Image Over Words

Storytelling with images must be as strong as your script -- plot, dramatic arch and dialogue. Film is a highly visual medium and because the camera was invented to be mobile and has become increasingly moreso as the technology has evolved --use its compactness and mobility to your advantage. As much time as a writer spends on writing, analyzing and rewriting their script, also the artistic team (director, cinematographer, lighting, art director, location manager, wardrobe) should spend pre-visualizing, sketching, and compositing each scene of the short film.

The low angle of the shot above with the dog and man rope jumping in unison makes the act more powerful and impactful. When both the man and certainly the dog rise above the mid-screen line, we feel their effort has been fair more significant than if we we view them from eye level with the horizon above mid-frame. These are important ways to think about your shots and each one is a unique and interesting challenge.

In film courses students are taught how to tell story without words, narration, or verbal exposition. Visual storytelling engages the audience more profoundly than hearing it told by a character or in narration. In every scene, the director, writer and cinematographer need to create the most powerful visual significance to propel emotion, circumstance, and predicament.

Try to avoid static horizon/ground shots all the time where is camera is on a tripod pointing straightforward, or held at eye height looking at your actors. Think and plan for over head shots, low angels, high angels and camera movement that contribute to telling the story and not just added as an after-thought. Create wonderment and excitement within your frame and build it throughout scenes.

Challenge yourself to provide visually stimulating diversity. Take your audiences to places they've never been before with visual perspectives they don't often reach. They will thank you for it and enjoy your film much more immensely.

3-Point Lighting

Chris Mick, the former equipment manager for IFP Minnesota and Producer at 355 Productions explains how to put lighting into your short drama in order to achieve an effect and mood to match the story. Lighting can be one of the single biggest factors that will separate your film from amateur home movies.

Properly lighting using 3 lights can assure you are able to get clear and true skin tones, a well rounded depth surrounding your actors, separation between the focal plane and the background and foreground that directs the eye for dramatic impact. Lighting, if done properly, can immediately raise the production quality of your film and that's what you need to get recognized in this contest as well as for future projects you want to make as an indie or in Hollywood.

With home movies a videographer often relies on available light or a lighting scheme that uniformly lights everything exactly the same regardless of where you want to viewer to focus their attention. This undirected light scheme makes movies flat, boring and tiresome to watch.

The inability to design with light is immediately recognizable as amateur by judges and the general audience alike. If you find a professional lighting designer or have a camera operator who is aware of how to compose both with light as well as framing and object composition you'll be way ahead of all the rest in this storytelling challenge.

IFP Minnesota rents three-point light packages by the day or weekend at really low cost to local independent filmmakers. Also, if you can get a group of five people or more together, IFP will bring a trainer like Chris Mick in for a topical class on lighting, location sound, or camera framing and composition. These technical services can be an invaluable resource to not only this Screenlabs Challenge 2008 production but your future career in filmmaking.

What is a location?

A location is the physical setting or concrete place where you set or block a film scene or sequence. While this might seem of feel abstract when writing your script, it is very concrete and specific with shooting your short film.

If your characters are inside a home or apartment that is location #1, if they are then inside a car speaking lines that is location #2, if they are inside a store or retail establishment that is location #3 and if they are at the Witches Hat Water Tower, that is location #4. With the ScreenLabs Challenge you are limited to a total of 4 locations in which all actions and dramatic scenes must occur.

A type or category of location, such as "interior" and "exterior" cannot altogether be counted as one location. You can have one location inside a home and another inside a retail store and that is two locations, not one. When you breakdown your script and plan the shooting of the scenes, there must be no more than 4 locations in your shooting schedule.

The guidelines established for Screenlabs Challenge are not meant to harm or penalize the production but rather make it possible for you to complete making the short film with few cash resources. Limiting locations provides a reasonable framework in which you can get all the shots you need in a one or two day shooting schedule. But we do encourage you to be creative and it is possible for a skilled director, DP, and lighting person to take the most of one location and make it look like more.

All good writers and scripts are very efficient with the use of locations and their impact to the story and its meaning and applying these guidelines will make you better screenwriters.

