When Christopher Nolan was 28
he made a few short films,
and was working a day job making boring corporate videos.
He hadn't gone to film school, but his
passion and curiosity for filmmaking allowed him to teach himself everything
he needed to know.
So, he and some friends got together,
to make their first feature film.
What they wound up with was “Following,” Nolan's debut feature
which paved the way for one of the most
successful filmmaking careers in history. So here's how he did it and how with today's technology,
you could do the same thing at a fraction of the budget that he had. Now if you haven’t seen “Following,” I won’t spoil anything here. All you need to know is that it's a noir film with a non-linear story structure that jumps around
in time and place, like many of Nolan’s films. He didn’t have access to star actors back then.
In fact, his lead actor was a producer on the film. This non-linear style of storytelling he used
was the film's real star and it's what made the film stand out. Since everybody had full-time jobs – the way he went out and put the movie together,
was to film on weekends over a very long period of time – many months. So, I love that about how this film was made,
it makes making a feature feel very doable like it's just another long-term project like
remodeling your house or getting in shape, you know you just chip away
and eventually you'll get there. Another thing Nolan did for this project that I
use for every film that I do now is that at the beginning and the end of his film
he really focused on making sure the production value was there. He figured: “I’m going to make the first scene look very controlled and smooth,” this is going to be the only time that I have a dolly
this is going to be the only time I have a sound-controlled environment So, I’m going to get great audio,
I’m going to get very controlled visuals, good lighting” “No, I’m a writer. I want to be a writer anyway…” And as the film goes on and Nolan breaks into
this handheld very documentary-style filmmaking
the audience instinctively thinks:
“Oh, that was a creative choice,” “because I just saw this slick professional filmmaking at the beginning,
now this is a choice that's being made creatively.” Once you've set your
audience up in the beginning ideally your story is going to be good enough
now they're hooked into it and that story is what's going to be maintaining
their engagement through the middle of the film. And then again at the end you want that ending to look really
professional because the viewers are going to walk away thinking that the whole film looked like that because it
was the last image that got put into their head. And "Last Laugh Inc." was a very low budget film it was just all dialogue so I wanted the intro to
have a bunch of different types of shots get a dolly shot in there get him looking through this curtain get a slo-mo thing and then at the end I wanted to mix it up
and do some fun stuff with the credits and then have this other set up at a different location. This technique is
scalable to all budget levels why not start and end with your best foot forward, right? Filming on 16-millimeter film stock,
obviously the lighting is a very real concern so they tried to use natural lighting wherever they could;
a lot of window lights you would intentionally block scenes so that they took place right next to windows for the
actors to get that natural light on them and by shooting in black and white he
was able to create a very stylized aesthetic very cheaply because you can
just shoot hard lights at your actors and you get a very fun noir-style look. Nolan said that if he tried to do the same thing in color there's no way he would have been able to achieve a clear-cut aesthetic the way he did in black and white. Film stock and processing is just really expensive and it was back then too.
So that is where the vast majority of Nolan's budget went to maximize the film
that they were able to work with they did not shoot coverage. So basically they're shooting, say two actors talking--
close-up of one actor close-up of another actor maybe there's a two-shot
at some point in the scene. He said "I would literally jump out to the two-shot for the two lines that they said that I
knew I would want in the final edit and I wouldn't shoot anything else in the two-shot." and the other way he saved money on film stock was
by rehearsing his actors very thoroughly beforehand and they never
did more than one to two takes for every shot. But man it is impressive how good his actors did. "New haircut, new set of clothes. Your mother wouldn't recognize you you know just because you
break into people's homes doesn't mean you need to look like a *beep* burglar!" Now this is all terrifying to do you're basically saying "I will not cover my own ass at all." "I will not shoot coverage. I will not shoot extra takes." But if you do this, whether you're
on film or on digital it's very risky, but it will make everything so much cheaper and so much
easier down the line. That means you're spending less time filming way less time editing you're gonna need less storage to put all the footage on everything becomes easier becomes cheaper becomes quicker Of course Nolan created "Following"
before HD cameras were even around so you andI have a huge advantage when it comes to creating that
gritty noir aesthetic
without the cost
and headache of shooting on actual film which brings me to this video's sponsor:
FILM CONVERT NITRATE this is a plugin
that works with most major editing programs that emulates 19 different real
film stocks and the best part is the
company has broken down all the most
popular camera model sensors to understand how they process light and color and better match the film look to
your specific camera. For example, check this out I'm filming this on my
Panasonic GH5s, all I got to do is throw
on the Nitrate plug-in choose my camera model choose my picture profile and then just choose any of these 19 different film stocks to start playing with it
let's try this Kodak one already looks way more cinematic and film-like. From here I can play with the
color correction and grain settings as
much or as little as I like to achieve my desired look. To get something close
to Nolan's following look let's try
throwing on this Kodak Tri-x film stock put it at 16-millimeter and "BOOM" how cool is that? So, lose that cheap digital look on your projects and elevate your
footage with this FILM CONVERT NITRATE plug-in. If you use the link in my
description you get 10% off or just put
in the promo code “STANDARD” at checkout I love this tool hope you guys try it out
and enjoy it. BACK TO THE VIDEO As I've said in many videos,
audio is crucial for a no budget film and it's
the number one place where everybody messes up. One thing Nolan did to save money is if the audio was bad and a take they would cut the camera and
immediately jump into what he called a "dry take" or what I would call getting
"wild" audio of the exact same scenes. So you would have the actors
redo the entire scene just with the sound recorder rolling
which is going to be a lot cheaper than having the camera roll. If it was right after a take the actors would be pretty fresh
with how they just performed it and they could match it up pretty good. He didn't have the budget to
