#isapelikula

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IsaPelikula 4: Directing

by Dane Santiago

edited by Joshua Chan 

On November 24, 2017, the fourth and final IsaPelikula class by the Loyola Film Circle featured director Prime Cruz to share with students about the processes of film directing. The acclaimed director provided general examples while also elaborating on some of his artistic decisions in the films Sleepless (2015) and Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B (2016).

He began by describing the notion that people commonly have about directors: someone who orders people around on a set. Upon closer examination of their creative process, however, we see that directors are, in fact, doing a largely collaborative job. The director needs to understand how the other elements of the film (acting, editing, production design, etc.) communicate the main message that they seek to convey.

“You’re the first audience to your film,” Cruz says, “as you watch things unfold in front of your camera—your job is to determine whether you like what you’re seeing or not.” Additionally, what makes this step more complex is that directors have to choose between a lot of different elements—whether it’s the way the actor conveys a particular emotion, or the way the subject is framed by the camera. In this sense, being a ‘decision-maker’ or having such power over a film does not always entail an easy job, Cruz even muses on how it is more difficult to decide on a film’s overall message than its execution.

Whether you like what you’re seeing or not is largely determined by the answer to the question “what is the film trying to say?” To answer this question effectively, one must distill a single thought or emotion from the multiple messages that a director may be tempted to express. Because such a message is not always apparent from first sight, the director has to decide the one overarching thought, emotion, or statement that will be imbued in every shot and every scene of the movie.

As an example, Cruz described a certain feeling of riding the MRT – the feeling of looking out the window, engulfed by a feeling of overwhelm; both by the inside of the train and the sights and sounds of the city outside. Although this seems to be more on the side of imagery than a clear-cut statement, this ‘solid emotion’ is what inspired Cruz to depict the emotions of the character of Gem (portrayed by Glaiza de Castro) from his film Sleepless. In the film, overwhelmed by her graveyard job as a call center agent, Gem’s state of stasis and isolation is continually depicted by shots that feature a lot of empty space between her and other objects. Because Gem finds it difficult to express herself, the director often chose to have the characters do very subtle acting while the shots themselves express what Gem is not able to.

Cruz then gives another example from his other movie, Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B. One scene is about Jewel (Ryza Cenon) being overpowered by a force within her (the titular ‘manananggal’). The actress was instructed to dramatize this very emotional scene, showing Jewel contorting out of a mixture of pain and pleasure. Aside from this acting, the director employed various other tricks—the foreground objects partially blocking her so she feels ‘unreachable’, the warm lighting, the creeping sound that continually escalated, and the slowly changing aspect-ratio (where the black frames at the top of and bottom of the screen slowly opened themselves upward just at the point that Jewel feels a ‘release’).

The latter trick—the changing aspect-ratio—surprised most people because it is something not easily noticed on first watch. Cruz noted that many people liked that scene but could not pinpoint why, and then added that it did not matter if it was not noticed on a technical or intellectual level – if people felt the emotions intended by the director for the scene, it has done its job well.

Lastly, to end the class, Cruz told everyone not to be too concerned with the ‘look’ or ‘polish’ of their own films. “You can get people to do that for you in the future,” he adds, “instead, be concerned with telling the story in your unique way.” He also assured the students that directing gets easier with practice over time, no matter the quality of the camera.

Cruz then ended by giving advice – picking out all the elements (acting/story/editing/mise-en-scene) from your personal top five films and find out why you like them and what the film’s message/tone/emotion does to tie these elements altogether.  In the end, although the classroom setting was intimate (with the event held close to the final exam week), the room resounded with applause as the lecture adjourned.

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IsaPelikula 1: Producing and Screenplay Writing

By: Raf Bautista

Producing a film and script writing are two of the most important aspects when doing a movie. A movie cannot be made properly, or at all, if they are not done correctly. For the first IsaPelikula class held on October 2, these were the topics that were discussed.

The first speaker was Pamela Reyes, the producer of Birdshot which is the Philippines’ entry to the 90th Academy Awards, who gave a talk on producing. Initially, she started by talking about how she started in the film industry. She started out as a college student where she directed several short films which were submitted to various Philippine cinema festivals. Eventually, she started producing films on a bigger scale such as Rekorder (2013), and Birdshot (2016).

The first thing she said was that the creation of a movie is not simple. It goes through a series of steps. Initially, a movie starts with an idea, which is followed by the creation of the script, then the genre is picked. At this stage, a decision is made on whether the film would be commercial or indie. Finally, the idea is then pitched to a finance team.

