Author: AJDorseyfilms

Business of film Reflection

“I’m just a simple man, trying to make my way in the universe”

— Jango Fett (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Dir. George Lucas)

Photo from behind the scenes of The Mandalorian

When I started up my film MFA at Full Sail in January 2020, I had certain expectations for my 2020, but I didn’t know many specifics, and I certainly didn’t know I’d basically be in quarantine for 10 months while taking my classes over zoom. So as my initial goals for this class included making a press kit, a poster, and a trailer for my thesis film, this class and year didn’t really work out that way. I did end up being part of a feature film which I believe we’ll be able to finish relatively soon. In this class, I definitely learned a lot about how to market a movie and myself as a filmmaker in addition to a lot about filmmaking as an industry rather than as an art-form. That’s important for me as I’m hoping to make a living in it. I included the above quote as I too am just a simple man who wants to live his life and make a living doing what I love, which could include bounty hunting like the Fetts if I’m able to get a job on The Mandalorian or any of the other 10+ Star Wars projects Disney announced recently. Business of film had a lot of practical knowledge for me including that I’ll definitely need a lawyer in the future if I’m ever signing big contracts or at least someone to help me with taxes as most of that goes right over my head. There was also a lot I was already familiar with as I’m one to follow a lot of film news anyway such as the recent move by WB to put all its 2021 movies on HBO Max on the same day as the theatrical release. Based on what was talked about in this class as well as what I already know, I’m very hopeful that the insane amount of movies and tv shows in development means there is an opportunity for me to get my foot in the door of the film industry and force my way in however I can. If I don’t have a career in film in 5 years then it’ll be only my own fault, just like Jango Fett not moving out of the way of Mace Windu charging at him with a lightsaber leading to his head getting chopped off.

FPT3 Post-Production Reflection

As an aspiring video editor, Post-Production was obviously a class I’ve been looking forward to since I got to Full Sail in January. Back when I made my goals for each class in Mastery I only had a rough idea of what I would be doing in each class, so my goals were a bit vague. Also, when I made the goals we had yet to be in an endless lockdown due to the Covid-19 virus which pretty much canceled our thesis projects we had planned early in the year. 

As such, my first goal of finishing a rough cut was definitely predicting where I’d be at in my thesis film. Despite that, I have been editing a feature film that we shot over the summer and have finished the assembly cut and about halfway through the rough cut. Also, I reached picture lock for a short film I shot last month so I accomplished this goal.

While I do have the book, “In the Blink of an Eye” thanks to a previous class, I still have to read the book. The rest of this goal I think I’ve accomplished as I’ve learned a lot more about Premiere Pro and am starting to learn more about Media Composer and am planning on getting certified in it by the end of my time at Full Sail.

The last goal of using feedback effectively has been accomplished the best I could considering I don’t get as much feedback from my classmates as I’d like and often don’t get much from faculty either, depending on the class. This month especially I wish I could’ve gotten more feedback on what I have worked on recently as, like I said earlier, I’m hoping to get into the post-production field so this is the subject I most want to hone my skills in. 

Reflections on Cinema

by Anthony Dorsey

            As a beginning filmmaker, it is important to be able to make your movie look the best it possibly can without breaking the bank. Robert Rodriguez understands this better than most and certainly better than I and others I know personally have done in practice. As Rodriguez described in the two short documentaries I watched, The Robert Rodriguez Ten Minute Film School and Robert Rodriguez – Ten More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shoot Out, when working on a low budget you want to spend as little as possible to make the best film you can make while also retaining your creativity. 

            In the Ten Minute Film School, Rodriguez went into detail on how he made El Mariachi on a budget of $7,000. Some of these cost cutting measures included filming with no sound so he didn’t need slates, had cast double as crew, reused props and vehicles and cut around it, and saved film by not shooting master shots and not cutting if someone screws up like in the shot when the actor ran up the stairs and failed to throw the case onto the next floor. These tactics to shoot cheaply are very useful for me in my own projects as in my latest short, The Loop which I directed, shot, and edited, I would discard angles I knew I wouldn’t use in the edit including master shots when I felt they weren’t necessary. I also only used things I had in my apartment (where I shot it) and things someone helping me brought over. To contrast that, on another project I’m currently involved in, there are people making big purchases for the film without saying anything as if they expect a bigger cut of profits (if we even get any) despite us all contributing to the budget and trying to keep spending to bare minimum. As Robert Rodriguez said “if you want to make a movie [for] a really low budget, you can’t spend on anything. You have to refuse to spend [on anything] …Think of a creative way to get around your problem and keep your money in your pocket.”

