A couple of days into the IFP Documentary Lab, we began admitting to
each other with increasing frequency that our heads are spinning. This,
it turns out, is not so much a complaint as a battle cry.
Part
nurturing cocoon for the creative process and part scared straight film
camp, this crash course in finishing compresses in one week a preview of
what all of us are inevitably going to go through in the last year of
finishing and releasing our work. The result is curiously energizing.
Bracing, one might say.
We started off gently, sharing clips and
stories about our projects and taking in feedback on our cuts from an
amazing group of editing advisers. In the process, we learned as much
from hearing the discussion on other projects as we learned from the
feedback sessions devoted to our own projects. (And we got to see some
spectacularly successful pairings of experienced advisers and first-time
filmmakers who practically started talking to each other in code within
seconds of meeting each other.)
Then, as we moved into the
finishing boot camp, we started to feel a bit like first-year med
students doing dissection: excited to get some real-life knowledge, but
not so thrilled yet about the prospect of dealing with all the guts and
entrails.
The result is much like learning to ski: the slopes
ahead of us after this week feel no less steep, but at least now we’ll
know how to make it to the bottom in one piece.
Here is some of the wisdom we’ll carry with us as we brace ourselves for the trip:
- The whole process of filmmaking is about intention, a shimmering
concept that encompasses choice-making, planning, social change goals,
and - hopefully - meaning. Everything else follows from intention. This
fact so obvious that we very frequently lose sight of it.
- The temptation to prematurely make things perfect is ultimately counter-productive. Imperfection is close friends with creativity, and bad ideas are often adjacent to the best ideas.
- Everyone is
struggling. Hopefully. If you’re not struggling, you’re not digging deep
enough to make the best movie you can - as our editing adviser, the
wonderfully empowering Mary Lampson (Harlan County, Trouble the Water) said to us: “You have what's going on. But what matters is what is really going on.”
- You have to devote one hundred and twenty per cent of your time to making the best film you can. The other one hundred and twenty per cent of your time must go into raising the money to finish the film and getting it out into the world.
[This post initially appeared on the IFP blog on April 16, 2010. Our School was selected by the Independent Filmmaker Project to participate in the 2010 Documentary Lab, a year-long fellowship for projects in post-production, in the 2008 and 2010 Independent Film Week Spotlight on Documentaries meet market, and in the fiscal sponsorship program - all organized by the IFP. We are extraordinarily grateful of IFP's longstanding support thoughout the life of this project, and particularly to the wonderfully visionary and tireless Milton Tabbot and Rose Vincelli.]
