New Book:

Practical Filmmaking Guide

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Endorsements:

'I’m a Directing Fellow at the AFI Conservatory in my final year. You came to speak with us a couple of times in the Fall, and I really appreciated your insights into the poet/engineer story spectrum. I found it such a useful framework!'

'I really enjoyed your masterclass on the story spectrum and found your way of teaching it very inspiring and insightful. As someone with a European sensibility at the AFI, it's sometimes a struggle to find how your stories fit into one category or another.'

'I was on your masterclass last year at AFI. Your class influenced me so much in some many ways. The idea of the elevated genre, the construct of the scene played a huge role in my thesis.'

‘As a filmmaking student The Story Spectrum has been invaluable in giving me insight and confidence in the development and production of short films. Rafael has given students a theory that gives clarity on who we can be as filmmakers and how to achieve a clear, powerful film.’

From The Author

I have always looked for a book on practical filmmaking that would give me direct answers and offer practical solutions.

Fast.

I have found a few, but they still appeared rather academic.

I have always wanted a book that would speak directly to me and guide me through the process of making a film that truly breathes. A book that would be my mentor and best friend. A book that would allow me to get the best out of myself. A book that would show me how to become the best kind of filmmaker: an engineer with a poet’s heart.

I could not find it, so I have written one.

‘The Story Spectrum’ is based on years of experience teaching practical filmmaking at some of the top film schools in the world and supervising hundreds of short films and narrative exercises.

Film school education is great, but it is expensive and time consuming. If you cannot go to film school but you are looking for a resource that will guide you through the process of developing and making a successful film, this book will do the job for you.

It is probably all you will ever need.

Introduction (Excerpt)

I have been asked - or provoked - to write this – so here you go. Please feel free to completely disagree. As we are being inundated with bland horrors, thrillers and other (mostly) illiterate nonsense maybe someone somewhere will find this useful...

So, let’s start with the basics...

Anything that you will find in the books by Alexander Mackendrick, Robert McKee or Lajos Egri is true. They are truly great books. They explain how to extract emotion, how to structure your text, and how not to be boring!

This book will try to answer a number of questions: How do I find a short film in me? And once I have found it, how do I get it ready for the scrutiny of a film camera?

But the fundamental question is: What kind of filmmaker am I today and what kind of filmmaker do I want to be tomorrow?

So I suppose more than anything this is a coaching manual, which targets young filmmakers whose primary purpose is to become a new kind of filmmaker:

An engineer with a heart.

Someone who is strong technically and better at engineering stories than anyone else. Someone who at the same time is sensitive and loves telling stories for the sake of telling them.

I am not going to offer useful physical exercises, neither am I going to advocate meditation (useful!) as others have done before me.

Instead, I would like to take you on a brief journey of discovering a short film inside of YOU.

I will try to keep it colloquial and simple, avoiding the usual screenwriting jargon as you can find it everywhere else.

But one more thing, before you buckle up and push off: you really must love telling stories.

I mean that in the most sincere way possible. You must feel like you were born to tell stories and you must know deep down that there is nothing in your life that will fulfil you until you tell a really successful story on the big screen.

That is the goal of everything that is said throughout this book.

Why make a short film?

So, you want to be a filmmaker. You want to be able to live off film-making (very few people actually do, contrary to what they might say). The first thing you need is a breakout film.

It does not matter whether it is short or long. I always tell my students to go for a feature if they are willing to consider it. Some do, others don’t. The ones who do have a special kind of confidence about them. The ones who don’t… don’t.

You see it in their eyes.

So, for the rest of us, how do you make a breakout short? Well, I strongly believe that as much as 80% of success is rooted in the concept stage.

Before anything else, the film has to come from the right place.

I have travelled to all major short film festivals in the world and have attended graduation showcases at some of the top film schools. I have always been struck by one thing: making a truly personal film remains the only way to truly stand out.

This is not to say that you cannot make a strong short sci-fi. This is not to say that you cannot drop as much as $1m on a VFX-packed short that will make everybody’s jaws drop. By all means, you can.

Yes, you can and often it is a very good way of showcasing your technical ability. In fact, some of my films have lost out on the festival circuit to some of those VFX-laden sci-fi films, which was always a bitter experience.

But I am often suspicious that striking visuals can often be a guise for not having much to say... But then, hello! Who said that a film director should be a philosopher? Well, actually, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Ermanno Olmi, Krzysztof Kieslowski, they all did...

If you don’t know who they were, you should.

Moreover, I do think that it is a little more difficult to make a stand-out short sci-fi film when you have no budget, and the no-budget scenario is a given in everything we say.

The other given is that your film should first and foremost showcase your technical ability as a narrative storyteller and a filmmaker.

What do I mean?

We all can spot a good storyteller. The way they tell a joke, the way they are able to pull on your heartstrings when they tell you of the time in their childhood when they found and loved a little dog… but then the rightful owners claimed it back… You know what I mean…

But what is interesting is that many good storytellers struggle to write a good script. Their scripts are properly formatted and look like scripts, but in reality they are not scripts… What do I mean by that?

When you read them it quickly becomes obvious that they are unlikely to withstand the scrutiny of the film camera. Technically speaking, their point of view is confused, the dialogue overwhelms everything else or they never turn the story …

I always tell my students that unless, technically speaking, the story turns, the film is not only going to be unworkable for the actors, but worse, it will not really require any directing.  

Let me explain. Imagine you are sitting in a car, hands on the wheel, ready to drive. However, the car is not moving, because the engine is off. You can sit there at the wheel making engine noises and moving the wheel all you want, but you are not really driving.

Only once you have put the engine into gear and pressed the accelerator will you be driving. The road turns, forcing you to engage, to drive.

