Watch it fullsize here.

Motion Graphics Reel 2010 from Earl Newton on Vimeo.

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I found this terrific video from the WGA about the way the Internet can enable writers to break beyond the written page to take control of their own work and how it’s seen.  (I touched on this topic of writers in The End of the Screenwriter ).

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Friend and composer Alistair Cooper turned me onto the 70-minute Phantom Menace, and having seen it, I think it’s a quintessential example of learning from a big-budget mistake. It should be required viewing for any storyteller.

You don’t have to have seen Phantom Menace to understand most of this, but it would help. It begins as an overview of the story and characters, and then delves deep into a beat-by-beat analysis of the film. Some of the later sections address specific character concerns (Qui-Gonn is a drunk), but there’s still enough important storytelling theory to make it worth anyone’s while.

(There are some “You Suck at Photoshop” author-as-character moments interspersed within the review, presumedly to break up the rhythm, so be ready for some weirdness. I can tell you the review is worth it. I also find it funny how the author has an excellent grasp of story structure and theory, and yet his own works ends with an awkward anticlimax. Nobody’s perfect.)

Part 1/7:

Part 2/7: Story

Part 3/7:

Part 4/7:

Part 5/7:

Part 6/7:

Part 7/7:

If you like the tone of these reviews, you can find more at RedLetter Media.

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The video and my comments after the jump.

“The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity.”

Adichie has a beautiful way of talking about prejudice and ignorance without ever using those words or adopting a preaching tone.  With equal candor and humility, she talks about her American roommate expecting her to be ignorant and poor, just as she herself expected her childhood servant to be lazy simply because he was poor.

While I think Adichie intended this as advice for living, it applies equally well to storytelling.  It’s a simple, practical tool to ask yourself: “How many stories do I know about my characters?”

Let’s imagine a coal miner.  Is he an oppressed laborer, crushed by a unsympathetic company?

Let’s ask his foreman.  Is he a lazy idiot who cannot show up on time?

Ask his wife.  Is he a distant, cold housemate?

Ask his mistress.  Is he a tender lover, afraid to share his fears anywhere but in the dark?

He is none of these completely, yet each make up a piece of his picture.  As you compose his actions in your head, it becomes easier to ask yourself, “Which story is my character playing out now?”

“There is never a single story about any place.”

Storytelling is based on seeing.  It is very much like working with a police sketch artist.  Unless you can fully imagine the person, you cannot describe them.

The process of creativity is the process of asking questions about your story until you have enough answers to move forward.  ”Who is this person?  What do they do?”  If you stop asking  too early, you’re settling, and the picture of your character will emerge as a hazy cliche.

Remember: creativity ends when we stop asking questions.

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Key excerpts of his quote, and the full video interview under the cut.

His advice for screenwriters: (paraphrased)

“Find what’s important to you, and stick to that…don’t give into the temptation of shaping yourself around some sort of perception of what the market wants or what people want.  Or God forbid, what critics want.”

As children, we learn to get what we want by finding what other people want and giving it to them. Take that as obedience to your parents, doing homework for your teacher, adopting habits of dress and behavior to be accepted into a social group.

When you get into the entertainment business (and perhaps other businesses as well), you find conformist behavior has a glass ceiling. The more you conform, the more you blend into the crowd.

I had the opportunity several years ago to strike out for LA and make my way. But I didn’t, and I didn’t for a specific reason: it seemed to me, the more I made myself available to the Los Angeles crowd, the less valuable I’d become. There are already thousands of filmmakers in Hollywood knocking on doors and hawking scripts; at some point, they all have to sound the same.

I have guided my steps based on this principle: the more you are able to strike out on your own (creatively, logistically, or both) the more valuable you are.

Here’s Mr. Johnson:

Find your thing, find what makes your voice unique, and stick to your guns…in the short term, it’s gonna seem like that’s what’s holding you back, that’s what’s making it difficult to break in.  In the long term, that’s what’s gonna make your voice unique and what’s gonna pop you up above the crowd and get you noticed.

