Author Archives: Michael Korican

About Michael Korican

A long-time media artist, Michael’s filmmaking stretches back to 1978. Michael graduated from York University film school with Special Honours, winning the Famous Players Scholarship in his final year. The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video called Michael's first feature 'Recorded: Live!' "the first film about rock video". Michael served on the board of L.I.F.T. when he lived in Toronto during the eighties and managed the Bloor Cinema for Tom and Jerry. He has been prolific over his past eight years in Victoria, having made over thirty-five shorts, won numerous awards, produced two works for BravoFACT! and received development funding for 'Begbie’s Ghost' through the CIFVF and BC Film.

How to come up with movie ideas

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Ever get writer’s block, or need a movie idea quick?

Script Reader Pro suggests 5 proven ways to unlock original movie ideas.

1. Turn off your phone and get outside. (Let your mind wander. Cue “Fixing a Hole.”)

2. Study other writers’ loglines. (My favourite: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.“)

3. Plunder real life. (Omg, that weird thing that happened to you or your relative might be the genesis of a great story!)

4. Focus on what moves you. (Your expertise will make your protagonist interesting.)

5. Forget “what if?” and relax. (Not sure about this one. “What if?” is one of my favourite questions.)

My take: lol! I only come up with one killer idea once every 1,000 days!

Spreadsheets you must befriend

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Rick Castañeda guest posts on No Film School, revealing The 73 Spreadsheets You’ll Need to Finish Your Feature Film.

He kindly shares:

“If you’re thinking about making your own feature film, I’m hoping this gives you an abridged, table-of-contents-style sketch of all the different parts of filmmaking. So many articles and interviews are all about writing, working with actors, camera choice, and the other creative aspects of the film, I thought it might be useful to get into the actual nuts and bolts. We absolutely loved making our film. All these spreadsheets helped us to get there.”

He discusses each one from the perspective of his second feature “All Sorts,” and includes some examples.

I like his advice for Credits:

“Just for keeping track of all the lovely folks who participated on the film. I know you’re thinking this should be in the post-production section, but start this on day one and just add people as they start to come into the life of the film. It’s easier than sitting with a blank slate all the way at the end of the film.”

Here are the titles of most of the spreadsheets Rick used:

Pre-Production Spreadsheets

  • Budget spreadsheets
  • Team spreadsheets (possible producers)
  • Location spreadsheets
  • Contact spreadsheets
  • Casting spreadsheets
    • Background
    • Auditions
    • Confirmed Cast
  • Scheduling spreadsheets
  • Art/props spreadsheets
    • June’s Diego vs Anthony spreadsheet
    • Calendar spreadsheet
    • “Go June” signs spreadsheet
  • Costume spreadsheets
  • Investor Spreadsheets

Production Spreadsheets

  • Call sheets

Post Spreadsheets

  • Footage spreadsheets
  • Editing spreadsheets
  • VFX spreadsheets
  • Credits spreadsheet
  • Master Rights Grid
  • Music Cue Sheet
  • QC Notes/Fixes

Crowdfunding Spreadsheets

  • Targets/contacts
  • Reward lists

Distribution Spreadsheets

  • Distributors
  • Deliverables spreadsheets
  • Screening invitees/attendees

PR/Marketing Spreadsheets

  • Social Media
  • Marketing
  • Email lists
  • Film Festivals
  • Published Articles

My take: Wow, that’s a lot of spreadsheets! What this actually reveals are the myriad jobs indie filmmakers routinely take on. With more money, each of these activities might be accomplished by a specialist in that one field. When you’re truly indie, you just do it all yourself. No wonder Rick resorted to these spreadsheets to track everything. You should too.

Where the money goes on short films

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Josh Jacobs invites everyone on No Film School to Learn all the behind-the-scenes secrets of [t]his $4,000 short.

He begins:

“Hi, I’m Josh, an LA-based filmmaker. I work as a writers’ assistant and script coordinator on TV shows, and I direct my own short films. By far, the most valuable thing I’ve learned about storytelling from big-budget shows and indie projects alike is that just two elements—the actors and the script—are way more important than everything else.”

Here’s my list of his important things to consider for indie filmmakers:

  1. The actors.
  2. The script.
  3. Don’t over-crew; have some crew do two jobs.
  4. No walkie talkies.
  5. Keep insurance costs in check.
  6. Be willing to walk away from too-expensive crew or locations.
  7. Some cities have cheaper gear than others.
  8. Join a writers group for feedback on your drafts.
  9. Devise films with locations that you have or can secure easily.
  10. Write for actors you personally know.
  11. Use costumes you have.
  12. Use equipment you have or can rent cheaply.
  13. Buy your crafty at Cosco.
  14. Save your costumes in case you need to shoot pickups.

Josh’s one day plus pickups shoot cost him $4,343.06 and he kindly shows the full breakdown.

My take: Thanks for sharing, Josh! One thing to note is that post-production actually cost more than double production. Oh, and nice short too!

Darth Vader to be voiced by AI

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Chance Townsend reports on Mashable that James Earl Jones signs over rights to voice of Darth Vader to be replaced by AI.

James Earl Jones (8516667383)

He refers to a Deadline article by Caroline Frost, titled James Earl Jones Signs Over Rights To Voice Of Darth Vader, Signalling Retirement From Legendary Role.

She in turn refers to a much more interesting Vanity Fair article by Anthony Breznican titled Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine.

The real story here is about Respeecher, the tech company that has managed to make computer-generated voices sound human.

From their FAQ:

“Why is STS (speech to speech) different from TTS (text to speech)?

The difference between the two is significant. A few important limitations text to speech has:

  1. In most cases, TTS provides non-natural, robotic emotions. AI doesn’t know where to take emotions from, so it tries to generate them based on the text alone.Very limited control over emotions. Some TTS can make the converted voice sound sad or excited using text annotation. But it is hard to manually encode intricacies of human acting using these annotations alone.
  2. Words only. TTS are based on dictionaries. Unknown words and abbreviations pose a significant problem. Natural speech contains lots of non-verbal content as well. TTS struggles to render that.
  3. Most TTS systems face challenges with low-resource languages due to higher data requirements.
  4. The Respeecher voice cloning system works solely in the acoustic domain. We convey all the emotions and sounds of the source speaker while converting their timbre and other subtle variations into the target speaker.“

Audition the almost 70 voices in the Voice Marketplace.

They even have a program for Small Creators and will accept pitches from interesting projects.

Here’s a glimpse of their online interface:

My take: well, that’s it. Along with deep fakes, now you can’t trust anything you hear either. I guess that leaves “real life” as the one thing you can trust — most of the time, that is. Maybe we are living in a simulation after all….

Screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Schechter loves the number 4

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The excellent Film Courage interviews Jeffrey Alan Schechter who claims Every Great Story Has A Main Character That Goes Through 4 Archetypes.

He explains the six Jungian archtypes:

“The most concise and well constructed version of this came from the book “Hero Within” by a person named Carol S. Pearson…. She was a psychologist who wrote a self-help book with the idea, and the hero within I think it’s like six archetypes we live by. Her idea was that you can define yourself by one of these six archetypes which was like warrior, wanderer, orphan, martyr, innocent, magician, there we go I actually got them all.”

Jeffrey is big on the number four. To him, every film answers four questions, in four acts:

He reviews movies on his website, mystorycanbeatupyourstory.com, and illustrates the four questions and four archetypes well. Just click on any film you know to see what I mean.

The four questions:

  1. Who is your main character?
  2. What are they trying to accomplish?
  3. Who is trying to stop them?
  4. What happens if they fail?

The protagonist will move through four of these six archetypes, one state in each of the four acts:

  1. Orphan
  2. Wanderer
  3. Warrior
  4. Martyr
  5. Magician
  6. Innocent

Jeffrey’s book, “My Story Can Beat Up Your Story: Ten Ways to Toughen Up Your Screenplay from Opening Hook to Knockout Punch”, is available on Amazon.

My take: fascinating! As someone very curious about storytelling, I love all the various theories on structure and the various rules and edits around screenwriting. Oh yeah, he also says there should be 44 plot points.

 

Telefilm Canada releases new 18-month corporate plan

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Telefilm Canada has just released its new 2022-2024 Corporate Plan.

“These strategic priorities are guided by Telefilm’s determination to provide a public service that reflects Canada in all its diversity. To this end, Telefilm will introduce nine initiatives in the coming months.”

The nine initiatives are:

  1. Evolve our funding allocation approach by delivering a continuum of success for filmmakers, by increasing access for underrepresented groups and by enabling eco-responsible productions.
  2. Act as a partner and ally on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and eco-responsibility by adopting an evidence-based approach to our funding and corporate decisions.
  3. Promote Canada’s unique creative voices and initiatives that set the example for a sustainable and inclusive screen-based industry.
  4. Empower Telefilm’s teams and encourage internal growth and development.
  5. Streamline our programs and processes to avoid red tape, ensure a simplified workflow, improve our services, and consolidate our partnership with the Canada Media Fund.
  6. Develop and maintain user-friendly tools and systems that optimize data management.
  7. Build on the trust achieved with the government to solidify the increase in our funding.
  8. Develop relationships with public and private partners to create synergy and attract additional sources of funding.
  9. Attract donations for the Talent Fund.

In the “Performance Indicators” section, Telefilm proposes to invest in:

  • 34 Projects with production budgets greater than $3.5 million (61% of funds)
  • 38 Projects with production budgets of less than $3.5 million (28% of funds)
  • 27 Theatrical Documentaries (6% of funds)
  • 15 Talent to Watch micro-budget features (4% of funds)

Telefilm also commits to:

  • 50% gender parity for women in the role of Producer, Director, Writer
  • At least 16 projects with “a Black or people of colour” key creative
  • $4 million to Indigenous stream projects
  • 33% French-language funding
  • 20 co-productions.

Read the PDF here.

My take: With a budget of $188 million, it works out to about $5 per person in Canada. Not a bad deal.

Titles and Thumbnail are Critical to Your Success

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Kent Lamm of Standard Story Company warns that YouTube will BURY your films without this. The this? Your title and thumbnail.

He says:

“Getting your film SEEN in the Age of YouTube is a different game. Your title and thumbnail have a huge effect in how many people will watch your movie. Give your short film or feature its best shot by optimizing your title and thumbnail and planning ahead.”

The Title should be:

  1. meaningful for your film,
  2. unique,
  3. catchy,
  4. grammatically simple,
  5. seo-able, and
  6. have an available domain name.

He admires the way Omeleto titles their films: Logline sentence. | Film Title

He also thinks getting the genre into the title helps.

The Thumbnail should be:

  1. a compelling image that’s going to get people interested,
  2. most likely a frame-grabbed close up of the main character,
  3. but why not get some dedicated stills on set?

My take: This stuff can’t be an afterthought. In fact, I think that after the film title, the film logo and one central image can really help you fine tune the script, narrow the audience and solidify the entertainment promise (probably because I worked as a graphic designer for many years.) Oh, as to the title, you might as well choose from the beginning of the alphabet rather than the bottom half.

CineVic to offer cash grants for films

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CineVic, Victoria’s media arts centre, has just announced its DYNAMO program that will fund new locally-produced films with grants of up to $2,500 in cash and $5,000 in equipment rentals.

One of the goals is to increase equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) in local independent film productions. An EDIA commitment to engage, collaborate with, and hire a diverse cast, crew, and community partners from underrepresented communities represents up to 20% of the assessment criteria.

“DYNAMO will support artists and filmmakers currently residing on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, at all levels of skill and experience from beginner to established. The program aims to foster collaborative partnerships with individuals from underrepresented communities and equity-seeking groups, including but not limited to those who self-identify as Indigenous, First Nation, Metis, Inuit, Black and persons of colour, LGBTQ2+, persons with a disability, low income, or unemployed.”

I asked Arnold Lim for his feedback:

Q: Given your background, can you comment on the DYNAMO goal of increasing equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in local independent film productions?

A: “The filmmakers of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands are among the most caring and hard-working people I know — and as a Korean-Canadian filmmaker I’ve felt like I have been treated well by the film community here. Having said that, funding has always been challenging for me. Even though I have been making narrative films since 2011, the very first film featuring a Korean-Canadian on screen that I have been able to get funding for will be released later this year. I couldn’t get anything else funded before and only now do I feel like I could try to fund films that I’ve written and come from my perspective. As a minority filmmaker I see DYNAMO as an opportunity for equity and an opportunity for amazing artistic relationships to be formed.”

