Greetings from the Future of Filmmaking!
I’m in Portland, Oregon, shooting an episode of TNT’s prime time drama, Leverage.
Just about every night after we wrap I meet up with my friend John Rogers, who is the co-executive producer and head writer for the show, to have a beer and decompress after a long day on the set. Whether we talk about filmmaking, comic books, nerdy geeky gaming stuff, or technology, a common thread runs through our conversations: it’s pretty awesome to live here in the future, we sure are lucky to get paid to make stuff up and entertain people, and holy crap has the industry changed since we first entered it.
Leverage is totally shot in the future. We use the Red One digital camera, we watch takes right after we finish them to make sure nothing went wrong, and we get our dailies via secure internet connection anywhere we have computers and WiFi. John told me that at least once, they realized they didn’t shoot a single or needed a tighter angle to make something work, and were able to create coverage in post-production, which is done entirely on Final Cut Pro. During production, we could send pictures and updates from the set to Twitter and our blogs, and engage the audience in a direct and intimate way that is unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
Evolution
I’ve worked in television and movies for so long, I have a hard time remembering a time in my life where I wasn’t going to auditions and spending most of my days on the set. I started acting in the mid-70s, and over the course of a three decade career, I’ve seen several subtle changes and a few paradigm shifts in how we get ideas out of a script, bring them to life on the set, and deliver them to the audience.
When I was a kid, everything was shot on 35mm film, which came in in magazines ranging from a few hundred to a thousand feet, and always produced a certain amount of noise. There were two main cameras back in those days: Panaflex and Arriflex. Everybody loved shooting the Panaflex, mostly because it’s a great camera. Arris were usually less expensive to rent, but were always louder. Even when they’d wrap the magazine in a baffle, I can remember some Arris being so loud, the sound of the film spinning through the camera would blast right out of the lens at us during a scene. There’s a certain romance to the sound of film churning past the gate, but as an actor, it was distracting and usually meant that we were going to have to re-record our dialog once the film was cut together.
Because film stock was a nontrivial production expense, if anything went wrong during a take, from an actor flubbing a line to a technical problem with camera or sound, we’d cut, reset, and start over to conserve film. Because developing film was a nontrivial production expense, depending on the show’s budget, a director could only pick a handful of takes to print and possibly include in the final cut.
Shooting digitally on the Red One means the camera is silent, and because there isn’t any film to load or run out of, shooting a scene is more like doing a little bit of a play. It’s so quiet, the director can stand right next to the camera and talk to us, and since we’re not burning film, we can quickly reset and keep rolling if something goes awry, and there’s no reason to stop rolling if something awesome or unexpected happens during a take.
How did we get here? I think it all started with the advent of video tape in the 1980s. Because video tape was so cheap and didn’t require a developing process, it lead to the home video revolution (and that unfortunate incident where Roller Girl stomped on that one guy’s face) but very few serious filmmakers liked shooting on video because it looked and felt so different from film. There was inherently less control over the entire process, and old habits died hard, you know. Video never really replaced film, but I think digital will finally provide an acceptable, game-changing alternative.
I think it was inevitable that we would get where we are today, and I think it’s only a matter of time before more shows (and networks who are scared shitless of anything new) catch up to where Leverage has been for over a year. This show is truly at the tip of the spear, and every day they rewrite the rules for television production.
In the early 90s, emboldened by the type of unwavering certainty that only a twenty year-old can have, I went to work for NewTek, as a tiny part of the team that brought the Video Toaster 4000 to life. The Video Toaster was an absolutely magnificent bit of technology that took everything you’d expect from a television studio, and crammed it into an Amiga computer. (Kids, ask your parents ... unless they are Amiga fanboys, because it’s just too painful to talk about.) In these days of iMovie and Final Cut, it may not seem like such a big deal, but about 25 years ago, being able to do real-time digital video effects, 3D computer graphics and animation, and titles for less than $10,000 was unheard of. Also, there was Toaster Paint (Robert Blackwell, I hope you read this, because that one was for you.)
If video was an incremental shift for filmmakers, the Toaster was a paradigm shift, because we made it affordable for just about anyone to produce high-quality video television, eliminating one of the biggest barriers to entry for a lot of hopeful filmmakers.
Despite all the magic NewTek brought to the world with the Toaster, we could never cross two vast chasms: What we didn’t have back then, that we all take for granted now, was digital, nonlinear editing. Hard drives were simply too expensive and computers weren’t fast enough to make that sort of thing anywhere close to affordable for average people, so filmmakers had to invest in additional editing equipment that was cool at the time, but seems as elegant as a Civil War field hospital today.
There was also a significant problem with distribution, which was still controlled entirely by the same moguls who controlled the networks. Today, a filmmaker can pick from dozens of different online options to put their work in front of the audience, but in the early 90s, it was a different world. We were still waiting for the Real Player to even start buffering, 56k dial-up was considered screaming fast, and our online porn arrived in ASCII art or .gif files that took an hour to download. (Er, I heard from some guy, because I never would have even dreamed of looking at Kimberly Conrad online in 1992.)
Get Excited and Make Things
Every day I work on Leverage, I can’t help but think about how much the entertainment industry has changed in my lifetime, and how what we did at NewTek fits into that.
Right now, if you have a creative idea, you can produce it and get it to an audience for under a thousand dollars. Right now, you can get your very own HD video camera for about the cost of feeding one of those kids in Africa for two months. Right now, if you have a Mac, it ships with everything you need to cut and finish your story. Right now, you can have a screening for more people, more easily, than at any other time in history, and they don’t even have to be in the same room.
