Directing Moodsnap and Setting the Style

Charles Frank, the director and editor at Zandrak, is hands-off in his directing, a style he calls bottom-up, “where I hand things off to more talented people.” He trusts his cinematographer and performers to do their jobs in a creative way and the best way he feels he can do that is by not being top-down with directorial authority. For example, when working with performers, “I wanted to cover their actions but without being really distinct in calling action and cut and doing really distinct takes or anything of that nature. I wanted to set up an environment for them to exist in and almost cover them documentary style.” This would give the Moodsnap film a natural style that reflects the app itself—finding the right music for a certain image, activity, or moment. He would find the right environment and have them live in it by giving them “context” for their action.

The discovery of his approach occurred during the making of “Still Life.” Through this collaborative approach with Jake Oleson, Charles transitioned away from top-down control as a director to one who works “from the bottom up and trusting the team.” When they build a team for a project, this collaborative approach forces them to “work really hard to find the people who are passionate with what they do. Because that allows us to trust them. That allows us to make the best work.”

A graduate of the New York Film Academy’s week-long summer workshops (he went before his freshman year in high school), Charles found it opened doors. He met Jake Oleson there—both were thirteen years old and he got into the DSLR cinema movement—shooting cinematic-style films on DSLRs. He had made home movies with his friends, but he did not grow up in a family that went to the movies. “My family wasn’t really a movie-watching family. I hadn’t really seen any films growing up and I also hadn’t really been exposed to anyone else who was making them,” he tells me in the Zandrak office.

He played basketball in the winter while in high school, but he convinced his teachers to allow him to drop mandatory sports in order to study film in the fall and spring. “For three hours a day I would conceptualize, shoot, edit short film.” He submitted two of his films to the school’s film festival, a place where a lot of the public and private schools in New England come together, he explains. “And it was during the intermission break that people had come up to me and expressed that my films had actually done something for them, which surprised me,” Charles says.

By the summer leading up to his junior year, he wanted to study more film, but living in western Massachusetts, he didn’t have many opportunities—he wanted to do more than just study YouTube tutorials. So he became industrious. He searched for film jobs on Google. He found Andrew Hutcheson’s call for help with his Emerson College capstone film project, April Grace. He sent Andrew an email with a link to his film projects and Andrew invited him to come down to New Jersey over the summer to help work on the film.

But after the shoot, Charles had to turn back to the reality of two more years of high school, which was a challenge for him since there was no formal way for him to study film further. “I had tapped into something that was just so clear to me that this is what I need to do,” Charles explains, “but I was still stuck in this community of people who didn’t understand what I had found. They didn’t understand that I had found a community of people that get me.”

Charles would eventually request Stillmotion to come out to his high school and give a workshop (during their 36-city tour). He made a connection with them and was offered a three-month job over the summer after graduating high school. He had also applied to NYU’s film school and was accepted. He deferred with NYU and took a gap year. He left Stillmotion at the end of that summer— after being enticed to work for Zandrak in Boston. “I wanted to commit myself in helping to create a brand and an identity and being part of that process. As soon as I got here we dove into the Hasbro commercial—and things starting rolling and we started seeing how this identity that we were building was actually something that could flourish and was real.” At this point, Charles knew that he wanted a team-based leadership role at Zandrak. “I withdrew my application from NYU.” At age nineteen, he had already directed a commercial and promotional work that many decades older would be envious of.

With his work on the Moodsnap commercial, “I wanted it to be really raw and organic and personal,” Charles explains. Working with Ray Tsang, the cinematographer, he decided the best way to shoot this documentary, raw style, was with a handheld camera, because he didn’t want the audience “to think they were observing in a really sterile way but I wanted them to feel part of the experiences.” He feels that “different styles of camera motion and camera choices tell different things and help people buy into different experiences.” In this case, the handheld camera works “because the way you see the world isn’t perfectly stable. You see it in just a more raw way.” It helped make the world he created with “Our Songs” something more natural.