Similarly, in film the story must change for the film to require real directing. This does not mean, as we’ll come to later, that you must pack your story with action. Not at all. The most promising way to move a story is to do it via changing relationships, but again, we’ll come to that later.

Let’s not get distracted for now.

So, if you want to establish yourself as a competent director, who will be getting jobs, your work should demonstrate a modicum of technical ability. It is as simple or as complex as that.

The five things that I usually look for in the work of young filmmakers are as follows:

1)    the ability to sustain a unified point of view;

2)    the ability to turn a dramatic scene;

3)    the ability to write effective dramatic performances;

4)    the ability to give the audience possibly the most attractive vantage point;

5)    honesty (I am not going to define it for you – whatever it means to you is what counts).

Other things may include writing effective film dialogue, which relates directly to the general understanding of the concept of subtext, pacing and, last but not least, understanding the concept of dramatic change.

However, the latter points are implied by the five basic criteria that I use to evaluate the work of young filmmakers.

You may have noticed that I seem to be suggesting that I attach little value to the filmmaker’s ability to create attractive mood or to prove the personal voice, but that is far from truth. In fact, I am a huge sucker for moody films with the strong personal voice, whatever the concept of ‘voice’ means, as we will explore later.

The bottom line is that I believe that the young filmmaker must focus on developing a storytelling technique first, before their personal voice becomes audible.

In fact, I strongly believe that the young filmmakers do not need to worry about having or not having their personal voice. I believe that once they have mastered dramatic cinema technique, their voice is going to emerge in all the different creative decisions they make as directors of their own films.

Therefore, I argue that technique should come first, before we try to become artists… Maybe we never become artists, maybe we are artists already… But like in all other arts, do we need the technique – actually a great deal of it - to express ourselves in the cinematic art.

We filmmakers are very arrogant.  I see more and more young filmmakers, who after a few months in a film school start talking about making their first feature film, although many of them have no other liberal arts training whatsoever. Most of them will have never written a readable short story, they will have never written even a one-act play.

What is equally bad, they do not play any music instruments. Musical understanding helps to develop the cinematic senses, as I will try to argue that cinema and music have more in common than film and literature.  

Also, many of my students try to make statements… All sorts of statements, in fact… About the futility of life, about politics, about the environment, about God… And although I sincerely admire them, as I myself was not able to say squat about politics or some other issues that they touch upon when I was their age, I often feel like by doing it too early they run the risk of doing more disservice to their causes rather than good.  

Although their attempts are admirable – after all, many of them are brilliant human beings full of eagerness and ambition – I do think that it is important to stress that to effectively tackle those concepts one must acquire at least an intermediate technical proficiency.

It is not good enough to intercut between the images of the political personality you do not support and images of riots, etc, only to make your point that a given politician or some other figure does not deserve the support some people might be giving them.

In fact, that rather technically naïve strategy is more likely to irritate your audience with the on-the-nose message rather than rally them to your cause.

Good intentions, passion and talent are usually not quite enough at the early stage. You need technique… One lesson you must learn is that paradoxically, in film you often need to show the opposite of what you mean to make your point effectively.

But let’s not jump the gun here… We will cover all of this in greater detail in a little bit.

The bottom line is that I always tell my students that before they run they should learn to walk, as cliché as it might sound, as they always hasten to point out to me.

In rebuttal, I usually try another angle: I tell them that there is no point trying to play Chopin after three piano lessons. If you do, it is bound to sound horrible.

Only then do they start to pay attention.

It is really very simple. Anyone who has ever tried to learn to play a music instrument knows that one always starts by playing scales. Then it takes approximately five to seven years (Maybe as much as ten!) before anyone dares mount a stage to play a concert to a paying audience.  Only prodigies operate within different timescales… But then you have to ask yourself: am I a prodigy? If you are, this book is not for you…  

Similarly, in any reputable arts school students spend at least a year drawing noses and thumbs before they tackle abstractions… In fact, all arts schools focus on the acquisition of technique, however broadly defined, before the students proceed to a stage where they are technically competent enough to try to ‘express themselves’, whatever that might mean.

To use the music analogy, making an average feature film can be compared to playing a ninety-minute concert to a paying and very critical audience. And yet over and over again I can hear my film students talking about making a feature film as soon as they enter the school.  

Please do not get me wrong… As I have already stated, there is nothing wrong with being ambitious, not to say a little arrogant, and making a feature film might well be within the range of some exceptionally talented and confident filmmakers relatively early in their careers, but I argue those situations are rare. I do think, again, that there is no point in trying to play Chopin after three piano lessons.  

As a result, I want to argue strongly that – as in any other art school - a young filmmaker needs to acquire the craft of storytelling and directing first. To become noticed, the focus of their early films should be on proving their mastery of the principles of the craft first and foremost, even if it comes at the expense of making statements or baring their souls to the audience.

The student’s technical competence is usually immediately apparent from their first exercise. There is certain clarity to their stories, there is crispness to characterisation, there is also a sense that they have a sense of purpose, or style. Last but not least, one feels like they are in a pair of safe hands.

The ones who are technically weaker, in contrast, usually rely too much on the creation of a certain mood or sometimes the projection of a certain tone to the determinant of the film’s dramatic structure.

As a result, a lot of early short films are rather self-indulgent and overlong exercises in projecting a personal quirkiness rather than proving a mastery of the craft. Those short films usually fall short of the filmmaker’s often lofty expectations as they fail in achieving the primary objective, which is to create a breakout short film that will win festivals and provide a springboard to a promising but a still fledgling filmmaking career.

And this is precisely what we will be discussing in this book.

The bottom line is that short films should viewed as technically competent calling cards, whose primary purpose is to get the young director as much festival circuit and industry attention as physically possible.

So be clever about it all.

If you agree, please read on.