She went on to enumerate the multiple ways on which you could finance your films. One way is private financing, which means getting money from your parents or other external sources close to the person. The second way is to get money from production companies. Another way is through sponsorships where companies are asked for money, in exchange for showing their product in the movie. Reyes also talked about how there are international grants available, if the requirements are met. The producer needs to be creative in terms of finding ways to make money and film production. Unlike in other countries, there isn’t a lot of soft money in the Philippines which can be used for the film making process. Therefore, the producer needs to find creative ways to raise money.

Reyes also discussed what it would take to be a good producer. Primarily, the producer needs to have a good team. Secondly, a long pre-production session is recommended so that there are preparations for any setbacks. Thirdly, a producer needs to have good production value. Finally, they need to be sociable.

Director and writer Antoinette Jadaone, whose previous works include That Thing Called Tadhana (2014) and English Only Please (2014), followed Reyes and talked about the process of screenplay writing. Jadaone said that she considers herself more of a scriptwriter than a director as she is more knowledgeable with writing scripts than directing.

Script writing is a time consuming process since the first draft is never the one used. Jadaone’s scripts go through numerous drafts and revisions before the final one is ready. She starts her script by asking the question “What if?”. Once this has been defined, the next step is to research on the topic so the script is as accurate as possible. On top of this, she stressed that a script must have a beginning, middle and end, where the problem is shown in the first ten minutes of the film.

All in all, the first IsaPelikula was a success since the venue packed with students, to the point where some had to stand up since there were no more seats left. The two speakers were very knowledgeable with the topics they discussed where even the event-goers were able to learn a lot.

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IsaPelikula: Production Design, How A Popular O-Film Was Made, and Star Wars

Written by Dianne Tapia Edited by Gaby Gloria & Alfonso Villareal Photos by Aisha Causing & Eia Tagaban

IsaPelikula 3: Production Design Speaker Yumi Catabijan

“There is no way I’m going to be able to make it to an IsaPe class,” was the very first thought I had, reading about LFC’s IsaPelikula classes. “No goddamn way.”

Then I checked my schedule, and thought, “Huh, I guess I am making it to one of them.”

Writing about one, however, was not a possibility I had in mind until I was asked to fill in for the original writer, who apparently wouldn’t be able to make it to the class. Because I didn’t have  much else to do (a lie, I did have a lot to do that I didn’t even want to look at), I shrugged and said, sure. Then I got a pad of yellow paper, a new black ballpoint pen, and a cup of coffee, and come 5:00 in the afternoon I had seated myself in the room, and others were already coming in.

Yumi Catabijan, the lecturer for this particular class, came in a little later than the people she was lecturing. We learned, over the course of the class, why she’d been picked to talk about this class in particular: she had been the production designer of the acclaimed O-Film Katipunan Jump Street, though I hadn’t seen it at the time of the class and still haven’t at the time of writing, and knew how to create a believable world on the budget of a college student.

“That is,” she said, “literally no money at all.”

Writer, Dianne Tapia

I managed not to break out laughing into hysterics, at the thought of having to create a whole world on the budget of a few thousand pesos at most for a class project. And the class project I was thinking of was fairly easy—I wondered how the production designer for the original Star Wars trilogy must’ve felt, given the expansive space setting of the films and the lack of computer-generated imagery to help them along. I’d known the originals were rife with practical effects, a necessity brought about by the limitations of the time period, but I wanted to know how the production designer had, on a budget comparable to that of a broke college student’s, managed to create sets so iconic that Star Wars fans all over the world tried their best to model their rooms off even one set in particular.

Back to the class: Catabijan spoke, at length, about the responsibilities of a production designer, to provide some background for those of us who hadn’t considered production design in detail before. Typically, production designers handled the complete art department—“that means they’re in charge of the overall look of the film,” she said. She also added that, “for a student, there is no such thing as an art department,” and that all the roles of said art department fell upon the one production designer, in a student production. Because of the very low budget most student productions had, she also told the class to take advantage of their connections and to borrow without shame. “Borrow your friends too, if you have to,” she added. “But return everything once you’re done with them, and if you’ve lent anything out, get them back—I can’t count the number of things I’ve lent out that I’ve just never gotten back at all.”

She also pointed out that production designers needed to know the story of the film whose look they were designing, which meant being organized enough to prevent from delaying the shoot and raising production costs, as well as working with the director (“who has the final say”) and the cinematographer (“who knows the frame”) to build the film’s world up. She brought up the idea of a Production Design Bible, and passed around the (very thick) PD bible for Katipunan Jump Street for us to see the amount of work that went into each element of the film to make it believable, from the costumes to the make-up to the sets themselves. And there was a lot of work done, from the more prominent sets that made it to the film—the spy van, for example, about which Catabijan also spoke about, noting that “the screens you see up there in the background are iPads, and we just downloaded an app that made them look like the spy screens you’d see in movies”—to things that either lasted for only a few seconds at most on-screen and things that never even made it past the conceptual stage.

