Catch Up

Okay, it's been a little while since a post. That's a combination of me being lazy, me being out of town, and me having a lot of work from school. But there's a lot to cover so let's get into it...

I was mistaken about 507 from the previous post. Let me explain how it really works. It essentially meets 3 times a week: for me, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday (different for other production majors).

Wednesday is always Cinematography. The professor is, again, an actual working cinematographer. He's done movies you've heard of, and has been working in the business for a long time; there seems to be no shortage of these kinds of people willing to work at USC. The class seems geared towards showing us the actual workings of cameras, beginning with 16mm film cameras and moving eventually to showing us how to work with our HD digital cameras that we will be making our first and second projects with.

Thursday class is always Fundamentals of Directing. Just like wed. it's taught by an actual director. It started interestingly, and is already an exciting class to be in. You would think that a directing class would be more free form as the skill is far less technical than cinematography, but our professor seems very interested in giving concrete examples of ways to direct better.

Monday class is rotational. We just finished our 2nd class of Producing, which was intense. Our second day was a full one. We started the day with pitches, 2-3 minutes of one student standing before the rest and trying to convince them that their idea for a movie/television show/web show was a great one. Our professor had us do it rapid fire, in a random order, but I have to say I learned a lot from watching others pitch.

It's completely baffling but the moment anyone got into any heavy story details, even if it was an interesting story, I found it difficult to keep track. I mean sure, if I only had one person to listen to I'm sure I could keep it in my head, but because we had so many you really only had time to remember a few striking images. With that little amount of time it seems you have to create some dramatic or exciting images inside your listener's head and work from that. As cliche as it is, the old "imagine Pirates of the Caribbean meets Lethal Weapon!" or "it's a modern day telling of three little pigs but THIS time the wolf is the hero!" works all too well. Also pre-casting your characters is amazingly effective, "imagine Robert Downey playing the devil may care Doctor..." and so on. It creates an image in the listener's head and that seems to be what matters in such a short time period.

After pitching, we discussed a short story as if we were going to turn it into a film. People had different ideas about where to place the exact story in time; keep it in the 60s or move it to modern times as well as stylistic choices on ways to differenetiate it from other Teen Dramas. Our professor then told us about making the actual film itself, which he did in the early 80s I believe. You can google it the story is "Where are you going, where have you been?" by Oates and the movie was called "Smooth Talk" and starred Treat Williams and Laura Dern.

Finally, we did a mock production meeting for another of our professor's works, an episode from the tv show Invasion. We were all assigned positions on a production team, A stunts man, constumes, transportation captain, hair and makeup guy, special effects, visual effects, prop master, line producers, unit production manager, 1st assistant director, 2nd assistant director, and director.

Again, this was an elightenting experience. No one had a real good handle on how the meeting was to be run. I was randomly assigned to be the Director, and after checking with our professor I was charged with galvanizing the rest of the group to make sure everyone had their stuff together. I think we ended up pulling off well enough. Everyone had something to contribute, and was prepared to talk about the show from their position's point of view. We ran a little slowly but that was to be expected; it was the first time most of us did anything like this. It was a similar situation to the pitches in a way; we were thrown into the situation and did our best, being corrected at the end and asking questions at the end.


Alright, that's enough. I have a little more prep to do before heading to the 2nd class of cinematography, and I'm hungry. More later. I'll try and post our syllabus for each class in the next post.