Noah Henry Morriss

  • A Quick Reflection On An Attempt at Directing

    Last weekend I was involved in a double short film shoot. Two shorts filmed in a period of three days. Seventeen page total.

    It was a lot of work, but everything was filmed and the post-production phase has begun.

    I headed one of the scripts as director, while my writing buddy headed the other. 

    I’d like to share my thoughts on where I made mistakes on my script and where I could improve. 

    My short was the shorter one which we allotted five-hours on the first day of filming to complete. I was determined to get it done quickly, and so imposed director, sound, and camera all on myself. It was just me and the two actors. 

    For more experienced filmmakers this may have been a cinch. The script wasn’t too complicated in terms of scale, more of a conversation piece, and there was no intense camera work—at least, not in my storyboard. 

    The shots were planned to be minimal and lengthy in order to highlight the actor’s performances. 

    Immediately into the first shot I knew that my planning was not going to work. 

    I had too much on my plate in terms of crew work, and I was struggling to communicate with the actors the specifics of what I was looking for. 

    My first note to the actors was an attempt at bringing an element of surrealism into the piece, which was not at all needed and only resulted in confusion all around. 

    Here’s my first tip: when in the moment of actually doing the work, don’t make things needlessly complicated. Be plainspoken in your communication and don’t change the theme of the piece moment by moment and expect others to follow without confusion.

    After forcing a few shots that just felt wrong, I had to look the actors in the eye and tell them that it wasn’t working. That the things I had planned were not going to cut it.

    To their credit, both actors were incredibly kind and willing to continue. They suggested a different approach and we took it. It was difficult to admit to them that I didn’t know what I was doing and that I was completely lost, but they handled it well. Perhaps that’s how most people handle someone admitting that they need some help.

    Going forward, I shot handheld while they went through the scene in completion a number of times. I noticed my camera captured close ups better than wide shots so I stuck with that, and the actors performances got deeper and deeper with each take. 

    It felt a little more experimental, and in a much better way than my pho-surrealism take. It was fast, exciting, and everyone was very focused. It felt like something Cassettes or Mike Leigh might have done, but maybe I’m just dreaming a little. 

    We finished filming around the three-hour mark, so early. We could have played around with the scene more, but we were all tired and content with what we’d gotten. 

    I’m editing the project now, which is coming with its own challenges that may be discussed in a post at some point, and I’m enjoying the footage that we gathered. 

    The style is recognizable—that fast, telephoto, Peeping-Tom style—and I can see where I could have done better with it, but that’s nothing I can do anything about. 

    Anyways, here are my major takeaways:

    1. Always meet with who you’re going to be working with prior to the day-of. Preferably far in advance. Plainly tell them what you’re looking for and listen to what they have to say. Don’t expect people to get you without explanation and to understand how to follow your lead blindly. 
    2. Running both sound and camera by yourself is not for the faint of heart. If you must do it, understand that quality will suffer on both ends. It will always be better to have someone else help with it, it’ll only add to the piece.
    3. Don’t add “weird for the sake of weird” in the moment of production. Following your gut is a great thing, but it must be communicable to others. It takes time to communicate and you don’t have time when you’re in the midst of production.
    4. Don’t be afraid of saying “This isn’t going to work,” but also don’t relent to chickening out on your ideas. If you do move on to another plan you must be wary of finding a path that you can stick with. If your plans keep changing moment to moment, you’ll never get anything done. 
    5. Confidence is just deciding that things need to be done in a specific way right now. 

    There is of course more that I just haven’t had the time to ponder on yet, but these are my thoughts a week after the fact.

    It was an intense learning experience, and certainly a humbling one.

    Thankfully it hasn’t killed the dream, it just has made me want to try again.

  • When Do You Film

    I’ve been thinking about scheduling, and how as an independent filmmaker who can’t pay people very much, if at all, scheduling can be one of those mountains that can seem unclimbable.

    It’s pretty unreasonable to ask people to take two weeks off of work in order to make a movie that might not go anywhere. That’s not something that most people can really do, so another solution must be decided upon.

    Christopher Nolan’s first feature Following was filmed over a number of weekends in small increments. This would work great if everyone is located in the same area, everyone has jobs in which their weekends are the same days, and the actors and locations agree to maintain their “looks” for a prolonged period of time.

    A more extreme version of this structure would be David Lynch’s Eraserhead, filmed over a period of five-years. Jack Nance had to maintain his unique hairdo for the entire period of time. They filmed when they had the money, and halted production when they didn’t.

    Slightly different would be Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. The film was shot over a twelve-year period, but rather than being told in a condensed period of time the story takes place over the twelve-year period. This makes the changes in the actors and locations okay.

    The filmmaker Noam Kroll shot a film in 2023 in a number of small increments throughout the year. It was something like: three-days in March, three-days in June, four-days in September, and three-days in December. I think this is intresting on a number of levels.

    One, you get to play with all four seasons. If you write a story that specifically takes place in different sections of the year, shooting in these little increments can work really well.

    Two, it’s basically four separate three-day weekends. If you space them out enough, I think asking for time off from work in this fashion is fairly reasonable and much more doable — and perhaps far less exhausting — than one mega-production week.