With the actors in place doing their thing, Charles works directly with the cinematographer, “helping him decide what moments to capture and how to capture them.” But they wouldn’t conceptualize from the script or in a pre-imagined way. They “would visit all of our locations, all of our environments prior to shooting them,” Charles says, “and we’d talk about the types of shots that we wanted to get.” For example, “We know we need a wide shot. We know we need two singles and we know that we want to have a medium shot of their feet as they’re walking.” They would write this down in their shot list.

Once on location, Charles says, “I would talk to the actors and set them up in their environments and then I would let them off and be free to exist in them.” He would let them improvise their actions, living in those spaces. Since they had already discussed what kinds of shots they needed for a scene—“the knowledge of the type of coverage we needed to get”—“we’d get the shots on the fly as the action is going on.” At times he might “reposition” the performers, Charles adds, “but I wanted to as much as I could to stay hands-off to allow their performance to flow naturally. I feel that makes it authentic and real.”

For example, in the scene when they’re driving in the car, Charles wanted to set up the feeling of, “Let’s just go for a ride and I want you to take in the environment, be happy that you are out of a city and you are in the country.” He describes his intention with his prompt for the performers: “Imagine that you live in a city and you infrequently get to come out to the country with

Figure 9.1 Charles assists Ray in setting up a shot in the car. (Photo courtesy of Zandrak.)

winding roads and you both are just silent, taking that in and happy to be a part of something that’s away from the hectic city. And from time to time, I want you to acknowledge that with each other, non-verbally.” And that was it for the prompt, for the intent of the action.

Figure 9.2 Shot of the touch of the knee in the car, from “Our Songs.” (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

He didn’t give them specific actions, but the interactions and the way they looked at each other, all became part of the organic flow of the piece. For example, Charles adds, “they would look over, touch each other’s knee. It was all organic and it was all driven by the atmosphere.” (See Figure 9.2.)

Charles feels that you cannot force those kinds of moments. “I don’t think you can tell an actor genuinely take a little peek over at your partner,” he feels. “It doesn’t feel as real as when you just have them do it on their own.” But he does feel that if you do provide the right context “you have to believe that those moments will happen.” Being in tune with the environment helped. As for the car, the performers would sit in the car and they “just took it in and experienced it together and it was very real.” That’s what he means by hands off. “That’s the directing approach that I like to take as much as I can,” he explains.

It sounds subtle and simple, and he wants to clarify what he means. “I think that there is a little bit of a misunderstanding in the role of the director. Some people think that directors generate performances and they create the Oscarwinning actors and actresses, but to me it’s more than that. As the director you create an atmosphere and you let people create for themselves.” To do the job of a good director, Charles explains, is about “creating the right atmosphere to capture that atmosphere effectively.” If the director steps in and directs every moment, then it falls apart, he says. “As soon as I step on their toes and tell them to look here and do this precisely they are going to feel constrained and feel rigid and it’s not going to feel real.” Charles doesn’t want stylization. He wants to create the atmosphere of real life.

And when you’re creating a piece that has minimal dialogue, “a piece like this that’s largely mood and non-verbal,” he feels that his approach is an effective way to go about it. But it’s not all freeform. In one scene, the actress, Alexandra Chelaru, falls behind, so Charles tells her to catch up with Drew (Andrew Cashin), making it “a little more directed, obviously.” And when it’s naturally raw, where every moment is not rehearsed (including timing performers with the camera), the documentary style can feel a bit more rough. “Drew invites her into the space, but you can even just see the visual style, just that handheld shot, it’s imperfect but it just feels real to me,” Charles explains.

When Drew invites her and she rushes to catch up, Charles and Ray talked about having a steadicam shot pushing up on her as she ran up to him. “But my concern was that it would feel too epic and too grandiose and it wouldn’t feel real.” It would feel staged, making the audience feel, perhaps, “distant from it.” By going with the handheld, the polish was lost, he says, but “even though it’s imperfect it feels a little more real.”

In another moment when Charles gave the performers a certain amount of creativity, he wanted Drew “to find a fabric, a ridiculous fabric to make clothes.

