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PRODUCTION NOTES A YEAR of Total Filmmaking Frank Capra worked by the motto, "One man, one film." He felt the best films were those that were not made by committee but by one person following their own focused idea or vision. The filmmakers I’ve always most admired have been the "hyphenates" – Stanley Kubrick, Claude Lelouch, Russ Meyer, David Lean, Haskell Wexler, John Cassavetes, Robert Rodriquez, Steven Soderbergh – producer-director- writer-cinematographer-editors. Those not satisfied to be "Directors" too often seen in baseball cap, dark sunglasses, nursing a coffee huddled in front of a monitor and away from the set, but "Total Filmmakers" who shoulder as many jobs as they can to make sure their films conform as closely as possible to their own concepts of cinema and storytelling. In setting out to make Year my goal was not only to prove ( to myself as much as to anybody else) that I could make a full-length feature film, but to make a film that adhered to my own cinematic values, both in story and style. When I watch a movie it’s always in the hope of making a discovery; to see a film that opens up something about the world and the human condition that I didn’t know or hadn’t seen before. Such recent films are The Constant Gardener and Capote, or Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland and In This World. I wanted to make a film that I wanted to see. Year was paid for out of my own pocket, using real locations for sets, scenes involving actors shot entirely hand-held and almost always with only existing lighting. Actors were told to keep their performances as natural as possible. Dialogue was kept as close as possible to the way people might actually talk. The most common direction going into a scene would be, "Okay, let’s just roll one off. Just let it go and let’s see what happens. And make me believe it." My wife Bonnie Bennett is an actor and hates auditions. Actors are generally not told much about the roles they are auditioning for and even less of what the director is looking for. Then the readings are very brief and the actor is quickly ushered out to make way for the next in line. The whole audition process leaves an actor with a sense of confusion and humiliation and usually wondering why they bothered in the first place. So in starting this film I decided I wasn’t going to do that. As Bonnie has been an actor here in Sacramento for over a dozen years and knew most of the best actors around, I turned to her for casting. She started calling people she knew, e-mailed them the script and invited them over to the house. I'd play a scene or two from Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland so they could see the kind of naturalistic acting and hand-held, available light filming style I wanted to have. I also assured them that I knew they were all working actors either in rehearsal or appearing in shows; that this project was going to take anywhere from eight months to a year to complete, and that I would work around their schedules. Christine Nicholson, who agreed to play "Sydney", is also one of the better theater directors in town and recommended several people with whom she’d worked. On her word alone we e-mailed scripts and invited them over. For the part of the little girl, "Chris", one of Christine’s recommendations, actor Cheantell Munn, volunteered her neice, who had done some plays and appeared in some local TV commercials. Chaentell e-mailed a snapshot of Savannah Swain and I said fine. "Chris" was a very simply written low-key part, so how hard could it be. In fact, I never met Swain until the first time I filmed with her, which was just a simple little moment of her playing soccer with Katherine Pappa, playing "Gina", her mother in the film. Bonnie and I never held auditions or readings with any of the actors. We knew the actors had several years, if not decades, of stage experience and they wouldn't still be performing if they couldn't act, so I felt that if they trusted me to make my first film with them, I could trust them to give me their talent and free time. While most of the theatre actors had never worked in a film before, the few who had were not impressed by the outcome of their local work and preferred not to discuss it. I made them a promise. I gave them my word that I would never make them look bad and that this would be one film that, when all was said and done, they would be proud to show to other people as an example of their work. Dialogue is the least interesting part of cinema. Over the past number of years American films have been relying more and more heavily on dialogue to communicate and explain movie stories rather than using the moving images that make up the movie and allowing audiences to absorb the story more viscerally. That’s why, for me, the 1970's films of director-editor Hal Ashby – Harold and Maude, The Landlord, Coming Home and The Last Detail – have always stood out as masterworks of storytelling with pictures and music. When planning Year, I wanted to convey significant sections of the story with combinations of music and imagery and avoid as much dialogue and exposition as possible. To apply this to my first dramatic film, I started shooting clouds. As the timeframe of Year spans one full year, I needed visual devices to convey passages of time and seasons. To that end I had planned to use beautiful time-lapse sequences. During the year that I was writing the script, I tested filming large dynamic landscapes of farmland, hillsides, and city skylines. I shot anything that looked interesting - that had dynamic cloud