Most importantly, in my opinion:

And on a more fundamental level, it’s what will sustain you creatively, being honest to what you want to put out there in the world.

It’s easy to forget the above, with the glut of books about “the rules of filmmaking!” and “Top 10 Mistakes Every Screenwriter Makes.” (First mistake: forgetting to check if the author of the book ever actually sold a screenplay)

I get turned off when I hear creative people talking about the Hero’s Journey and “four-quadrant entertainment.”  I’m all for studying the principles that guide our business, but if you make every move based on “what do people want,” you’re going to choke yourself into mediocrity.

George Lucas.  Pixar.  Steven Spielberg.
The great creative people of our time understand the principles that guide their business, but they don’t look to principles for their solutions.  They reach inside themselves, find something true, and draw it out into the world.

And when they do it right, they find the thing that people always wanted but didn’t know to ask for.  That’s why they are considered geniuses.

Your career is a long-term proposition.  No matter how good you are, it is going to take a long, long time to get anywhere with it.  You will not have the stamina to survive the journey if you use it all trying to please other people.

Break what you learned in school.  Don’t echo your classmates.  Find something you love and cultivate the skills to communicate why you love it.

The critics will take care of themselves.

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I thought Rachel White’s comments were especially on-the-mark.  Listen close when she starts talking about “being the right puzzle piece.”

Stranger Things fans will also recognize Rachel as Madeline from Disconnect.

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This time we featured Messengers II: The Scarecrow, a new movie from Ghost House Pictures, available in stores and on Amazon.com. (I get no kickbacks for the link, I’m just helpful like that)

New upgrades to look for:

• We added some fun “interview cutaways” for fresh takes on Ghost House and their new flick (featuring novelist J.C. Hutchins in Episode One, Messengers screenwriter Todd Farmer in Episode Two, and me)
• Moving cameras!  I wanted this in the first series, and there just wasn’t time to develop it.  Now the camera cruises constantly as Scott lays out the dirt on Messengers II.  Groovy.

Post some comments, thoughts are welcome.  I want to smooth out the cameras in the next version, and I’m looking to revamp a few other things too.

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At fourteen seconds, this is a bit longer than I want.  I’ll end up cutting a few seconds out of the middle for the “long version” (8-10 seconds), and fading to black at 4-5 seconds for the short version.

I could also chop it in half and have two options for an animation.

Strange RSS LLC Logo from Earl Newton on Vimeo.

Stock footage animated in After Effects.

I’ve done a lot of VFX insertions into live footage, but this is my first attempt at completely artificial photorealism.  Color choice seems to be everything in photorealism.  Nothing is ever true white or true black, it’s a lot of grays and irregularities and asymmetrical details until it looks right.

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Normally I’d embed the video here, but MakingOf.com has some weird Iframe code going on, so I’m just providing the link.

John August on Breaking Storytelling Conventions

And, as a screenwriter, you should already be a regular visitor to JohnAugust.com.

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…doesn’t that mean it’s conventional now?

I haven’t cut many demo reels before, but I’ve been an editor ten years, so it didn’t seem impossible to learn.  So I spent a few days researching great demo reels, reading up on tips, and somewhere in there, it clicked.  48 hours later, I had this.

I sent that out to ten potential clients this morning at 5am.  Today, at 2PM, I already have one contract offer and one request for more information.

So what is a good demo reel?

A good demo reel is a trailer for your talent.

As a filmmaker, I was having a hard time cutting a “demo reel.”  It was vague.  But something I do know how to cut is a good trailer.  And what make up the key elements of a trailer?

• Trailers have great music

Not always true, but often enough to be a good rule of thumb.  A trailer (and a reel) is essentially a montage, and montage thrives on a strong partnership with an evocative song.  Whatever song you choose will instill the flavor, the style, and the heartbeat of your reel.  Choose carefully.

What I did: I spent an entire day digging through my music library, listening to bits, jumping around in a song. (Remember, you don’t need a perfect 3 minutes, you need several solid 20-30 second segments you can stitch together, taken from anywhere in the song).  I fiddled with a lot of ideas, and eventually settled on “5-4″ by the Gorillaz.

