As those of you in New York know, I’ve pretty much removed myself from the world for the last month or so, trying to complete this rough cut (except my birthday – I just had to party that night).  I am ITCHING to be done.  Not in a bad way though, more like – I can almost feel what this film will be like when it’s done but I also know the months of work that lie ahead  before I get to that stage.  It’s a great feeling when all the footage you’ve assembled starts to feel like a ‘real’ movie.  When you momentarily forget that you were on set, that you’ve already seen so-and-so make that face, that you shot the 19th scene on Day 1 and the 1st scene on Day 20.

a) I miss being on set and making movies with my best friends.  b) Priscillia Vidal, Chris Modoono, Deniz Barisik and of course, Gabriel Frye-Behar have been absolutely indispensable in the editing process and keep me going on days when I just want to go on an extended holiday.  c) We should have a final cut by the end of summer and d) SUMMER!!  Time to get a haircut and make another movie.

Lots of love,

Bornila

Gentlefolk, may I proudly present our very first poster!  I’ll be making more over the next couple months – it’s what I do when I don’t feel like editing.

Jabari Brisport went to Tisch around the same time that I did.  Though we were in different departments – he in Drama and I in Film – Jabari was one of those people who everyone seemed to know and had wonderful things to say about.  I had a weekly Tisch University Scholars class with him for three years but seeing that our friend circles never venn diagrammed, there was just no reason to talk to the guy.

Nonetheless I was extremely excited when Jabari responded to our casting call for Walt – a dedicated performer whose uncomplicated solidness balances out the more mercurial personalities in Oh, Sophia. “Lipica, Jabari just submitted his headshot on Breakdown!” to which she replied: “Cast him, cast him, cast him.” And we did.

Some of my favorite days on set are the ones with Jabari in them because you could always count on him (or him as his character Walt, which he’d often stay in between takes) to do or say something wildly inappropriate and hence wickedly funny.  So without further ado, I present our guest-blogger this week: Jabari Brisport.  WORRRK IT, YOU FIERCE BETCH.

Finding The Inner Queen

Jabari Brisport, Gabriel Frye-Behar, Angela Gulner, Lipica Shah and Margaret Ying Drake on our first guerrilla shoot. (For us that usually meant letting the actors film themselves while crew sat back and relaxed... or tried to.)

I’m a humble, introverted guy with hopes of making it big.  So of course I leapt at the opportunity to play Walt: a flamboyant, “tap-dancer extraordinare” who also has hopes of making it big.  Same dream, different personality.  I felt that I started off the process with one foot in his shoes already, and it was a wonderful challenge to find out what rusty, unused corner of Jabari housed the rest of Walt’s character.

I wanted to make him a snappy diva, which Bornila made extremely easy.  I remember sweating buckets on one of the hottest days of the summer, in an apartment that we turned into an oven by shutting off the AC for sound.  And I remember shivering on a barren street in Bushwick, around midnight, grabbing my sweatshirt in between takes, and pretending I couldn’t see my breath.  In both circumstances, the attitude was easily accessible.

But Walt also needed a certain “don’t give a f***” quality, which I attained by repeatedly smoking hookah and drinking shots of “gingeralecokesprite” at 7am.  Or chasing Diya (Lipica) through midtown traffic during rush hour.  Multiple times, until we got the biggest crowd of unsuspecting people to weave in and out of and capture on Jules’ camera.  Then a repeat performance i.e. tearing down a sidewalk, yelling at the top of my lungs at 3 in the morning until an angry/tired East Village tenant threaten to call the cops on us if we didn’t shut up (Lucky for us, he never did call the cops.  Unlucky for Bornila: he poured water on her….too bad we didn’t get footage of that).

I also got to tap-dance!  I don’t consider myself the best tapper, and I was terrified to perform something like that, let alone choreograph it.  But Bornila’s support and unwavering faith in her actors gave me the confidence I needed to put a little something-something together.  And without even seeing the final cut, I’ll bet that it looks damn sexy.