patterns to help fill out the top portion of the frame – and let these shots roll for twenty minutes to an hour. Then I’d load them into my eMac and speed them up ten to twenty times so that they’d be only twenty seconds or a minute long. What I discovered was that the locales looked too specific to one place, whereas the moving and re-shaping clouds at the top of the frame were beautiful and amazingly hypnotic. At that moment I stopped worrying about driving around and looking for interesting locations to shoot. I narrowed the time-lapse sequences to only using interesting cloudscapes, which I shot almost exclusively from my backyard. Filming the most interesting clouds rapidly became an obsession and my daily routine for almost all of 2004 and the first half of 2005 became something like this: I'd wake up before dawn, look out the window and if there were any clouds, I'd roll out of bed, set up my Panasonic DVX 100A on the back patio, angle it up at an intriguing part of the sky, lock it down, start the tape rolling and go back to bed. Several times a day I'd go out the back window and if there was any decent sky, I'd drag out the DVX 100A and start rolling. Often a month would go by without shooting a frame. Summertime in Sacramento is most commonly a blistering empty sky devoid of anything for 360 degrees for weeks at a time. Then a weather front would roll in from the Coast and I'd roll six hours of tape in a day. For the music soundtrack, I originally planned on reaching out to local bands and musicians as well as selecting classical music in the public domain and finding local musicians to perform them. In my heart of hearts I really wanted to have a new-age electronic score – but what, where and how? Then Tom Duhain, a good friend and co-worker, who is also plugged into the alternative music scene, introduced me to the website of a new independent label called Spotted Peccary and played a sample track from the site by an artist named Erik Wollo. It was moody, evocative, dynamic and cerebral all at the same time. It was emotions streaming through the subconscious. It was mind music. Tom’s very first suggestion was exactly the sound I was looking for. I ordered Erik Wollo's CD of Wind Journey that very night. By October 2003 I had a first full-draft of the script and gave it to my wife Bonnie, who would be co-producing and starring in the film. She didn't like it. She felt the story was cold and the characters uninvolving. Listening to Erik's music, I began a radical re-write. I’d listen to the CD of Wind Journey as I drove and was electrified. On this one disk was every range of emotion I was looking for. Yet it was also frustrating because I knew that I couldn't use it. Around this time, Thanksgiving, 2003, I had twenty or thirty hours of good footage of clouds, which I had time-lapsed down to about 45 minutes and put this on a tape with the music of Erik Wollo's Wind Journey. I'd put this tape in and let it play on the TV as background when people would be over during the Holidays. The result was amazing. One by one, people's heads would turn and they'd be drawn to screen and become entranced by the patterns of clouds shifting to the haunting, emotive music. Principal photography of Year began in March 2004 and both the shooting and editing was very intense by mid-summer. By this time I had been exploring the music of many Sacramento area musicians and, while it was very good, there was nothing that matched the depth and power of Wind Journey. One afternoon I was mentioning my dead-ends to Tom Duhain, who had pointed me towards Wind Journey in the first place, and he suggested that I try giving Spotted Peccary a call, tell them what I was doing and ask if I could use the CD for my soundtrack. It sounded stupefyingly simple. And unlikely. But I did. And they said "yes". Howard Givens, the president of Spotted Peccary Music, was involved in the film world himself and was well aware of the odds that beginning filmmakers are up against. He was very supportive and gave me permission to use Wind Journey as the soundtrack for Year. The phone call had exceeded all my expectations. I had my dream music. The remainder of 2004 was dominated with emailing actors for their availability and getting whomever I could together for two or three hours on evenings and weekend afternoons, which was when they weren’t rehearsing or appearing in plays. While those brief filming sessions might sound like a chaotic filming method – shooting frantically to get a lot done in a limited amount of time – on the contrary, they were amazingly relaxed. I had several factors working in my favor: First, the actors all worked with each other on stage and were comfortable. Also, being theatrically trained, they came prepared, knew their lines and their characters and, being used to rehearsing and performing the same show over and over, they were incredibly at ease doing our little scenes over and over. Added to that, the few actors who had film experience were used to working with sizeable crews who could crowd a set and be distracting. On almost all of the shooting of Year, I was the crew. I was the person who wired them with radio mics. I worked with them on the direction and I ran the camera. And as I was shooting without a tripod or dolly and with little or no augmented lighting, the clutter of equipment was at a minimum. It was much more similar to documentary shooting. On a handful of days I did have the valuable assistance of Dominick Bernal as a sound boom operator. But, even then, the crew was just the two of us. Shooting in a naturalistic style with experienced actors who were