I never liked TV. It took college -- scratch that -- it took DVD seasons of Weeds, Dexter and Studio 60 to convince me you could do great things with the medium.
It is, after all, the weirdest challenge in writing, because it has a perpetual length. A movie begins and ends. A book has a first and a last page. A show just runs, and so the writers have the freedom to use as many characters they like and bury intricate plots into multi-hour storyarcs, or bring a tangent in for a single episode.
The backlash of having no end in sight is it's not easy to maintain quality for the long haul.
Unknown to many, Be The Shoe tried this once. It lasted 2 months.
The Internet is for Higher Education
It was my misguided plan: an idea for a web show, which we could shoot ahead of time and release in little 15-25 minute episodes online, building an audience as we went. It was a great idea in theory, and it didn't work.
The story was Matt Shepley's, the script was Randy's, and with the assistance of the very funny Daniel Shar, we had a sitcom: Higher Education, a less-than-touching story of three dudes and their terribly misguided attempts to tackle college, life, and ketchup-standed blue jeans.
It took us less than one episode to realize this wasn't going to work out.
Daunting tasks
Our math was wrong. We thought the scenes were short, the cast simple, and we could hammer these out at a rapid pace. It didn't occur to us that every episode was essentially a short film, and a block of three was a feature. We didn't realize that scheduling the shoot around people's busy lives wasn't so bad for a weekend but impossible in the long run.
As a result, we killed the project, although there's been some discussion about releasing the pilot episode (after we finish Loss For Words, of course).
But few good things did came out of this experience.
For one, filming on a major street with an actress dressed in full over-the-top hooker atire is a once in a lifetime experience. It's also the only time I've ever been tapped on the shoulder by a passing friend and told I didn't need to resort to this.
More importantly, this is where we mastered our current filmmaking process.
New techniques for shooting on a shoestring budget
We shoot a lot handicam. Randy is really good at it, and it gives us a lot of freedom, so why not? Higher Education is where we got that straight.
The cinematography of Salad Daze is pretty conservative: two cameras, two mics, tripods and over-the-shoulder angles. We play it safe, in part because we were understaffed (I was out of town for most of production) and in part to try and create a tamer visual feel than American Gothic.
But when we hit the ending, we needed something else. The Shiva scene, (it's okay, no spoilers) takes the movie up a notch, and we needed to have a lot more visual flexibility to follow Jake's character around the room.
On the spot, with the extras waiting, Randy and I did a quick test run. He picked up the camera, I picked up the shotgun mic, we followed Jake's path. This was going to work. We'd never tried this method before, but we could just tell this was how it had to be. And we shot the climax of the movie handicam.
It worked, and for Higher Education, when Randy wanted to play with a rougher look, we finally had some time to explore the technique. We added much-needed live monitoring of audio (err... headphones, so I could hear what we were really getting on tape). We learned how to stay out of each other's way and get just about any shot we wanted, complete with pans, zooms, and mirrors (mirrors are asking for trouble)... the list goes on.
Video people know you just don't do this. Our Assistant Director, who's a great photographer, didn't originally believe me when I said it was often better than a steadycam, depending on the scene.
He changed his mind when he saw the footage.
So why does this matter?
Because we shot half of Loss For Words using the same technique, and in combination with a steadycam and the occassional jib shot, produced the most visually interesting movie we've ever put on a screen, with a deadline that we could never have made using tracks and dollies.
We've had our share of failed experiments, but we always get something out of them. If nothing else, I have a lot of respect for the writers and producers who can sustain quality in a television format. It's not easy.
