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CHAPTER 2

FOCUSING YOUR ENERGIES

1. Set limits on your project from the beginning.

2. Let the project inform you about which way it wants to go.

3. Look for, and find, the key idea in your project.

4. Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish?”

5. If you don’t frame your idea, the project may become unmanageable.

6. Create a one-sheet description to define the project.

If you don’t set limits on your project from the beginning, you may never finish! One of the main challenges filmmakers face is going overboard: doing too much research, shooting too many interviews, coming up with too many ideas, spending too much money, and taking too long to edit the film.

To finish a film, you have to decide how best to use what you have to work with. You cannot predict that your resources will grow. You may or may not raise more money as you go. You may attract more volunteers, but you can’t count on it.

So, be realistic. Don’t expect miracles, and put together what you can — without going into debt, cutting yourself off from friends and family, or getting sick.

I’ve learned all this the hard way.

The magic words are focus, focus, and focus. If you can focus, you can pace yourself. And if you can pace yourself, you will have time for a relatively normal life as well.

Ideally, a good film can be described in one strong sentence. Writing that sentence will help you focus. The sentence should include:

1. Subject;

2. Verb (action);

3. Purpose.

Funders, for example, expect you to be able to say what you are doing and why, succinctly. For example:

1. Radiance (subject);

2. brings together the light in nature with spiritual illumination (what the film does);

3. to create a tapestry which connects the day-to-day world with the infinite (why).

This chapter is about focusing your energies and setting limits, so you can finish — and finish without exhausting yourself and your resources.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF FINISHING YOUR FILM

At the beginning of the film, focus on the subject and set limits. Without a focus and a goal, you can end up shooting, raising money, interviewing people, and tweaking scenes forever.

Set your aim: Decide what you hope to accomplish with this film.

Decide on the scope of the film — and be realistic about length and budget. Is the film you envision feasible and practical? Make it doable.

Ask people (or do research) and find out, has it already been done? If so, what about your film will be unique?

Do you have, or can you gain, access to the people and material you think you will need? If you need to do that, find out how you can!

Figure out what kinds of research you would need to do.

FINDING A BALANCE

You will need to start someplace — with an idea and a plan — and then allow your vision to evolve as you work. Keep your goals in mind, and as you learn more, meet new people, and start shooting, your focus will develop and may change. You cannot predict at the outset how your project might take off later.

For example, you might decide on a main character at the beginning of your interviewing, and not know who the main character really is until well into the project! We assumed Molly Hale, a woman who had suffered a spinal cord injury, would be the “lead” in Moment by Moment. Halfway through, we realized that her husband Jeramy, who had been by her side through her years of struggle and triumph, was at least as important. The main character turned out to be two people, Jeramy and Molly!

Identifying Your Premise

Once you settle on a subject, it is necessary to frame your idea as a way of defining the scope and setting limits at the start. Any independent filmmaker can tell you that a film project has the potential to absorb all of your money, all of your time, and all of your energy. As the production proceeds, related ideas will tempt you to expand your focus; your goal should be to protect and nurture the heart of the story that you want to tell.

In Moment by Moment, when I chose to expand my core characters to include Jeramy, Molly’s husband, I still remained true to my original idea, which was to follow Molly’s healing journey.

One way to frame your idea is to define your goal. Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish?” The answer to that question will reveal what is most important to you, personally, about your movie.

By keeping in mind what you want to accomplish, you can be alert when seductive side issues begin to pull you away from your purpose.

ONE FILMMAKER’S SUCCESS AT FINDING AND FOLLOWING A SINGLE PREMISE

Michael Moore is well known for focusing his documentaries on a single premise. Roger & Me is apparently built on one question: “What if I set out to ask GM’s CEO, Roger B. Smith, how he feels about the damage done to Flint, Michigan, when General Motors closed the plant and threw thirty thousand people out of work?”

Microphone in hand and camera crew in tow, Moore set out to interview Smith. In his pursuit of an interview, Moore managed to talk to GM guards, GM employees, and the unemployed people of Flint. He toured a new jail, and filmed a high-society lawn party. The comedic premise of a rumpled, unemployed troublemaker trying to put the CEO of GM on the spot hooked the audience. Along the way, Moore achieved his real objective: He showed what happened to Flint and its people after the GM plant closed.

As you go forward, ask yourself: “What is the key idea at the heart of my movie?” The key idea will act as a spine that links the other elements: interviews, on-location scenes, factual information, graphics, and special effects.

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

When you clarify what you want to achieve, you will begin to feel that the production is finally rolling forward.

There is a natural momentum built into every project. Once your project is “in motion,” commit to doing something on the film every day. Even if you just scribble down some notes, you’ll soon feel a magnetic pull, matching your own effort.

Here is a breakdown of the journey of one of my films When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories.

a. The single premise

With the film When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories, I focused on a single premise: That the people who lived through the days of back-alley abortions, by telling their personal stories, could educate a generation with no memory of that era.

b. My goals

One of my goals was to reach a generation of young adults who had grown up after Roe v. Wade, without a frame of reference for what it was like to live at a time when abortion was illegal and women were dying in back alleys.

c. The momentum

The project attracted women who had gone through illegal abortions, who had never told their stories before, as well as the doctors, nurses, and others who risked being arrested to provide safe care. As the generation that lived through these experiences aged, their stories were on the verge of being lost.

d. The response

By staying with one theme — dramatic stories of the era — I invited viewers to empathize with the human experiences of those who had lived through the suffering and danger.

Now, more than fifteen years after its release, we still get a steady stream of requests for that film. Within the last few years we have sold forty thousand copies of a DVD which includes excerpts from it.

