Start acting like an Amateur if you want to be a Professional one day

Aspiring Filmmaker - Professional Filmmaker.

I think we have a problem, a deeply flawed sense of what these two monikers mean. And in the digital age of the internet free-for-all, the problem is getting Worse.

This post may feel like a rant, but if you bare with me i promise to get to a positive and constructive point by the end.

Here goes…

Would all you multi-hyphenate, DSLR shooting, one-man-band, editor / director / screenwriter / colour-grader / filmmakers, with your ultra-shallow depth-of-field, Vimeo hosted music-video showreels - who have never actually had a paid professional gig in your life - please, for the love of God, SHUT THE FUCK UP…!

Please Stop blogging, please Stop tweeting, please Stop dispensing advice or setting up websites with your ‘pro’ techniques and commentary, please Stop propagating fallacy and ignorance, please Stop offering your opinions on what is or isn’t Cinematic, Please Stop signing your signature with a litany of job titles just because you own a fist-full of software plug-ins and a Mac. Please Stop Pretending…

Deep breath…

Ok, Allow me to qualify my consternation. 

There has been a distinct trend shift over the past decade in the way we discuss and use the term ‘professional’ particularly in relation to the screen media production. Once upon a time the term Professional had a very specific meaning - a doctor, priest or lawyer - specialized positions of trust. Later the term broadened and embodied a person who makes a living from a knowledge-based art or craft and is hence denoted as belonging to a ‘profession’. The word ‘profession’ derives from someone who ‘professes’  for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs.

However the moniker of Professional seems now to be adopted not just by those who possess specialist knowledge and make a living from that knowledge, but also by those who simply claim to have a professional attitude, a professional mindset, a professional demeanor irrespective of whether they actually make a professional living from that knowledge or even whether they possess that knowledge or experience at all. In short, the notion of a screen media ‘professional’ has been watered down into a evaporating puddle of mediocrity and irrelevance.

Now certainly many praise the breakdown of such hierarchies and the, so called, democratization of creative screen production. And moreover, many companies have made a whole shit load of money selling stuff because of this breakdown (witness FCPX which will make 100x more money for Apple than FCP ever did) And I would be the first to champion the dynamism and vibrancy of a society as a whole when creative engagement is undertaken at a popular grass-roots level. To this I raise my glass in full and vocal support. 

However, there is a downside to this watering down that i feel compelled to point out.

Now, don’t get me wrong - acting ‘professionally’ is certainly an admirable quality and one certainly doesn’t need to be a working professional, to act ‘professionally’. (and arguably theres a lot of ‘professionals’ who rarely display ‘professionalism’) But acting professionally and having a professional attitude is Not the same as actually being a Professional. And to confuse the two is to do yourself a great disservice. Very often such delusion will deny or hinder opportunities to actually become a real professional.

Let us also not confuse Professional with Art. You, of course, do Not need to be a professional to make art. Indeed there is arguably no direct connection between the two at all. A Professional-Writer for example may occasionally write art - personally motivated creative expression - but more often a Professional-Writer will more likely be writing for a living - writing to commission, writing to a brief. In such acts of writing, ‘art’ is either incidental or a bonus rather than a requirement or goal. 

This again is the difference between the amateur and the professional. An aspiring filmmaker may spend a decade making art they love in an artform they are passionate about, even producing work of quality. And yet never actually be a ‘professional’ and make a living from it. Which is to say, they never need to have a daily rigor of discipline and deep knowledge-base to produce their art, but which would be crucial to day-to-day making a living from it.

So, having made these distinctions (not as a value judgement of worth but as tangible fact about what a ‘professional’ is) we can make a broad assumption about most Aspiring Filmmakers - that they actually do desire to make a living from it and build a professional reputation over a life-long career. Thus I come to my argument - that those calling themselves ‘Professional’ before they actually are, do their ambition no good.

