In critical discussion about movies, “loud” is a synonym for “dumb.” It’s Michael Bay, Wolfgang Petersen, everything exploding and Holywood generally revelling it its own lack of substance. Conversely, silence is often deemed virtuous by default, a sure sign that the filmmaker is too busy thinking to worry about a soundtrack.
It’s a specious stance, considering that the most significant moment in the history of motion pictures remains the advent of the talkies way back in the ’20s. Cinema may be the art of telling stories with images, but sound is what brings those images out into the audience’s space, the element that most forcefully creates the illusion of three-dimensionality and the only one that can, when loud enough, literally move the audience.
The relationship between noise, space and narrative was the focus – or more accurately, the target – of Live Images 6, the second of two events at this year’s Images Festival that featured live musicians testing the boundaries of image art. Curated by veteran Japanese sound artist and current New York resident Aki Onda, and subtitled “Some Cats From Japan,” the evening saw three members of Japan’s renowned, avant-garde noise scene taking the stage at Toronto’s Vatikan to wreak aural terror on a much larger audience than you’d expect for this kind of thing.
The event’s programme was structured to start with both the quietest and the most overtly cinematic performance. Kanta Horio took the stage beside a large projection screen showing the plain surface of a wooden board. At first the purpose of the sceen was evasive, as Horio hunched over his equipment and a nervous ticking noise began emenating from the Vatkian’s speakers. The clicking came in starts and stops, like glitch music sped up and freed of the constraints of beat-driven repetition, sometimes evoking a kind of abstract rhythm and other times acting as a suite played in pure texture.
The source of the noise soon became apparent on-screen: a small segment of a metal paper clip slapping the surface of the board, its fits varying in intensity and volume depending on the current being fed into an electromagnet hanging just above, plugged into a power amplifier receving audio signals from Horio.
From there, audio and visual elements began to work in harmony, as the artist composed and choreographed a minimalist drama that emphasized the mechanical foundations of film, the fundamentally plastic nature of narrative and the primal power of noise in creating physical and emotional response. Accompanied by the amplified sound of metal on wood – frenzied when Horio turned up his audio signal, delicate when he laid off a little – the little paperclips on screen served as a miniature sketch of cinema’s naked bits, the cogs and reels that rely on electricity to transform them into communicative and evocative stories. The projection screen provided both the final filter and a kind of playful reversal, positing the primacy of light in cinema’s visual manifestation while relying on sound, input through the magnet via Horio’s amplifier, to bring its tableaux to life.
This set-up uses more paperclips simultaneously than were used at Live Images
The result went beyond inviting anthrpomorphism. By adding metal bits and varying the current, Horio was able to create the the illusion of conflict and resolution despite his “actors” being inanimate material and their interactions requiring no analogue with human relationships. As such, the dance of the paperclips, invested as it was with both tension and ability to evoke ambiguous yet genuine emotion, suggested that actors are largely a luxury in the creation of cinematic drama. (Tell me you wouldn’t love to see a canteloupe or tape meaure replace Tom Cruise in Mission Imposible 4.)
The latter half of the evening was equally cerebral, if a hell of a lot louder. The two artists that followed EM#2 were more in line with the stereotype of Japanese noisemakers as dudes primarily interested in shattering your molars and prompting unintentional bowel movements. It’s worth noting that by the end of the second set – according to the program book, a lovely 20 or so minutes of “Whirr Extreme Optical Noise Core” – it was a lot easier to get close to the front of the Vatikan stage (and speakers).
Said noise core was provided by Atsuhiro Ito, founder of Off Site, a Tokyo club/free space where a particlar style of noise improv (called “onkya” by some) has developed. Wielding his own invention – a device called the Optron that looks something like a cross between a light sabre and a guitar – Ito delivered the night’s highlight performance, wrenching squalls of fuzz, hum and scree from his instrument like a skilled torturer. The noise was generated by a fluorescent light tube, then processed and amplified to extreme levels.
Where Horio’s examination of the physical and visual power of noise was subdued and elegent, Ito was looking for pure impact. With the Optron casting a sinister glow up into the recesses of his Druidesque parka, the artist thrusted, feinted and whirled with his instrument, leaving no mistake about the ability of light to affect the auditory senses. Removing even Horio’s simple paperclip dummies from the equation, Ito explored the potential of pure light to create drama through the interplay between its visual and aural manifestations.
Many of the same themes were explored by Taeji Sawai, the night’s final Japanese cat, who performed a ritualistic routine with glowing orbs followed by a bit of straight sonic sadism. However, his set also drifted the furthest from issues related to cinema, and so will be left at that for now.