The Party: Making a 10 Minute Short

Running Time: 10 minutes 12 seconds

Writing a ten minute short is very demanding. How much story and exposition can you tell? With the ScreenLabs Challenge you are limited by the number of locations you can use (4), the number of characters (4) and the only thing you have to fall back on is your imagination and a great script (12 pages) or less. That is if you want to win.

The Party by Eric Maierson for MediaStorm is a quick little case study in how to make the most with one location and two characters and no money on the theme "unrequitted love." Check it out. Feel free to comment good or bad. Criticism makes better films.

Lighting: Techniques to Advance Mood and Story

Running Time: 5 minutes 40 seconds

With a simple three point light package a no budget or low budget short drama can gain high production values by creating a mood and advancing the story with purpose. Often filmmakers are tempted to use available light and the low light sensitivity of todays commercial camcorders as a cover for not having a lighting plan or not knowing how to use lighting to direct viewers deeper into the story. Don't fall into this lazy trap.

Motivation with light makes a huge impact on the strength of the story you are trying to tell. This short video shows huge differences created within the same space and exactly the same shot. You can imply the passage of time, you can shift the internal psychology of the character and even using inexpensive materials and your white balance setting on the camera shoot day-for-night. This gives you many options with one simple location, even one shot, to suggest the passage of time.

Storyboard onto Screen

Running Time: 1 minute 25 seconds

Working out visual ideas on paper in pre-production can be extremely useful for the Director, Director for Photography, First AD, Lighting and Grip specialists. Drawings can be simple - even stick figures will help in many cases. If you don't think you can draw find someone who can and add them to you team. But if you cannot, do not let that stop your from making the storyboards.

Go to your primary shooting locations and using a digital camera, shoot stills a varying angles and then Hanna Hock style you can composite photos either in Photoshop or on paper of actors and actresses clipped from magazines to create the look of what can be translated to film.

The shot break downs are even more important than storyboards and they work together as a planning tool to make sure you can work efficiently on location. A shot breakdown is essentially a list of all the shots needed to tell the story.

Location Audio: Sound EFX Techniques

Running Time: 2 minutes 33 seconds

Capturing sounds on location will greatly enhance the viewing experience when the final edit and sound mix down come together for your film. Videomakers' John Burkhart gives a few simple tips here for capturing sound EFX on location.

A Matter of Note: In this video Burkhart makes an error in basic location sound recording, did you catch it? He should have shut the engine off and rolled the car silently to get a clean sound print of the wheels turning in the gravel.

Location Audio: Using a Boom for Dialogue

Running Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

This basic primer on field recording using today's low-cost video cameras is ideal at covering basic techniques for Screenlabs Challenge productions.

Ninety percent of the time filmmakers will use shotguns microphones and boom poles to capture the dialog of their actors on location. Here is a basic overview of how to handle and use shotguns with low and no-budget production and a shake-and-bake crew. When you markup your script and storyboard the scenes, you'll want to make notation of when you will be using a shotgun or if you'll need to change to lavaliere microphones on your actors to capture dialogue.

Audio Challenge: Capturing Location Audio

The first rule of filmmaking: Audio is the most important element in your film.

If the viewer of your ScreenLabs Challenge short film cannot hear what your characters are saying they will shut it off and stop listening. Like a chef who serves raw chicken or cold cup of coffee, you've totally lost the audience and the movie is basically over.

Getting great audio starts in the field on location when you are shooting your film for the ScreenLabs Challenge. Capturing quality audio requries that you know your equipment, have a decent microphone appropriate to your action and constantly monitor the levels with the use of headphones. While a great boom mic and experienced operator is preferable in most locations, some dialogue can only be captured using lavaliere mics on location (photo by Julia Ryner12)

Good audio also starts in the script. Take the time to read your script through the prism of the audio events. There are three levels of notation that need to be marked on your script and closely monitored by an experienced sound technician or someone with a keen ear for audio separation.

First, the spoken lines of the actors need to be captured cleanly and without interruptions. The sound tech should be listening for actors who are dropping levels at the end or beginning of their lines and slurred words. Also, it is important to note when an actor jumps on the line of another actor making both words incomprehensible. Clean separation between spoken lines is critical here.

