We abandoned much of our movie-making for a long time. Rather than gaining much hands on experience, yours truly Topher spent his time watching lots of movies and reading about technique in composition, writing and editing. The best way to learn is through self-teaching...
The closest I myself came back to filmmaking was taking a summer long course of NYFA. It was a very educational program, yet it showed me I had a long way to go as a moviemaker. For there I made a three-minute long short film (we were supposed to make 10-minute films) entitled "Guns Don't Kill People". It was critically panned by my teachers and laughed at by the test audience.
Of course as a fifteen year-old boy, I felt my dreams were crushed, which is why I did not return to actual movie-making for a long time; instead settling for writing books and scripts as my creative outlet.
In retrospect and in seeing where I could fix my errors here were some of the things wrong with my first attempt at a serious drama:
-I cast other directors as actors. They had no experience.
But of course, any great director, can make any one person, a decent actor. I gave no directions to my crew. I offered them no insight into characterization. I simply said what happened in the scene and expected them to understand.
-All long takes. For every scene I only did one angle, and usually, only one or two takes. So as you can imagine the film was very flat; it had no tension, no build-up...it was staged like it was on theater, not a cinema screen.
-No music.
Anyway, the grand re-introduction of myself as film director, was when Scott and I planned a high school history project that we envisioned as a feature-length epic. The rest of our group simply wanted a good grade, to make a funny little video, and didn't share our enthusiasm.
But for what it was, our look at 1920's Mafia life ("Wiseguys"), was a good chance to learn how to work with a cast, and to use the new camera I had purchased; a $2000 widescreen, HD, JVC.
Next on our hit list, was a documentary I invested in for creative writing. Entitled "Magic Landy"--you guessed it--it was a project chronicling Scott's short lived career as a magician. For me, this overlong, a little indulgent, film is important because my style was starting to come to fruition. I grasped jump cuts and tracking shots better. I composed more elaborate and aesthetically eye-catching compositions. And I learned the effectiveness of music via my rock soundtrack. *The project got an A+*
What came next was what I like to call my first real movie. At only 8 minutes, the short was "The Duel"; starring Scott Landy and Ed Andrews as medieval combatants engaged in a furious sword fight, intercut with the story of how their fight came to be. By now I had a sure hand at editing, and the project was slickly scored, shot (some very cool angles if I may say so), choreographed (Scott designed the fight) and acted by my friends. It became something of a hit to watch at our high school, and spawned Scott and I the notoriety to make our most ambitious project.
Which leads us to the birth of Trif3cta. Scott and I chose this as the name of our company, shortly after I had finished writing an untitled script about 2 hitmen with a love/hate friendship that would go on to become "A PRICE TO BE PAID". Trif3cta refers to a three way win. Scott and I liked the concept of the definition, and had decided we needed a permanent name to produce our films under.
Well readers, very soon I will post the third and final bit of info on Trif3cta's history. The part that details it's finest hour thus far: the creation of "A PRICE TO BE PAID".
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