friends made for a warm and productive working environment. There was almost no downtime. On the rare occasion where shooting ran longer than expected, rather than keep people late, I’d call it a day and we’d pick up from there the next time. One night I was shooting with David Harris and Kristen Heitman and had scheduled an arrival time of 6:30 with shooting by seven, and wrapping no later than 9:30. We started shooting outside in David’s van in front of a neighbor’s house after dark. Then I strung some low-wattage dashboard lights in his van and filmed a few scenes of him driving on the freeway. When we finished and headed back to the house he looked at the clock in the dashboard and said, "My God, it’s 9:15. You said we’d be finished by 9:30. You’ve got it down to the minute!" At the end of February, 2005, with three scenes still to be shot, I ran a loose assembly of the whole film for Bonnie and Michael Dryhurst, who had won the Golden Globe for producing Hope and Glory and had critiqued the Year script in its early stages, as well as played the small but pivotal role of "Morris", "Ava’s" former manager. Michael’s always said that he enjoys the editing of a film more than anything – "because, Mike, that's where the movie is made." Two hours and thirty-three minutes later the film faded out, the lights came on with a collective sigh and notes began to be compared. But it was Michael’s view that, while the film was overlong and still rough, there was a good film there. Then he added, "Mike, where did you find your actors? There’s not a single weak performance in the whole film!" Monday, March 7, 2005 – I still needed one simple four second shot of an AMTRAK train pulling into a station for the scene when Ava (Bonnie Bennett) drops Lana (Kristen Heitman) off at the train station - a scene shot on the very first day of shooting back in the early part of 2004 when the trees were still leafless and could pass for New Years Day. I’d planned on going back to the station a few days later to pick up the shot of the train pulling in, but by then the leaves were already bursting out on the trees. I was resigned to having to wait until November or December to pick the shot up. But the trees were not bare enough to match until January, when it was either raining or too overcast to match on the days when I was free to go out and film. Finally, on that Monday in March of 2005 the light was good and I spent the afternoon at the downtown AMTRAK station waiting for a train to pull in. Eventually, after about three hours a train reversed out of the station. But I had it in the camera. I could reverse the shot in the computer and lay in the sound of a different train arriving. When I got home and was logging the tape into the rack with the other tapes amassed over the lengthy shooting, I pulled out Tape One from the first day of filming, labeled March 7, 2004. It had been exactly one year to the day from filming Bonnie and Kristen at the train station to the day I got the establishing shot of the train pulling in. The following Sunday, March 13, 2005, principal photography of Year was completed. 372 days after rolling on the first scenes with actors. 53 weeks. One week longer than the story that was being told. All on-camera scenes – the ones we started out to film and the ones that were added along the way - involving actors and locations were completed. The final filming took place in Katherine Pappa’s apartment, used for scenes with Christine Nicholson (Sydney) and Eric Wheeler (Miles). We started shooting around noon and wrapped just an hour and a half later, filming four scenes in 69 shots on Tape #136. The very last scene was a simple shower scene to be cross-cut with a scene shot with Christine back in August. "Great," Christine said, "we finally get some nudity in this movie." Great, yes – except the person in the shower was Eric Wheeler. It was a year and a half of intense work putting this film together, especially as it was in addition to my full-time job as a TV news cameraman. A year of living with a calendar close by my side to juggle scheduling and availability of actors. A year of constantly revising and reworking the script. A year of spending every available moment, hour and day in front of the computer editing, editing and editing. But the end result truly made it worth the effort. After a lifetime of watching movies, thinking about filmmaking and styles, writing scripts, pondering how I would have shot or directed something differently if I’d had the chance, I was able to sit back and watch an entire feature-length film, from the opening credit to the final fade out, that I was responsible for. A film made according to my own cinematic principles. The writing of Year began in 2002. Shooting draft was incredibly ambitious with over 400 scenes, both large and small. Casting began in March 2004. Photography began a week later and was filmed exclusively on weekends and evenings, depending on actors’ availability. Photography was complete in April 2005 – one year and one month later. Editing began on the evening of first day's shooting and continued into June 2005. The film was shot in Anamorphic 16:9 with a Panasonic DVX-100A in 24p. 70 hours of footage with actors was shot. Another 70 hours of skies, clouds and skylines. A total of 140 one-hour mini-DV cassette tapes were used. Edited on an Apple EMAC using Final Cut Pro 4. Four external firewire hard drives were daisy-chained to library over 5,000 different elements - shots, takes, time lapses, sound effects, etc. – using over 1.2 TB of storage space.
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