            In his Anatomy of a Shootout Documentary, Rodriguez goes in detail on the making of the opening sequence of his film Desperado. One thing he says early on in the video that I found interesting was when you hire a storyboard artist that artist is basically directing the movie and creating the shots for you, so it is beneficial to draw on your own to retain creative control. Throughout the rest of the video he details an alternative method for those, like me, who can’t draw, which is video storyboarding. He basically took a video recorder and walked through the scene with Antonio Banderas and stunt people/crew in the order he wanted while recording in the way he wanted to shoot the final scene. I find this method great as it makes all the time spent planning the scene and rehearsing more efficient by making it double as storyboards. I did something similar on a past short film where I was DP where I would put the other crew in the positions the actors would be in when we shoot and had them pose for visual storyboard shots which would help me easily set up the shots on the day of filming.

            These short documentaries by Robert Rodriguez were very useful and informative and has made me want to watch more of his films as I have only seen a couple. The films he described here I’d especially like to see as I don’t think I could ever pull off what he did for $7,000 budget, but in any case I’ll be sure to keep in mind what he talked about here if I ever have to shoot an action scene on a low budget.

Bibliography

Rodriguez, R. (Director). (1998). The Robert Rodriguez Ten Minute Film School [Documentary Short]. Los Hooligans Productions.

Rodriguez, R. (Director). (1998). Ten More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shootout [Documentary Short]. Troublemaker Studios.

Movie Review: The New Mutants (2020) Dir. Josh Boone

As a comic book fan, I was starting to think this movie was never going to release. It has been constantly delayed since its original date in 2018 and when COVID-19 struck I was sure it would just be dropped on Disney+ or another streaming service. That is not the case. For the first movie I saw in a theatre since they closed in March, was it any good? Was this a good cap on the Fox X-Men franchise or did it go out on a whimper? Probably more the latter.

            The New Mutants begins after a tragedy that leaves a young Mutant named Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt) in a strange facility with four other mutants; Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton), and Roberto Da Costa (Henry Zaga); with the mysterious Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga) as she helps them come to terms with their abilities all while they encounter strange apparitions and their greatest fears. In addition to controlling their powers, a major theme of the movie was that we all have good and bad inside of us and it’s up to us to go one way or the other. Of the ones I’ve seen, I believe this was also the first superhero horror movie and it is packed with jump scares and creepy imagery, though not as much as I expected.

            In the first act, I was expecting more character build-up as it is an ensemble movie, but the focus was mostly on Danielle and Rahne with some good scenes with Illyana. Throughout the movie Sam and Roberto seemed to be only there to round out the team and when they had scenes showing backstory for them they felt very shoehorned in and out of place. There’s an early scene with Sam where he has a vision with his dad which I didn’t understand and probably could’ve been moved to a later point in the movie when it would have made more sense. There is also a good romantic element between two cast members, and a less developed one between two others, which had some of the best acting in the movie and felt very genuine.

            As the movie progresses, the characters and the viewers start trusting Dr. Reyes and her “superiors” less and less. This culminates in the reveal of who her superiors are which most X-Men fans should know, and it was a genuine surprise for me so I won’t spoil it. Sadly, they’ve planted a seed with that which will never grow since this is the final movie in this franchise thanks to the Disney/Fox merger.

            The third act was quite good and is where characters like Illyana shined as she seemed to be the closest to an actual superhero this movie has (despite being a murderer). It was also cool seeing how each of their powers came into use in a fight, although there’s never that kind of The Avengers like group shot. Still, the connection between the new mutants was easy to see by the time the movie ended.

            One thing I appreciated in the movie that I know would be useful for the project(s) I’m currently working on, is the fact that the movie is pretty much only set in one location. That was definitely a factor in keeping the budget low, although there is some impressive CGI and vfx during the horror scenes and the third act. The set design was also minimal as it was a sterile hospital though there are a couple of rooms they go in that have more personality like the hidden club house where they use a lie detector on each other. 

            The cinematography was fine, it didn’t have much that stood out to me. There was one part in the third act when Illyana was using her powers where it cut between two locations without changing the angle that I thought was pretty cool. Similarly, the music was passable and didn’t have anything that would get me excited enough to but the soundtrack. The dialogue also lacked subtext and pretty much led you to know exactly what characters were going to say or do and often made characters seem stupid especially with how others don’t believe when some of them say they encountered strange things happening until pretty late into the movie.

