I have been in Melbourne longer than intended. What was initially only meant to be a visit for a month or so, has stretched into a stay over four months as I’ve helped my mum move into a retirement village and sell the family home. Cleaning out the house has taken me for a trip down memory lane as I’ve discovered props, pictures, and DVDs from my first ever film: Shades of the Soul.
Hardly a soul has seen the film. Pun intended. I made it back in 2006 together with my friend Heath Novkovic, co-writing and co-directing. It is actually a feature film, 87 minutes long. I also played the antagonist, Leviticus, a military commander leading an expedition in the jungle when he is attacked and corrupted by a demon. He puts on a mask (we knew so little about copyright the mask in question is a replica from the band Slipknot) and begins gruesomely killing his own unit one by one, until the final confrontation with the lead protagonists and lovers Alexandra ‘Ice’ Peterson and Marcus ‘Dracon’ Maitlin. It was typical slasher fare with a touch of occult, only more poorly done than most, due to our total lack of experience and budget.
A screen grab from Shades of the Soul showing some of the bold affects used in post production.
It’s such an amateurish film that it was never released, and I don’t even count it in my filmography. We were a bunch of dreamers running around the ‘jungles’ of Brimbank Park with camcorders, playing at filmmakers. But as I sat down and watched the film for the first time in many, many years, inspired by the nostalgia this trip to Melbourne instigated, I realized something: there is freedom in naivety.
There is freedom in not knowing the rules, not realizing this is “no how you make porridge.” Or not how you make films in this case.
I was also the editor on Shades of the Soul after teaching myself how to edit a couple of years earlier by putting together backyard wrestling videos. And the film is full of animated sequences, long music montages, rewinding and fast forwarding footage, the screen jumping from colour to black and white, to a wash of blood red in between standard scenes of two-person dialogue; a truly frenetic and eclectic hodgepodge of styles all rolled into one.
This was me just going for it, not held back by any conventions (as I didn’t know any), doing all I could (with a lot of help from Patrick Siscar who did VFX) to find creative solutions for horrible footage, average acting, gaps in the story. Today, after editing and making films for over fifteen years, if I had the same footage to work with in post production, I would throw it out and say the film could not be salvaged.
But on that first film, my first feature, I kept going because I didn’t want to let the cast down, all who had volunteered their time to work with us. I was too young and proud to consider failing. I was too naive to know what I was producing was a hot mess.
Completing Shades of the Soul gave me confidence as an editor and a filmmaker. It led me to believe there was nothing I couldn’t achieve, no footage I couldn’t turn into something. It was a misplaced confidence, but it was confidence nonetheless. It made me bold as a young filmmaker, always coming up with new ideas for films, bigger ideas, innovations, secure in the knowledge I could make them happen.
Today, my attitude is different. Much more cautious, much more conscious of minimizing ideas to avoid spending too much money, as I am thinking of the bottom line. Whereas in my youth I thought about nothing but the art.
There was a freedom, a willingness to risk, to go big and bold to my filmmaking as a youth, which I notice is gone now. I have become risk averse.
The Shades of the Soul cast and crew at work.
I redraft my outlines looking to cut out scenes with expensive locations and too many extras, always considering budget. I am older, I have rent to pay, so I am thinking of the business side of filmmaking. How much money can I save? Which is the best angle and theme to tackle for marketing? It’s smarter filmmaking. It is career focused filmmaking.
But is it limiting filmmaking?
Possibly.
There is a documentary I wanted to pursue earlier this year about Australians stuck overseas during the height of the pandemic, but it would require a lot of news footage to do properly. I looked into the costs of getting the footage and even contacted a lawyer to see if there was a way around paying for footage such as the fair use doctrine in American law. To my disappointment, there was no such leeway in Australia. So knowing the costs would be prohibitive, my enthusiasm for the documentary waned and I stalled on the idea.
A younger me may have just gone for it anyway and worked out the lack of funds problem in post production. But the older, more cautious me, hesitated. The older me won’t put money behind a project unless I know I can finish it and am reasonably sure I can recoup. And the thought of fundraising again (after we just went through a grueling Kickstarter for Cats of Malta) or worse, applying for grants and jumping through government hoops, did not appeal.
With youth and naivety you can approach a new endeavour with optimism even if there is fear; with age and experience you learn what you like and do not like and are reluctant to repeat the latter. Raising money is an aspect of filmmaking I have never enjoyed.
Biologist and Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner said this on innovative thinking:
"I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. If you’re like me and you know too much you can’t try new things.”
The older I get, the more I feel this. You get comfortable with experience and it becomes easy to stick to what works. Right now, what works for me are small films, improvised, with few cast members, locations, crew. Each has its own challenges, each is exciting, especially in pre-production, but perhaps they are not quite as exciting as those young and wild ideas of demon-possessed killers and animations and musicals and greenscreen and westerns.
Glenn Boyd playing Marcus Maitlin.
And I am not saying I miss the old days or I want to change what I do or the films I make. I am happy. I am comfortable. I am doing what I love for a living. But sometimes, just sometimes, I catch myself hesitating, reducing a scene or an idea to meet a budget, and I wonder if the old me would have found a way to film that crazy idea as originally envisioned.
So young filmmakers; embrace the bold. Embrace the big idea. Find creative ways to achieve your vision and don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do this or that. You may fail. Your first film may be amatuer production like Shades of the Soul. But no matter how the project turns out, or even if it doesn’t turn out at all, you’ll learn more from going out and filming something than you ever will from talking about filming.
Pick up a camera and let yourself innovate.
Written by Ivan Malekin