Any topic is potentially inexhaustible. I could have spent years on different aspects of that issue. However, I chose a single topic: people telling their untold stories.

e. A note: You don’t need to “do it all” with one film

A film with a strong point will trigger curiosity. You don’t need to talk about all aspects of a subject in your film. People are eager, if interested, to put the rest of the puzzle together in other ways.

What I did, in addition to When Abortion Was Illegal, was make two additional films, with each taking on a different focus. From Danger to Dignity profiles underground networks, and the struggle to make abortion legal. The Fragile Promise of Choice looks at the current situation ranging from clinic violence to regressive legislation.

The issues and dramas that surround abortion are multiple. Every one is worthy of documentation, and they all engaged me.

But I had to circumscribe one to start.

Setting Goals

Too often filmmakers end up with boxes of unfinished elements because they attempted to do too much. After deciding to focus on those untold stories in When Abortion Was Illegal, I asked myself, “What would I need to make and to complete this one film?” I came up with a list:

Interviewees

1. Women who had had illegal abortions, who would be telling their stories for the first time outside their immediate family.

2. Professionals (doctors, nurses, clergy, lawyers) who defied abortion laws as acts of conscience.

3. How many? Based on past experience, I hoped to find about ten interviewees for the final film.

Time

Given the urgency (in 1991 there was the danger of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade), I planned to finish in less than a year.

Money

To interview people from different parts of the United States, I needed to add travel costs into the budget (in addition to a videographer, an editor, appropriate music, and other basic costs).

Aiming for national television and PBS meant that I needed high production values. The camera work, images, and audio had to be broadcast quality.

Distribution

My goal was to get the film out to as many people as possible, so I aimed for national television, PBS, educational markets, and private screenings — all of which happened.

(What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t have put on the list as a goal, is that When Abortion Was Illegal would be nominated for an Oscar and would win the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Medal!)

With my thumbnail sketch of project requirements, I was able to assess what I might need to complete the film. The list enabled me to get started without feeling overwhelmed. As I worked on the film, my needs changed, but I had a place from which to start.

Framing the Idea

The potential for doing background research, searching for interviewees, and tweaking a script is unlimited! If, for example, you have too much information, or too many interviewees, your goal begins to get fragmented. Some filmmakers never finish because they never feel they’ve done enough.

How do you know when to stop gathering material, doing interviews, or researching?

You have to ask yourself, “What do I actually need?”

Taking stock is necessary at every stage of your film, including the stage when you are shooting footage. (See Chapter 12 for a description of field production.) When we were shooting location footage for Woman by Woman, we became enchanted with colorful, dramatic, poignant images of India. We shot tape after tape of street scenes and villages. We could have made do with half of what we gathered. But we were drawn deeper and deeper into the mysterious beauty of India. We finally did run out of money, and then stopped. If I had been more judicious — or spent more time on preproduction — I would have stopped much sooner and still had more than enough footage. Logging the footage took months! (See Chapter 15 for a description of logging.)

Limiting your idea to a focused premise gives you a yardstick. Ask yourself, as well as you can early on, does this B-roll footage, this interview, or this research, support the point of the film?

THE PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Early in the process of making your film, you may find it useful to create a “one-sheet” for your film.

A one-sheet is exactly what the name implies: one sheet of paper, on which information is provided about the filmmaker and the film.

The one-sheet typically serves as a way to introduce a particular film or a series of films. It will often contain a variety of information, both images and text, about the film. The name of the filmmaker and the title of the film should appear prominently.

Begin by writing a single sentence that describes your project and then expand on that sentence until you have a concise description of your project that fits on part of one sheet of paper.

This first pass should include full contact information.

As your project evolves, some common elements you might add to the one-sheet would include:

Biographical information

Photograph(s) of the filmmaker

Cover artwork for the release

Names of other films or awards.

List of credits

The description will eventually evolve in two directions: one for publicity as a flyer, and one into a detailed treatment, which can be used for everything from press releases, to giving new interns an overview of the project, to an introduction to a funding proposal.

Developing Your Idea

Once you have your subject in mind, and have a sense of where you are going with that idea — even though you might not yet have raised any money or shot any footage — you should take a crack at laying out possible scenarios for your idea, to see how it might look.

Three Ways to Map a Project

Mind map

A mind map is a graphic way to organize information and reveal relationships. One way to make a mind map is to write a key word in the middle of a blank piece of paper, and then to draw branching links to other key words.

Post-Its™ and poster board

Poster boards are very, very useful ways to see, at a glance, the possibilities of a storyboarded progression at the beginning, or the shape of a film partway through. I often use different colored Post-Its to represent different types of information (interviews, narration, archival footage, vérité synch sound scenes, etc.).

Mind dump

When you are really stuck, doing a “mind dump” can break through mental logjams. To do a mind dump, just list everything you can think of on a piece of paper or on the computer screen, then organize it in different ways showing how the pieces might fit together.

MAINTAINING A BALANCE

The eventual success of your film will depend on your ability to find and develop a basic premise that sustains from beginning to end, while allowing for change. Whether you are profiling an individual, documenting a current event, or delving into history, filmmaking requires finding and keeping a balance — somewhere between staying focused and being flexible around the central premise.

Throughout production, ask yourself, “What is this film really about?” Asking that question, letting go of “old pictures,” and listening attentively to the answer as it grows, will make the film uniquely “yours.”

KEY POINTS

Starting a film is relatively easy. Identifying the key theme is harder. Finishing may be the hardest part of all.

When you frame your idea, you pave the way not only for producing but also finishing your film.

Related ideas and projects may take you off track, and will tempt you to spread your interests, energies, and time. Your goal should be to protect and nurture the heart of the story that you want to tell.

A film project has the potential to absorb all of your money, all of your time, and all of your life. Your job is to set limits.

The frame for your film will change and evolve as you work.

Write a one-sheet project description to frame and define your project.