In the 1960s, film stock, sound equipment, and cameras became (relatively) cheap and affordable. This put advanced tools into the hands of creative people, and lead to the greatest decade of filmmaking in history: 1970s. I think we’re poised for a similar revolution.
See you at the barricades.
April on June 26, 2009 at 11:02 AM
This is fascinating stuff! Love all the info and great detail in posts! It's hard to find useful blogs out there, and it's nice to find some. At www.bigartblog.com we're featuring theatre arts as our art of choice right now and I should write a post about you and the insightful words that my viewers might find useful.
Thanks!
MeiLin Miranda on June 26, 2009 at 02:58 PM
Vive La Revolution! You seem to be at the barricades on a number of fronts, Wil. :) PDX misses ya. Come back and see us soon.
BlogDog on June 27, 2009 at 04:53 PM
In contradistinction to Gil Scott Heron, not only will the revolution be televised, the revolution will be television.
Thanks to Whill Wheaton for this most informative post.
Mike Gebert on June 27, 2009 at 06:57 PM
I think the excitement is not only that you can make a feature film for pocket change, edit it on a desktop that gives you a $200,000 Avid suite of a decade ago for a couple of thousand bucks and distribute it to people worldwide... it's that you don't have to make a feature film to do it.
A year ago I started making little documentaries about food in the midwest called Sky Full of Bacon. If I set out to make a feature, I'd have to find a subject worthy of feature treatment, work on it for a year or two, then spend another year or two finding ways to promote it, working the festival circuit, etc., all to get... maybe 10,000 or 20,000 people to watch it?
Instead I shoot smaller subjects myself, edit them, and put them on the web about every six or eight weeks-- and in a year I've produced about 3 hours' worth that have been seen by 20,000 people online. Total cost, well, occasionally they break 100 bucks per episode... if I have to get a hotel room during the shoot. With more money, crew and time, I could do something bigger, but I have to say, the satisfaction to final result ratio of this kind of homemade, one-person production is pretty damn favorable.
Linda Starr on June 27, 2009 at 07:24 PM
The Theater and Film Exchange - www.theaterandfilmexchange.com fits into this new dynamic perfectly!
susan on June 28, 2009 at 05:17 AM
I have to agree with David Mamet, 1977 was the death of Hollywood Film when craft was replaced with easy eye-candy which led to the demise of the storyteller. Like filmmakers there are millions of screenwriters in Hollywood yet none have the ability to craft a good script; film has been a dead art for some time now, more money is made throwing together eye-candy which is even cheaper since the eye-candy is now digital.
Since 1977 the bar has been lowered to the point that the audience has no idea just how bad is today's entertainment; because everyone can push a button on a camera and call it a movie there is no competition, lack of competitive spirit means nobody really tries to craft their work and in the end craft-less work is just a bunch of junk.
Hollywood is just an hobby industry driven by amateurs convinced they're master craftsmen.
By all means if you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a hobby feel free however if the hobby takes up the money to pay your own bills then it is time to give up the hobby rather than turn to the government to take care of your bills.
One reason why Beethoven created great Art was because he was not interested in trappings; he shunned the royal groupies who attempted to buy him with expensive gifts. He abhorred the celebrity ideal, the piling on of expensive trappings because it interfered with his Art.
The demise of craft gave rise to the modern pop culture in which the 'artist' seeks fortune and fame; art cannot exist with such ambition and is why we have such a crap culture, nothing is cultivated.
Enrique on June 28, 2009 at 08:50 AM
I thank you for this post, it's nice to get hands on information from someone in the field, especially when I plan on entering that field.
Also, thank you Susan, it's when money gets in the way of creating art that things go down the tubes.
I still think film looks best, digital may have the resolution but just doesn't have the color latitudes film has, but digital is certainly easier and more cost effective. It's sad, but these days, most viewers don't even know if they're looking at something that was shot on film or digital.
Enrique
Video Product Rental on June 29, 2009 at 01:13 AM
Good quality film making is what we are after, and we can only have quality output for such activity if we use high-end equipments. Rental will surely give you the latest version of the available equipment when you borrow.
Ex-Amigan on July 02, 2009 at 11:13 PM
Not bad... a pretty good summary, but I would have liked to see you mention the other company that picked up where Newtek left off and where your brother worked, I believe:
Play Industries was it, or Play Inc?
Can you tell us about those days?
Heath on July 09, 2009 at 07:13 PM
GREAT article, Wil!
10 years ago I bought a Canon XL1 and Final Cut Pro to produce and direct my first feature film, Skye Falling. I was laughed at, even by an old film school teacher, but I kept at it. I have touched film in 11 years.
Heath
Darrell Moore on July 20, 2009 at 08:10 PM
I don't give a shit if the Revolution is televised. But please, please, please let Television be revolutionized.
Blaine Fallis on August 28, 2009 at 11:34 PM
just a short quip about connectivity... I was watching a bit of Leverage on DVR, paused it, and ended up reading books at Safari online, looking for a book I saw at B&N tonight... searched for blogging bliss but they don't have it, but saw Just a Geek in the search results (by Wil Wheaton) and started reading chapter 10, "You're Gonna Be A Great Writer Someday, Gordie." Never heard of you before that moment except possibly in passing watching Stand by Me years ago. Began reading that book a bit, looked up your blog and next thing ya know I'm reading this post about how you work on the show Leverage. Kind of a bizarre full circle. But I enjoy your writing style :)
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Its sounds pretty good about the film making and I am excited to know more about this.Thanks for the post.
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