Tales from the Set: The Auteur at Work

So one of the best things about being an independent/student filmmaker is getting to work with people you absolutely love to bits. There's something really, really satisfying about getting together with a group of friends and in the timeframe of one or two days, or sometimes even one or two hours, just making something because you freaking can.

What's really great about the Oakland University cinema studies program, not to shamelessly advertise my own school or anything, is that even though most of the classes offered are theory or analysis-based (Film Theory, Methods of Cinema Studies, Masterpieces of World Cinema, Film History, etc.), the majority of the professors will allow you to make a film or other creative project for a grade. I ended up making a short documentary on film exhibition as my senior capstone. In my junior year, I wrote a script about globalization for my World Cinema class and then did a short documentary on the effects of globalization in Detroit for my Documentary theory class.

And in my second-to-last semester at OU, I teamed up with my close friend Morgan and my boyfriend Ian to make a short film for the film theory class that all three of us were taking. The movie we made was called The Auteur at Work, which you can see here, and let me just say, here and now...it would have been way easier to just write a paper.

Trying to work in a team when all three of you have wildly varying opinions and filmmaking styles is no picnic, but the thing is, that can always be worked around. Morgan and Ian and I just sat down one evening between classes and said, okay, what do we want to do? The assignment was to make a short film--not a video essay--about a film theory that we had studied that semester. We tossed out a few ideas, but the one that really stuck was making fun of several prominent filmmakers that we'd studied that semester by making a film about auteur theory.

And for those who have not suffered through endless film-school debates about auteur theory, allow me to briefly explain what the hell that is. Basically, auteur theory claims that directors deserve "authorship" for their films. So, by that logic, Big Eyes is not a Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski film, it is officially a TIM BURTON film. Because the director has the most creative input, they deserve to "claim" the film as their own, the way a writer claims authorship of their book or an artist claims authorship of their painting. A lot of people agree with this point of view, but there are definitely scholars, critics and teenagers out there who do not. Hence, the debate.

So Morgan and Ian and I decided that we would shamelessly make fun of auteur theory and several prominent 20th-century auteurs--Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, and Orson Welles--with our final project. The story was simple: a director would write and re-write a script in the hopes of pleasing a producer and, in the end, would end up pleasing no one. The message was that in order to really be an auteur, you couldn't copy other directors' work, you had to create your own style or you wouldn't get the attention your work deserved.

It took me all of two days to write and edit the four-page script. We quickly decided that Morgan would be director and camerawoman, since those were her favorite aspects of production, and Ian, the tallest of the three of us, could do audio. Since Morgan had her hands full juggling final exams, Ian and I would be the editors and finish the post-production work. Morgan found our cast, too: her friend Cody would be the director, and her brother Collin would play the producer. We had a shotlist, we had a cast, we had props, we had a plan. Everything was in place.

And then, as always happens, once we got on-set everything went to merry hell in a handbasket.

Problem #1 came when we realized that the sunlight was encroaching on our chosen location for the producer's office. Morgan was about ready to go upstairs and outright yell at the sun, but that wasn't an option for obvious reasons, so we had to improvise. By moving office furniture to the right, we managed to keep both of our actors out of the blinding sunlight and maintain semi-even light through the scene. Crisis averted, but then we had to figure out how to make our audio work. We ended up calling our professor, the one who'd taught us to do audio and camerawork in the first place, and he told us how to solve the problem. Crisis averted again. And with the exception of Collin knocking over the table, we got through the scene with minimal outtakes.

The next major problem popped up when we realized we had nowhere to actually shoot the scenes from the Director's script. Ian and I ran out to find the next location, while Morgan, Cody, and Collin stayed with our equipment stash. Everywhere in the Oakland Center (where we shot the entire project) was occupied. We needed a long table to shoot the "Citizen Kane" parody scene, and we needed a place with a lot of light because two of our scenes were "deep depth of field" shots, meaning that everything and everyone in frame needed to be in focus, not just the people/objects in the foreground. After ruling out the food court and the basement, we settled on fireside lounge. Perfect, because lots of windows meant lots of light, and--miracle of miracles--there were several long tables that were not in use, right there, ours for the taking! Couldn't have been better.

Then we realized that lots of windows didn't just mean lots of light, it meant lots of backlight. Figuring out how to shoot without breaking the 180-rule while keeping our shots in the right light was a pain. Finally Morgan came up with the brilliant idea of shooting only one angle for each scene. Why not? Godard was famous for long takes, and Welles loved using a stationary camera and long takes to create a live theater-esque aesthetic. As for the Eisenstein parody shots, well, we could do that in post-production; he was more famous for editing than camerawork anyway. Problem solved.