Without a doubt, this has been the best experience I’ve had while working on a film.  The cast/crew gets A-plusses across the board for creating a safe, fun and funny environment.  K.C.  would take keywords from two people every day and make a poem out of it and read it to us after lunch.  Who does that? Amazing!  Moreover, we were treated to lots of delicious food.  And lots of delicious lager.  The icing on the cake was seeing the teaser trailer, and having all the good old memories dredged up again.  Have you seen it yet?  You should.  It’ll make your soul smile.

And if you’re secular, it’ll make your face smile as well.

K.C. McLeod – a film-school comrade and Bushwick neighbor – has been a part of Oh, Sophia from the very start.  Along with Gabe, Lina and Lipica, K.C. has read every single draft I wrote and watched every single casting tape.  I couldn’t imagine going into production without him and thankfully when the time rolled around, K.C. was free and willing to A.D.

On American film sets, an A.D schedules the shoot and makes sure that everyone sticks to that schedule.  It’s a pretty monumental task, as is.  Throw in boom-opping,  stunt driving, directing B-roll/extras/animals/dancers, fixing a typewriter, providing lunch-time entertainment, providing anytime entertainment and making it rain and you almost get an idea of what K.C. did on our set.

Pretty much everything.  Enjoy his blog post!

“On the Nature of Underwater Cameras (and their Relation to the Filmmaking Process (Particularly that of Micro and/or No-Budget Films) as a Whole)”

by K.C. McLeod

As an Assistant Director, or AD, one’s role in a film production is that of “facilitator;” that is to say, an AD has no one specific job, but rather, a job composed of various tasks that allow other crew members, each with more specific roles, to perform their required duties in order to get the film, proverbially, in the can.  Historically, this position was the final stepping stone towards becoming a director because, historically, a director served the same utilitarian purpose: coordinate the actions of the “talent,” don’t get in the way of the stars, and let the producers take the credit.

Of course, directors are no longer thought of as glorified production coordinators.  Following my time as an AD on Oh, Sophia, I am tempted to say the time of ADs as “facilitators” is also over.  To borrow, with apologies, from the phrasing auteur theory, this is caméra sous-marine theory: underwater camera theory.

I recently had the opportunity, as an Assistant to the Director, to be on the set of a marginally big budget (~$35 million) feature during the shooting of a sequence involving underwater photography.  Excluding the actor, the stand-in, the wetsuits, the coast guard boat, the pilot of the boat, the EMT on the boat, the hot tub for warming between takes, the hot tub technician, and the driver of the truck that towed the hot tub to set, the scene was remarkably personnel and equipment heavy: two camera operators, an underwater rig resembling the helmet of late 19^th-century diving suit, a special 35mm camera that could fit inside this rig, the camera operator’s scuba equipment, a surfboard to rest the rig on when the camera operators surfaced, and a surfboard wrangler to ensure it remained out of frame during a take.

Oh, Sophia also features underwater photography.  The effect was achieved approximately so: the DP purchased a ~$200 underwater video camera, the DP changed into a bathing suit, and the DP waded into the water with the actors and shot the scene.

This is not to craft an oversimplified argument as to how mainstream productions are hampered by unnecessary rules, regulations, union representatives, etc., while indie productions flourish in the unregulated utopic rule of a creative invisible hand.  Union rules and safety regulations exist for very real reasons; it was less than a year ago that a crewmember died on an NYU student film shoot, perhaps the most free-form sets of all.

What the disparity in the shooting of these two scenes does illuminate is that the AD’s role is changing, and that it is changing because films are changing.  In the first situation, our big budget film, with a few dozen individuals needed to capture the simplest of scenes, constant rehearsal was the AD’s modus operandi.  Any unpredictable element was – out of necessity – rehearsed out of existence.  In the case of Oh, Sophia, the camera just rolled, the actors leapt into the water, and that was our first take.