My reasoning is very simple. The people best placed to be able to help them fulfill their ambition of becoming working professionals are those who already are working Professionals. They are the people who may hire you, give you work experience, introduce you to people, be your referee or recommend you for gigs. They may also mentor, teach, advise or guide you.

BUT, if you jump the gun and declare and pretend yourself a Professional, an expert, before you’ve earned it, then those Professionals will see right through your fraud and will likely Not have any interest in helping you. 

(I will refrain from naming names; needless to say a swathe of websites, bloggers and vocal ‘filmmaker’ online personalities and forums spring to mind that clearly fit the category of the fraud attempting to pose themselves as a professional; pretense at being a bastion of knowledge and experience when they have scant of either. I will leave these sites and individuals nameless for now in the hope that they will do some examination of self and realise their folly.)

Allow me to use myself as a case study. I call myself a professional for one simple reason; I’ve never worked in any other industries. I’ve never had a ‘day job’. Writing, shooting, editing and, in more recent years, teaching screen production is all I have ever done. Those skills and knowledge have in turn lead to opportunities in ancillary roles as critic, curator and commentator on screen production and even software development of tools for filmmakers. My profession has also taken me across mediums - from film, TV and radio, to online, live events and gallery spaces - fiction and documentary. This is how I make my living and along the way I’ve done many years of post-graduate formal training and study to continually make my profession viable as a living. It has taken nearly 20 years to get to a point where I now no longer have to hunt work, make a very comfortable living, and have some degree of flexibility to pick and choose projects that interest me creatively. My job is a working profession.

Now imagine what happens when the Wannabe fraud filmmaker described above - who calls themselves a professional but whose skills, knowledge and opinions are wafer thin - encounters someone like yours truly, who has taken decades to build a career and knowledge base in order to sustain their professiona as a living.

It’s not a fight that happens, or an argument or even angry words. or even some sort of snobbish exchange. What happens by and large, online and off, is…. Nothing. The Wannabe filmmaker armed with their DSLR’s, software plugins, blog website, Vimeo account, and a dangerous mix of ignorance and arrogance, is simply ignored; dismissed as irrelevant by the greater working professional industry.

The sad truth is that, despite the accessibility of both the tools of production and the means of distribution, the great champions of the successive DV, HDV and DSLR “revolutions” are generally NOT working professionals. They are NOT making a living from their craft. And whilst some may produce interesting creative works, their opinions and perspectives on ‘industry’ and ‘practice’, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘form’, rarely have any basis in real experience. 

Don’t get me wrong, Thats absolutly a-ok. They don’t Have to make a living to make art or contribute to the greater creative consciousness of the world. BUT, if they do wish to be a professional (in the purest sense of the word) then declaring their expertise in excess of their experience is NOT the way to achieve that goal. It doesnt help, it just makes them look stupid and arrogant to the people who could otherwise help them in their ambition.

The anti-film school wannabes seem to think that by avoiding, bypassing, ignoring or circumventing formal training they also bypass the label of ‘Aspiring’. The sense of entitlement the so-called digital revolution inspires, convinces them they can jump straight to being the ‘real thing’ simply by saying they are and avoiding a position where they would have to admit to not knowing. Which is what film school is, a place where you go to learn what you don’t know. Thus a student is invariably someone who admits that they don’t know and seeks to change that. 

On the flip side, this disease of the pseudo-professional filmmaker-fraud knows no bounds. I’m just as dismayed by the number of film school students who seem only to have enrolled in order to validate what they think they already are rather than learn what they don’t know. Film school is a waste of time for such people and teaching them is painful because they arent there to learn, they are there to prove.

Without doubt, the key to learning and success is being able to know what you don’t know and finding a path to remedy that situation. Inside or outside of film school there seem far too many who are blind to this truism. The broad rejection of learning and knowledge that prevails in western societies is surely the reaosn why, despite having so many cameras and so many screens and so many opportunities, we’re still making a lot of crap. 

But, I think the answer is really very simple. 