            Like I alluded to earlier, I believe the editing could’ve been improved, especially with how long they could’ve been tweaking it with all the delays. Some of the scenes felt out of place like nobody watched the whole thing in one go to see if it all made sense. It also would’ve benefited from spending more time with the ensemble early on with more scenes focused on each of them or even like a montage of what they do every day to show more of their unique personalities, especially Roberto and Sam who only started to get mor screen time at the halfway mark. 

            All in all, I think my favorite part of this movie was the movie theatre popcorn I’ve missed so much. Next to that I thought Illyana was very well portrayed compared to her comics counterpart (she is the only one I’m familiar with so I can’t really judge the rest). There were several other elements I enjoyed such as the romantic subplot and the action and horror elements, but overall I’d say it was just pretty good. If you’re desperate to return to the theatres like I was then at least wait for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. That should be much better than this. 

For my own project, I’d look at this movie as an example of what to not do with the edit while also realizing how smart they were to place the film in one location which I wish we did for our film and I’ll definitely keep in mind going forward while making zero/low budget films.

Rating: 6/10

Experimental Filmmaking

I think starting this class I started to get excited again as I was before I was starting at Full Sail. The last couple months during lockdown have really demoralized me, my classmate, and to an extant the professors. Now that the re-opening has begun (too soon, in my opinion, but that a whole other matter), I was happy to finally be able to have a class where we can shoot projects again and even meet up with classmates with is helpful for both class and life. 

Due to the group limit of 3 people and the continuing low access to equipment and locations, I had the idea to make a stop motion video using some of the many Lego figures and some sets I have here at my apartment. For the video, my part was production design, DP, and some directing in that I built (literally) the set that we shot on, set up the lighting and shots, and moved the Lego minifigures on the set. As I write this, we haven’t finished our final video and Jon and Brittany are still editing. Soon we will have some reshoots for missing shots and a couple shots that didn’t work in the edit. If we wanted to be really meta I’d try to get a joke about the Justice League reshoots in there, but that’s too much at this point (just like those reshoots as well, I mean 70 pages of script for the reshoots and cutting a 4 hour movie down to two including those 70 minutes? Insane). I did have some ideas that made it into the script like the Snyder Cut and Crisis cameo jokes, but the script overall is definitely Jon’s. 

            So far, I think the video itself is turning out very well, despite some communication problems and lack of sleep starting to tear us apart. I’m confident it will all work out though as I think we work well together as a group which is why I sought them out to form up in the first place. Since the film isn’t finished yet I can’t say it’s how I would’ve hoped, but the most recent rough cut left some elements to be desired, though it’s mostly temporary stuff that’ll hopefully all be worked out in the end. So far, though, I’ve learned a lesson I already knew, which is stop motion takes a very long time, but specifically if I do another like this I’d plan to break up the shoot into several more days than the few we used and try to shoot as many scenes in one go as I can and save alternate angles for other days so then I can see a more complete edit earlier on and plan better for the rest of the shoot. It’s also very tiresome and repetitive to shoot a scene several times from different angles in a stop motion. 

Story Development For Film

Another class at Full Sail down and so is another month of quarantine. Like last month this class was entirely online and I feel like this class was hit much differently than the last one. In Directing Talent, it was clear from the get-go that the class structure was gutted by the removal of on-campus labs and events like the casting day and simply doing projects as a group. This month, though, felt more like quarantine had just finally caught up with everyone and it seemed like everyone was either burned out on motivation and didn’t want to put much effort in or were burning themselves out on numerous projects as they didn’t want to do anything else as they came here to be filmmakers. Personally, I’m at the point where I came here to be a filmmaker but I also didn’t move to Florida just to do online classes for several months when I came here to get hands on time with equipment and locations for filming that I don’t normally have access to. Plus, without any filmed projects in development I haven’t had anything new to cultivate my editing skills since March. Being stuck in quarantine alone has definitely not done much for my morale and motivation which had only just started to go up leading up to my move to Florida. 