Did it work?  Of course not.

We needed multiple takes.  Actors and wardrobe had to dry out.  Our DP came close to freezing to death in the water when a late summer chill took over the night.

But when we did get it, the scene was still alive for everyone.  And it wasn’t just the water we shot in this method.  We upended the maxim “Measure twice, cut once” in favor of “Rehearse half, shoot as much as you need.”  The sheer amount of unpreparedness on camera is Oh, Sophia’s strength; even more so, it is its core.  Film history is replete with stories of actors breaking character in a scene and the result being used in the final cut because that is some of the strongest material, and it’s true.  Real life is endlessly compelling in a way the most finely crafted films can only approximate.  When Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” he was not referring to works of other artists, but rather to real life.  With Oh, Sophia, we were able to create an environment exploding with those moments where the artifice of film drops away, where actors could just be, all with our insistence on just going, just yelling action, just announcing we were ready long before we were and before anyone could protest.

In the scope of the profession, I did a pretty lousy job as an AD on Oh, Sophia. I spent my time discussing shot composition, actor’s performances, and the emotional flow of a scene instead of making sure we made first shot on schedule, that we broke for lunch on time, and that our progression through setups minimized the number of times we needed to relight.  But maybe a task-master or a clock-watcher of an AD is not what best suits a production any more.

Directors used to be glorified technicians.  Actors used to vamp on screen with the intensity of a theatrical performance.  Dialogue used to not sound like the way people actually spoke.  Stories used to always end happily.  Now, with the completion of Oh, Sophia, the question is:

What is the next “used to?”

After putting on an exorbitant amount of makeup, and probably the heaviest belly dance costume I own (of course, out of all the options, the one that weighed 15 pounds was Bornila’s favorite) I was ready to go, and we shot the outdoor scene with me and Lipica (who plays “Diya”). Moving inside the hookah bar, we planned out the master shot where Teeny dances through the bar. I don’t know how long we spent planning the shot, but it required that I dance over and over so that Gabe, Bornila and Eric knew the ins and outs of my movements. With 15 extra pounds, that gets to be quite the workout, and considering that my internal clock was totally off by starting my day at 1am, I was relieved that I had time to nap before the extras got there for the actual shoot.

And boy, what a nap that was! I sat on the edge of a bench and laid back.. and I was out like a light.  Bornila woke me up about an hour later. It was time.

Air conditioners and fans were off to prevent sound issues. The front door was closed, windows sealed off to prevent any early morning light seeping in.  Hookahs were lit up, glitter abounded (at Bornila’s demand for more and more sparkles, to which I, of course, happily complied) and the dance began. It didn’t take long for the sweat to start pouring. No ventilation, a 15 pound costume, and an unbreathable synthetic polyester skirt had me quickly exhausted and swearing to splurge on real silk for the rest of my belly dancing career. So many shots and angles, over and over again… I danced until I became somewhat loopy. I hadn’t eaten before I got to set because if I dance on a full stomach, I get sick. With only the hour-long nap, I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough time to digest, so I hadn’t eaten during rehearsal either. So now it was going on 9 hours since I had left for the shoot, and I was starting to wonder whether avoiding nausea was worth the starvation. Water alone wasn’t cutting it.

Still, I danced. It was the longest span of time I’d ever danced in my life, and it was glorious. Veil swooping, spinning, shimmying, undulating, back bending, fabulous belly dancing, over and over and over again! It was exhilarating and deliriously fun, and when we wrapped at noon, I stuffed myself with all the noodles my tired body could handle.  It was a much-needed and deliciously satisfying ending to a fantastic experience.

The cold’s settling in… which means I need to buckle down and edit this film if I want to meet my (self-inflicted) March 12 deadline for a FULL ROUGH CUT.

So for now, I’m turning over the blogging to others in the Oh, Sophia family, starting off with the one and only Angela Gulner, who plays Jules, the reckless and passionate playwright/instigator/leader of the bohemian pack that accepts Diya into its fold and snaps her out of her funk.