Figure 9.3 Charles tells Alexandra to catch up to Drew as Ray rushes in with the camera. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

But I told Alexandra that I want her to be opposed to whatever fabric he chooses.” He didn’t tell her how to react, but to oppose whatever he chose. And she ended up doing it in a “really subtle and sweet way.” Charles says, “I don’t think she has the most approving eyes here. But it’s sweet and it’s still cute but she’s not overdoing it” (see Figure 9.4). By not “pushing it on her” he brought out a “subtlety” that became “a choice that she made. She decided that that was the best way to tell him, ‘bad choice,’” Charles explains. The magic came from how Charles approached that moment. “She didn’t have to have me tell her how to do it. And that’s what I think is pretty real. This is my favorite scene in the entire piece.”

In the end, Charles feels that by “putting people in the right atmosphere does so much for direction that I’ve barely had to say anything. They felt it because they were there and they were on location. Just watching them interact, you can just see it. It is just natural to the performers. For example, I didn’t plan the back pat and the kiss. I didn’t tell them to do any of that. It just came about naturally,” he says, reinforcing his hands-off perspective.

In the scene with the argument outside the car, Charles told them that there’s a disagreement about which way to go. At one point he wanted Drew to “reach the tipping point where he can no longer take her input and decides to be entrenched in his decision and walk the way he thinks is right.” This is an example of how he approached the scene cinematically, visually and aurally. He set the camera inside the car and recorded audio from inside the car, as well, providing the audience with a sense of distance from the scene. “Their sounds and argument is muffled. We hear that repetitious dinging of the car door being open” (see Figure 9.5).

Figure 9.4 Alexandra gives Drew a look of disbelief in Zandrak’s “Our Songs.” Charles allowed the performers a certain amount of freedom when blocking scenes. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

Figure 9.5 Alexandra and Drew argue in Zandrak’s “Our Songs.” The camera and microphone were placed inside the car in order to create visual and aural tension. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

By making this choice, Charles explains, he builds “an uncomfortable tension because you are far away from them and you can’t quite hear what they are saying and there is this incessant sound that keeps coming over you.” You, as the audience, feel the argument as an uncomfortable tension, because it’s being done cinematically (the visual and aural elements) and not just from the performance. “Any way that you can cinematically express what you are trying to say through a performance,” Charles says, “it just enhances it twofold. In creating the sound that makes you uncomfortable, creating a visual style that pulls the viewer away and forces them to watch this from a distance, and also through the muffled argumentative dialogue, I think all together it makes you feel tension.”

In the scene occurring in the field, it was spontaneous. They had just finished the scene occurring on the side of the road when Charles noticed the magic hour light in a field and told everyone to get out of the car. “It wasn’t shot listed, it wasn’t planned, wasn’t in the schedule, but I had a harmonica in my car and there was this beautiful field and the sun had just set and the light was gorgeous and the energy felt right.” They were already pumped up from coming off a really great scene. “I told Alexandra to take the harmonica and play Drew a song and walk through the field. And so I just let them go,” (see Figure 9.6 and book cover). Charles, looking at an external portable monitor, got behind Ray as they shot it documentary-style. “I was really focused just on how to capture it.”

Charles feeds off this spontaneous approach, because “sometimes that stuff is the best. Especially if you capture it without interrupting it.” It’s key for Charles that the camera captures it without stopping or setting up another shot. “That’s a really big thing for me,” he explains, and that’s why Ray was best for this job. “Ray comes from a documentary background,” Charles says. “This is one

Figure 9.6 A still from Zandrak’s “Our Songs” in which Alexandra plays the harmonica in an unplanned spontaneous scene. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

Figure 9.7 Behind the scenes covering the action. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

of the first narrative pieces he has done. But it benefited us so well because of his documentary sensibility for cinematography,” he adds. “He was able to capture it as a documentary within the confines of a narrative structure. Which is a really cool approach that I hadn’t really considered when we first conceived the piece.”

