<\/a><\/p>\n Alex writes about directing, and why he gives directors so much credit.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThis is probably a terrible idea,\u201d he said as he sipped on his drink, knowing all well that the probabilities were probably even less in his favour than he assumed. <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBut let\u2019s do it anyway.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n There\u2019s a moment in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow\u2019s film De Palma, where the Notorious BDP is talking about a sequence he had designed for use in his 1993 film Carlito\u2019s Way. For this scene, De Palma went to incredible lengths to make sure everything was just right when everybody eventually got on set. He storyboarded the shot, and he did a pre-visualization in an unnamed computer program that was uncommon for non-effects shots. Brian De Palma knew exactly what he was going to do, and how he was going to achieve it. He was a man with a plan.<\/p>\n In the sequence, Al Pacino – as Carlito – is being chased by a group of people for reasons I don\u2019t quite recall. I do, however, recall that these people definitely wanted to murder Carlito, so this was most certainly a chase with stakes. Said chase began on a subway train, but was to continue off of it, as Carlito stepped off the train. In De Palma\u2019s idea, Carlito was to exit the New York City subway to continue trying to evade his eventual murderers. The subway station they had planned to use for Carlito\u2019s train exit and continued evasion was the subway station underneath the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n The day before the sequence was to be filmed, \u00a0a truck full of explosives was driven into the World Trade Center. Everything had to be rethought; all planning was for naught.<\/p>\n In the documentary, Brian De Palma uses this anecdote as a comment on the role of director: you see what you want, but there are a million outside forces that you can\u2019t anticipate waiting to change the course of your ideas. Obviously, the Carlito\u2019s Way example is a particularly uncommon example, but the point remains. Having an idea in your head is nothing; making some version of that idea into a reality is what makes you a director.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n (Quick interjection: before I continue, I want to make a couple of things as clear as possible. One, it is impossible to direct anything without a good crew. Whenever directors talk about their film, they never say \u201cmyself and the crew\u201d because that would get tiring and repetitive. For ease, I will do the same when discussing my own work.<\/p>\n Also, and most importantly: I am not comparing myself to Brian De Palma. That would be idiotic; I don\u2019t have the ear lobes for it. I am definitely not comparing myself to any of the other directors I will mention either. The only thing I have in common with David Fincher is a general disdain for the world and an appreciation of Brad Pitt. To say I am not on the level of these directors would be a tremendous understatement, and I definitely don\u2019t see myself as somebody that even has the capability to become their creative peer. I would be shocked if I ever even tried to make a short, let alone a feature film. I am fine with this. The closest I will ever come to making a film is tweeting at Ryan Fleck. I do not have a filmmaker\u2019s dedication. I am a mere layman. That said, it is true that I am a layman with more directorial experience than most of my fellow laypeople. So, with all necessary qualifiers mentioned, we travel onward.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Professionally, I am a freelance video producer, which is to say I make my bones providing various companies with various types of video projects to get their various messages across. In making these videos to (fundamentally) help peddle product, I do pretty much everything: I hire the camera operators, I book the space to shoot in, I direct the shoot on the day, and I edit the eventual video. I frequently double as my own director of photography. I am like Steven Soderbergh, if Soderbergh was a capitalist pig that used too many pronouns in his writing.<\/p>\n The reason I do everything is the same reason everybody in my field should do this: when you do everything, and you have the ability to do everything quickly, it is simply the smartest financial reasoning. I can work quicker, so I can work more. And when it comes time to actually do something creative, this Swiss Army Knife mentality does the same thing for your more personal projects: it keeps your costs down. Rian Johnson edited Brick on his PowerMac because his debut had a budget of less than half a million dollars, and he could save that money for film stock instead. (In the past, the only reason I\u2019ve been able to afford the production crew I want is because I don\u2019t have to pay an editor.)<\/p>\n When I haven\u2019t been capitalizing on my capitalistic tendencies, I sometimes pursue creative pursuits of my own, and my two degrees of separation from a band that doesn\u2019t suck has allowed me to make a bunch of music videos. I have the emotional fortitude to watch exactly one of them without wanting to vomit.<\/p>\n This is not a good batting average. The jury is in, and they have rendered a guilty verdict on 11 counts of being a terrible director, despite the fact that I am (technically) an award-winning director.<\/p>\n Invariably, the process goes as such: I am tasked with listening to a song and proposing a handful of video-based ideas this song gives me. Those ideas are sent to the band, who then decide whether or not these ideas are hot garbage. Much conversation is had, and much planning is done. We talk about how much money we have to spend, and we talk about whether or not anybody can be paid. I storyboard some shots, the artist tells me all of their ideas, and then we combine the two. Finally, we pick a shoot day.<\/p>\n When that day eventually comes, all of that planning is pretty much useless. We deal with realities that come with low budget productions: somebody that was supposed to show up at 8am will be arriving at 11:30am. The space we have simply is not conducive to the camera moves we had planned, because we couldn\u2019t afford a rehearsal day with the crew to solve these issues. Our gaffer doesn\u2019t have enough diffusion to adequately control the sunlight in the way we had wanted. The space we\u2019re shooting in turns out to be a bong water-soaked porn dungeon, and nobody brought any Purell.<\/p>\n Sorting out all of these issues is taking us time that we already didn\u2019t have enough of to begin with. A production assistant has to go buy lighters and hand sanitizer, while we have to move the shot list around to take care of all the things we can get without the person that will be arriving three and a half hours late. We simply have to deal with the fact that we\u2019re going to be in a porn dungeon for the next fourteen hours.<\/p>\n I have never left a set without enough to get a completed video. What we are able to get, however, is almost never what I wanted. If this wasn\u2019t my profession, I am certain\u00a0I would drink less.<\/p>\n