The Difference Between Expressing Yourself and Being Understood:

Thinking between set ups on "She Watches Blindly" Photo by Jesse Scimeca

I am at the time of writing this, deep in post-production on my first feature length film. I probably owe everyone a little bit more context about how it all came about and how it went but I’ll save that for another day. Over the last few months I have gone through a process of critique, sending out the cut in its unfinished state for feedback. I’ve asked for and received more feedback on this film than on any previous effort, and I am not even done yet. It has made me aware of a fundamental creative tension that I think every artist will have to deal with.

What is more important: to accurately express an emotion as you feel it, or to express it in a way that will be understood? This might sound like only a subtle difference at first, but it turns out to be quite significant. I remember the walls of my elementary art classes were covered with the truisms of our day. Color posters reminding one to “just be yourself” and “shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars,” and so on. I have nothing to dispute with the general consensus that children and beginners of all sorts need prodigious amounts of encouragement and positive reinforcement, but I fear that in artistic pursuits we might never outgrow this elementary view.

My rounds of feedback have taught me that mere self-expression is not always going to be understandable to an audience. Maybe the “just be yourself” platitudes that we were raised with miss the degrees of translation one must undertake to be understood. This introduces a challenge for an artist in a mass medium like film. It may be necessary to sacrifice a little bit of your own experience or your own vision; to alter it in subtle ways for it to be more understandable. There is a balance between this. How much you are willing to change your concept to reach more people, and how much you are resolved to stick to your initial conception regardless of the response you hear? Of course, you can’t just lie down and do every last thing that pops into the head of your viewer, but you might be just as foolish to utterly ignore the reactions you receive.

It may not be clear at first glance how these two things are in tension with one another. We might think the opposite, “the better and more accurately I express my inner state, the more people will understand me. The only difficulty is in execution.” It does not help that what I am suggesting here goes against much of the popular wisdom of our time. Beyond the encouragement we receive as children, many of the larger metanarratives of the day go against my suggestion. We’re told our own perspective is holy, and our intuitions are never wrong. We are in an existential struggle against The Man holding us down. We perceive that we are burdened and held back by voices of authority that want to crush our individuality and our ability to express our inner state. The goal, implicit and explicit, is to free ourselves from the chains of expectation, and to reach a state of self-actualization, where no barrier exists between our goals, our thoughts, and our ability to express ourselves. Sometimes the barriers between us and our goals are external. We might reckon that we have technical, logistical, racial, political, familial, or financial barriers, among others that prevent us from even beginning our quest. In the other case we might have internal, mental barriers such as neurosis, self-doubt, or other anxieties that we first need to overcome in order to reach our ideal state.

The trouble is that we assume, once we overcome these barriers, that our self-expression shall come easily, our vision will speak for itself, and our work will be celebrated simply because it is the representation of our personal victory. We assume that the mere sound of a solitary voice soaring above the rest shall make our imagined audience break out into spontaneous applause. “Just express yourself, and someone out there will understand you.” While this might be true to varying degrees, we damage ourselves with an overly romantic view of this process. That someone, in our heads at least, is ultimately most people, or perhaps more nefariously, the people who matter, not a few scattered individuals.

You might hear many a more seasoned artist lament, “I think if just one person understands me, I’ll be happy.” This is not true. We all desire to be understood universally but our varying levels of success make us settle for what we can get. It is those of us who have strived valiantly only to hear in response a frisson of indifference who utter these words. We know that we want more, or we wanted more long ago, but now, older and wiser, we know that few will understand us, and perhaps that is enough. After many works of personal significance and collective indifference, we perceive that which we did not at the outset: that our idiosyncrasies will alienate as much as they endear.

At this point, I fear I shall be misunderstood unless I make some clarification. I am not suggesting that self-expression is impossible or pointless in art. Rather, up to this point, we have been ignoring a key factor in our work: the act of translation.