I tried using Pandora.com to find songs similar to “5-4,” but nothing quite popped.  I also thought about cutting together different covers of “Wicked Game” (one by HIM and one by Bassboosa) to create different moods within the trailer, but the changes were a bit abrupt (didn’t work for me, but if you can get it to fly, go for it!)

• Trailers provoke interest

It’s not just that it looks or sounds good; a good trailer suggests that there is a WHOLE LOT more where this came from.  Your demo reel needs to do the same thing.  There needs to be a sense of overflowing talent, as though you couldn’t cram everything into it.  You get that feeling by trimming until only the best parts remain.

What I did: I took time to comb through all of the material that I thought had merit, piled it all into a directory, and started pulling clips.  From there, like any trailer, it became a puzzle game: dropping in clips, finding interesting combinations, and juggling the pieces around until it was as clean and tight as I could make it.

This flows right into:

• Trailers only show the good parts of the movie

When was the last time you bought a ticket to a movie with a boring trailer?  The same thing applies to your reel: leave the bland parts out.  If it doesn’t pop, cut it.

What I Did: Killed my darlings.  I had some great material I shot for a group called “RISC Management” – very beautiful footage, but too stationary for my “trailer.”  Every choice comes back down to the same basic question: not “is this element right,” but “is this element right for this purpose and context?”

I’m saving the footage for later, when I cut a more slow-paced, sincere reel for clients who are looking for heart over “whizbang wow.”

• Trailers are fast

Nobody’s going to watch a 7-minute trailer.  Two and half minutes is pushing it as it is.  Similarly, your demo reel needs to be fast and furious (two cents into Vin Diesel’s hat).  I read from multiple sources that a client will rarely look past the first 30 seconds.  Sounds like a mainstream audience to me.  You have to hook them quick, get out quick.  This also means: don’t save your best material for last. Put it up front.  The audience isn’t going to watch that long.

What I did: I stopped frequently to watch the reel over and over.  When you’re watching, don’t zone out or fall in love with your work.  Be alert.  Watch it like you have better things to be doing (your audience does).  And whenever you feel the pace flag, note it.  You don’t need to start chopping immediately, but as you watch again and again, ideas will come for how to fix the slow parts.

NOTE: “Well-paced” doesn’t mean “fast.”  A good pace has levels: intense speed for a bit, and then some relief with a slower moment, then back again.  All-fast or all-slow is death by monotony: it’s like a visual metronome.

• Trailers are original

Having great footage and cutting it well isn’t enough.  There has to be something that breaks your reel out of the pack.  Do your research, find out what everyone else is doing, and find an original twist.  You can bet that a lot of people will simply be copying what they’ve seen in other reels; if you can come up with a new hook, you’ll catch attention.

What I Did: I saw a lot of reels with flashy intros that SLAPPED people to attention with a big animation sequence in the beginning; a great choice, but a bad choice for me if I wanted to stand out.  So I played with footage for awhile, without knowing how I was going to start, and I started thinking about how I have shown people my work before: my iPhone.

From there, I knew I had something.  An off-beat, quiet opening that kick-started the meat of my reel.  Quiet sells can be dangerous if you run them too long, but it only took six and a half seconds for the music to start, and by 00:15, we’re fully into the reel.

• Trailers are not made in a day or a vacuum

You’re going to be showing this for a long, long time: it is worth taking time to plan it out.  Come up with alternative ideas, explore other possibilities.  The mark of a professional isn’t the ability to be right every time, it’s the ability to generate multiple solutions and recognize the right one when he/she sees it.

Run your ideas past other people and get their feedback.  Sometimes other people will have great ideas, and other times you’ll realize (like I did) that one of your “great ideas” is actually completely nonsensical.

What I Did: I planned and edited the reel over two days.  This was even a bit of a rush, but I have potential clients waiting to see it, so there wasn’t a lot of room for error.  But I was on track to for error anyway: I had planned to shoot an additional piece where I took two paper cups (with an old heaphone cable taped to the bottom of each) and plugged them into my iPhone.  I would alter the music so that as I plugged in the headphone cable, the music would come booming out of the cups.  I thought it was a neat, visually-different way to start the piece.