The idea of the director's script was that it was a normal scene (we decided to have me passing a note to Ian, nice and simple) that got progressively more elaborate and jacked-up as the producer demanded more and more rewrites. First, he'd demand an Eisenstein-esque rewrite. Unsatisfied with that, he'd instruct the director to give him a Godard-themed rewrite. And when that wasn't good enough, he'd ask for an Orson Welles homage. And, crazy as we are, we decided that we'd shoot all these "rewrites" in order.

The first take, the "normal" shot, was easy enough. One take. Boom. We needed a close-up of Ian's wide-eyed "shocked" face for the Eisenstein parody, which we got no problem. One take, boom. Hey, maybe this was going to be easier than we thought...

Nope. Not even.

The Godard parody was one long shot. This basically meant that if we screwed up one thing, we had to do the whole scene over again. And because it was a parody of Godard, who loved to cram lots of details into his movies, we had a lot of little things to worry about. We had one guy (Collin, doing double-duty as an extra) pelvic-thrusting with flowers stuck in his pants. We had Ian fixing a Barbie polaroid camera with a candy cane. And I was supposed to come into the middle of this craziness and hand Ian a note, which Cody, wearing my Star-Lord mask and a feather boa, would snatch from my grasp with a pair of tongs. If none of that makes any sense at all, don't worry. It's not supposed to; it's a damn Godard parody for Pete's sake. But it made for some damn difficult filming. I think we did maybe three or four takes, not including all the rehearsal takes that we didn't film, before we got it right.

Finally we shot the Citizen Kane parody. The danger here was laughing. Collin played a butler, who passed Ian my note on a silver tray...while wearing my blazer, an old black velvet thing that, when put on him, was so painfully obviously a women's blazer that it bordered on hilarious. Then Ian would read the note and react...well...Kane-style. He was supposed to flip the table, throw furniture, and yell at me...and guess how much of that he was actually comfortable doing in a public place? If you guessed "zero out of three," you'd be right. "I'm worried about causing a scene," he told us. Ian, honey. We've already pelvic-thrusted with flowers in our trousers, run amok dressed like Star-Lord at the Pride Parade, and set off my broken alarm clock. We're way past causing a scene at this point.

I won't bore you with the details of post-production. Just know that if one of your editors is working through a cold and the other has the actual maturity level of an eight-year-old on Froot Loops, you will get nothing done. Seriously. We had to bust our asses, mainly because we wasted so much time laughing off said asses while we watched and re-watched the clip of Star-Lord-Cody snatching the note away while Collin pelvic-thrusted with the flowers in the background. (In our defense, it was finals week and we needed something to laugh about.)

But for all of that we made a damn cute film. I'm proud of it, and I truly hope that the others are, too. The moral of the story here is, work with your friends. You will love the results. Seriously.

My work: 'The Auteur at Work,' 'Moving Along,' and 'Professors'

My senior year of college was spent doing more writing, studying and researching than filming. I wasn't too happy with that. But I did manage to make three short films during that time, one of which I submitted for my senior capstone.

First, there was The Auteur at Work. I teamed up with Morgan, my Michigan-based partner-in-crime, to make a mockery of Auteur Theory, which we'd been learning about in our hard-as-hell film theory class, for our final project. Rounding out our team we had Ian (who is a fairly good actor, and don't let him tell you otherwise), Morgan's brother Collin, and her BFF Cody. Morgan, Ian and I nailed down the concept, I wrote us a script, Morgan took the helm as director, and we convinced Cody and Collin to act for us. Let the games begin!

Since most of us had worked together on Morgan's final project for production class, Death Lets it Go, we were pretty well gelled as a team already. The trick was pulling off a short film in less than three weeks, which as I mentioned when talking about Auto-Incorrect is no small task. The script was completed in two drafts. We didn't have time for storyboards or a beat breakdown. Casting came down to "wanna be in it? cool." Ian and I had to round out the cast, since we only had two real actors and the script called for at least four characters. To top it all off, we had technical difficulties as well: the day-of, we had to call in our production teacher to help with an audio issue, intermittent sunlight made setting up a shot nearly impossible, and we had to location scout on the fly. Then, once we had the damn thing shot, Ian had to work through a cold the last week of class to get it edited, and I was left to help choose the music and take care of post-production effects. Sleep? What's that?

