Beyond the Still

I’ve been itching to enter Canon and Vimeo’s Beyond the Still film contest for months now. After I watched my friends Scott Brignac and Cody Bess collaborate on the second chapter, make the top 5, and have a blast, I knew that I had to do it. Now, I have never written/directed/shot/edited anything narrative before and I thought that this contest provided a great opportunity to try it out. I have been following the contest pretty closely and have voted for each chapter. I had been arm-chair quarterbacking from the sidelines and knew it was time to jump in and make a film. I promise you, my only goal was finishing. I wanted to try something new, make something that I could be proud of, and turn it in by deadline. I knew that anything beyond that was largely out of my control. To make the top 5 is a huge honor. There were some really, really strong pieces this round. I am interested to see what happens to the story from here and who the vimeo community will pick as the winner. If you feel that my piece is the direction you’d like to see the story go, please take a moment and vote! (just click the header above).

The “telephone” nature of the competition, I believe, is both the biggest strength (incredibly inviting for first time filmmakers) and its biggest challenge (good luck trying to tonally/stylistically make anything connect). Trying to logically (and interestingly) follow four other narrative pieces is quite tricky…you don’t want to simply follow the structure, but rather, want to insert your own ideas into the framework and to hopefully nudge it in a different direction. The trick is finding the balance. You want to pay respect to the winning chapters and to the fact that viewers are naturally going to be interested in what happens to the Cabbie at this point. Producing something that was a sharp divergence from the story and completely outside of the cabbie/bear/key/warehouse paradigm seemed to be disingenuous. So I decided to operate within the arc presented by the first four winners, albeit, with a bit of a different tone. I decided to thicken up the Cabbie and daughter characters…asking questions about why we should be rooting for them, why we are following them in the first place… The action that is taking place in the “present” of this story was pretty set at this point. Kidnapped daughter, weird beachcomber guy, “go to this address”, creepy warehouse, etc. I kept coming back to this thought that these kind of mystical/strange/sinister things don’t happen in a vacuum. Mystical begets mystical, sinister begets sinister. Choices tend to cascade exponentially. My idea was to explore what happened long before this particular few days/nights. What was the Cabbie engaged in, regardless of the reasons, that would have put him on a path to intersect with these bizarre characters/circumstances?  

Given that I had never written a screenplay before, my friend Dan Steele was my first phone call when i started thinking seriously about entering. I have known Dan since theater days in college and have always appreciated his writing (of course), but more than that, I knew that he would be a perfect person to bounce ideas around with. We would spend hours on the phone throwing out “what if…” questions, following the rabbit trails where they would lead. We discussed motivations and new characters and how to make this story move forward. Yet, we also began to try and fill in the structure with more emotional subtext. “Raising the stakes” as my theater professors would say. We quickly dismantled the first few ideas, realizing that that is where most people would stop (in a rush to start shooting) and we really spent a lot of time trying to think of ways to thicken the story and provide the filmmakers of the next chapter with plenty of fresh alley ways to explore.

First goal: map out the structure of the entire story (including our ideas), as it existed.

THE CABBIE (CH. 1 - CH. 5)

After we would talk Dan would go and format it all into an actual screenplay and send me drafts at night. Pretty soon we had a script:

Now, to this point any video work I have done has been mostly documentary/promotional pieces and mostly for musicians and labels. I have been overseas quite a bit shooting and telling stories of the work of NGOs, however this is an entirely different animal. I’d like to think that I am not unfamiliar with the theory of assembling a project like this. I have been engineering records for years now and to make music you start with the structure (writing), assemble your team and begin to layer part on part until it begins to take shape. Then you convene, make sure everything is heading into the right direction, then begin to fill in the holes and strengthen the weak spots…a guitar line here, a different fill there…then you take all of your pieces and edit them together to present a cohesive final product. Narrative filmmaking seems to occupy a similar space as making music, albeit with many more moving pieces… 

Friends were called, gear was borrowed, the script was printed out and away we went. My friend Andrew brought a jib down for the cemetery scene. I didn’t want to use a slider and I knew that I didn’t want to light heavily. I shot most of it natural light, mostly on sticks. Anything that moved was shot with a Glidecam2000. All in all, it took a few days of shooting here and there, a few days of pickups after I started editing, and a few days of editing.

A couple of photos from production:

I have a new respect for the difficulty of filmmaking, of continuity in non-linear shooting, and for how many people it takes to even pull off something small. I have learned an immense amount of information in just a few days of self-directed shooting. I am excited to try new pieces, to shoot, to direct, to edit, to create…i have always said that I view myself primarily as a storyteller and I am thrilled with the process of constructing narrative film. I might be hooked… 

Miracle from Ryan Booth on Vimeo.