“The Tower” - Breakdown
Since I started my journey as a director, editor, and graphic designer, I found myself spending the majority of my time working on client projects, which is great for generating cash flow, but ultimately left me feeling creatively drained. It’s important to take gigs to scale your business, but it is equally important to work on personal projects that feel fulfilling and recharge your creative spirit. With that said, I’m going to breakdown a personal project I’m very proud of and explain how I went from idea to finished product in only three days. If you haven’t watched it yet, please check out my short film, The Tower, before reading further.
Constraints and Themes
The hardest part about executing a creative project is simply just starting. I’ve found that constraints are very useful when beginning a new creative project because they impose specific limitations that ultimately give you some sort of structure in which to build off of. For example, when working with a new graphic design project, I’ll set certain limitations such as “black and white color only” or a specific canvas size such as “1080px by 1080px” - this gives me a clear starting point to begin creating. Since the tower is a video based project, I set the following constraints:
Can be no longer than 7 minutes in total runtime
Must be shot in 4k widescreen format (3840 x 2160)
Narrative based with 2 characters maximum
All scenes needed to be shot in one day
Once I decided on the constraints upon which to create, I settled on a theme - “The Self”. I wanted this video to be about me. To execute this, I decided to create a narrative based story that encapsulates my ambition, my love for adventure, and my creative style. In order to understand me, it's equally important to understand the people, places, and communities in which I identify with. And so, I chose locations that I identify with, as well as casting Cristian, my childhood friend, to play a role in this film. These decisions were made before I even began brainstorming ideas.
Brainstorming
Once I had a clear direction of where I wanted this film to go, I grabbed a pen and paper and proceeded to write down as many ideas as I could think of. Considering that I wanted to shoot this in my hometown, I started writing down specific places I wanted to capture on camera. I started thinking about what kind of shots would be exciting to capture and so I made sure to write down “driving shots” on my paper, knowing that I had always wanted to film a driving sequence. I also knew that I wanted to film a secret spot I discovered in the Hollywood Hills near a radio tower. I originally found this spot when I was only 16 years old, but find myself revisiting it every time I go back home - clearly this place means something to me. I had multiple locations that I now wanted to shoot at and I had a few specific sequences I wanted to film, but still no narrative.
I decided to take a break from brainstorming and went to go play basketball. Ironically, while playing basketball an idea popped into my head about the narrative of the film. The narrative involved throwing paper airplanes off the radio tower and having the story feel like a game of telephone, where another person would find the paper airplane and add their own message to it, only to throw it again in hopes that someone new would find it. This was simple, didn’t involve any dialogue scenes, and could be executed in one day.
Storyboards and Shot List
I began drawing a storyboard in my notebook during class one day. I drew lots of inspiration from David Fincher’s Mulholland Drive and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. I used filmgrab, an online repository of movie stills, to help frame the types of shots I wanted to get. As I continued storyboarding, I could start to see my idea come to life. I ended up with a total of 36 drawn out shots that I wanted to film, each with specific guidelines for how they were going to be shot (focal length, shot type, handheld/tripod/stabilized, etc.) - this became my shot list.
Filming
I left for Los Angeles early the next morning and brought my friend, Gideon, to help film the scenes that involved me in front of the camera. The weather was absolutely perfect - a clear sky, not much wind, and very little traffic when navigating between locations. I made sure to film all of the shots I had previously drawn up, but ended up deviating slightly from the plan when new ideas popped into my head while onsite. I chose to shoot most of the landscapes on a tripod with a couple handheld shots for the car scenes, but the majority of the film was shot with a gimbal to ensure smooth, steady shots.
The short film was shot on a Sony A7iii, a full-frame digital camera, with a flat picture profile to ensure that I could add my own colors during post production.
Editing
The final edit was composed of exactly 50 shots. I condensed the final edit from 75 minutes of footage into the final runtime of 6 minutes and 41 seconds. I wanted this film to feel adventurous and fast, but also cinematically beautiful and so it took multiple iterations before settling on the film’s overall pace. Music played a large part in creating the emotions of adventure and empowerment that I wanted the audience to feel while watching. Before settling on the final music choices, I tried over fifteen different tracks to ensure the fit was just right.
My favorite part of the edit was the color grading portion. Over the last year or so, I’ve spent countless hours trying to imitate the texture and colors of popular film stocks that some of my favorite movies used. I was inspired by the vibrant colors that Wes Anderson used in Moonrise Kingdom and loved how something as simple as color could make the overall piece feel youthful and adventurous. I decided to use vibrant colors, low contrast, and grain to add texture, as well including halation (the red outline that appears within the highlights of the image) to mimic the texture of film.
What Went Wrong
There were two shots that were noticeably shaky and I knew that they would bring the overall quality of the film down, but had to include them because I didn’t have time to reshoot the scenes. I was also disappointed by the scene where I throw the paper airplane off of the mountain because if you look closely, you can see the paper airplane plummet downwards instead of sailing off into the sky. Again, I couldn’t reshoot this scene so I had to keep it anyways, which ended up giving a sort of comedic feel to that portion of the film. However, I feel like it ended up working out anyways because its a reflection of my somewhat easygoing and light hearted personality.
Conclusion
My intention for this film was to reveal a little more about myself by taking you on a journey that is uniquely inspired by my adventures growing up in Los Angeles. I'm excited to look back on this film as I grow older - surely to celebrate the progression of my skills, but also to remind myself of where I come from, where my dreams were first born, and the city that inspired it all. I hope this writeup has inspired you to pursue your own passion projects and to create stories that remind you why you began your creative journey in the first place.