    Of course, by spacing out production so much you do run the risk of losing interest. In my experience, if a project takes too much of a lull its chances of continuing are significantly diminished.

    So there are risks to prolonged production, but filmmaking is a risky business anyway.

    I do find these unique production structures interesting, so I’ll be on the lookout for more. It could be fun to implement them as rules for your writing, as ways to influence stories.

  • The Royal Ocean Film Society

    Recently I’ve only been looking at my Youtube Subscription feed for stuff to watch rather than browsing through their main page. It helps remove all the dreck from the feed, and then I can choose if I care about any of the things that my subscriptions have posted. It’s been saving me a lot of time.

    But really, the best thing about Youtube is the liked folder (Spotify’s also works very well, I also use IMDB’s watchlist for a similar purpose).

    I don’t “like” every video that I find enjoyable, I only like the stuff that really punches me in the gut.

    So, after ‘X’ amount of years, my liked folder has turned into this wonderful suppository of things that are meaningful to me, and I can scroll through it and sort out the history of my thinking. It’s pretty cool.

    Anyway, I was scrolling through this past week and came across a number of videos from The Royal Ocean Film Society’s channel and remembered how great they are.

    He hasn’t been posting as much recently, but the catalog is worth it. Many are video essays, which I am typically wary of, but these are really well done. The graphic design and editing are very impressive in each episode. Well worth checking out.

  • World Enough and Time

    There are a number of repeat discussions that I have with myself whenever I go for a walk or sit down to do some thinking. Every few weeks they’ll pop up and I’ll rehash the same information, the same discussion points, and the same insights over and over and over. 

    It’s very cyclical.

    So, I figure the best way to expunge these conversations from my brain is to put them on paper. That way I can free up some space to develop some new internal discussions that I can also eventually get sick of and also write down. 

    Makes sense to me.

    So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on what we have the time to do with ourselves.

    I believe I first came across Warren Buffett’s 5/20 Rule through Cal Newport’s Deep Work, but the experiment has come up in a number of books on productivity, ugh, that I’ve gone through in the past couple of years. 

    The experiment completed in 3 steps.

    1. Take some time and write down the 20 most important things that you’d like to do with your life. These should be big things; like having a family, starting a business, or writing a book. Those ginormous dream goals that everyone supposedly has. 
    2. Then, take even more time to circle the most important 5 out of that list of 20. Really think of what the top points are for you.
    3. Finally, cross out the 15 non-circled points and spend the rest of your life actively avoiding them. 

    The point is, if you spend your life trying to complete all 20 of these goals, by the time you die you will likely not have finished any of them. Each may only be 20-30% complete. 

    Whereas, if you only have 5 major goals, your chance of completion is much higher.

    Now, Warren Buffett is a very rich man, so… take that for what you will. But I do believe that this exercise has a lot of gold in it. 

    I want to make feature films, but there are many other mediums that I find very tantalizing, and it’s tough to not succumb to their songs. 

    Short stories, plays, animation, children’s books, novels, comics, tabletop role playing games… not a week goes by that I do not feel drawn to one of these mediums and feel that maybe I should give them a go. 

    Now there are filmmakers that have dabbled in separate mediums. Tarantino and Cronenberg have both written novels; Ethan Coen has published plays, short stories, and poetry; David Lynch has his artwork… and there are going to be other examples too, of course, but these are established filmmakers, they’re going to have the funds to reach out. 

    And, for the most part, these forays into other mediums only came well into their film careers. They weren’t juggling multiple crafts when they were starting out. 

    Whenever I’d go over this conversation in my head I’d always be very adamant about the idea that you only get one medium. That if you want to make movies, or write novels, or be an architect, or a fashion designer than you focus on that specific “want,” you don’t let other “wants” creep in. 

    I’m not so sure now. Does it all add up to whatever you are supposed to be? To whatever you are supposed to do?

    I just heard the phrase, “If I knew where I was going, I’d already be there,” and I think that’s all there is to it. 

    Follow your nose and hope for the best. 

  • A Drawer Is a Coffin

    I have a tendency when I’m playing a game to save my resources and never use them. To keep them in my inventory, tucked away, until I really “need” them.

    If you only have twenty-fire arrows in the whole game, you should only use them when you really need them, right? On the final boss, or on something that’s actually worth it, not some minion or mini-boss.

    There are two typical results from this type of mentality.

    1. I finish the game before I actually use the resources, thus making them completely useless.
    2. I give up on the game because it’s too challenging, even in if I realize that the game would be easier if I use those special resources.

    Basically, rather than using this fun game mechanic that the designers intend for me to use, I would prefer to stubbornly/greedily hoard these things away.

    This is typically out of fear of wasting them.

    I think I’m stuck in this mindset with my work as well. I keep writing new scripts and stuffing them into a drawer or binder when I deem them “done.” Likely leaving them to rot away and be forgotten about.

    “I’m saving them for later,” I tell myself. “Saving them for the right time.” Saving them to be made after whatever I make next.

    This is a loop. If I keep writing these things and putting them away, waiting for the “right” time to make them, I’ll never make anything.