In addition to ringing ears, the evening provided a way into a discussion of cinema as a varied sensory experience, going beyond standard notions of image-driven narrative. Which is to say, next time you throw on a copy of Kurosawa’s Ran, resist the temptation to be wowed by the colours, costumes and landscapes, and instead close your eyes to see how the director’s use of howling wind and hissing rainfall scuplts the dread-laden mood. Or, next time you’re in the theatre, forget for a second about whether the hero will get the girl, and sit back to see how the whirr of the projector and the buzz of the light play with the sound of gunshots on screen. Because sometimes it really is worth remembering that it’s only a movie – not to comfort yourself, but to be amazed by the power of cinema to take electrical pulses, frequencies and some transparent plastic and churn them into things like laughter, sadness and love. And, for jaded noise-haters, to remember that sound is only ever as dumb as what it evokes in you.
Think of other films of similar genres, styles and budgets, and find out how they did at the box-office, who distributed them, and what were the pros and cons of each. The Internet is full of web sites that can help you.
Apart from helping you to make decisions during development, having done some market research will impress upon any distributor that you end up pitching your project to that you’re serious. They’re not going to be dazzled by your encyclopedic knowledge of box-office grosses of the films you’ve checked out, but they will be impressed that you’ve actually done some market research, and it should improve your relations with them. The signal you’re sending out is that you’re not just a bunch of wannabe filmmakers – you’re a bunch of wannabe filmmakers who are taking this seriously, and know that “Show Business” is a small part “show,” and a larger part “business.” As long as you have your facts straight, it should give a distributor more confidence in you and your team.
The other market research is used to determine what you plan to do with the film once you’ve completed it. Is it a festival film, or is it wide release? If it is a festival film, how does the schedule of festivals jive with your projected completion date? It’s all fine to say that you’re aiming to open at Cannes, but if you plan to finish your film a month after Cannes is over, you certainly aren’t going to wait until next year to spring your creation on the world. Is your film straight to video, or is it going to be strong enough to release theatrically? In either case, which distributors have shown strength in releasing films of your nature? Who do you think would be good to work with?
Personally, I find research the best part of development, and is indicative of one of the reasons that I love this business: you’re constantly being exposed to different worlds. I once helped the development of a script that involved, among other things, taxidermy. While the story was rollicking and fun, it still felt dry. We did a little research on taxidermy, and came up with dozens and dozens of little-known facts and oddities of the business. Of the thirty plus details we gleaned from our research, maybe one or two found their way into the final draft. But those little details gave the story just that much more authenticity.
The easiest (and laziest?) way tot do research is on the Internet. But I’ve found that the most valuable research that produces the most compelling details is when you interview people face to face. It’s human nature: people like to talk about things they know about. Their stories don’t always end up on the internet, and in interviewing them, you can gear your questions directly to ideas that you have in your script.
For instance, if your story takes place in a bowling alley, you’d better find out if you can cut a deal with ‘your friend of a friend of a friend’ who owns a bowling alley. If much of your film takes place in the country, can you really afford to put a cast and crew up regarding meals, accommodations and all the perils of being on a location shoot, or can it be so close to the city that you can travel each day? If your story is based on a true event, will you be able to secure ‘life rights’ agreements in order to proceed? How much will your “E&O” insurance be if your script is based on a true story? As with any kind of research, the more thinking you do ahead of time, the easier the production is going to be – and the more realistic it’s going to be.
The quickest way to find out how much your film will cost to produce is to hire a Production Manager to budget and schedule it. This might end up costing three thousand dollars or so, but if it’s done during one of the first drafts, then you’ll be able to adjust the script – and ultimately the budget – well before your run off to try and secure production financing.
Now that you’re armed with some research and a well thought out outline, you’re ready to plunge into the first draft. Don’t bother with numbering scenes – save that for the final shooting script. Bearing in mind that one page of screenplay is equal to one minute of screen time, aim toward writing a script that should be no longer than ninety pages. Try to bring your first draft in at under 120 pages – and start trimming from there (possibly according to budget notes).
A legitimate feature film has to be at least seventy-five minutes long. Add a few minutes for head and tail credits, and you can push it to eighty. I believe that for a first feature, the shorter the better. You simply won’t have the money to produce much more than eighty or ninety minutes. And the odds are that the story itself may not be strong enough to keep an audience interested for longer than that.
For anywhere from two to five hundred dollars or more, a professional script reader will give you a two to five page critique of the project. Ideally, you should get the opinions of two or three readers. You’ll notice that there are similarities in their various takes on the project, and you should both address the concerns they raise, and fortify – or at least don’t cut out – the ideas, scenes, characters, etc., that they like.
In addition to some professional readers taking a look at your script, you would do well to hire a professional story editor. A good story editor will charge between two and three and a half thousand dollars, and will basically give you a much more elaborate critique of your script. They will go through the script with you page by page, character by character, plot point by plot point, and will try to squeeze the best material out of you that they can. A story editor can be brought on during the outline stage, or later in the process - the earlier the better. They will generally work with the writer through two or three drafts of the script.