But we pulled it off, and The Auteur at Work turned out to be the most fun I'd had on a film set in a long time. Watch it HERE.



I like making narrative films. I love to watch documentaries, but I don't consider making them to be my strong suit...so how the hell is it that I've ended up making so many of them?!? I've made three for various classes, two for good-cause events at my school, and two just because I felt like it. Huh. That's...a lot, now that I think about it.

Had I stayed at McDaniel, my first college, my senior-year project would have been a narrative. But I transferred to Oakland University, where I had to take a film-exhibition class for my capstone credits, and he wouldn't let me make a narrative film. So I made a documentary on the changing film exhibition industry, with special focus on why Blockbuster went out of business and the ways that theater and other video-store owners are staying in business despite the rise of Netflix and other on-demand services. If that sounds like a lot to pack into a five-minute capstone video, believe me, it was. But the end result was worth it.

The interviews were the easy part...but even the "easy" part involved traveling to Ann Arbor and Bloomfield Hills, coordinating with my mother when and where I could take the car, borrowing equipment from my production teacher, and printing and filing a handful of release forms for all the interviewees to sign. The hard part was finding B-roll and archive footage, as I didn't have any old photos or videos from Blockbuster that I could conveniently slip into the final cut. I ended up taking to the Internet for archive photos, hunting YouTube for old Blockbuster commercials, and asking Ian if I could film inside Disc Replay. And the hardest part of all was editing several hours' worth of material into a five-minute video that told a story without presenting too much of a bias. But all the work paid off when I saw the final cut--and when I saw my grade.

I never pictured myself making a documentary for my last-ever college project--but I'm so glad I did. Check it out HERE.



After all the hard work of my last semester of college, it almost felt like a relief to make another comedy short with Morgan. We were a "production team" for OU's end-of-year showcase, and our task was simple: create content. Make it OU-related. And above all make it good. This is for the school, after all.

Faced with this task, Morgan and I started out making a documentary, which turned into a loosely-scripted mockumentary about our favorite professors. For each of the four teachers we profiled we chose a well-known quirk and blew it way, way out of proportion. Our theory teacher, for example, was known for choosing a wide, often disjointed selection of films for his various classes. We filmed him choosing movies out of a hat and putting them into his class syllabus.

How Well Do You Know Your Professors was probably one of the easiest films I've ever made. The difficult part was finding the time to finish it; at the time that we were making the film, Morgan was writing a 90-page script for her class and I was shooting Moving Along for my capstone assignment. But we were lucky, because our professors cooperated every step of the way. And the reaction we got when we premiered it at the OU end-of-year cinema department showcase? Priceless.

Watch our dorky mockumentary HERE.

My work: Auto-Incorrect

This past summer I made a short film as a final project for my practical film production class. It was an 8-week, 4-credit-hour class, so you know that means a lot of work packed into a very short amount of time. All told I think I spent maybe 3 weeks total on Auto-Incorrect, from the initial conception of the idea to the final presentation. And for sure I could not have done this without my amazing A.D. Morgan (who plays Thea in the film) and kick-ass lead actor Billy (who, you guessed it, plays Jamie). Making a short film is never easy, but when you're doing it with friends, it's definitely a LOT more fun.

Watch Auto-Incorrect HERE.

My work: He's A Rockstar

For my senior year at Interlochen I had to make a film to show off everything I'd learned during my time there. They called it "senior thesis." Those of us who had to make them called it "anywhere from four to nine months running around like a headless chicken trying to write, shoot, edit, and produce a short film that would impress prospective colleges."

You wouldn't believe how much work I put into this film. I started writing it the summer before senior year and finally finished the script in November. I shot it January 13-15 2011, edited like a madwoman, got help on the titles, commissioned and supervised the recording of the music, and premiered the damn thing (as I so affectionately called it at that point) at the end-of-year student showcase in May 2011. And the result of all that work? It got into exactly one film festival and was available for streaming--it wasn't even screened.

So, yeah, suffice it to say that this was not the hit of my lifetime. But because I spent basically my entire senior year slaving over it, He's A Rockstar holds a special place in my heart. It's pretty much the ultimate fantasy of my teenage years: meeting and falling in love with the frontman of my favorite band. The kind of movie only a teenage girl would make. But, honestly, when all is said and done, I don't think it's all that bad.

Watch He's A Rockstar HERE.