Mycology
Back in 2019 I started attending a FILM 1 class at LBCC after work. The goal was to give myself the language and the knowledge to analytically interpret the films I watched. This was a period of my life where I started to attend theatre screenings in earnest because I realized I loved watching movies just a tad more than your average person. I tell people my cinematic awakening came when I watched There Will Be Blood for the second time. The first was in the theatre when I was 17 and I wasn’t *quite* there on my sociological or philosophical journey to grapple with the ideas beneath the surface of the film. The second time I saw it though was sometime after I started college and had been exposed to ideas, thinkers, and some critical analysis of literature. So when my brain tackled it this time I saw the nearly unending wealth of symbolism within the frame, the ideas that were presented as the two opposing forces of capitalism and religion as measured by the effect on the family. I thought if one movie could have such fecundity, surely others would as well.
After that I began chasing that high across the cinematic landscape, becoming familiar with directors and their oeuvre. Still the deeper layer of understanding was missing, as evidenced by the fact that every time I read a good analysis on the AV Club or the Criterion website my mind would be blown by the evidence and conclusions these writers were drawing. I had to tap into this second sight of sorts, open my third eye to the pieces of film as a text. After I took Film 1 everything opened up to me, I understood why I loved music in film and how it worked in concert with the action on the screen, I learned to notice things like camera movement, pacing, cuts, mise-en-scène, colors, framing. By seeing all the different pieces I was able to form interpretations and analysis that were beyond my previous capability. The side effect was that even films that I didn’t have any interest in or that I considered bad or boring now became an endless stream of subtext and symbolism that I could also analyze. This sort of retrospective analysis is the sorts that reclaim certain movies from the box office graveyard or the genre film wasteland.
Of course this was all for personal enrichment as I never thought I would be in the business of making a movie, but I thought maybe I could write one. The next class I took was a screenwriting class, it was eye-opening. Especially in the way that I realized this class was geared towards writing a very specific type of movie: A Hollywood Blockbuster. I guess the goal of this school is to get you employed which is great, but the classes were definitely centered around the kind of cookie cutter process that can threaten to rob the art from the artifice of movies. Still being able to write even the most basic script to create stakes and deliver an emotional response is better than writing my indie, arthouse script with 0 thought to dramatic tension. I came out of that class with a 20 page script that although I thought was pretty good, remains unfilmable (for now) because of the set pieces and locations I had written into it.
So I figured my journey was over at this point because the rest of the classes in the film program, the ones that required hands-on training were 6 hours of lecture and lab and, as I tend to forget, I have a full blown software engineering career that I still have to maintain and I couldn’t disappear for a whole day every week to take more classes. At this point I took a quick dip into Philosophy courses, but always keeping eye on the film classes. This Spring I saw an opportunity, the class was being offered on Saturdays! So I devoted my Saturday for 13 weeks straight to learning filmmaking from scratch because I didn’t even know how to turn on the camera. This was the workshop version of all the analysis classes I had taken. Lighting, framing, coverage, color temperature, scene direction, I had to learn these basic concepts and apply them every week and by the end I would end up with a 5 minute short.
The film I eventually made is 10 minutes and 45 seconds. This was because the script I wrote about a “humble” mushroom salesman who tries to breathe life into crappy spores had an ambitious montage sequence that was basically a love letter to a specific Allman Brothers Band album. The version I aired for class was 6 minutes long with a huge chunk of the montage cut out and I absolutely could not stand it so the version I’ll share with the world is my longer cut. The challenge presented by our professor was to write a script with 0 dialogue so the success of this little film of mine rests on whether the viewer can piece together the interior thoughts of the character without any explicit exposition. I broke the script up into individual shots of which I ended up with 50, not counting the coverage we would eventually have to take. I realized that the props I had written into it (mushrooms, trays, spores, caviar, flyers, etc) would take some effort to procure so on day 1 I wanted to film the easier scenes. This kind of backfired because we spent 80% of the time arranging the lighting so that it would look natural but well lit in the room. It was very slow at first, but by the second and third day we were figuring out what worked and what didn’t work and the shots we had to retake vastly dwindled in number. There were some shots we took that were….let’s say experimental and although I wasn’t happy with them we spent too much time setting them up so they had to stay in the film, you’ll probably know which ones I’m talking about.
My perfectionist streak was wearing thin with the deadline looming so the iron grasp I had on prop design went from being true to life to being “good enough to get the point across” and me and my friend Sergio went around to a couple Cambodian grocery stores in Long Beach looking for interesting mushrooms before going to the mushroom mecca that is H Mart. I took my iPhone into the store and guerrilla filmed the scenes there. For the scene at the liquor store, Hops and Vine in Long Beach was nice enough to let us film at 8 am when they opened and we didn’t take the boom mic because I was self conscious about filming in a public place with it. I deeply regretted it because the sound we recorded on camera was basically unusable and I had to flex some sound design muscles to make it sound okay. We also filmed the drug exchange at Ground Hideout which was kind enough to let us shoot the scene in their outdoor sidewalk as long as we didn’t interrupt customers. Then my friend Will who was in that scene as the USC student suggested a little field off the LA River bike path that we could use as a cow farm so we drove there and I mixed up some chocolate pudding and dirt at Sergio’s suggestion and we had our cow poop. The editing process took another week and a half and although there are some things I would have liked to reshoot it wasn’t in the cards with my time running out.
So to undo any pretentiousness that may have seeped into the rest of this post, I know this film is not an example of any of the aforementioned masterpieces and to boot there were other class members who seemed to take this course as just another class on their way to a degree of some sort. But once you’re over 30, any accomplishment is worth celebrating and I feel like for someone who graduated college with an engineering degree, exploring this wholly unrelated field and being able to produce something that is at least intelligible was a great accomplishment. Most importantly it was fun shooting with my roommate and friend Daniel who is in every single scene and contributed the one word of dialogue in the movie. This marks the first step in what I hope is a series of self-financed, short films involving me and my friends that will get better and better as I practice the craft a bit more.