do ADR down the road so doing these dry takes is how he was able to save scenes
that had weak audio. And interestingly Nolan says he used
the exact same technique of calling cut and immediately
jumping into these dry takes. During "The Dark Knight" he was having Christian Bale
and Heath Ledger go through the scene
again for the dry takes for the audio. From what I hear Nolan hates ADR maybe
that's why his films don't always have the clearest dialogue. "Gotham, take control of your city" (Unclear Dialogue) For no budget films, locations are very difficult Their lead actor/producer Jeremy Theobald was often responsible for finding these locations and they'd be changing at the last minute he'd have to go find someplace the night before they shot this is the exact same scenario that I ran into with my second feature film "The Hands You Shake," we wrote way too many locations it
was a urban setting film and we were
just running around town just grabbing anybody's apartment we could get any
back alley we could find and just making it work. but for their film the locations
included Christopher Nolan's parents home and various friends' apartments. He also filmed in and around his college and out on the streets. so they used a smaller wind-up film camera out on the
streets to avoid bypassers looking into the camera and to avoid problems with the police and at the end the last shot
he actually filmed it from waist level intentionally to avoid people walking by the camera even having the chance of
looking into the lens he also said that
rooftops were an ideal location for some of the scenes in this film because it was the only way he could get a very public exterior view with privacy and if you're setting a film in a big city like London you're going to want to see London, right? so setting these scenes up on a rooftop gave you that vista gave you that setting and texture without having to deal with any of the problems
that come with shooting exteriors. EXTRAS Extras are very hard to come by as they
always are for no budget projects so for any public locations scenes, the crew and Nolan's family would usually be there
to fill up the bars and cafes. Basically everybody who worked on the movie,
also worked as an extra at some point. ART DIRECTION As far as the props and art direction, Nolan didn't want to include anything in the
film that might betray his tiny budget. so he avoided things like fake guns he felt that in no budget films guns never
really worked well so he avoided them entirely and wrote a hammer
as the key weapon in the film because a hammer is really easy to just get a real hammer and he could even make a rubber replica of the hammer very cheaply and easily
and have it look completely real. ♪ "HAMMER TIME!" ♪ Likewise he used only real lived-in locations for every apartment scene. That way, each apartment location had a ton of
texture and character already built-in. Insert shots like this were really heavily-used in the film and he claims
that this was a story choice because key props like this played an important part
in the film and grounding the time and location of the characters but he also admitted that it was a producing choice because insert shots are much easier to
light well than any wide shot. you can get your lights right off camera
and take your time setting up the shot even filming it at a different location if you need to so these shots are usually
visually very appealing and spice up what may have been a bland
or underlit scene otherwise. So I guess the relevant question for us,
the modern filmmakers, is if we were to go out and make "Following" today? Would it hold up? Would it do anything?
Would we be Christopher Nolan in a few years if we
made "Following" right now? And, honestly maybe... I actually went into the viewing
thinking that this was not gonna hold up at all It was just gonna be another wave
on the beach if somebody came out with this movie today. But here's the thing: One:
It is shot on film which now in this day and age is not a no budget film move that is a difficult kind of attention-grabbing move
especially for something so low-budget. But with FILM CONVERT NITRATE you could always just fake that! I won't tell nobody! And then you have this super non-linear story structure. you watch the entire movie trying to just figure out
what's going on and get your footing but the acting is good so you're along
for the ride and you want to see where this is going to go and then once you finally get to the ending you want to watch it again because you just started to understand and you're like "Oh wait so everything I just watched I was looking at it the
wrong way I could watch it again and get a completely different experience off of it." And that's great filmmaking that's how you take advantage of your limited resources when you don't have star actors You don't have big budget scripts
and explosions you can throw in there. You can do the same thing with how
you're structuring your story. And the fact that he had “Memento” his follow-up movie written by the time that "Following" was going out to film festivals
and starting to get a lot of attention he was just completely set up for success. Because "Memento" is the movie that really blew him up
and that is the movie that developed
these non-linear storytelling techniques that he started with "Following" to the next level. What I really wonder is what would Nolan do if
he was starting fresh today? How would he use the amazing tools and technology
that we now have access to to stand out from today's crowd of filmmakers? Well in my opinion Nolan would use many of the
same production techniques used back
then today if he was coming up with the notable exception of shooting his film digitally. Now Nolan's famous for only shooting on film but if he had no budget to work with like his $6,000 first film, I just can't imagine him using all of that money on film stock when there's so many great digital
tools like FILM CONVERT NITRATE to achieve a very similar look that are just readily available but besides that everything would be the same
and he would turn his focus once again to creating another innovative story because that is really where the rubber meets the road with any film but especially a no budget film you have to be making something that makes people want to tell everybody they know that they have to see your film. So if your story isn't bold enough,
isn't innovative enough, isn't exciting enough, to do that then that's where you need to be
focusing as a no budget filmmaker. And if you enjoyed this video check out my
Patreon I post exclusive weekly videos there as well and I just did one going more in depth about how Nolan
made "Following" for $6,000 versus how I made my first feature film
"Bad is Bad" for $6,000 10 or 11 years later. So many of the techniques he used I just unknowingly copied what he did. But either way I hope this video about
Nolan's come up makes going out there and making your own film feel attainable and doable.
Because, guess what: it is! So, get out there - start making your films telling your stories, and who knows,
maybe you'll be the next Christopher Nolan! Thanks for watching! and "Following!" English CC - SuriTranslations.com