Talking specifically about this class, as described by a classmate, it felt like a recap of what we have been learning at Full Sail thus far. There hasn’t been an abundance of new information, rather, we went more in depth about things in story development that we should already have some grasp of. This makes this class feel like we’re treading water due to the last class also being adapted for online learning to feel almost like a continuation of script writing as instead of doing the labs where we would have worked with actors to learn more about the directing process we pretty much fine-tuned some previous scripts as well as edit existing scripts for the purposes of adaptation and adding subtext to neutral dialogue. This class also felt like an extension of that as we spent several days workshopping various scripts we wrote even one, like mine, that we weren’t planning on pitching for thesis. The workshops were helpful, and I got some great feedback for my tv series idea as I needed to work out a lot of it as a concept outside of the first act of the pilot that I wrote so far. The assignments also helped me develop this idea further including delving deeper into the protagonist and the world in itself not to mention developing a theoretical pitch keynote for it so I can narrow down the look of the show and what the series will feel like as well as what can be expected from a given episode and how it could possibly be filmed and produced. These assignments and workshopping have helped give me more motivation to develop this project further even if I leave full sail with just a completed pilot script that could be useful for the future. 

What this class hasn’t helped with is deciding on a thesis project. Before this class even started I’ve been hoping that we’ll be able to film something for thesis as I’m not confident in myself as a writer enough to write a feature film script that I would be happy with by the end of the year nor is writing why I came here. No, I’m hoping to get on another of my cohort’s thesis project and be the film editor and/or a camera operator. After the last, and only, project I’ve filmed at Full Sail I don’t think my path is leading towards my being a Director of Photography. Rather, editing is my real passion. The problem here is that everything has been locked down since mid-March and I haven’t had any new projects to edit, nor have I been confident in the ability to be able to even be part of a thesis production given the state of everything. Recently, I’ve become more confident we’ll be able to shoot something for thesis as well as other projects, but that’s only been within the last week. That means that I still don’t know who is going to pitch a project or what project they’re pitching. Hopefully that is sorted out soon so I can get excited to work on something again. In the meantime, further developing my series idea using tools from this class will be a goal of mine, if anything as a backup thesis project and at the very least something I can show employers in the future to show that I can write tv. 

One thing I’ve enjoyed from the lectures this month is the use of referencing clips from movies as well as watching some full movies and TV episodes and analyzing them as I always enjoy digging deeper into things that I watch and these times were no exception. Especially watching clips after going over the same scene in the script is very useful as I know I and others in my cohort have struggle with not directing on the page and knowing that we need to trust our actors. For example, we watched the diner scene from the end of Pulp Fiction which was mostly the same as the script but several lines were improvised or removed but if you just watch the scene itself it all flows perfectly and no one would ever be able to tell anything is missing.

In any case, I definitely learned more about story development through this class, although admittedly its mostly been outside of the lectures. The assignments, though, are useful so far to help me develop this story, which I suppose is the entire purpose of this class. As someone who wants to be a film editor, though, I hope soon I can get more experience at it and learn more on telling the story through the edit. Here’s to next month hopefully being the last class taking place entirely in my bedroom on Zoom.

Directing Talent Reflection

So, going into this class I knew I’d be experiencing like basically no one has before my in the master’s program at Full Sail due to the class being moved entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was right. Sadly, I feel like this class lost a lot due to this change as otherwise we would’ve had significant time in the soundstage and working with talent. Due to being by myself in quarantine, I wasn’t able to film the at-home versions of the major assignments and instead did the alternate script editing versions of the assignments which made this class feel like an extension of Scriptwriting back in March (which was also affected by the pandemic, but I feel wasn’t hit as hard as this class). I did find those assignments helpful especially in identifying subtext in dialogue that I had written and by adding subtext to neutral dialogue. 

            The lectures were interesting, but it was noticeable to me that pretty much everyone in my cohort has lost something by being forced off-campus and online as our discussions really died down as this quarantine progressed. I felt bad going through this class as I know that it could’ve been a lot better, though no one could have expected it to be exactly what it is meant to be given the circumstances. As for the actual content of the lectures, I did find it interesting getting more details on things talked about in previous classes such as casting and, as I mentioned, identifying subtext in a scene as well as characters’ objectives. Other than the lectures and assignments, I did enjoy the increase in number of guest lecturers (especially since we could join other classes’ zoom sessions with said guests). Steven C. Miller was an especially great guest as he seemed very open to being a useful contact once we graduate and are trying to get in the industry. Davey Jay was also a great guest as she was very knowledgeable on entertainment law and gave us a lot of useful legal info. All in all, this class had some good highlights, but depending on how the rest of this program goes, I’m highly considering auditing it in the future once things are more normal and I can get the most out of what this class was meant to be.