Evie - Mark Harris

So great to see this finished. Lots of really powerful stuff in it. The bathroom scene is the best for me. Some of the improv still is a little iffy for me. I think a more concrete screenplay, perhaps crafted from improv but locked down eventually, might have made for a more flawless film. But regardless this is a great piece of work, with many layers. The sound work really pulls it together. Congrats to you, your crew and your actors. Fine work all around.
 
I can truly say that is one of the best short films I've seen. Amazing, relatable without being predictable. Even as it visually went into the surreal, it stayed emotionally hard and true throughout. Tops.
 
jasonthewho said:
So great to see this finished. Lots of really powerful stuff in it. The bathroom scene is the best for me. Some of the improv still is a little iffy for me. I think a more concrete screenplay, perhaps crafted from improv but locked down eventually, might have made for a more flawless film. But regardless this is a great piece of work, with many layers. The sound work really pulls it together. Congrats to you, your crew and your actors. Fine work all around.
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I hear you on the improv stuff. I myself was on the fence about it and going forward I am going to use it in rehearsal and lock it down more in the shoot. But that's what shorts are for, in my book, experiment and learn.

Thanks for checking it out!!!!
 
strangerthings said:
I can truly say that is one of the best short films I've seen. Amazing, relatable without being predictable. Even as it visually went into the surreal, it stayed emotionally hard and true throughout. Tops.
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Thanks for watching it. I think I've heard of your site before. I think my friend Jack Stanley turned me onto it. Do you know him?
 
You know i love this short. And Leah in particular. With regard to the improv'd scene between Thomas and Evie, maybe you could go into a little detail as to how it was arrived at? this is only my perception, but I sensed a tension between the freedom they likely had to find the scene in rehearsal and the amount of room they had as it was actually being shot. the performances in this scene didn't strike me as any more or less natural than anywhere else in the short. I get a feeling of the author's presence in their words. Now I don't know if that "author" is the writer or if the lines came out of rehearsal and were incorporated into the scene, but it doesn't hit me as any more or less "real" than the rest of the film. it's very consistent throughout. If i hadn't been told this scene was improv, my guess would be that it was scripted.

Something i learned the hard way, and I don't know if this applies to your working method or not and you may have a different experience, but I no longer expect more natural results from doing improv during rehearsal and then incorporating that material into re-scripting the scene. you'd think because some of the lines came from the actors, it would lead to a "shortcut" to a more natural performance. it doesn't. at least, i have not seen that happen or am incapable of making that happen. what was organic to the actors in that moment during the rehearsal is now a line of dialogue. it will play out on set like any other scene with written dialogue. you'll work it until it pops.

The thing with improv is you're capturing magic in a bottle. and I haven't seen successful results from melding full-on, pedal-to-the-metal improv with very controlled composition and editing. I find I have to be true to the results and willing to commit to the trajectory it may send me on. and very rarely can I cross cut between takes because the continuity of emotion is so unique to each take. two cameras is often a must. I bring this up because the cut between "Thomas is this your first time ever?" and "Am I going to pop your cherry?" betrays a sense of emotional continuity. with my ultra-sensitive editor "spidey sense", I can feel the editor's hands on the scene there.

I'd love to show you, one day, the massive difference between a scene we cut from my film where we had an amazing rehearsal and the video of that actual rehearsal. I rewrote the scene to be what we had discovered in improv. but when we shot it, it lacked the spark and naturalism from before. it was lines of dialogue now, not organic to the moment. ultimately, it was cut.
 
When doing drama that may be true Zak... though I've seen bits of improv. infused into the written scene on set, and they work wonderfully...

Every actor/actress is different too... on No Greater Love, we had one guy who read the lines nearly word for word and was as natural and convincing as anything... you would think he had just thought them up... and another guy who had to change nearly each of his lines, to make them sound more natural... both gave great natural performances, but it took different ways to get there.
 
i hear you brandon. thats definitely true. the improv i'm talking about in the latter half there is the sort where there is no written dialogue to work from, only the character's objectives.

:) but of course i should offer this disclaimer: if one day I was able to make a film with a fictional narrative that someone mistook as a beautifully composed documentary, i'd be very happy.
 
Zak Forsman said:
i hear you brandon. thats definitely true. the improv i'm talking about in the latter half there is the sort where there is no written dialogue to work from, only the character's objectives.