That made me think, then, of the Star Wars original trilogy’s design: while it took place in a sci-fi setting, unlike most of the sci-fi films and properties at the time, the galaxy the series took place in featured a more used, gritty look to the world and the objects that populated said world. If anything shone in the films, it was a sure bet it belonged to the Empire, which spoke to the vast resources that it had at hand—everything else was scuffed, beaten, used. One of the best examples of this is, perhaps, Han Solo’s ship the Millennium Falcon, one of the most iconic ships from the franchise and certainly one of the ships that most shows the used aesthetic so characteristic of the Star Wars franchise.

How’d they make such an iconic ship, then?

The concepts started from George Lucas’ relatively childish drawings, built upon by Colin Cantwell, who was one of the first people hired onto the project by Lucas, at a time when the protagonist was still called Luke Starkiller. Cantwell, who started earlier than the more well-known Ralph McQuarrie, went to work on the designs first proposed by Lucas, and McQuarrie, the first name most fans think of when they think of Star Wars concept art, built up on the designs by both Cantwell and Lucas, especially the ship that was first known as the Pirate Ship. Eventually, this Pirate Ship evolved—in shape and in name—into what we now know and love as the Millennium Falcon.

But translating the ship from a drawing on paper to a real-life set fell on the shoulders of Norman Reynolds, John Barry, and their team. Says Roger Christian, set decorator for A New Hope, to Esquire, “The Millennium Falcon was difficult, because I had to train prop men to break down jet engines into scrap pieces and then line them all up into different categories and stick them to the wall.”

(A note about the class, here: Catabijan had spoken about simply sliding a wooden board into the spy van to prop up the iPads. Some things don’t change, it seems.)

The Millennium Falcon’s exterior and interior? Airplane scrap—“if I bought airplane scrap and broke it down, I could stick it to the sets in specific ways—because there’s an order to doing it, it’s not just random.” Christian then goes on to add that no one wanted airplane scraps, noting that there had been junkyards so full of the things that he could’ve been able to buy a whole airplane in scraps for only fifty pounds.

I laughed, reading that article. Catabijan had also stressed the importance of reupholstering stuff, and I could see how that applied to a low-budget science-fiction film that had become a pop culture phenomenon all by itself.

I left the room after the last crash course in production design—during which Apricot was recommended as a master class in production design, and Catabijan expressed her distaste for Heneral Luna’s historically inaccurate design—and the Q&A, feeling more than a little ready to tackle my own projects, and humming the Star Wars theme to myself.

References: XXX

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IsaPelikula 2: Production Design Class

By Eri Ranchez 

“The world is how the production designer tells the story,” says the 2nd speaker as he opens the second lecture for this year’s series of Isapelikula production classes. A class on how to turn visions of worlds into reality, the Loyola Film Circle held its second Isapelikula 2014 production class on Sept. 8, 2014 this time centering on the aspects of production management and design. The class’ second speaker was none other than the organization’s moderator, Mr. Jose Angelo Supangco, also a professor on campus, who has been a key mover in several productions, and has a broad knowledge of the different aspects of production management and design.

  During the talk, Supangco introduced to the IsaPe participants present in SOM 111 the different components that make up the umbrella term, “Production Design”.  He emphasized the different relationships of production design with the other components that make up the film, such as its importance to the concretization of the script and the overall visual result of the production. Sharing fun and insightful stories from work and other personal experiences, Supangco also shared different terms, techniques and tactics that may aid the participants as they complete their own films. 

One interesting technique shared by Supangco was his Milo/chocolate powder technique, in which production designers would sprinkle chocolate powder over white walls in order to give it texture, according to the vision of the film. The technique proved successful for Supangco and his crew, however, he notes that it is important to clean up after production times, so as not to provoke unwanted visitors on the set. Students were even given behind-the-scenes looks to one of Supangco’s most recent productions as he explained the anatomy of the set and how he pieced his production together.

  To cap off the talk, as usual, was an open forum, where listeners asked questions that ranged from the how-to’s of production work to Supangco’s own production work. Surely, inspired by the knowledge, tips and tricks shared by Mr. Ayo Supangco, the IsaPe participants will be creating beautiful worlds in their upcoming grad films.