, then go back to The Discovery Channel (or someone else) to see if they'll reconsider. Vince seconds this idea, and even suggests it might work as a Rabbit Bandini production. As they say - when Fate closes a door, she opens a window. Now the task is planning and preparing that pilot, which will probably start with a sit-down, on-camera interview with the "main character" of the paranormal show, just to get some video on him.

Stay tuned. This is one thread of the unfolding story of my life as a preditor, and we'll see how it develops.


Saturday, January 14, 2017

Hello again....

Jame Franco in The Long Home
So I was abducted by aliens, taken on a trip around the universe and, thanks to the dilation of the spacetime continuum as a result of my superluminal speeds, six years have passed since my last post.

Think that'll work as an excuse? No?

Okay then, the real reason I've been away from blogging is that I have no reason. I want to correct that and get back to blogging at least once a week. Hopefully more.

But I've been working. Prediting away, as it were. Doing the videos for Yelp, Zillow and the others, but I have to admit: that's been feeling more and more like a "day job" to pay the bills. The perks are still there - if I do a Yelp video for a restaurant, for example, the client will still likely as not feed me, as any good host would. There's no great ceremony involved: if we shoot a restaurant, the restaurant will want to promote its chief asset - namely, its food - which means that they'll make up some menu items for me to film. Then, after the filming is done, they'll feed the dish to me rather than simply throw it away. Not always, though. From time to time, they'll just whisk the food back into the kitchen after the shoot is done. Bastards....

Anyway, it has started to feel like a day job. How can it not? You do something for 12 years, it's bound to start feeling old. So I've been exploring other avenues of endeavor. Making films and videos for other outlets, for example. And, of course, writing. 

The big news has to be THE LONG HOME, a feature-film adaptation of a novel of the same name by William Gay which I co-wrote with my good friend Vince Jolivette. The film starred and was directed by James Franco, who is Vince's partner in Rabbit Bandini productions. Vince has produced a number of James' films, including SPRING BREAKERS, and was the screenwriter for CHILD OF GOD. I'm sure I've talked about him in earlier posts.

The way this all came about was this: Vince called me up one day out of the blue (which is how many of my stories involving Vince start out) to say he had this project he wanted to work on with me. Who am I to turn down a writing gig for James friggin' Franco, so of curse I jumped on it. Vince made the trip here to Philadelphia in late 2014 to outline the script and then, after he returned to Los Angeles, we wrote the script itself over the Internet, with Vince writing the first act, me writing the second act, and us tag-teaming the final act. 

I really didn't expect things to move as quickly as they did after that. After we came up with an acceptable draft, an opening apeared in James' schedule and THE LONG HOME was rushed into production. It was shot near Vince's hometown of Hamilton, Ohio, in May of 2015. It's likely to be released theatrically sometime in 2017, Vince says.

Adapting a novel is quite a unique challenge for a screenwriter. I remember being told once that short stories are actually easier to adapt into films than novels, and this experience has taught me why. There's just so much material that has to be jettisoned. And Long Home isn't that long of a novel. I can just imagine what they had to do with something like War and Peace.

Probably the first and foremost challenge is fitting the story into the standard three-act structure of a film. These days, many novels are written - whether consciously or not - in that format, and I suspect that the reason (aside from making it easier to attract film producers and screenwriters to the material) is that novelists of this generation have been reared on movies as much as books. That three-act format is written into their DNA.

Not necessarily so with The Long Home. Gay, a devotee of Southern Gothic writers like Faulkner, follows a literary tradition that isn't bound by the rules of Hollywood. In fact, Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness style almost precludes manhandling it into that standardized format. William Gay (who died in 2012) isn't as un-cinematic as Faulkner, but seeing his words transliterated onto the screen doesn't appear to have been that big of a priority for him.

And what lovely words they are. Gay writes in a visually rich style that recalls a languid summer afternoon in the South. His prose is poetic and dense, which rewards patience. A novel like this is not just a quick beach-day read. So how does a screenwriter transfer that emphasis on language to the screen?

What I did was try to pay close attention to the imagery being conveyed by the language. Images are something that can be filmed, and so gaining an understanding of the metaphorical lexicon Gay was compiling with his images was key to adapting the novel into a film. The rolling lineament of a western Tennessee landscape, the thrilling portent of an approaching thunderstorm, the way each relates to the myth-like story Gay is telling, with words so evocative you can almost hear the southern drawl in them  - picture that in your mind's eye, get that picture on the page and, hey, it's a wrap.

Alright, well, there are a few more steps involved than that (like hoping the director sees the images in the words the way you do), but it's a start.

And it was a start. I've since been hired to write a follow-up Gay project called LITTLE SISTER DEATH, and I'm flying solo this time - no co-writer. Vince also flew me out to L.A. last summer to do some script-doctoring on a Mad Max-like opus called FUTUREWORLD, and Vince assures me that a couple spec scripts of mine are in the production pipeline at Rabbit Bandini.

So, as they say in the TV biz, stay tuned. I ain't goin' nowhere.