Tyler Gibb

I’m giving it a name. And tentatively that name is The Great Big Emptiness.

There’ll be more soon. Lots more. But sufficed to say this week I’ve been learning about “shooting scripts” and “production schedules” - things that didn’t have much relevance in the life of a solo animator.

So what is The Great Big Emptiness? Well it’s going to be a bit of a departure from Minushi, that’s sure enough… It’s going to have music, and drama, tears and blood and music. Did I mention music?

As I said, more to come. I want to make this as transparent a process as possible so that you can come along the production journey of Emptiness. But so far that journey hasn’t really even reached the foothills. It’s little more than words on a page; and a couple camera tests… But soon.

I don’t have anything new to post this week. I like to think that’s because I’m in the midst of the proverbial calm.

I’ve been cleaning house. Both hard drives and hardwood. It’s been a chore but I feel I need this freshness around me before I plunge into the unknown.

Within a week I’ll have pulled a script out of a drawer (where it’s been for a fortnight), read it over and started redrafting it. Within a month I’ll be casting actors to perform the roles I’ve written in the script. Within a year I’ll have a new feature.

That’s the plan.

Well, that’s half the plan… More soon.

T

Not fifteen minutes ago I had a near miss involving my precious phalanges and the canines of a… Well, canine. The dog in question belongs to a neighbour of mine who I’ve always gladly stopped to talk to whenever our paths crossed. For reasons unknown (and possibly unknowable) to me, my neighbour’s dog however has disliking for me; always has. Today however, when I ran into them, my neighbour offered me a potential olive branch; a doggy treat which I could then take and offer to the pouch. This seemed like a perfect solution to years of uncomfortable encounters! I humbly offered the dog her treat. She humbly accepted. Whatever bad blood there had been between us seemed to have simply disappeared. Contented, I gave her a scratch behind the ear, said goodbye and walked away.

That’s when the bitch bit me in the ass.

My neighbour was horrified but fortunately also a responsible dog owner and he was quick with the leash. Which was nice because it meant I didn’t have to kill his dog… Which would have been my next move. Also, to my great fortune, it’s February and I was wearing my long coat which is only this side of being as heavy as kevlar, so my ass remains quite unscathed.

Now I have no intention of making this webspace a depository for the weekly banality of my life and I’m going somewhere with this so stay with me…

Dogs don’t like me. I get along great with most of the animal kingdom but it seems that man’s best friend is no friend of mine. Blame it on pheromones, maybe it’s my hirsuteness, whatever. I’m tired of trying to rectify things when I seem to be the only one who’s making any effort, which brings me to my point:

You can’t please everybody. Some people just won’t get your work. They just won’t get you. In fact they may even take an instant disliking to you before you even have a chance to prove yourself. What you’ve got to remember is that this has nothing to do with you (and I mean the collective “you” - I’m really talking about myself here). There are any number of reasons why somebody just may not like you and as an artist you can’t take that personally. Any equivalency of the phrase “It’s just not for us,” exists as a reminder of this. Taste is subjective and nothing’s personal.

As for me and the bitch who bit my ass, I’m not sure what I did in another life to deserve that, but in the next one I’m coming back as a flea.

I recently declared this year to be “The Year of Production” over here in the Tylerverse. And so far so good, I say. What this really means for me is that if I’m not either sleeping or writing I want to make sure I’ve got a camera rolling.

I’m in the early stages of producing a live-action feature (sorry animation buffs, you’ll have to wait little longer for me to get back on that horse). So in preparation I’ve been trying to shoot a little something every weekend. I think of these little shoots as ways of honing the different aspects of filmmaking that I’m going to need to produce the bigger project. And rather then simply making these little shoots nothing more than “camera tests” I’m trying to treat them like the short films they have every possibility of being.

For instance, a few weeks ago I wanted to test a my ability to organize camera set-ups and manage the more administrative side of shooting a film; planning the shoot, marking the scenes, keeping a record of everything; that kind of thing. It’s tedious but if you don’t do it then you’re going to be in a world of crap when you get down to shooting and moreover, editing. So I wrote a short script… It came out to about 15 pages - which is short for me. Then I went about creating a list of the shots I wanted which meant rehearsing and blocking them (that’s figuring out how the actors would move around the set and where to put the camera).

The shoot was fun… For the first two days. Then I realized that to get everything on my list (there were about a hundred shots because I’m a gluton for punishment) I was going to be at this for at least another three days. I’d originally thought the whole thing would take just one weekend.

But that’s why I shot the thing. To teach myself what I wanted to learn as well as encounter whatever other problems might arise. In this case that lesson was: Calculate your schedule then triple it… And that was shooting video… Yeesh.

Anyway, thanks to the ever forgiving nature of my stunning partner, Vidya, we persevered and finished the project… Or so we thought. But I think I’ll leave post-production and the art of additional dialogue recording an entire short film to another day.

Here’s a trailer for our fifteen minute short film The Seven Second Slice: