The Production of the Production
Before you produce anything, you must first pre-produce it. What does that mean?
I’m in “pre-production” for a music video that I plan to shoot on 16mm film for an artist who is flying in from Los Angeles this weekend. We only have a day, more or less, to get this work done, but I’ve been in pre-production for two months and six days, according to my phone records. I’ll still be in pre-production until the moment on Friday morning that the artist lands in Austin, at which point we’ll be in “production.” What have I been up to?
Anyone who works as a professional in the creative industries of film, music, theater, etc. knows exactly what I’m talking about—they call it their “job.” But independent, DIY artists and creators often always have to take on multiple roles in order to get anything done, and the weeds here are tall and dense. For this music video, for example, I am the writer, the director, the editor, the production manager, the property master (props), set designer, costume coordinator, casting director, script coordinator (“scriptgirl” in Hollywood’s Golden Era), location coordinator, continuity editor, cinematographer, camera operator, camera loader (because this is film, after all), focus puller, grip, best boy, gaffer, electrician, special effects coordinator, and so on (did I mention “driver?” I am picking them up from the airport, after all). And yet, at the time of this writing, three days before the shoot date, I don’t feel schizophrenic in the slightest. Pre-production is the reason why.
“Pre-production” is a nebulous term. In my day job as Chief Operator at our non-profit community radio station KOOP, I often train people on how to broadcast remotely, set up sound systems and turntables for live events, or produce live radio shows. In these educational scenarios, I always define pre-production as “the process by which you anticipate as many potential errors or mistakes as possible and make arrangements in advance to mitigate all of them.” The add-on to that definition is, “with the knowledge that it is already guaranteed that you will make all of the errors and mistakes that you did not anticipate.”
Pre-production is, at its core, about readiness. The process looks different for everyone, and in all cases it’s a learn-on-the-job kind of skill. I developed a knack for pre-production when I used to work as a live sound engineer for concerts, theater, corporate events, and more. I’ve unloaded and set up PA systems in venues, on public streets, in parks, in fields, on boats, and in foreign countries where I didn’t speak the language. I’ve pinned microphones on celebrities, former presidents, and my own musical heroes. I’ve made virtually all the mistakes you can make in that field (hot mic while an actor goes to the bathroom between scenes? Yep), and I’ve survived to do better on the next gig.
All of that work was for live productions, but the skills translate to creative endeavors like making records or films. You learn, over time, to expect that in any production scenario you’ll need things like gaffer tape, extension cords, power strips, and cable adaptors, and so you pack those things without even thinking about them.
But it’s also my opinion that pre-production is where most of the creativity actually happens. The “magic” happens on the day-of, sure, but the planning must happen for some unspecified amount of time before that. How much time is up to the individual and the project. You can’t knock down an elaborate domino maze without first setting it up. The setup is the tedious part, the boring part, but it’s also the work. Let’s take a look at a reconstructed diary of the last two months and six days:
May 3 — Talked to the artist on the phone and agreed to collaborate on the project.
May 5 — The artist sends me three songs for consideration. I like them all, one more than the other two.
May 15 — The idea for the video is starting to coalesce, and we decide on the tune. It wasn’t my first favorite, but now I’m finding it the most visually inspiring of the three. At this point I’ve been hipped to the concept of the whole record, which is heavily invested in the relationship between humanity and modern technology. For the film, I’m picturing an alternate-tech present, something that feels modern and uses modern terminology (AIs, large language models, etc.) but that has a retro-tech look to it since we’ll be shooting on film on a fifty-five year-old camera. I’m thinking about the great sci-fi and tech movies of the ‘80s. The artist and I trade visual reference points. I want to do something that references classic indie body horror à la Tetsuo: The Iron Man; he’s already doodled some pixel images that look exactly like that! The synchronicity encourages us onward.
May 31 — The last two weeks have been stuffed with preparation for screening and performing the Guma film The Public Service Announcement on the 28th, but now that that’s behind me I can really focus on this project. I picked up an old CRT monitor for $50 on Craigslist to use for a set piece. I hope I can figure out how to make the screen not flicker in-camera.
June 1 — Talked with a friend who is a software developer and mentioned this project. One of my ideas is to have the CRT monitor spit out classic, green, “hacker-style” text, and it would be great if I didn’t have to animate it but could write a basic script that would simply print pre-scripted text at the click of a button. Remember “Hello World” from the first day of high school computer programming class?
June 8 — Went to Austin Creative Reuse, a trash store that knows they’re selling trash, so nothing there is marked up like at a thrift store, garage sale, or Goodwill. The whole point is to reuse things creatively that would otherwise have ended up in the landfill, and so I was able to get a working mechanical calculator, a small electric motor, various tubes and cables for set pieces, metal scraps, etc., all for under $12.
June 11 — Poked around on AliExpress for inspiration and ended up buying a shit ton of LED “fairy lights” for practically pennies and a $40 laser projector that shoots multi-colored, moving laser patterns. Anything that blinks or glows is going to look good on film, I’m thinking. Also delivered an official budget spreadsheet to the artist to keep track of money spent on this project. Talking money almost always sucks, and we never really landed on anything other than a ballpark for this project. I have to get better at that if I want to do more of these. This artist is a friend, so it’s chill; in any case, my goal is to keep it under $500 including the cost of the film stock and developing/scanning. DIY until I die.
June 15 — Delivered a full script “treatment” to the artist for their approval. A treatment is a document that is halfway between fiction prose and a movie script. It’s a descriptive rundown of the whole narrative and comprises the bulk of the writing process. There won’t be any dialogue since this is a music video, so an actual script is not necessary. The writing portion of the project is complete.