It’s time we reclaimed the word ASPIRING as a prestigious descriptor rather than a term to be circumvented or avoided. To say you are Aspiring is constructive. To say you are Aspiring is honest. Rare qualities in an online and interconnected world filled with fraudulent voices pretending to be something they have no claim yet to be and dispensing knowledge they don’t have the experience to understand.

In short, my message to those who may be guilty of these crimes (yes, you know who you are) is this - Start acting like an Aspiring Amateur rather than a Pretending Professional and I think you’ll find you get to your goal of making a living as a professional a lot quicker. Start acting like someone who wants to learn and knows they have much to learn openly and honestly, rather than slipping into the pit of self-delusion that will result in nothing but the perpetuation of ignorance. Be careful who you read, choose your sources carefully, check the ‘about’ page of the website to see if the author has credability. Cross-check opinions on technology and technique with writers who do know what they are talking about. I am a vivacious reader of websites and blogs about production technology but I can assure that 16 out of every 20 websites and blogs I encounter propogate nothing but fallacies, innacuracies and misunderstandings. To be an effective Learner you need to have good powers of critical-thinking to sift through the bullshit. Because there is a whole lot of Bullshit out there.

True Professionals are more likely to take you seriously and be inclined to help you if you dont try and pretend to be something you’re not. The honesty and openness of being Apsiring is much more productive than the close-minded arrogance of the fraud-professional. 

What is crucial to remember is that whilst anyone can make something, not everyone can or will be TRUSTED to make something with someone else’s money. This is the difference between the Fraud and the Professional. Professional screen production is ultimately a trust game. I was recently discussing this idea with Kris Wilde - arguably one of Australia’s most successful television writers and creator of outstanding crime drama series such as Wildside and EastWest 101. Kris commented that the idea that a great project, talent or script will ultimately win out is a myth. The only thing that matters is Trust. And Trust has to be built up over time. Trust has to be earned. This is true at every level; from a kick-starter indie project, to a major international production. Thus your ability to make a living from your knowledge and skills is based almost solely on how much people trust you and how well that trust is warranted.

And quite frankly the brigade of DSLR-wielding, Vimeo showreel hosting, film-tech blogging, aficionados spouting their multi-hyphenate job titles, have absolutely Zero Trust Value in the grand scheme of things.

So, Stop pretending - if you are an Aspiring Amateur then proudly say so - you’ll learn more and have people far more willing to help you and offer you opportunities. But if you persist with being a fraud, with pretending your merit exceeds your experience, if you insist on calling yourself a professional when you clearly are not making a living in the profession, then the only people who will buy into your trust value will be other frauds and non professionals. 

If you would like one day to make a living making screen media, then start acting like an Amateur. You’ll get there faster.

—

Heres a few websites that have the good-oil - written by folks who truly know what they are talking about…

http://www.hdwarrior.co.uk/

http://www.philiphodgetts.com/

http://provideocoalition.com/

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/ 

http://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/

http://lfhd.net/

http://www.biscardicreative.com/blog/

http://www.hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/

http://www.dslrnewsshooter.com/

And, Trawling the plethora of websites of online fraud-pros that embody the issues above, I have concluded the following golden rules which apparently equate to being a ‘Professional DSLR filmmaker’.

• The shallower the Depth of Field, the more professional you are. 
• Always shoot aperture wide open despite the fact that wide-open is where the lens is least sharp, least clear and least effective.
• Always matte to 2.40:1 despite the fact that it throws away 1/3 of the screen real-estate when your entire audience will watch on a 16:9 TV.
• The dirtier the image the better; Lens flare, grain and artifacts are what make you a Pro. If you cant shoot them, add them in post.
• Use the word ‘industry standard’ a lot. It allows you to validate yourself by your tools when you cant validate yourself by experience.
• Avoid ‘narrative’ and ‘meaning’ at all costs. The mark of the real Pro is dreamy showreels of clouds and sunsets scored by Sigur Ros Radiohead music tracks on Vimeo.
• Colour Grading always begins with a Bleach-Bypass filter.
• Always have actors walk into focus (preferably with a melancholy expression). It makes you and them look cool. It’s a win win.
• Ignore sound, it doesn’t matter. They’ll be listening to your ripped Sigur Ross Radiohead tracks anyway.
• Size matters. Always make your camera look as bulky as possible with as many handles, follow-focus knobs and cables hanging off it as you can.
• Rack-Focus everything. Professionalism is directly proportional to how many focus moves you can squeeze into a shot. It also helps you justify the cost of the follow-focus rig.
• No one will take you seriously unless you use Prime lenses for everything. 