    It would be smarter, more sustainable, and more fun to just make these things that I’ve spent time on. I enjoy them, I just don’t want to see them fizzle out as finished pieces. But that’s exactly what they’re doing in the drawer.

    Finish your projects. Don’t have a drawer where you can hide things away.

    A drawer for your work is practically a coffin.

  • Taking The Pieces Out Of The Box

    In my last post I quoted David Lynch speaking on his process and how he compares ideas to puzzle pieces that he receives individually from some other room. 

    He says he slowly collects these pieces one by one until he has them all, then he begins putting them together. 

    This is a pretty simple analogy for the process of making anything, but it’s been swirling in my brain recently and I’d like to find out why.

    I’m working on a bigger project at the moment, or at least trying to, and I’m still on this puzzle piece collecting stage, although I seem to be in denial of it. Most of the pieces are still in the box, but I’ve taken out a few handfuls and have already started to try to put them together. Needless to say, the odds that all of these choice pieces fitting together when they’ve been selected at random is very slim. 

    Sure, I’ve got a few that connect, but the majority don’t and I’m getting frustrated by this.

    It’s sort of a mountain fever type thing. Oliver Burkeman’s book, The Antidote, goes into some detail about this phenomenon. In short, it’s when mountain climbers push safety to the side when the peak of their mountain is just within sight. They’ll keep moving forward, even when everything – health issues, equipment malfunctions, poor weather… – starts yelling at them to turn back. This is where most casualties in mountain climbing come from.

    I think that prior to a rough draft—which is a cohesive, whole piece of writing, just without the flair and style of an edit—you must have a collection phase, and you must collect enough pieces before you can start to try and put the project together.

    Keep collecting pieces, keep those pieces organized, and only start to link them when you’ve for sure stockpiled enough.

  • Looking for the starting line

    The creator of the Mothership RPG, Sean McCoy, posted this blog entry last October. It references another blog by Ted Gioia, also called My Favorite Problems, which talks about the scientist Richard Feynman and how he had a dozen or so questions that guided his life’s work.

    Gioia created a list of his own questions, related to the music industry and education, as did McCoy, related to the tabletop roleplaying game industry.

    I’m not in the middle of anything at the moment, I’m still looking for the start line. These are the questions that I have as someone eager to begin:

    1. How do you know what you’re supposed to make?

    “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

    – W. Somerset Maugham

    It seems that you are not allowed to know this until you’ve already done it. The only way to figure out what you were supposed to make, is to have already made it so that you can look back on it.

    You can’t see what you haven’t yet done.

    2. What do you do with all the stuff that’s sitting in the drawer?

    “I get ideas in fragments…it’s as if in the other room, there’s a puzzle; all the pieces are together. But in my room, they just flip one piece at a time into me. The first piece that I get is a fragment of the whole puzzle, but I fall in love with this fragment…and it holds a promise for more. I keep it, I write it down. And then I say that having the fragment is more bait on the hook…it pulls in more, and the more that come in, the faster the rest come in.”

    – David Lynch

    Don’t forget it, because it’ll probably come in handy some day.

    I think big projects are really collages of smaller projects. Fragments that don’t make sense by themselves and must be paired with other fragments to make a whole.

    This article by Austin Kleon really goes into detail about filing your ideas for later. It’s important to be able to grab them at a moment’s notice.

    Right now I’m trying to use this method for a larger project. I might write about this more at a later date.

    3. How do you get things done?

    “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”

    – Isak Dinesen

    Somehow you have to work a little everyday. Somehow.

    This is where habits come in to play. A page day, a drawing a day, a workout a day. Small and manageable tasks, things that don’t have the potential to explode in a fiery mess.

    I’ve been doing a single sheet of loose-leaf paper, front-and-back, a day. If I feel like doing another, I grab another sheet, but I only have to do the one.

    4. How do you meet new people?

    “… At some point you’ve just got to make the decision, ‘well, no one’s gonna keep up with me. I’m going to a 12:00 show, then I’m gonna go to a 3:00 show, and a 5:00 show…’ You know, and so you just get used to buying that ticket alone, getting your seat wherever, you know, and it’s fun cause you tend to meet those other loners… I got friends with a guy who always sat over there… about six-months later you finally go, “hey man, who are you? I’ve seen you at about seventy-five movies by now.”

    – Richard Linklater (on going to the movies alone)

    It seems that you’ve got to go where the people are. You’ve got to go up to them and say hello. You have to make the first step.

    This of course doesn’t answer WHERE you’re supposed to go. I don’t think I’ve figured that out, but I guess movie theaters would be a good place to start.

    5. When do you go for the big project? When do you go for the small?

    “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her. Start alone.”

    – Roger Ebert

    The project chooses itself. When it’s “done” it is whatever length it is.

    The only thing that likely matters is that you pair your projects to your resources.

    What do you have?

    What can you do?

    I think about these problems everyday, and perhaps I shouldn’t. The answer to all of these is either patience or beginning.

    Make a line on the ground and call it your own starting line. Right where you stand.

© Noah Morriss 2023–2025

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