Noah Henry Morriss

This was a little improvised film that my buddy and I put together. I’d like to talk a bit about how we did it, because it worked out great and I plan on doing it again.

Sometimes the NEED for a detailed script can be a roadblock, sometimes it pays to just run with what you’ve got.

My pal mentioned that he wanted to film something at a basketball court so we thought up a couple of ideas for a conflict. He mentioned that he had a basketball in his car and it made us think of Tom Hanks in Castaway befriending the volleyball. We liked this and felt it was enough so it became the driving force.

Grabbing minimal equipment, I attached my boom to the top of my DSLR and called it a day, we were on our way.

The lights at the court were alright but not great so we decided to lean into the grittiness and grain of the picture.

Without ever really talking about the story we just jumped right in. Quickly the bit became never making the shot, which made the ending obvious. Knowing this helped us figure out how to get through the middle.

We had a handful of shots that we wanted to get specifically, but for the most part things were done on the fly.

We had to work quickly as the lights at the court would go out at 9 each night, our first night was cut short, but this helped us make faster decisions. There was no room for putzing about.

We filmed for a total of three-hours over a period of two-days.

Editing took about a month, but not cause we were dragging our heels. There was the challenge of reverse engineering the story, but that wasn’t a pain. It was tough, but it was good work. Not the kind that makes you wanna smash your desk in two.

And that’s what we did. We moved fast, didn’t let ourselves overthink things, and put it together.

This was a great exercise and I really do plan on doing it more. It helps to have actors that are comfortable with improv and that understand time limits, story structure, and how films are edited.

Going forward, here are my plans for future improv shorts:

1. Pick a location that’s outside of the house while also not that far away.
   • I liked going on location. It made things feel a little more professional than if we’d done it at the apartment.
   • It also had the element of being an unfamiliar territory, which I think allowed me to be more curious with my photography.
2. Have a time limit for your shooting.
   • Only being able to shoot till 9 each night really lit a fire under our butts. We worked quickly and made decisions quickly because of it.
   • Maybe schedule shooting a couple of hours before you have to go to work so that you know what the hard deadline is.
   • This also helps with not letting the project overstay its welcome. Being an improvised film, it has the potential to never end. Don’t let this happen.
3. What kind of conversation is occurring?
   • I think this type of project works best in one of two formats.
   • A: A conversation between two characters. Very classical. Just have two actors converse on something and have that be the information of the piece.
   • B: A conversation done through action. Brickhead does this. The conversation is the action of playing basketball. Sure there is some dialogue, but a lot of information is conveyed through the action.
   • Both of these work great, but for a mini, low-budget short film I’d say stick to one.
4. It’s a fun thing.
   • Go with the punches. If something isn’t working, let it go. If something presents itself, follow it.

I’ve been working on finding work as a freelance writer doing copywriting, scriptwriting, ad copy… that kind of thing. I’m a beginner without a whole lot to my name in terms of a professional portfolio so I’ve been doing a lot of research on how to get that moving.

Upwork has been my main platform for this. I’ll search through the jobs and try to find the ones that have specific requests. The ones that have laid out the exact type of work they are looking for.

Sometimes they’ll have links to samples, sometimes they’ll have potential prompts.

What I do then is lay out what the specifics are and then work to type up a sample that fits those guidelines. It’ll take a couple of hours, but I find this easier than trying to come up with my own ideas for samples. That usually results in a lot of second guessing.

This way there is a sort of guiding light, and I can almost convince myself that I’ve been hired to do the work. It also makes it a little less personal, which can help me work quickly and with a sense of disconnection, which I think is entirely necessary in order to get things done.

I also found this link.

It’s a list of 91 potential service businesses.

I’ve used it as a jumping off point. I’ll scroll through, find a service that sparks something in my brain, come up with a fake company, and then write some advertisement, video, or article in reference to it.

It’s a nice list with some unique things on it.

What I’m finding right now in regards to portfolio creation is that more is gonna be better than less. My pieces are all fairly short, which I think is best for now, but I find that each one is a little better than the last, which is all you can ask for really.

I’m doing this because I’m reminded of the writers I admire who worked as journalists, copywriters, advertisers, and freelancers. Mark Twain, Hemingway, Sam Fuller… there are lots. Many of them express that this type of work, this fast paced writing with harsh, quick, cruel deadlines, made them much better writers.

