Mannequin Monday – Adventures in Filmmaking

Mannequin Monday – Adventures in Filmmaking

Welcome to another Mannequin Monday. Today we dress the naked form, the blank page, with both words and moving images. A quote from author/painter Huguette Martel’s graphic story, Adventures of a Would-be Filmmaker: “When I die, and if there is life after death, I want to finally be able to walk in very high heels.” And in this week’s interview, camera operator Georgia Packard encourages any filmmaker to emulate Ansel Adams in walking around their subject from all angles before shooting.

This Week’s Reading

Here is a delightful graphic story by author/painter Huguette Martel titled Adventures of a Would-be Filmmaker. Again, I thank Narrative magazine for posting the story.

Discussion

In Martel’s story, a woman in her seventies, a painter by profession, decides to make a film. It’s now or never, she tells herself. In applying for film school, she must submit a synopsis of a film script to the admissions committee. She submits three different script proposals. All are rejected.

The woman is French by birth, an immigrant to New York City in her late teens. She is also a Jew who lost her father in the Holocaust. The admissions committee tells her: Avoid the Holocaust. Avoid old people who are dying. Watch out for production costs.

Her first submission is humorous. They reject it. her second, quite serious. Again, rejected. The third synopsis focuses on a series of film trailers. Rejected.

For each script proposal she paints pictures and suggests film scores. All the images are moving, delightful, poignant. Supporting the script. For example:

“When I die, and if there is life after death, I want to finally be able to walk in very high heels.”

The character is telling us, this is my life. I can’t help it if a committee thinks aging and the Holocaust and film trailers are overdone. This is all I have. It is me. I offer you vignettes of my life. I am someone who does not know the rules of baseball. The smell of goat cheese brings me to tears. I love animals. I can’t wear high heels. I lost my father. In the Holocaust.

This is a thoroughly entertaining and moving story. See more of her illustrated stories in The New York Review of Books.

This Week’s Podcast/Interview

Several years ago I had the privilege to interview camera operator Georgia Packard for my website, The Filmmaker Lifestyle. The one note that has stayed with me is something she said she learned from Ansel Adams: observe your subject. As a kid, Packard took a summer class with Adams.

“Ansel Adams was such a wonderful mentor,” Packard says, “teaching me pre-visualization in his still photography. We would go out with a pin-hole ‘camera’ shoebox with only one exposure. I knew I had to get it right the first time! I walked around my subject looking high and low, moving far left and right before releasing the cap.”

The lessons stayed with Packard. “I still do that on my film sets, watching where the actors move and often from where the director is watching the scene. This works really well when there are two cameras shooting the scene together so I can offer up my camera’s position.”

My Current Writing

In the vein of adventures in filmmaking, here’s a playful, teaser zine I made for my next book, Surfrider. In it the teen film crew, Tessa, Eric and Lyndie, find themselves caught up in drug smuggling in Malibu. Murder, too. And a plot to destroy an historic landmark. Coming soon.