Let us imagine for a moment that you are a desert nomad, and you are charged with uniting a group of separated tribes in order to defend your lands against invasion and subjugation. So you concoct a rousing speech, you tie all the histories of your people together in an immaculate metaphor with a beautiful and inspiring vision of the future. You climb the hill overlooking the camp and begin your speech. But there is a problem. None of the tribes speak the same language. The few who understand you are taken by your words and listen intently. But most lose interest in a few minutes and walk away, grumbling to themselves “what was that old nut rambling about anyway?” It may be the case that later, rumors would pass between the groups about the content of your speech. Those who understand it may later tell others how your words painted a bright future, and maybe a few would be convinced, but most would simply dismiss this with a wave of the hand and go about their lives.

In order to be understood, you needed to give your speech in a language that all would understand. But there is a problem with this. Not all the metaphors of your language will translate clearly. It is impossible that your meaning and intent shall be perfectly preserved. Some of these you will have to replace and carefully reword and other parts you may have to abandon wholesale for fear of causing confusion. The more that you know about the universal characteristics of the group, the less you would rely on your more idiosyncratic language to construct your speech.

It is not enough to express ourselves. We must do so in a way that can be understood. These should not be empty words. It will mean a real change in our creative perspective, a change in our priorities, our sensor, our metric of taste. We must think at every turn, that which is clear to us might not be clear to them.

In my own work, this has meant I have had to accept a certain level of compromise. That is a word we do not like these days. I know reasons why I have cut every scene the way that I have. But my reasoning does not always produce the desired reaction. Yet, if trimming a scene a little tighter than my own taste suggests gets the audience closer to understanding what I am hoping to convey, I won’t feel like I’ll have compromised at all. Part of maturing as a filmmaker is learning that it isn’t about you, it’s about the audience.

As I was thinking about this, I was struck by the thought, what if we took this approach not simply for the final stages of tweaking the edit, but back to the very beginning, back to our very first conception of our idea. Almost nothing would be untouched. This is not to say that one should just make work to please audiences and never challenge them in any way. It is rather to think of the work as ultimately not for myself.

I am beginning to suspect that we do not realize how difficult this is to achieve. It is as though we have been painting self-portraits all along and then we are surprised when we are met by indifference. We want to ask, “didn’t you see the subtle shades of color?” To which they reply, “I guess so, but it’s just another picture of your face.” We don’t mean to be egotistical, but everything that we have learned, everything that has been told to us as encouragement has emphasized nothing but our total self-expression without regard for who is looking or listening. The trouble is, quite simply, that we are weird. We each see something different in the world, perhaps that no one has seen before, and we cannot put it in front of an audience without any context and expect them to understand. But it would not do to simply throw some extra lines of exposition here and there, it would change entirely how we think about a story. We would be creating, not for ourselves and our own gratification, but for everyone else.

Now an innate fear might arise in us almost immediately at this suggestion. That our individuality, the very thing that makes our work unique will be lost if we do this. We might say, “you can’t know what other people like anyway so you better just please yourself.” The expectations of the audience are a moving target, which vary from person to person, across every metric by which you might try to group people together. So I recognize there is real futility in trying to please everyone, but if we just left things here we would be missing the point.

When Peter Jackson adapted The Lord of the Rings for film, we can be thankful that he did not treat Tolkien's opus as a playground for his self-expression. Yet none of this means that he did not trust his own metric of taste. It is just that he understood he was only the messenger of a story larger than himself. He became something less than the material, subservient to the lofty prose on which his films were based. None of Jackson’s previous films would suggest intuitively that he was the perfect fit for Lord of the Rings. Regardless, he valiantly served the story that came to him. His voice and unique perspective, though not at the forefront, make invaluable contributions. Jackson never failed to capture the visceral detail and the true horror of evil. Where a different director might have pulled many of the punches that make the films so engaging, he did not.

Of course, not every story is Lord of the Rings, and nor should it be, but that does not mean that we cannot strive to find both within the world and within ourselves, stories that amount to more than our own personal experience. We can turn our lens outwards, away from our own lives. This will not prevent our voice from coming through. We are still weird, even when serving a story bigger than ourselves. Each individual director will not fail to notice things and fixate on little details that no one else will notice. We needn’t worry so much about our self-expression. We cannot escape ourselves, barring some external circumstance, our voice will always come through our work, precisely because it is ours.