They learned to write concisely and quickly.

Things I hope to learn too.

Did a little project today.

I had an idea for a little booklet of different Treants for D&D, or any fantasy game really. Definitely inspired by Luke Gearing’s Monsters &.

I had the idea that most Treants, or Ents depending on what you go for, are always Oaks or some other generic tree when there are so many species to choose from. So many species that would result in widely different creatures.

So I put together a couple.

I dig ’em. Maybe I’ll do more, maybe I won’t.

I do think it’d be a nice little booklet though.

This is usually one of my major pitfalls. It’s a trap, you feel like you’ve completed something but you also understand that it’s not really formed. It’s likely convoluted, repetitive, and surface level.

But the improv is largely done. The “fun” part. The spontaneity of ideas is replaced with something much more akin to active work. Hard thinking is needed in order to organize, expand, and define what you’ve dragged out of your subconscious.

And so, in this middle phase between ideation and organization, the project flounders and often dies.

How unfortunate.

It’s like being called in from playtime because you’ve got to do your homework. What a buzzkill.

Somehow you have to make this second part fun, otherwise its a job.

Yesterday I went and saw Wes Anderson’s new film The Phoenician Scheme and then I went home and rewatched Rushmore.

I liked the movie. The new one. I liked a lot about it, and I even got some chills right at the beginning. The opening sequence was something that I wasn’t expecting from an Anderson film.

I found it to be cynical, frightening, and oddly cold. I liked all of these elements.

Benicio Del Toro’s performance is very serious, he’s very imposing, especially in the beginning, and seeing him surrounded by Anderson’s typical mise-en-scène gives the film an offbeat touch.

But it is a comedy, and it’s very funny. So there’s that.

Anderson’s last few films have all had a very similar energy to them. The characters hardly smile, or show any emotion on their faces for that matter, and the stories are mish-mashed genre pieces that embrace the building blocks but leave out the passion.

Or at least the passion is very subtle, if not down right hidden.

The roboticism of the actor’s delivery is very specific. Clearly Anderson worked hard to get everyone on the same page with what he’s looking for, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why he would choose to do that. It’s something he obviously wants, as it has been present in his last few films, but what’s its purpose?

I liked the movie, but there was a disconnect. Like the characters were just a little too afraid to say what they meant, like they were struggling with holding back a greater emotion that lay underneath.

And since the movie is done, and those characters are trapped within those 145 minutes that will be the same every time that it is watched, those feelings will never be shared.

I’ve been messing around with a new project and have been taking a different approach. Rather than doing a significant amount of writing up front, I’m doing some design work first. Sort of creating a pitch document with images, mood, texture, and bits and pieces of writing. The story is being translated in short summaries.

I’m hoping that by taking this macro-view approach seriously first, the rest of the project will be more structured to work through.

Today I was working on a poster. I had woke up in a funk and wanted something fun to work on. I tried a bunch of different designs but nothing was really hitting. I liked a lot of them, but I wasn’t jumping for joy.

I was getting worked up, more so than I already was, and then I realized that I was supposed to be doing this for fun. I also realized that all my adjustments weren’t exactly making the design better, each version was sidestepping rather than moving forward.

So I decided to call it a day.

I like what I got, here are some of the options.

It’s hard to tell yourself that you’re finished, but at some point you’ve got to. At some point the project just isn’t going to get any better and you’ve just got to let it go.

This still is from Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 movie Possession.

The two characters, husband and wife played by Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, are having a conversation on whether she is seeing someone else.

I watched this movie a couple of years ago and still this framing sticks in my head. It’s just interesting that the two wouldn’t sit at the same table, they sit at this weird angle forced by a cornered wall.

For the most part they don’t even look at each other, they just converse like this. It adds a whole new layer of tension to the scene as the camera slowly dollies closer to them.

I’ve been reading David Bordwell’s book Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging which is an analysis on a number of different dinner scenes between small groups of characters. It demonstrates different ways in which these scenes, which are typical of most films, can be framed, shot, edited, and blocked. It goes through a number of films by a number of different directors and goes into a lot of detail on how such a simple scene can be done.

A lot of films tend to operate on the same set of standards. A dinner conversation like this would have back and forth coverage between the actors, which is a fine thing to do. We know that it works.

But a choice like this one is just a touch more weighty.