The 'film look' is a Crock, Shallow depth-of-field is Banal and Rack focus is Lazy. Would all you indie filmmakers please Get Over It..!

Allow me to be deliberately provocative….

How a Movie looks is a very important thing. The visual aesthetics of a movie profoundly shape the experience of watching it. Few would argue with this position.

Aesthetics, by definition, is the study of ways of seeing and of perceiving. When we consider the aesthetics of cinema we are considering how a movie looks and is perceived. To the filmmaker - concerned with making, building, constructing a film rather than just experiencing it - aesthetics are tangibly the techniques they employ to depict the world of their cinematic creation.

So far, this is all pretty obvious and straight forward. But something we must consider is this idea of ‘Technique’ and the choices at the filmmaker’s disposal - What are they? How are they used? What do they mean?

Any visual technique used by a filmmaker is simply a tool leveraged for an aesthetic story-telling purpose. Quick-cutting or long-takes, close-ups or wide shots, colour or black and white, dollys or pans, so on and so on… The effectiveness, impact and worth of any given technique a filmmaker employs is derived from its suitability to the context of the film. In simple terms, does the technique match the story?

Filmmaking is above all else a process of problem solving and the techniques employed are simply the solution to those problems - be they narrative, emotive, technical or creative. For example;
PROBLEM - The audience need to feel a part of the action, that they share the danger the characters face.
SOLUTION - Shoot hand-held and shaky, ducking and weaving the camera with the action

All this seems well and good and leaves open infinite possibilities for creative aesthetic solutions. Great films are made when directors find innovative, fresh and exciting aesthetics to solve creative problems.

But if we except this premise then we must face up to a distinct problem. If a single aesthetic choice becomes so dominant and common and ubiquitous across all genre’s of filmmaking, regardless of the creative problems posed by individual films, then it ceases to be grounded technique - it becomes stale, meaningless, banal, a default position rather than a creative choice.

In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly…. “What the hell happened to Deep Focus?”



Let me step back a bit from this verbose statement and provide some clarity on the trajectory that leads me to this point. In the early days of cinema film stocks were slow and so apertures had to be wide open in the hope of obtaining decent exposure. With wide open apertures you get very shallow depth of field - a short stretch of space where the subject is in focus that renders anything in the fore or back ground blurred.

In the 40’s companies such as Kodak and Agfa developed better chemical processes and faster film stocks. With faster film stocks apertures dont need to open so wide for exposure and thus depth of field can be extended. Deep-Focus cinema was born; an image aesthetic where subjects at varying focal-lengths from the camera can be equally sharp; both foreground and background in focus. Cinema changed dramatically as a new set of problem solving aesthetic techniques were opened up for filmmakers; new opportunities and possibilities for how a film could look. Shallow Focus and its offspring Rack Focus (where the lens is manipulated in-shot to shift focus from one subject to another) became not the staple of how films looked and worked visually but rather options of choice that a filmmaker may chose to use, or not use, depending on the needs and context of the film.



Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and the superb camera work of Gregg Toland, stands as the ultimate example of the power of deep-focus and spawned the host of new thinking about cinema aesthetics that was embodied by the French New Wave and scholarly journals such as Cahiers du Cinema.



But the cinematic party of aesthetic choice, possibility and variety where filmmakers could choose shallow or deep as situation demanded, seemed to be cut short as deep-focus became the victim of the Video and Digital Revolutions.

