In My Boots

I attended a crash course in filmmaking at the Brave New Foundation campus in Los Angles. The three-day “filmmaker’s boot camp” was the cliff notes version of film school and was geared towards giving the five Operation In Their Boots (OITB) filmmaking fellows, all Iraq and/or Afghanistan combat veterans, a basic foundation that would allow us to write/produce/direct our very own documentaries.  I left the course with binders full of notes, tons of legal forms, and a newfound respect for documentary filmmakers.

I am now knee deep in the filmmaking process and it has gotten any easier. This is hard work.  On this short journey of mine, I have learned a number of things about making documentaries.  I am by no means an expert, and don’t have a background in film, but perhaps the following will give insight into this jarhead’s OITB journey.

1) Executive Producer Richard Ray Perez preaches the importance of fleshed out treatments and thoughtful shooting scripts and each of the OITB fellows has had to write several drafts of each.  This tedious and unglamorous work is, in my opinion, not an option.  My shooting script and treatment were my best friends when I was filming in Philadelphia and all the time I spent on those two documents saved me a lot of heartache and a ton of money.

2) “Art for art’s sake” only applies to rich directors. Making movies is freaking expensive and unless you are footing the bill yourself, you have to answer to someone.  Filmmaking is a business and the sooner you learn that, the better off you will be.  Once you get rich and famous, which probably won’t happen making documentaries, you might be able to do what you want.

3) In the Marine Corps we would say, “Semper Gumby, always flexible.”  This applies to documentary filmmaking as well.  I put a lot of effort into crafting my shooting script only to arrive at my shoot during one of the worst storms of the year. Needless to say, that took away from some of the filming I had planned.  During the same shoot, I also had the wild idea of taking an unplanned, multi-state road trip.  Richard crushed those dreams as soon as he caught wind of them (see #2 ) and now I am grateful he did.

4) Batteries aren’t cheap and your DP/sound person will burn through them at an unbelievable rate. When I was first told that I would need to budget so much for batteries, I thought they were joking. They weren’t.

5) I always envisioned directors as loud dictators who barked orders at everyone on set and thought I would get the chance to revert back to my days as a Marine Sergeant a few times during my film shoot. However, that never happened.  Making movies is a collaboration of many experts rather than a one-man show. Therefore, it is imperative that you trust the people you are working with, especially your Director of Photography (DP).

I was lucky Brave New Foundation paired me with Jon Dunham, a talented DP and documentary filmmaker – you can watch some of his work here. We talked about the planned shoot beforehand. He also studied my treatment and shooting schedule and knew what I was looking to capture on film. After that, he was on automatic pilot. Because I trusted his instincts and understood that he didn’t need a newbie bossing him around, I was able to focus on the story and shooting schedule.  We left Philly with hours of great footage.

6)  A professor of mine at Arizona State University West used to say that every sentence you write should do one of three things: enlighten, inform, or entertain.  While editing my film I realized that, for documentaries, entertainment is not enough. Every scene needs to entertain and enlighten or inform.

7) Maybe the most important thing I have learned on this journey is that I am extremely lucky for this opportunity.  It isn’t easy to find funding for a documentary and newbie filmmakers are hardly ever given a network of professionals who are willing to break their necks to help them succeed.  The OITB fellows have both.

Originally posted on Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clint-van-winkle

   I’m also blogging about OITB over at the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clint-van-winkle/

I thought making a documentary would be easy. I thought I would get a camera and follow a few veterans, maybe add a little voice over, and then call it a day. That’s what I thought before I attended the 3-day filmmakers’ boot camp in L.A. Well, I was wrong.

Making a documentary is a grueling process that involves tons of preparation. Before capturing my first images, I wrote (and rewrote) a treatment, shooting script, and shooting schedule. Then I had to get permission to film in various locations and coordinate everything with a million people. I managed to get all of that done and somehow thought that the hard part was behind me. Wrong again.

 I have just returned from filming  in Philly. Grueling doesn’t do the filming process justice. Thankfully, I had a great Director of Photography —Jon Dunham. Thankfully, I had tons of support from the OITB staff (I’m nominating Sandi for sainthood). Thankfully, Rick put me in my place when I mentioned  an unscheduled, multi-state road trip—it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The shoot went well. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good experience, minus a road trip. I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I know that it is all going to be worth it in the end.

Recently, there has been some hoopla in the media about how soldiers were portrayed in the box office hit “The Hurt Locker.”  Paul Rieckhoff, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America’s (IAVA) executive director/ founder, wrote the following in a Newsweek article:

“The Hurt Locker tries to articulate that experience, but those of us who have served  in the military couldn’t  help but be distracted by a litany of inaccuracies that reveal not only a lack of   research, but ultimately respect for the American military.”

While I haven’t seen the movie and can’t comment on it, I do want to note what Rieckhoff said in his conclusion:

“Americans want to think they know what the ground truth is in Iraq, but until Hollywood and the media give them the right information, our experience will continue to be lost in translation. So someone, do us a favor and tell our story properly. Or maybe Hollywood will help one of us tell it ourselves.”

Well, Mr. Rieckhoff, here we are.

There are four other combat veterans involved in the Operation In Their Boots (OITB) project. The five of us are making short documentaries that will let people see what the veteran experience is really like. We aren’t making Hollywood action movies and they aren’t stories that have been dreamed-up by a script writer who has never served in the military.  These are films about combat veterans by combat veterans. 

After being selected from a large pool of applicants, Brave New Foundation invited us to a three day long filmmakers’ boot camp that covered everything we need to know about the filmmaking process. We have budgets, camera crews, lighting people, and production assistants.  More importantly, we have amazing stories.

Our movies won’t lean to the left or to the right.  We are shooting straight down the middle and offering the world an honest portrayal of the veteran experience. 

We’ve have been given the rare opportunity to share our reality.  And while that reality is often painful, it is a reality that people need to see.    None of the OITB participants are taking this task lightly.  We are going to work hard and pull from all of our resources to make the best films possible.  Movies like “The Hurt Locker” might not get it correct, but we will. We have to. Our fellow combat veterans deserve that much.   

Over the next few months I’ll be posting pictures and updates about the filmmaking journey.  Please feel free to ask any questions you have about any of our projects.

Clint Van Winkle is an OITB filmmaker and the author of Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His website is www.clintvanwinkle.com.