What medium does your material want? Leonard Guercio explains how directors choose between film and digital formats to serve the story they want to tell.
When an artist sets out to create a new work, one of the first technical decisions to be made is the choice of medium. If you are a painter, do you choose to realize your work in oils, acrylics, or watercolor? Or perhaps you’ll want to use crayons, pencils or charcoal? Do you draw or paint on canvas, wood, paper, metal or some other material? The answers to these questions are most often found in the subject matter itself. What form does the content indicate? What material(s) will provide the best emotional expression of the artist’s ideas and perspectives? What medium does the material tell you it wants to be?
Similarly, the creative moviemaker is faced with the same kind of questions. What medium, film or video, will be best for what he or she intends to communicate? In the past, there was only one choice: film. Now, the choices are two: film or video.
Within these choices are subsets of other choices. If shooting film, for example, will it be 16mm or 35mm? Color or B&W? If video – SD or HD; tape or tapeless? What release format is best: film or video projection? SD or HD DVD’s? Internet distribution or iPod?
All of these considerations elicit other pertinent questions, all of which can be more easily addressed if you can answer two very important fundamental questions. First, who is the audience for your movie? And second, what do you want them to feel and know after watching it?
The answers to these basic questions lead to the solutions to the many other subsequent questions. Since, as filmmakers, we’re all storytellers at heart, I’d like to tell you a true story I hope will help exemplify my point. Picture this.
Late one summer some years ago, I spent several days on a large rural campground where my good friend’s sister and husband were the caretakers. The summer camp program was recently over, and we had the whole place to ourselves. My friend’s uncle from Italy, who was a stonemason, was also visiting that week. After a few days of being inactive, Uncle Vittorio quickly became restless and looked for something to occupy his time. He also wanted to repay his niece’s kind invitation to visit with the gift of his skilled labor.
Early on, he had spotted an unsupported mound of earth on top of which sat a two-car garage. Having convinced his niece that the mound needed to be buttressed to safely hold the weight of the cars and garage, he planned to construct a stone wall to shore up the unsupported side. After a local quarry man delivered a load of fieldstone, he commenced his work.
Fascinated by his arcane craft, I watched carefully as, stone by stone, he fashioned a practical yet beautifully constructed wall. Since none of the stones were uniform in size or shape, I could not comprehend how he knew which stones to place on top of any other stone. So I asked him and, to my surprise, he confessed that he didn’t know either.
Seeing my reaction of disbelief, he stated very simply that it was the individual stones that tell him where they want to go. Turning and continuing his work, he said, “I hear the stone calling out to me, ‘Pick me, pick me,’ and that’s how I choose. After I lay the first stones, the wall builds itself. I just do the work.”
The process of making choices in filmmaking is very much like the stonemason’s process. It may seem mystical at first, but with enough time and experience, you learn what works and what doesn’t. Once you decide what the foundation of your movie is going to be, you continue to build upon that foundation. Making choices becomes second, something you intuit rather than think about. Each decision leads to the next and, before you realize it, your movie has built itself. You just have to be willing to do the work.
Leonard Guercio is an independent filmmaker and an adjunct film professor at Temple University in Philadelphia
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