Despite the improvisational nature of the performances—within the constraints of the environment and the parameters of the narrative, the story that needs to be told in each scene—Charles does see the scene unfolding in his head. When he doesn’t see it, he runs into trouble. About the scene where the performers do shadow play on the wall, Charles says, “When I shot it, I was really indecisive. We would try one thing and I’d try to see that shot and then imagine the following shots but I couldn’t, so I would try a different thing. We’d go in a different direction and we tried four different avenues and four different sequences.” Charles says it ended up placing stress on the actors for having to do different kinds of performances and more stress on Ray for having to do more sequences than planned. “Ray talked to me afterwards and he told me, ‘You got to be more direct with what you want. You were all over the place with that and it didn’t work.’ And I have to admit that I totally agreed with him—because I hadn’t seen it play in my head. I hadn’t seen the way it would cut.”

In the end it worked, but Charles learned that he needs to visualize it before shooting. But as a lesson in editing and persevering in the scene and experimenting with different approaches (getting enough coverage), Charles was able to “mix and match and pull shots from two different sequences that ended up working in the end.”

In another unplanned scene, they were driving to another location. Rather than waste time he decided to shoot a scene of them driving to that location. “I told them to play the radio and jam out,” Charles says. “I played a song and this is them just listening to it together and jamming out. And that was it. Just a short little piece, a little sequence that could plug in at any moment in the film.” But it wasn’t necessarily easy for the cinematographer. “There was so much timing and focus pulling and Ray had to get the right pan at the right time so it all linked up and that was Ray just nailing it,” Charles explains.

In the diner scene, Charles ended up shooting the scene in a linear way. He had Alexandra and Drew draw each other on napkins at the table. But he didn’t allow them to show each other the drawings until they shot it, so the reveal of the portraits would be natural. “We just started shooting that process of them drawing each other,” he says. “The looks at each other were very real and the laughs were real and then we did the reveal. The initial reaction was their real first reaction to see the images that they drew of each other. So her holding it up and laughing at it, was just what Alexandra was doing because she thought the drawing he did was funny and we were there to capture it” (see Figure 9.8).

Figure 9.8 Alexandra laughs at her portrait drawn by Drew in Zandrak’s “Our Songs.” Charles had the actors reveal the images they drew for the first time on camera in order to get the natural reaction from the performers. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

Another aspect of the documentary approach occurred in the bowling scene. “We just walked into the environment,” Charles says, “and I told them to bowl and be competitive and just have fun with it and maybe over-celebrate if anything good happened, just to shove it in each other’s faces. And then we just let them bowl an entire round.” He and Ray had discussed the types of shots they wanted—long takes of them bowling. “Roll one long take where you track them,” Charles describes talking to Ray, “and then you cut back to a wide. And maybe you swing around and you get the profile two shot as they interact with each other as they are walking by after having bowled.” He told Ray that he would “whisper in his ear if there is something different I want to be capturing.” He would let the actors bowl, and then he would “tell them I want it to be a little more competitive when you get back, or I want you to condescendingly clap as he walks on his way back,” he says. He mentioned how he had seen her do it earlier and wanted to use it at the point where he is “disappointed, it went poorly for him and then she claps as he comes around and it was just something she had done earlier and decided to implement when we went to shoot it” (see Figure 9.9).

In addition, there were some arcade games in the bowling alley, so he had them go and play. He told Ray to just cover it documentary style. “Ray just went in handheld.” And in a moment that didn’t make it in the final cut, there was sunlight coming over the mountain at the dock on a lake. “We had about five minutes before the light was about to peek above the mountain. Ray ran, he shot this one, then he got this one shot and then sprinted back and got the wide.” They would wrap the shoot on this shot. “We all celebrated on the pier,” Charles says. “And that was it. That was the visual style and the directorial choices I tried to make in this film.”

Figure 9.9 Charles had Alexandra clap in a condescending way, just as he had noticed her doing earlier. (Courtesy of Zandrak.)

You can see Zandrak’s “Our Songs” at: http://vimeo.com/106374768