:) but of course i should offer this disclaimer: if one day I was able to make a film with a fictional narrative that someone mistook as a beautifully composed documentary, i'd be very happy.
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Ah, which is probably where you and I would differ... as I like reality, but still find a certain magic in a narrative film that I don't find in a documentary...
 
haha, well to be clear, i'm not saying I aspire to make fictional docs. I'd like to evolve toward crafting narratives that make use of all the elements of this artform – music, light, color, rhythm, heart, intimacy -- but for the actors to not appear as actors, and for the dialogue to be almost incidental to what the character's expressions and behavior are communicating. I consider films like Breaking the Waves, Blue, Lilja 4-ever, Millennium Mambo, and The Son to be the high-water mark of that kind of filmmaking. Or something like Half Nelson, if you've seen that. i'd love to discuss this more, but not in mark's thread. </hijack>

btw, if you want to see a doc with some real story-telling magic and the emotional wallop of a fictional narrative, start with "Dear Zachary" if you haven't already.
 
Hey Mark,

I just wanted to say that I'm still thinking about your short that we saw at the QuestFest premiere and that's saying a lot... it takes a lot to have something "stick" with me these days. Really a great peice of work.

My only criticism, if I may, is in the beginning during the phone conversation felt wooden, a tad unnatural, probably because she didn't have an actual actor right there to work off of. Still a good scene but not... great (not that I could do anything nearly as good :) )

Anyway, great stuff... keep up the good work and if your feature is anything like this, you'll have a winner on your hands.

Jeremy
 
Zak Forsman said:
You know i love this short. And Leah in particular. With regard to the improv'd scene between Thomas and Evie, maybe you could go into a little detail as to how it was arrived at? this is only my perception, but I sensed a tension between the freedom they likely had to find the scene in rehearsal and the amount of room they had as it was actually being shot. the performances in this scene didn't strike me as any more or less natural than anywhere else in the short. I get a feeling of the author's presence in their words. Now I don't know if that "author" is the writer or if the lines came out of rehearsal and were incorporated into the scene, but it doesn't hit me as any more or less "real" than the rest of the film. it's very consistent throughout. If i hadn't been told this scene was improv, my guess would be that it was scripted.

Something i learned the hard way, and I don't know if this applies to your working method or not and you may have a different experience, but I no longer expect more natural results from doing improv during rehearsal and then incorporating that material into re-scripting the scene. you'd think because some of the lines came from the actors, it would lead to a "shortcut" to a more natural performance. it doesn't. at least, i have not seen that happen or am incapable of making that happen. what was organic to the actors in that moment during the rehearsal is now a line of dialogue. it will play out on set like any other scene with written dialogue. you'll work it until it pops.
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Well in this case, we were using improv to actually develop the script and find the beats. There were no scripted words in this film at all. Not even Chance Sturges' speeches. He did those after I got him riffing on certain topics.

I wanted to try this as an experiment, and it's the most I have ever gone into this kind of work in a film. What I meant was that if I do that again, I will lock down the words and beats we found a little more, than I did this time.

But usually, I use improv in rehearsal to help the actors find character. Like we might improv other aspects of the characters' lives, etc.

The thing with improv is you're capturing magic in a bottle. and I haven't seen successful results from melding full-on, pedal-to-the-metal improv with very controlled composition and editing. I find I have to be true to the results and willing to commit to the trajectory it may send me on. and very rarely can I cross cut between takes because the continuity of emotion is so unique to each take. two cameras is often a must. I bring this up because the cut between "Thomas is this your first time ever?" and "Am I going to pop your cherry?" betrays a sense of emotional continuity. with my ultra-sensitive editor "spidey sense", I can feel the editor's hands on the scene there.
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Right, this is a section that would have benefitted by what I say above, locking down the beats more than we did. I think there was another statement in there, and a long pause or something...

I'd love to show you, one day, the massive difference between a scene we cut from my film where we had an amazing rehearsal and the video of that actual rehearsal. I rewrote the scene to be what we had discovered in improv. but when we shot it, it lacked the spark and naturalism from before. it was lines of dialogue now, not organic to the moment. ultimately, it was cut.
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Yeah, I am not so concerned with trying to get more "natural" performances through improv. That's what actor training is for. I mean, the acting in DeadWood was not any less truthful than say, Mo-Pho, and DeadWood was heavily scripted. And there are actors up and down this country who can act Shakespeare truthfully, without it being "real." I think that's the actor's job.

I think it's a little dangerous to confuse "realism" with truth. I think inexperienced people can easily fall into the trap of thinking that if it feels real, it must be good, and use that as the only bar they need to pass, when in fact, it's only the lowest bar they need to pass. Being truthful in the imaginary circumstances is the whole trick of theater, and has been for thousands of years.