Let me explain…

Video technology - the ability to capture a moving image electronically rather than chemically - came along in the 70’s and 80’s. For the most part such technology was seen as having a great many benefits but one of them was Not visual fidelity. The technology still had many years to go (and an evolution from analogue to digital) before it may be considered visually equal. The simplistic result of this was that Video Cameras at this time were made, in large part, not to directly compete with film cameras for conservatively traditional cinema roles but to serve different purposes. As such they were largely small cameras with small sensors. There is of course a direct mathematical correlation between the size of the sensor (the imaging plane) and the depth of field rendered. Small sensor = deep depth of field. Large sensor = shallow depth of field. Video technology, by nature of both its technological limitations and cultural position within media industry contexts, was innately deep-focus.

What must remembered about cinema aesthetics is that they are deeply connected to cultural responses. Take for example the modern age of mobile phones and mass popular YouTube uploading. We have become so used to seeing nightly TV news filled with amateur footage that is shaky, pixelated and out of focus depicting immediate and current events in a veritae style that there is a prevailing cultural construct that directly associates such Shaky / Out of focus / Pixelated images with ‘Truth’ and ‘Actuality’. It’s for this reason that modern TV news proactively requests amateur footage from its viewers despite it being only a few years ago that airing such footage would have been considered beneath ‘Broadcast Quality Standards’. Similarly TV networks the world over have been known to compress and deliberately degrade images of natural disasters and war zones in order to make it seem more ‘authentic’.

This same cultural construct response was forced upon deep focus by the video revolution of the 70’s and 80’s. What was ingrained into the popular visual language was that ‘deep focus’ equated to video and so, in the minds of viewers, primarily to documentary, news reporting, amateur footage, cheap production and pornography. Conversely that ‘shallow focus’ equated to ‘film’ and high budget, narrative cinema, high-art.

This shift in the popular cultural ‘reading’ of moving image aesthetics and the separation of High and Low cinematic art on the basis of Deep or Shallow focus has been a blight and a curse on filmmaking ever since.

In the digital age, amid the famed ‘digital revolution’, we at last moved towards a parity of visual fidelity between celluloid and digital but have been simultaneously afflicted with a prevailing bogus desire to constrict the aesthetics of digital to the legacy hang-ups of film.

Sadly the prime concern of digital indie filmmakers over the past decade has not been the new aesthetic possibilities afforded them by digital technologies but rather an almost singular focus on the cost saving and pragmatic elements of digital. As such, the much lauded desire of digital filmmaking has been to, on one hand, shoot cheap but, on the other, have it look like ‘Film’.

Now, despite the thousands of website articles, posts, forum treatises and essays dedicated to the mission of how to get the ‘Film Look’ it is arguable that a useful definition with any clarity on exactly what constitutes the ‘Film look’ is near impossible to come by. Frame Rate, Progressive scan, Grain, Flicker, Weave, Dynamic Range, Gamma curve - these are all the traits often cited as the ‘film look’ but together they constitute such a broad palette of hazy and in-tangible possibilities that distilling them into a particular set of aesthetic traits is a highly ephemeral process.

May I suggest this…. The ‘film look’ is bullshit; a product of marketing representation and the digestible distillation of an association with a particular mode of viewing. The ‘film look’ is a cultural rather than aesthetic understanding; one drawn from our legacy of personal cinematic experiences in the movie theatre watching a projected image - Nostalgia not Aesthetics.. Thus, when it comes to making ‘films’ in the digital age for ourselves our base instincts are to want our films to evoke those same nostalgic memory associations we have with celluloid. This we translate as the aesthetic of film, the ‘film look’, but in truth it’s much more about cultural and personal association.

Through all this, the ramifications of this for digital indie filmmakers have been profound. In working with Digital Video but desiring a ‘film look’ - that is near impossible to quantify - their efforts were skewed and corrupted. For so many digital indie filmmakers over the past 15 years their functional definition of the ‘film look’ was primarily whatever aesthetic characteristics were the opposite of what was innate to small-format video. Most specifically Shallow Focus.