When we think back to our favorite films of childhood we might find that it was precisely those universal stories that inspired us. When we hear a friend lament “they just don’t make good movies anymore,” we suspect that they likewise have such stories in mind. These are films like Jurassic Park, where Spielberg, and all involved, express a palpable love of the material that the audience shares: the simple awe and wonder of seeing dinosaurs come to life. None of the sequels ever captured this feeling or had the same kind of universality.

Now “mature filmmakers” might have tastes more obscure than the likes of Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, we have some handy euphemisms for broader audiences like “appealing to the lowest common denominator,” but this is not what I am suggesting we do. What is it about Lord of the Rings or Jurassic Park that makes these films so memorable after all these years? It is not the low things that are universal but those things that are highest. Yet we scarcely ever strive to capture these things. Perhaps we don’t feel worthy of it, or maybe we’ve stopped believing it.

One of my favorite films from the last decade was Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Yet this is by and large a film that only filmmakers or cinephiles can appreciate. I hope I’m wrong about that, this is only my anecdotal report after all, but there are very few people whom I can talk to The Master about. This is a great shame. We should question what success we will have if a filmmaker as great as PTA can make such a film as The Master and be understood by so few. Do we likewise want to set out on this path? Do we simply demand that audiences understand us and hope they catch up with our taste? We can demand all we like. Most of the audience will leave the theater grumbling “what was that old nut rambling about anyway?”

I hope there are always difficult filmmakers out there, who like PTA, explore the depths of the psyche in ways that few can follow. But I wish there was a film like The Master that I could also watch with my mother. There is something of my grandfather in Freddie Quell, the central character in The Master. Like Freddie, my grandfather wandered for several years in post war America, working odd jobs, getting into fights, getting new jobs, holding them for a couple days. There is much in The Master that is poignant and relatable, and fills a gap in the cultural memory of the early postwar years. But there is much more that holds it at an impenetrable distance. It is not that I wish The Master were a different film, but I cannot help but wonder what such a film would be like if it could be translated into a narrative comprehensible to a wider audience. (I emphasize again, I don’t mean this “appealing to the lowest common denominator” stuff, I mean the opposite.) If we want film to continue to be the influential medium that it has been, we might need more of the latter and less of the former. It is precisely our greatest filmmakers who we need most to make this effort. Francis Ford Coppola once did this and the result was nothing less than The Godfather.

- Bryan

Making The Emissary

The Emissary was such a massive effort for me that I thought it would be worth the time to put some of the journey down on paper. If you've arrived here without seeing the film, I encourage you to watch it first, here!

I also cut together some of the b-roll from the film shoot and my time building the set into this video. I was so emaciated when I recorded this interview! Or go directly to vimeo here.

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Before I discovered filmmaking, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I loved space; to read about black holes, neutron stars, and Europa, Jupiter's strangest moon. Mostly, I dreamed of going there -- of floating above the Milky Way, able to take in its whole spiraled shape with my own eyes. But I do not regret that to study such things was not ultimately my career path. I realized that a filmmaker is much more likely to travel to these places than a physicist. For there is no other person who can more vividly appreciate how stuck we are here on Earth than the physicist.

The Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Courtesy of Hubble.

Prior to The Emissary, I had never been able to marry my love of space with my love of filmmaking. I spent the better part of 2016 writing a feature script The Basilica, which is in many ways the predecessor to The Emissary. Upon finishing The Basilica, also a film set on a space ship, I knew the visuals would appear too ambitious and difficult to achieve on a limited budget, so I set about finding a cost effective way to prove that they would be doable in a striking and effective manner. Out of this, was born The Emissary. I did not want The Emissary to be a simple scene or two from The Basilica. Rather, The Emissary is a standalone film with a tone and message unique to its story and to my mental state at the time.

Nonetheless, The Emissary allowed me to test a scaled down version of the methods and techniques that I plan to employ on The Basilica.

So began 2017, which shall always be for me, the year of The Emissary. Making a film has a way of taking over your entire life, and never was this more the case for me than on this film. Indeed, it is only now, two years later that I am truly stepping out of the shadow of this project.