Q: As a long-time CineVic member and award-winning filmmaker working with budgets from $20 to $200,000, in your opinion can folks actually make a decent film for $2,500?

A: “It’s absolutely possible to make a great film for $2,500! I have seen films that make my heart explode that had no budgets at all and there are countless Hollywood films with multi-million dollar budgets that I couldn’t watch for longer than five minutes. As clichéd as it sounds, at the end of the day it really comes down to imagination, perspective and execution. I have said this before and I will say it again, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands hit way above their weight class in terms of the number of amazing artists we have here and I am really pumped to see what projects grow from this great opportunity.”

The first deadline is October 31, 2022.

My take: I’m also looking forward to a crop of fascinating films from this worthy program. Let me know if you want to bounce ideas around.

BIFA replaces gendered acting awards

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Annie Martin reports on UPI that the British Independent Film Awards introduce gender-neutral acting categories.

She says:

“BIFA will replace its gendered acting categories with five new awards: Best Lead Performance, Best Supporting Performance, Best Joint Lead Performance — for two or three performances that are the joint focus of the film — and Best Ensemble. The new categories join Breakthrough Performance. Other organizations have also switched to gender-neutral categories, including the Berlin Film Festival, the MTV Movie Awards and the BRIT Awards.”

Meanwhile, John Norris argues on The Daily Beast Why the Oscars Should Do Away With Gender.

He says:

“It’s long past time for acting awards like the Oscars to be non-gendered. Whenever this, to my mind, sensible, modest proposal is brought up, the objections generally come down to three areas: (1) that if men and women competed against one another for Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, BAFTAs and Golden Globes, the result would be an XY tsunami, in which women would hardly stand a chance; (2) the inequality of acting opportunity in Hollywood and beyond is so skewed in favor of men that having separate female categories is necessary; and (3) that no one, from award show producers to networks to the public, wants to see any change that could potentially decrease the number of stars on stage or on a red carpet in a designer gown.“

He proposes that the two five-person categories should be combined into one ten-person category. Note that Best Picture is a ten film category.

My take: just to play Devil’s Advocate, I think we should acknowledge more excellence by female creators and therefore recognize male and female winners in every category. How about separate nights for each Academy Awards: one night the women can bask in their collective successes and the next the men can duke it out among each other for supremacy?

Please do feed the film crew

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According to the adage, an army travels on its stomach. And it’s no different for an indie film production.

Feeding a film crew? A few suggestions, and an idea on how to do it for free:

Sophia Harvey writes Food on Set: Do’s and Don’ts for Feeding Your Crew on No Film School and expounds on these topics:

  1. Don’t be stingy.
  2. Aim for variety.
  3. Keep it caloric, but healthy.
  4. Pay attention to dietary restrictions.
  5. Keep it hot and punctual.
  6. Crafty: no mess, no mayo.
  7. Coffee and water, always and forever.
  8. Choose bulk catering.
  9. Special touches matter.

AJ Unitas lists 8 Essential Tips for Prepping an Awesome Craft Services Table on StudioBinder that include:

  1. Keep caterers away from the craft services table.
  2. Buy supplies in bulk from wholesale markets.
  3. Account for allergies and diets.
  4. Fill your craft table with healthy options.
  5. But don’t get too crazy.
  6. Get brands specifically asked for.
  7. Turn cheese sticks into two.
  8. Keep your Production going.

How to afford what could be your biggest expense on a low-budget short?

Lacee Kloze suggests 9 Ways to Feed A Hungry Film Crew For Free on Creative Live. Her bold strategy?

  1. Create a flashy one-sheet about your project.
  2. Write a form letter.
  3. Send your form letter and one sheet combo EVERYWHERE!
  4. Don’t be afraid to ask for something small — snacks, drinks or desserts — instead of a full meal.
  5. Don’t forget to ask for staples like bagels and coffee.
  6. Hit the grocery stores, natural food markets and co-ops.
  7. Start early.
  8. Team up with a non-profit.
  9. When the yeses start coming back, follow through with your promises.

Three great blog posts to get you thinking!

My take: I like French Hours that keep your work day to 10 hours, with no meal break.