June 24 — $40 laser projector has arrived from China. There is no power switch and the plug sparks whenever you plug it into the wall. I will not be plugging this thing in any more than I absolutely have to for the video. Nevertheless, it looks great and will do exactly what I need it to for my retro-tech idea. The laser colors ought to look awesome on the Kodak 500T film stock I’m planning to shoot with.
June 29 — A surprise! My software developer friend came through with a web-based application that does exactly what I asked for and which I can access from any device that is connected to the internet. I had no idea he was even working on it, and I am incredibly grateful and feeling like this video is going to be great.
June 30 — Booked the official shoot date for mid-July.
July 1 — Bought fireworks for special effects from the roadside stand that is only open two weeks out of the year (Independence Day and New Year’s). I want to have a climactic showdown between man and machine, and I need things that spark and flare. B is not going to be happy that I plan to ignite these things in the garage, but pyro looks great on film, natch. We’ll run the garden hose inside and keep it handy just in case.
July 4 — Panic ordered two more rolls of film from the distributor. I have two rolls already, which add up to about double the length of the song, but running out of film in the middle of the shoot was making me anxious.
July 5 — Started putting together a “shot list” of specific images, including any camera movement (pan, tilt) or angle (wide, medium, close) notes. “Storyboarding is for cowards,” to paraphrase Werner Herzog. Still, surely he writes his ideas down? I do, or else I’ll forget them.
July 6 — Trip to WalMart for hot glue gun, fishing line, and costume piece.
July 7 — Built a key prop with leftover parts from a completed electronics project.
July 8 — Locked in a second location (thanks Carolyn!) and an actress (thanks Mira!) for some quick inter-scenes to tie together the three main beats of my narrative. Drove to north North Austin to pick up wood pallets from the free section of Craigslist for set pieces.
July 9 — Cleaned camera gate and film magazine, inspected all mating points, panels, and doors with a bright LED headlamp to make sure there are no light leaks.
I bought a ridiculous telephoto lens for the Arriflex that is nearly twice the length of the camera itself. These Century-brand lenses are one of the only U.S.A.-made lenses for this German camera, and they were highly favored by nature documentary filmmakers for their extreme length. In the background: I managed to find time to hand-build a tube guitar amp from scratch last month. Maybe I’ll write about it soon.
As you can see, since July started I have really ramped up my activity in preparation for the shoot this weekend. I found it really helpful to make sure that I accomplished at least one task of preparation every day this week to mitigate my own anxiety about the project’s success. Too often, when you’re “doing” you can’t be “thinking,” and this is a key precept of human psychology that I leverage to my advantage (existentially speaking as well).
At this point I’m feeling optimistic about the weekend, but it took me over two months to get there. What are not totally represented by the diary are all of the daily behaviors and activities in my life that contributed to spinning this project up. Watching movies? Pre-production. Listening to music? Pre-production. Shooting another artist’s project in the meantime and taking close notes about how my camera is behaving? Pre-production for this project. Lying in bed and feeling like puking? That’s not anxiety, that’s pre-production! Any amount of mental or physical or financial effort that goes into a project before the project itself happens is pre-production.
And this applies to so much more than filmmaking. The same feelings and processes are necessary for me to get a record off the ground, to get a radio show done every week, and sometimes even to get a Substack essay going. It’s going to be different every time, for every person, and it’s going to be more or less extensive depending on what needs to actually happen on the day(s) of the production. But it has to happen.
Beginners in any field are often lost before they’ve begun, or they’re distracted by others’ finished products and completely in the dark as to where their own project starts and ends. People can languish in this purgatory of the arts for decades. This is not a personal failing of character but a natural state of inexperience—nevertheless, it must be surmounted, and preferably soon, in order to get on with the work. My best advice is that if you want to produce something, start by pre-producing it.
What Am I Watching?
Lola Rennt, translated into English and better known as Run Lola Run, is a classic slice of daring auteur filmmaking from the late ‘90s. Popping up amidst such time-twisting peers as Christopher Nolan’s Memento or even the multi-threaded Pulp Fiction, it tells the story of a young woman called to the aid of her wannabe gangster boyfriend, who frantically informs her over payphone that he’s lost 100,000 Deutsche marks (this is Germany pre-Euro) of drug money that he’s supposed to deliver to his mobster boss. He only has twenty minutes to come up with it, and somehow it’s all Lola’s fault because she wasn’t available to pick him up from the drug deal in the first place. Lola dashes out of her apartment and doesn’t stop running for nearly the next 80 minutes, except for when she gets shot and killed about a half hour into the film. Or does she? After a brief interlude, the story picks up again from the beginning, Lola sprinting down the apartment stairs, and repeats itself with a few new twists.
This happens three times in total, offering different perspectives and outcomes for each of the characters Lola runs into along the way. Technical hallmarks of late-90’s filmmaking abound: rapid cuts, under-cranked shots that result in speedy Chaplin-esque camera movement, the horrendous frame-dropping slow motion that ruins all of Wong Kar-Wai’s films (for me), animated sequences, mixed media (16mm, 35mm, even video), and a touch (but not too much) of early CGI. It’s a kitchen sink style of filmmaking that few can pull off well, and part of what keeps this film vibrant is its short runtime. Oy, the puns. It’s writer/director/techno-soundtrack producer Tom Tykwer’s third film, and it’s a reminder of an era when newer filmmakers were given latitude and money to realize their strangest ideas. The 4k restoration looks fabulous, with every grain preserved and practically popping off the screen.