Second, there is the natural sound of the environment -- if you are in a gymnasium you will need the sounds of the shoes on the floor, balls bouncing against the floor or walls (to match the action) or an airport will have the sounds of airplanes taking off and landing or voices over an intercom announcing flights arriving and leaving. Mark up all these points in the script. Capture each distinctive sound clean and when editing add them to the appropriate places to enhance the film story.

The ambient quality of the location is important to consider in relation to the mood you want to create in the scene you are shooting there. Scouting locations just for sound can be critical in pre-production. If you find there is a quality of an echo or if at the witching hour you draw the mic closer to the actors voice and capture a more throaty quality of the speech or the crackle of leave and branches under foot as the character walks, it can add suspense if it enhances the story being told. Take time to stand in different parts of Prospect Park in proximity to the Tower and just listen. Then shout, clap, or whistle and listen to where the sound goes depending on which side of the park you in, might give you qualities to capture for your story.

Third, sound events are crucial to the action on screen such as door slamming when a character is angry or water in the sink when a character washes their hands needs to be captured separately. Matching actions on screen to their sounds makes the story more vivid. Do you homework and mark them up in pre-production.

In the best circumstances, you will have an experienced audio location sound person who makes certain you have properly recorded the audio of your actors and the wild sound in each and every scene. At the very least, either you or a designated sound assistant will listen every second while rolling to the audio on the camera with a set of headphones that block out all other sounds.

When a plane, automobile or other unintended loud distracting noises occur it is the responsibility of the sound person to stop the action or alert the director that the sound has been compromised by noise interference in the take. Always do another take even if your actors gave incredible performances. Ask them to give it again.

In summary, the goal before leaving all shooting locations is to get good, clean, quality audio recording of the actors speaking their lines, human caused audio events (car starting, door slamming, footsteps on wooden floor, toilet flushing, etc.) and wild sound (the wind, water flowing, birds churping, clocks ticking), and ambient noise (the white noise in a scene or shot that is present when not other sound event is occuring). Every one of these types of sound need to be recorded cleanly and separately in order to create an effective audio mix when editing your short film.

Constructing the right sound montage will greatly increase the believability of your story and enhance the relationships between the characters themselves, the surroundings and the moment they are living in the drama.

Why Have Guidelines?

We are often asked this question with ScreenLabs Challenge. 

The purpose of the ScreenLabs Challenge is to inspire screenwriters and filmmakers to create new work in 2008. Thus, the rules specifiy that new films be created for the Challenge on the theme of "unrequited love: agony; bliss" We do not want the participants to submit short works that were created and completed before the Challenge began.

However, we also do not wish to inhibit or restrain your creativity in using archival materials or footage. For instance, if a filmmaker has or acquires some super 8mm footage from the 1960s of chidren playing in a park and that could be a flashback in the mind of the main character, we don't want to restrict that maker from using it provided they follow the rules of 4 characters, 4 locations (one them being the Witches Hat Water Tower), uses the theme of "unrequitted love." and is not longer than 12 minutes. If your short film fits within these basic guidelines, we do not care if you began writing, planning or if you shot footage prior to the registration date. 

Of course, the purpose of "the Challenge" is to provide a framework to inspire writers and filmmakers to make new moving picture stories and keep them working. We do not want filmmakers or writers to pull a past work from five or ten years ago out of their cabinet, add a few scenes (at the Witches Hat Water Tower for instance) or re-edit a longer piece to get inside the 12-minute limit and then submit it for the challenge. 

Most importantly, the guidelines are meant to provide a level playing field for the writes and filmmakers to approach this competition. By restricting the numbers of character and locations we cut down on the expense of making the short film, cut down on the number of days it takes to shoot, eliminates some of the chances for error (for instance if crew or cast fail to show up on location) and removes some of the pressure so that you can achieve more with the effort made necessary to tell the story. Eliminating physical and practical complexities can free your expression and make low-budget and no-budget filmmaking possible.