Ideas, plans, mantras (and a bit of abuse)
The kinds of notes I write whilst filming.
I just got home from shooting some of my new feature documentary in Austria. As the film develops and progresses, I’ll be writing a lot about it here.
But for now, I’ll keep it about the process - how I’m making it, thinking about it, and everything else that gets added to the vast, bubbling broth of a new film. And as this Substack is called Little Scraps of Filmmaking, I thought I’d start with notes.
(I love notes. And notebooks. And handwriting. I often choose jackets or shirts because they have perfect notebook-sized pockets.)
The swirl of ideas and questions and anxieties and excitement when you’re in production on a film can be pretty intense.
Directing can feel like a mix of giving a live performance, gambling your life’s savings and trying to defend your PhD thesis all at once.
I find that note-taking and writing whilst I’m away on a shoot are my way of clarifying all those thoughts, grounding my brain and keeping myself on track.
Taking time to write amidst the storm helps me distill thoughts into their most communicable form. It helps me form ideas and helps keep the good ones locked in my brain, and it helps me organise structure - If I write down how I think a scene might play out, then it gives me a basis to then be alive to.
Yes, finding time to write during a film is really fucking hard. But any moment you can carve out is worth it.
In Austria, I was staying in a strange hotel in a quiet valley. I would go down to the hotel breakfast area at 6am to have some time to myself to write.
I’d been told by the lady who ran the place that breakfast started at 7.30, so when I did that the first morning she thought I was confused and/or stupid. I’d chosen a nice table in the large, empty restaurant area. She told me that wasn’t my table.
The next day when I came down at the same time she was a little less surprised and seemed happy that I sat at the right table.
The third day she still wouldn’t lay out the breakfast, but did let me turn on the coffee machine.
These mornings, especially the ones without brutally early call times, were essential for processing the previous day and preparing me for the day ahead.
The notes take different forms. Over the past 2 weeks of shooting, there has been 3 main types of note.
The Idea note.
These are where I work out an idea, or splurge out half-thoughts as I’m trying to find what a scene or a shot might be.
I might write a lot of them and in the process of writing them, connections get made and a filtering process happens and the idea solidifies. Or I can recognise when it’s down on paper that actually it’s a terrible idea and I don’t have to waste more time on it.
Sitting and writing helps sift through the terrible ideas and find the good ones. It helps me see things like repetition or leaps of logic that the brain can make but the film can’t.
Or it just lets me think them through a bit so that they deepen and refine themselves.
The Plan note
So much of filmmaking is about creating time.
How can the day unfold in the way that lets the best moments happen?
On a doc like this, I like to have a sequence of events that might unfold and allow time for them to do so in a visually rich way.
A sequence of scenes, or real moments, that I think might be ahead, and a path through them. I like to remind myself what I’m looking for in each moment. What the central idea is and where it should happen.
The visualisation of this plan helps me order it in my brain in a way that gives me solid structure. I can then veer from that, or ditch it entirely. But by writing it down, I’m focusing my aims for the day.
The Mantra note
The final type of note I’ve written a lot is the kind of mantra or set of rules.
These are notes to myself about what I’m trying to achieve - tonally, visually, emotionally or even as a person that day.
I’ll sometimes write them on a little card too and tuck that somewhere useful like on a monitor, or in the pocket of the jacket I’m most likely to wear.
(I mentioned my Coppola-inspired note that I kept on the dashboard whilst making The Lure here).
They become a focusing reminder on what kind of film I want to make. They can be ultra specific about how I approach a scene, or a set of rules for the visual language I’m using.
Days of filming happen fast. There’s so much detail and nuance, so many big ideas, so much life and emotion rushing by you, that without these notes I find it’s easy to get carried away downstream on the current. These notes keep the framework and the theme of what I’m doing in line with what I want the film to be.
The act of writing itself, of taking that time to open the notebook and stop and think is really important to me.
It’s a small period of time for me to recalibrate, refocus and take note of where I am in all senses.
It’s also a nice little space to give myself some abuse in case my ego is getting rampant.
I have many pages where there will be a ‘Just fucking get on with it Leach’ scrawled across the top.
Of course, having time to read them is a whole other issue, but having them tucked in my pocket and having written them is sometimes enough for me.
I think I know that notebook... Stalogy? (what a couple of nerds)