Because deep-focus is the default position of many small format digital cameras, owing largely to small sensors as imaging planes, the prevailing aesthetic desire of indie filmmakers was to invest their films with the opposite - to enforce shallow-focus as a way of connecting with a popular culture mindset that connects Shallow Focus with ‘high-budget cinema’ and Deep Focus with ‘low-budget’ video.

As a result we have a whole generation of filmmakers who measure their aesthetic mark by how shallow their focus can be and how often they can Rack-Focus their shots. They are a generation who have been obsessed with rack-focusing rather than staging to move the viewer around the cinematic space; using the camera lens to depict space in flat 2D blurry planes  rather than a 3-diemnsion staging of space itself.

We’ve spent so much of the digital revolution fussing over how to make digital look like film that we’ve neglected the subtle art of arranging space itself, forgotten how to focus the eye Spatially rather than the more clumsy and overt mechanics of doing it Optically. Most importantly we’ve forgotten that the viewer is a sentient and intelligent being, more than capable of deciphering, analyzing, speculating on and articulating the visual information they take in.

Let me offer a verbose rebuke of Shallow Focus and Rack-Focus as a cienmatic default by way of being provocative and pushing the pendulum back to normalcy.

Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmakers disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.

Shallow focus and Rack Focus  is the cinema equivalent of spoon-feeding the audience one small digestible and banal visual morsel at a time. Handing to them a deliberately unsophisticated and unchallenging image platter. It is the camera equivalent of writing only in capital letters and short sentences for fear your reader/viewer may not understand precisely and exactly what you want them to understand. “Look here”, “see this”, “turn now” - no distractions, no surprises, no accidentals, no confusion, no uncertainty, just the domineering dictation of a moving-image experience on pre-determined flat 2-dimensional planes.  This is the essential internal logic of Shallow-Focus/Rack-Focus cinematography which, by nature of it’s elimination through blur of any distractions outside of a singular focus, is an acutely dictatorial aesthetic. An aesthetic that leaves nothing to the viewers analytical mind and doesn’t engage the viewer in a more complex visual contract. Rack-Focus refuses to  allow the viewer to decipher and assemble meanings for themselves and is a condescending and patronizing way present a cinematic image.

That said, the problem is not Shallow and Rack Focus unto themselves as techniques but rather that they are not seen and used as deft Tools and problem solving Options. Rather they act as blithe and banal default methods fueled by a misguided desire for an association with nostalgic ‘high-art’.

Utilizing deeper focus allows for a complex play of light, space, distance, obstacles and subjects. The arrangement of the framed contents becomes paramount, the subjects proportions and relationships to each other the prime creative device. The construction of a cinematic space that is detailed and nuanced becomes the main canvas of the filmmaker. Shallow focus eliminates and takes these options away, it dissolves a great deal of the problem-solving and decision making process that is the art of the Director. In shallow focus the Director is not demanded to solve problems of space, is not compelled to ask questions of arrangement and position, is relieved of the requirement to convey proximity and relationships.

A post such as this may be very confronting for some indie filmmakers who have dedicated so much of their time to extolling the virtues of shallow depth-of-field (and yes I do blame DSLR’s) and to toiling in their colour-grading system to mimic film-stock emulsion and gamma curves. But for those more enlightened readers who feel compelled to think outside of banal convention and consider how else things might be done, I encourage you to read David Bordwells superb book ‘Figures Traced Light’ which explores in exquisite detail the lost art of Cinematic Staging and Deep-Focus.



Likewise the two links below present some interesting reading in regard to the contentious history of deep-focus and its connection to movements such as the New Wave and the idea of ‘reality’.

Do filmmakers deserve the last word? David Brodwell

Sharpening Deep Focus, by Joe Heumann and Charles H. Harpole