Most of our actors had prior film experience but Oh, Sophia was the first time Angela had ever acted in or even been on a film set and quite frankly, you never would have guessed it.  Now back at school (she’s getting her MFA in Acting at Harvard) Angela sums it up in her post below.  Enjoy!

AugustNewYorkOhSophia – FINALLY

I had been looking forward to shooting my first film for months, and as I boarded the plane from Minneapolis to New York, I was suddenly terrified. Bornila has trusted me with her story, her character, her dream – and I had no idea what I was doing. Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!

But I was surprised at how quickly I felt at home. Never have my anxieties about my work been calmed so quickly – and I attribute that to such a warm, welcoming, supportive, and professional group of crew and cast members. It’s really a gift when a director can make an actor (especially an exceptionally hard-on-oneself actor like me) feel so safe and so free so immediately. It was a really rare experience, I think.

As I’ve re-entered the world of ‘Acting School’ this fall, I’ve tried to process and hold onto all I learned from the shoot. It was surprise after surprise – “Film is so weird!” felt like my mantra. I had always heard that films shoot out of order, but I had no idea how this would shape my understanding of my character, Jules. You can read a script and think about a character as much as you want on your own, but you only really discover who that person is by playing with the other actors, exploring the world, the relationships, and the story in the moment. With a play, you have weeks to do this, but with film, it’s all jumbled. I came to set on Day One with my idea of Jules and her arc — but Bornila (thankfully) never let me hold onto this. She would shake things up, have us try a scene five different ways, and so suddenly I had no idea what the story was anymore – I had to let go of trying to control or plan (the biggest no-no for an actor) anything, and just play around in Jules’ dirty shoes.

It was great. Though at times odd – learning things about Jules out-of-order. I’d discover something one day and think to myself – “Argh! If only I had known this about Jules yesterday when we shot that scene from the end of the film!” The puzzle was put together in a really strange way — but I think the disorder was a blessing – forcing me to just ‘exist’.

There was also a bizarre freedom in doing so many takes. I started to feel like everything I did both mattered and didn’t matter at all. The fact that everything we tried was shot meant that I could try new things all the time and not worry about if they were better or worse than the time before, because they were all documented and ultimately Bornila would choose what was best. If the beginning of one take was great, and then end of another was great, well, great! She’d use them both. The knowledge that I really had no control over how Jules would “seem” in the film allowed me to let go of trying to make her “seem” anything. I think it freed me up to play more recklessly as the shoot went on.

Focus was another interesting thing. Stage acting takes an extraordinary amount of physical, mental, and emotional focus, and oddly so does screen acting, but in a different way. Shoots are long, at weird hours, in weird places – it takes a lot of energy to hold onto a character for that long. Also, film uses strange conventions like sometimes playing to nobody during a close up, or mouthing scenes, or shooting in really small fragments — it’s all very strange and requires great focus if you’re still trying to exist truthfully despite the weirdness.

Another odd thing about film… the camera. It’s like, right in your face. When you’re crying, when you’re laughing, when you’re kissing your girlfriend. I mean, obviously, yes, the camera is there – but it’s REALLY there. It was another lesson in focus, to not play to the camera, or look at the camera, or to elbow Gabe in the face. I’m not sure if this is something you ever get used to…?

I really grew to love the whole experience and owe a lot to the rest of the cast, the crew and to Jules. Acting for film is a completely different kind of craft, and yet as I reflect, not so different. An actor should let go of control, take risks, play, be messy — oddly enough, “Oh, Sophia” ended up reinforcing the heart of everything we study in grad school. On top of that, there’s something really special about having physical evidence of your work. At the wrap party last weekend, we saw a trailer and a few other segments of the footage, and I felt such a sense of joy, excitement, and pride. It’s a special sense of accomplishment, to be able to see everyone’s work come together and I can’t wait to see the film!