2/13/24
Newsletter #559
The Crack of Dawn
I said to my buddy, a former automotive engineer, “I want to do a newsletter on ‘process’.” He casually replied something along these lines, “Process – a series of actions or operations used in making or manufacturing or achieving something.” I said, “Right. That.” He was extremely well informed on the subject because that’s exactly what he did as a car engineer – figure out the many, many steps it takes to build an automobile (I just looked it up, there are about 30,000 parts in a car).
For instance, regarding film direction, I’ve used various processes over the years. My first several films I had almost no idea what I was doing. I had nothing prepared to guide me through the complicated process of production – and making any kind of film or video (beyond a selfie) is usually complicated – and subsequently didn’t do a terrific job, other than having the wherewithal to make the films in the first place. The first trap in which many directors find themselves, like me, is not getting all of the shots they had in mind. Often, this isn’t realized until one is in editing, when it’s sort of too late to get the shot. Therefore, minimally, you need a shot shit – a list of all the shots you intend to shoot that day.
The next trap is coming up with too many shots that can’t possibly be gotten in a day. Also, coming up with shots that are so complicated that they are extremely time consuming to pull off, and often don’t work very well. A piece of wisdom I picked up from a wise 1st Assistant Director early into my TV directing career was, “You can’t get a shot in less than 30 minutes.” Between everything it takes to get a shot of anything – a person, a house, a car tire, anything – meaning getting the camera to the right spot, lighting, makeup and hair if it’s a person, etc. it will always be at least 30 minutes, and that’s moving expeditiously. So therefore, if you’re shooting 12 hours a day, minus an hour for lunch (and another half hour for tea in New Zealand), that leaves you with 10 ½ hours, or 21 shots.
I tried shot listing as a kid and it confused me. I couldn’t figure out how to explain a shot (I can now), and it’s not hard to do. But since my hero Alfred Hitchcock storyboarded everything, so did I. And even though you don’t have to be able to draw to draw storyboards – many directors, like Sam Raimi, for instance, use stick figures, which work perfectly well – I can actually draw a little bit and I immediately loved the process of drawing them. Once I did, with my Super-8 movie, The Final Round (1977), my movies took a quantum leap forward in professionalism. Going through the process of storyboarding made me preconceive what these shots would be. Once I’d done that, and even drawn a little picture, then that was handled in some way.
Most movie and TV directors don’t storyboard. If they do, they hire a storyboard artist. Ultimately, I came to understand that there really isn’t time for storyboards while directing TV. Not only are you moving too fast, but they keep rewriting the scripts and negating my little drawings, which broke my heart. So I switched to shot lists, which caused me, along with every other director, to clue into a language that made sense to describe shots. Long shot, close-up, over-the-shoulder, and I always include the screen direction, meaning are they looking right or left? When this becomes an issue on the set, as it occasionally does, my shot list is always correct.
But finally, somewhere around my movie, If I Had a Hammer (2001), I concluded that if indeed there were only 21 shots to be gotten during the course of a day, I could actually remember that many things without storyboards or a shot list, which I still made for everybody else’s benefit.
Anyway, that’s my process while directing. It has nothing to do with how I direct; it’s just a way of keeping track of what I want to do, and of how much I really do.
In just five weeks it will be spring.
Life, is a process. And just to clarify , there are about 5.9 Million total individual parts in an automobile.
The 30,000 Figure that is often referred to online is
The assemblies which are comprised of individual components. Modern car assembly plants receive about 3,000 Modules required to build an entire car.
Six million Individual itty bitty parts total.