Pet Peeves - film and ads

I had in mind a topic to blog about which had nothing to do with what is now the first pet peeve on my mind. First, I'm sure some insufferable boob is going to say, "If you don't like ads there is nobody forcing you to use the website." That is the kind of remark that deserves a slap in the head with a dead fish. I finally make my way to google and blogger and click "create new post" and lately what I get is a blank screen with nothing but an ad banner and at the bottom a "send feedback" button which I may have use for. If I want to actually see where to put my subject line and the body of my blog entry I have to click refresh. This I find out purely by experimenting. When I sign into a hotmail account, I see at the top an indication like, "a password is not enough," which looks like the name of a philosophically horrific song raising money for internet stupidity. To circumvent that I have to highlight the address bar and either go to another site or type hotmail again and then I am in. So I'm learning two things from msn in that case: They want to force me to give them a phone number or credit card or some other perhaps false verification of identity for an account I have had for 13 years (which is something I don't respect) and the security of their stupid system can be gotten around (which I also can't say I respect). I have heard that something on the horizon will replace hotmail accounts entirety, but have received no alerts and it may have merely been hype for the new service. Some of us have records of hotmail messages archived in such a way that there would be a loss if they were deleted. I don't know how to fight these things without seeming naive. What I had in mind was to talk about filmmaker pet peeves. Mainly the way that aspects of production are played off without context. An actor brags, "We don't need to use monitors or video assist. The camera man can do that. And I don't like the director looking at a monitor during the take. He should be looking at me." Or somebody says, "Oh, out director doesn't bother with storyboards. He just makes up his mind as we go along. That keeps it all fresh. he doesn't need the crutch of storyboard sketches." There seems to be nobody responding to those kinds of sound bytes, and so they are taken at face value. This drives me nuts. About the actor saying a director should be looking at him/her during the take, the actor is important but so is context and perspective. Even if the director is ONLY concerned about the actor, the lens and the lighting and the way the actor is framed and frankly whether a moment within a take is actually IN FRAME at all are all elements of that. And the actor's job is largely concentration. If the reality of the director standing there in his/her eye-line and staring at them is important, that actor has problems ACTING!!!!!! There IS NO director between action and cut, only your character and whatever other fictional person should be imagined there. Furthermore, the director has to sign off on the shot. It is nice if other people do to, but the director HAS TO be able to give the minimum direction of YES or NO. The director can sign-off blindly and take the cinematographer's word for it, but chances are the cinematographer might not be operating the camera either and if HE isn't using a monitor to at least see how the lights interact with the scene then it would come down to the camera operator's sign-off. However competent or extraordinary each member of the crew may be, the director should WANT to be the person who signs off. Especially because there may always be one detail that shouldn't be taken for granted and he should have to take responsibility when it comes to edit and there are no surprises about something being there you don't want or something missing that should be there. About the storyboard, this is not spelled out enough. The kind of storyboards to avoid are the ones that a studio might give to the director of a tent-pole film and say "just shoot this." A good storyboard for s similar size film might be Paul Verhoven's personal storyboards for Starship Troopers which depict the shooting plan pretty much as it emerged on screen, and with the added benefit that he happens to be an excellent draftsman so the illustrations are true to the subjects. Whether it happens all the time or not, I like the idea of the director drawing each frame within a shot and having a plan. If a movie were 100 pages of screenplay, I estimate that two and a half weeks of 8-hour days could be spent on the director doing the first pass of thumbnail storyboards for a feature. That is thought and time and close regard of the scenes that will not be spent during the high tension of making the movie itself when time is of the essence. Plans can be modified or adapted as circumstances change, but having done storyboards makes a person mentally prepared for how to use the camera as visual reinforcement to contain the relationships and moments of the story. They can also help narrow down locations. If someone expects to be a beggar and not a chooser with locations or sets, they might compromise the best way to shoot a scene. For example, being unable to get the camera far enough away from the actors to blur out the background because the location is too confined might be something that they are willing to compromise or it might be an argument that can be defended persuasively with storyboarding (and with pointing to the sketch and explaining "this is the character and this is scribble is the blur because he is isolated from others and should have his own focal plane"). The camera (except in faux documentary style which I dislike) should not be playing catch-up with the actors. There is nothing unusual about giving the actor the edge of the stage and the confines in which he/she has to work. Sometimes it will be just their hands acting in close-up, sometimes just the face, and sometimes head-to-toe body language. The actor's requirements include technical competence. They can certainly bring something to the table, and may have a better-motivated start position or an idea of how to be introduced. But even those are best as early discussions instead of last minute so their implications can be applied throughout the story and not as a whim or as a concession to a star's ego. If you are lucky, Samuel L. Jackson has a character-motivated way to first show his religious character in Black Snake Moan, in a prayer-like position leaning on a vehicle. If you are unlikely and actress doesn't feel like wearing the hat the movie is named after and scenes that have already been done with it have to be abandoned, as detailed in "Claire's Hat" the bootleg documentary by Bruce McDonald. I'm sure there are other examples but those were the ones I had to get off my chest today. In case anyone is reading.