The first three months of 2017 consisted of planning, learning new software, and laying the groundwork for what would come. I first approached Viviana Chavez, an actress and a good friend who immediately responded to the material and who I knew would be able to bear the burden of the central character, Liv Laika. Vivi's husband, Travis is incidentally a cinematographer and regular co-worker of mine. I knew the experience of our countless projects and years of lighting together would be invaluable to capturing the interior of the space ship. I next met with Sam Laubscher another talented cinematographer friend, and we set about creating a unique palette for the Earth portions of the film. In the mean time Holly Patterson, production designer on my SCAD projects, and I designed the look and layout of the spaceship in Sketchup. All the while, Matt Finley and I discussed how we would render the complex space imagery outside the windows of Liv's ship.

At the end of March we filmed at Lake Lanier on 35mm film. This was my first time shooting film for my own project and there is little I can say about celluloid that would be new. I simply echo what has been said about it by its proponents. It is beautiful, almost magical, and brings an entirely different energy to the process of film making that makes for a heightened experience unlike anything else. The look of film suited the memory-like quality that I wanted for the earth sequence.

It occurred to me that memories do not unfold like dialogue scenes from a movie. We often remember little snippets of what a person says and these snippets are not married to close ups of the person speaking to us. We remember rather, the visual palette of where we were: the details, the wind, the weather, a smile. We remember how we felt.

In April began the real work of constructing Liv's spaceship, the set where most of the film unfolds. I knew the room in which we built the set would be key. Because of my greenness in set design, I knew I would need far longer than a professional crew to build the set. I also wanted to have the space available for an extended period so that we could take our time with production and have room for reshoots. On our thin budget, this ruled out any professional studio space. As it turned out, the best place to build the ship was right next to me, the garage of my parent's house. It was an environment that I had constant access to and for free. In indie filmmaking, I am constantly reminded of the Teddy Roosevelt quote, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Over the next four months, I made no less than forty nine trips to Home Depot. I learned how to build the set as we went along. The Sketchup model was the groundwork, but provided no basis for actual execution. I am a freelancer so any day that I was not on a job, I was building the set. Each day was new territory, a new challenge of measuring, cutting, painting, measuring again, cutting again, and so on, for months on end.

I was not entirely alone in constructing the ship. I was helped at key moments along the way by a great number of people. Justin Torrence helped me figuratively break ground on the first day of the set build with a crash course in carpentry. Phil Dunlop performed the nerve wracking drive across town with the massive cardboard sonotube that would become the Sleep Tube. My brother David spent his weeks' vacation putting in 12 hour days with me to construct the cockpit set. Jesse Scimeca built the entire corridor set for the ending scene, with minimal direction from myself. Matt Finley sacrificed many countless hours of sleep, compositing the visuals of the film for projection, on top of his full time job. Months later, and across the country, Brittany Ellis and Kyle Lammerding gave up their concert trip to complete the sound design in time for delivery of the finished film.

This is only a fragment of the full picture of effort friends and family put in; day in, day out toil through the hottest summer days. I couldn't possibly name everyone who helped here. Even my parents helped along the way, my dad frowning at my carpentry and filling in the gaps with his caulk gun. My mother worked many of the finer details of the ship, like the labels of the cockpit switches and the sewing of the translucent garden screens. With any less effort, the film could not have existed.

We built the cockpit on wheels so that we could transport it to other locations. This was our studio day. We filmed at BrandRED studios where we could have better control of the environment as opposed to the backyard of my parent's house.

I wanted as many of the film's special effects as possible to be captured in camera, without green screen, so this meant that the visual effects we created had to be completed before we began filming. The visual effects process is normally reserved for the months after the film is shot. This meant that we had double the pre-production workload compared to a normal film shoot.

So when it grew dark and the bugs came out, I would go inside, into the next room and hunch over the craft table where I worked on the miniature, a beast in its own right, but absolutely pivotal to the film's climactic moments.

The miniature is of a space station – actually a space elevator, which travels from orbit, down to the surface of an icy moon, where presumably, the people of Yaghan have taken up residence in a colony underneath the surface.

Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, served as inspiration for Navarino, the mysterious final moon of Liv's journey. This moon is covered in ice beneath which there is a liquid sea of water. Although it appears inhospitable, some scientists actually believe it is strong candidate to support life.