So yeah, it was a learning experience, and helped solidify the approach I am going to take to my feature film. And in the end, that was the main purpose of this short. That and getting my hands dirty with the RED, to see what's what.
 
jeremytuttle said:
Hey Mark,

I just wanted to say that I'm still thinking about your short that we saw at the QuestFest premiere and that's saying a lot... it takes a lot to have something "stick" with me these days. Really a great peice of work.

My only criticism, if I may, is in the beginning during the phone conversation felt wooden, a tad unnatural, probably because she didn't have an actual actor right there to work off of. Still a good scene but not... great (not that I could do anything nearly as good :) )

Anyway, great stuff... keep up the good work and if your feature is anything like this, you'll have a winner on your hands.

Jeremy
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Thanks for the feedback, Jeremy. I am going to look at that section again. I actually think the fault there is on the other end of the line, because the actor playing her father on the phone SUCKS. Cannot take direction, no talent hack. I will never work with him again.
 
Mark Harris said:
I think it's a little dangerous to confuse "realism" with truth. I think inexperienced people can easily fall into the trap of thinking that if it feels real, it must be good, and use that as the only bar they need to pass, when in fact, it's only the lowest bar they need to pass. Being truthful in the imaginary circumstances is the whole trick of theater, and has been for thousands of years.
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:) interesting. as a baseline: if it feels real, it IS good. but that's only one component of many that I need to satisfy, to my mind, and it needs to be appropriate for the story or character or underlying themes, etc. I imagine I set "being truthful" as the most essential bar -- without it, the other components of a scene just sort of hang there looking contrived or wooden or oddly motivated.

Mark Harris said:
But usually, I use improv in rehearsal to help the actors find character. Like we might improv other aspects of the characters' lives, etc.
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nice, that's something i really like to do. in fact, i don't really like to rehearse the scene we ARE going to shoot. and instead, work out a bunch of backstory scenes leading up to the first page of the story. we put one character in a job interview, we'll do the day that two characters met, the day they broke up, etc. In HoN, Dusty and Mary Elise did an improv where it was the morning after he had blacked out at a party and he assumed they'd slept together. I really like giving them this history to draw from before going into shooting the scenes in the film.
 
Sure, when I say it's the lowest bar, I mean, it's the most basic bar. It's the first step, not the end, in my eyes.
 
Thanks for sharing this, Mark.

I find this film totally captivating. For me, it has a very simple message that I bet many people in this world can connect to: The only feeling and sense of beauty in Evie's life comes from pain. Everything else is dry toast, or even less bland and dead than that.

The color shifting tells that story all by itself, and I don't feel it's used as a crutch or something gimmicky, because the performances are so strong. I found myself wanting to get away from this desaturated world, and that probably serves to connect me to her troubles. Each time the color comes back, it's such a breath of fresh air.

Is this going to be part of a feature? It stands on its own now, whereas the 6 min version didn't feel complete. Seeing what you have here, it's pretty obvious that a story like this can't be told in 6 min anyway. I was asking myself in the beginning, "where is this going? What does she want?" and I like how it unfolded and those questions were answered by the end.

The cut to her sitting in the bathroom, with all the band-aids... whoa. That one hit me in the chest. You really dig down and get all the fingers pinching the guts of human emotion. Again, the performances, all around, stellar.

The one criticism, if I had to say, was the jump cuts at the beginning and end, and the one where she is suddenly straddling the guy. Since you have the 'tv' effect on the Lost Children guy anyway, you could zoom in to a shot of his eye or something for a second. I'm sure it's a choice, but one I find jarring in a bad way. A minor issue and more of personal taste.

Sound design is rockin'. Minimalist and effective.

I'm curious about how much more you shot, compared to what we see. What I mean is that the cinematography and editing combine superpowers and tell the story so well that I think, 'there must be tons of stuff you cut', OR, was this your vision more-or-less to begin with, in terms of composition, shot selection, and editing choices? I also wonder how much of that was born on the set between you and Aram, or perhaps others? Whatever the recipe, it seems to work, and I wish to someday get to that level with my own work.

This is a hardcore, gritty subject to dive into, and certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but it moved me, inspired me, and motivated me. Thanks!
 
Mark it's stunning and amazingly portrayed by the actors.

The cinematography is poetic.

Love how germane / organic the technical story telling is and how well it's executed.

Tim Joy said:
...
Sound design is rockin'. Minimalist and effective.
....
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Minimalist? Which short were you watching :)

I agree some of the underscore is minimal, but I think the sound design is quite intense and thick - at least watched on my home theater system.

I think perhaps that it's so well integrated you didn't notice it so much? Which is of course the goal.
 
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