When I ran it by my brother, he gave me a look of such confusion that I dropped it immediately.

• Trailers let you know what they are selling

Apparently “forgetting your contact info” is common enough that almost EVERY demo reel advice I read included that. Don’t forget your contact information.

What I Did: I knew I planned on releasing this on the Internet, so I created two versions of my reel: one with and one without my phone number. My phone number will be compressed to DVD and handed out – if I’m emailing potential clients, I can just include my phone number in the email.

Remember, unless you password-protect the video, everyone in the world will get to see it. Keep that in mind, for many reasons.

• Trailers capture the spirit of their source

This is where your shot selection, music selection, and editing choices blend into one big pot called “tone.”  What you juxtapose against what, and how fast you do it, decides the spirit of your piece.  Editing is just another kind of adaptation: you’re trying to adapt your attitude and your ability into a visual form people can emotionally understand.  There is no way to teach this, but luckily, you can learn it – by doing it over and over again (See Ira Glass On Creativity part three).

What I Did: The important part of this reel was to convey my talent, professionalism, and ability to deliver a high-end product for national-level clients.  At the end, however, it felt like there was a bit of room for humor, so rather than just cut to a title card with my information, I “changed the channel” and began playing “Call Me Now” (with appropriate whipcracks).

Humor is a great tool for a trailer, because by its nature, humor is surprising.  Humor calls out the ridiculousness of a situation, and draws the audience closer to you emotionally.  It’s like saying, “Do you see this thing?  Isn’t it crazy?” and lets them in on the joke with you.

Making friends.  WITH MEDIA.

The downside is it can be mistaken for unprofessionalism, so use your best judgment, and remember that few of your clients will be from your age or peer group.

Finally, just for fun, I thought you’d like to see this.  These are Pixar’s official guidelines for demo reels.  (Check out the jobs list: anybody wanna be a line cook or cafe host at Pixar?)

Some of the sites I consulted while cutting my reel and writing this article:

• Guide to Good Demo Reels (Written in 1996, but the precepts are still very applicable.  Covers a lot of great professional notes, like: don’t take credit for others’ work, and don’t feature shots you learned from a tutorial in your reel – your employer has probably seen them before)
• Bill Davis’ Advice on Demo Reels (Video professional Bill Davis reminds us of many do’s and don’ts – especially: don’t forget to put your contact information on the reel!)
• How to Make a Demo Reel

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Over four segments of an interview (presumably for Current.TV), Ira basically lays bare the nature of storytelling, the difficulty of it, and what it takes to make it.

It took me years to figure out what he explains in a few minutes.  It’s something every creative person should hear.  Here are the rest of the segments:

Ira Glass Part Two (Finding a Decent Story: Be Brutal)

Ira Glass Part Three (On Good Taste, And Sucking Major)

Ira Glass Part Four (Two Common Errors of the Beginner)

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Disconnect (Stranger Things episode 5) just went live on the site yesterday. Feedback is good so far. Leave your comments below or on the site itself.

Written and Directed by Earl Newton

Starring Jonathan MacQueen, James Donadio, and Rachel White

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Scott hosted the video, shot by Mevio, and post-production done by me.  Special props to Kevin Capizzi for the wicked Horror House door animations, and of course, our own David W. Kanter for his excellent music supervision.

Watch the first video here.  The next four will be emerging from now till Tuesday.  Then go pick up a copy of Saw V, and tell ‘em Newton and Sigler sent you.

For those of you keeping score, this was identified as Secret Project #2.

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Thanks go to the Parsec committee, honor to our fellow nominees, and above all, enormous gratitude to our fanbase. You make us what we are.

The acceptance video:

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I did this video as part of a series of promotional pieces for Heritage Plantation. I warn you, many people have been converted to golf after watching this.

I like the dramatic pacing of this one. As I told the owners when I first pitched the series, I wanted these videos to feel like a postcard from Heritage Plantation. Postcard achieved.

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