I wanted the space station to look unlike anything we have seen in a film. I wanted it to have the feeling of a massive oil platform at sea, with a strange, irregular shape, impossible to take in at a glance; a platform with no aesthetic concerns in mind, only brute function. In depictions of space elevators, we almost never see the rendering of the top. It occurred to me, the top of such an elevator would not be a simple door. It would be a great hub, like an airport, where ships could come and go. There would probably be staff and living space and a great number of amenities necessary to support the function of the station. By the time of the film, this station is abandoned. At this isolated moon of Yaghan, there is no need to go into orbit, no one to trade with, nowhere to go.

I first modeled the station in Sketchup, and then constructed it out of foam-core, styrofoam, and styrene modeling plastic. The stiff odor of the solvent which bonds the styrene forms together shall never leave me. I felt great dread every time I looked at the miniature, sitting unfinished on the desk. Of all the challenges of the film, I was the most skeptical that the miniature would be convincing.

Despite all this effort, we were not ready to film until September. The shoot itself is all blurred together for me, I remember it like one long day, but it was actually five. We wrapped the night before Hurricane Irma hit. I remember the scary drive across town to return the gear the following day, only hours before the storm arrived. We later shot several pick up days, and the final shoot day was not until late October, when we had our effects for the space station completed. It was not until this last day of shooting, when I held up the camera, looking through the cockpit of Liv's ship, where I could see the projected image of the station, that I thought, “Wow, we made that.”

Post production was completed in March, 2018, in time for our premier at the Atlanta Film Festival. After which, I continued to make subtle changes to the effects, the edit and the sound mix. I made my last and hopefully final changes as recently as March 2019.

Now after a year of film festivals, looking back on it all, I wonder about the take away. I wonder if the immense effort we put in comes through on the screen. Whole features have been made in the time it took for me to make one short film. I wonder if it was all worth it. The trouble with a project like this is that when you talk about it, you don't talk about the film and its story. Conversation just becomes about how difficult it was to make. “Wow, good job, that must have been really tough.” “Looked awesome, mate. Can't believe you did that in your garage!” Of course I appreciate these comments but I'd hate to say that all this was about was getting a pat on the back for a hard days work.

The Basilica looms large over the future. I am six drafts into the screenplay. I want to incorporate every lesson I learned from The Emissary. I now appreciate the challenges it shall present so palpably. But then, what about The Emissary? Was this stepping stone really justified as a film in its own right, or was it all just an elaborate screen test for The Basilica? And how long will it be before I can make The Basilica anyway?

When I have these thoughts I think back to an interaction I had following our screening at the Rome Film Festival. After The Emissary played, I was approached by a group of high school students from the audience. Their teacher bought them tickets to go to the film festival. (Props to that teacher!)

“Are you going to make a sequel?”

“Why do you think the people left the Earth?”

“What's on the other side of the door?”

“If I were rich, I'd give you a billion dollars to make whatever you want.”

Their bubbly questions and genuine interest must be among the most edifying things I have ever heard. For these kids, there was no question of the set or miniatures, or how we did it, or shooting with projection instead of green screen. For them, the world of the story existed and nothing else: a woman alone on a spaceship with only her memories and the fading hope of finding her ancestors.

- Bryan

ANOMIE: Do you need to reschedule your shoot?

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In the past, during the frantic scramble of production, I have found it hard to avoid my thoughts being pulled into a narrow avenue of tunnel vision. When I was a film student, working on my senior film, Anomie, we required a central location that we found nearly impossible to obtain. We needed a house that had character, that looked old and lived in; not a suburban cardboard cut out. We needed several days of unobstructed access, with owners gracious enough to let us film a night home invasion, shoot-out, and fire live blanks out of a shotgun. And of course being broke students, we needed to be able to do it for free.

This proved even more difficult than we could have envisioned; after months of preproduction, it was only four days before our prospective shoot that we settled on a house that would suffice. I remember loading up the gear the day before the shoot; a full box truck. Help was sparse, a few friends dropped by for a short time but most of the crew was in class or busy. I remember having a deathly feeling of dread:

This is going to be a disaster.

I had this feeling before. While most of the time everything went great, once, it went dreadfully wrong. Not since then had the feeling hit so strong. We learned that some of the neighbors didn't take too kindly to the notion of us filming, even though we had the express permission of the home-owner and the local police. Apparently these neighbors were prepared to raise hell anyway they could. As a director, I felt woefully unprepared. We were not only filming the shoot-out sequence, but a rather significant portion of the film. We hadn't spent enough time at the location to have a detailed plan for any of the departments. My producer, Oran Domingue and I, spent six hours straight working out a schedule to cram the whole shoot into one three day weekend. There was no margin for error. We certainly didn't want to deal with angry neighbors on top of that.

Twelve hours before call time, the morning before the shoot, my producer and I talked over eggs and bacon.

Do we need to pull the plug?

It is easy to lose perspective when making a film. Perhaps even more so as a student. The bubble of college life protects from finance, from clients, from fees and insurance, but there is often nothing to protect one from illusions of grandeur. One often has the feeling that the whole of one's career shall be determined by those few semesters.

We can all laugh and shake our heads in retrospect, but there is no understating how monumental even such a small project as this could feel when experienced from within.

This is me, my calling card. This is my statement to the world.

I have since concluded that no single work of art will ever be a full representation of an artist. A work can only be a fraction, a faint impression the creator left behind. It seems to me a folly that anyone should ever try to make such a sweeping mission statement. Not that one consciously sets out to do so, but I believe the intoxicating atmosphere of film school encouraged such thinking, or at least, did little to prevent it.

So, feeling the weight of eternal consequence on our shoulders, we discussed the possibility of rescheduling. We could seriously jeopardize our host's relation with her neighbors. The house wasn't the perfect location – it was a compromise. The schedule was tight; perhaps impossibly so. Our crew was too small. Only our pride stood in the way of realizing the blatantly obvious. So we had no choice but to humble ourselves as we drearily crunched on buttery toast and sipped our coffee black. Finally we had a realization. There was nothing truly preventing us from filming at another time. We had been thinking within the construct of film school. The semester was ending, I would be turning in my project half finished, but this is a film we're talking about. Damn the class, we have to do the film justice!

I want to concede that some people may have the opposite problem. Of course, it is just as bad, or perhaps worse, to delay, delay, delay, but that is an issue of the opposite nature.

My head hung low for the rest of the quarter. I was defeated. Classmates offered their condolences to me like I had lost a friend. My professor was understanding. So long as I showed up next fall with a rough cut, I'd pass the class.

I have since learned that there is no shame in pushing back your shoot so long as your schedule can accommodate it. But this was precisely what was so hard for us to discern. If you find yourself pondering the same question, it will necessitate a large step back; out of yourself, out of the immediate circumstance. You have to ask yourself whether the film can exist under different auspices than the ones that created it. If you and your collaborators are truly passionate about the project then surely it can. It might take a few phone calls to the key players; a good meal doesn't hurt either. In our case we found that the barriers we had perceived were more immaterial than we imagined.

If you decide to pull the trigger, try not to waste those precious days; put it into meeting with your team. Do those rehearsals with your cast that you always wanted but never had the time for. The worst thing would be to end up exactly where you started. Fortunately in the light of our past mistakes, we knew what we had to look out for.

Six weeks later I was stumbling over dolly tracks in a darkened house. Three AM, bright HMI lights bursting through the windows, I discussed with the cinematographer, Brad Watson over whether or not the muzzle flashes from the blanks would read on camera.

The location was magnificent, our hosts, impossibly hospitable, and we were in the country; in utter seclusion, an atmosphere highly conducive to film production. We were halfway through the climactic scene, it must have been about twenty five individual camera set ups in all. We didn't go to bed until the sun rose, but it was manageable.

This time we had planned extensively, we had a full crew, and enough time to spend the whole day walking through every set up, arranging the exact shooting order. None of that would have been possible had we stubbornly struggled on six weeks before, ignoring the bigger picture. There is no question in my mind that our decision to reschedule was the single most vital decision we made in the course of the film.

In all its flaws, and successes, I am proud of Anomie. I don't mean to wallow in memories in writing this. I have made other films since. They have been smaller – more intimate – better, I think. I plan to make many more. But I shall never have another senior film, upon which so many blind hopes, so many ambitions rode. Perhaps that is a good thing. - Bryan Anomie can now be viewed online. Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/211430939

#film #Anomie #shortfilm #filmmaking