MicroCinema Scene

Movies that are shot on digital video suck.

Right?

Somebody forgot to tell Miguel Coyula. 

And since Miguel didn’t know any better, he went out and shot an ambitious feature length drama with a Canon GL1 and a budget of around $2,000. The movie is RED COCKROACHES and it’s pretty amazing. The film is set against a surreal futuristic backdrop and explores complex themes like alienation, betrayal and incest. The film has already developed a huge buzz among low-budget filmmakers thanks to the slick website and incredible trailer. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to track this guy down and see this movie.

I had the chance to interview Miguel about his background, digital video and filmmaking in general.

MicroCinema Scene: I know you made a lot of films in Cuba. Of course, I have only seen RED COCKROACHES. But can you tell me a little bit about your past work? Did you shoot on film or DV? How did you get started making films?

Miguel Coyula: Yes, RED COCKROACHES is my first feature, but I started out by making shorts at 17 when my aunt gave me her old VHS camera.  Before that, I had been writing short stories, drawing comic books and with a group of high school friends, we even attempted a radio show. So the camera was the manifestation of all these mediums coming together.  My first “film” was a 31-minute experimental piece, which had the peculiarity (since I didn’t have editing facilities) of having been shot chronologically (edited in the camera) and thanks to that film I got into EICTV (The International Film School in Cuba) where I experimented with all the different formats (16mm, Hi 8, BETACAM and finally my thesis in 35mm).  After I finished film school I produced a six-minute short (shot with my old faithful VHS camcorder), which ironically is my most awarded work to date.  I have to say that I don’t believe much in formats

I think I am one of the biggest fans of Digital Video.  It has allowed me to remain creative without having to worry too much about the financial resources. However, growing up and learning filmmaking in Cuba provided excellent training in achieving great results under the most difficult conditions.  The stories I like are usually dark. I consider myself a hybrid I like to mix several genres, drama, science fiction, noir, etc. But always being consistent throughout, I’m obsessed with creating an atmosphere using all the elements (sound, color, editing) that this medium provides you.

MicroCinema Scene: You describe yourself as the worlds biggest DV fan. Do you run into many film snobs that think DV is beneath them? What is your response to those people?

Coyula: Well, yes there are a lot of people like that. I really don’t care. Even if I had the budget to shoot in 35mm I would still use DV and use the money on other areas of the production.  I shot a film in 35mm, and frankly I didn’t enjoy the experience very much. There is a lot of pressure with running out of film, lots of people needed to operate everything, and EVERYTHING is very time consuming, and to what end? To achieve a “film texture”? I mean c�mon! For me a film is much more than that.  Another pro: film technology is stuck, but DV keeps improving and revolutionizing all the time, who knows where it will be in 10 years, it’s really unstoppable.

MicroCinema Scene: Are there any filmmakers currently making films that interest or inspire you? If so, who and why?

Coyula: I like David Lynch a lot. I think MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a masterpiece.  I also like Michelangelo Antonioni’s films from the sixties and my old time favorite of all times is Andrey Tarkovsky’s original SOLARIS.  I saw that movie in the theater when I was 17 and it blew me away. Despite being slow for some people, it has amazing ideas wrapped in a dark, enigmatic yet beautiful atmosphere, solid acting, great cinematography and a very subtle and moody soundtrack.  It stills haunts me and inspires me, both in form and content.

MicroCinema Scene: When did you first decide to make RED COCKROACHES? How long have you had the idea for this project?

Coyula: Three years ago I wrote OCEAN a still unpublished sci-fi drama.  My plan was to make it into a film.  But the novel is huge with lots of characters, special effects, and a complicated storyline. The main conflict in RED COCKROACHES: “Adam and Lily, brother and sister separated when kids and now reunited as young adults” was an old idea I had back in Cuba that was based on a real story I heard.  So I adapted it into the world of OCEAN so that RED COCKROACHES serves as prequel, an appetizer of what OCEAN will be. 

So I came to New York on a scholarship to the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.  And I thought “I’ve got do this now!” and so I got really busy and wrote the screenplay in four months.  And with a miniDV camera that a friend bought me, I started shooting, with no money, no permits and no crew.  When I look back; I see now that it was pure madness. It took one very long year to shoot and it was indeed quite draining to all involved.  But in the midst of it all, I met my future wife and she in turn got drawn into the excitement of making a movie and became one of the executive producers of the film.  The total cost of the film was less than $2,000 (a big budget production compared to all my previous projects).

MicroCinema Scene: RED COCKROACHES is one of the rare “science fiction” films that stays focused on the characters and uses the science fiction elements as a realistic backdrop. You seem very interested in focusing on the strangeness of the human character. Was this focus on characters a result of the film being a very low-budget movie, or can we expect this intense focus on characters throughout the rest of OCEAN?

Coyula: That’s always a question that I ask myself, I will always try to give some life to characters, even if they are small.  RED COCKROACHES takes place in an “alternative reality.” It’s not really the distant future although it has lots of futuristic elements. Science fiction for me is some kind of an excuse to create atmosphere, call it a backdrop. I’m very interested in creating a world that you don’t know exactly where you are or what’s going on: A science fiction without many scientific explanations.

There is a person about to be born towards the end of RED COCKROACHES who will be the troubled protagonist of OCEAN.  I like unusual, alienated characters living in strange worlds that somehow I cannot totally comprehend myself.  For some reason I can’t bring myself to do realistic everyday type of stories, I need to resort to some element of surrealism or science fiction. I think that’s the main theme of OCEAN: The inability to relate to a society, to people, in this case the future. But OCEAN takes place in a more advanced future, which will require lots of resources to produce, that’s why I decided to do RED COCKROACHES first. RED COCKROACHES takes place about 30 years before Ocean, but it sets up the basis for that world and besides it’s easier to make without a budget.  Although I have lots of characters, I think OCEAN’s protagonist is strong enough. The storyline however is very complex and non linear, it still scares me to think about-facing that production. But that’s my dream project, I will wait, 10, 20 years if I have to do it right.

MicroCinema Scene: One of the things that most impressed me about RED COCKROACHES was your editing style. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it’s very unique. I’m referring to the way you transition, often not through straight cuts, but almost through layers of the image. The way you’ve edited seems to not only increase the tension, but to increase the seamlessness of the movie. Is this a style that developed naturally or is something you set out to consciously experimented with on RED COCKROACHES?

Coyula: I’ve been obsessed with transitions from the very beginning when I made my first short.  I think transitions should either act as punch on the jaw to wake you up, or should serve as a catalyst to merge the ideas and concepts of two scenes. Creating a transition can be like creating a scene in itself.  By merging those two scenes in a specific way you create a concept that adds a new layer to both scenes.  Also, the strategy in RED COCKROACHES was not to have the same camera angle used twice in the film.  I believe that every moment in a film has its own meaning and therefore I don’t believe in cutting back to the same angle, instead a different setup should be used to express a different message.  With all this in mind, I storyboarded all the shots of the film. Then with the computer, I created a lot of masks, compositing, filtering, and color correction to enhance the image and disguise its low budget beginnings.  And as you pointed out correctly, I wanted everything to be seamless. There is a lot of stuff that you would have pay very close attention and maybe even have to play in a frame-by frame mode to be able to spot it. I wanted all this to operate more on a subconscious level to increase the tension, so that someone watching the film might stop and ask himself “I think I saw something but maybe it was my imagination” and not be able to pinpoint exactly what the source was.

MicroCinema Scene: You really tell the story through images which I very much respect. In fact I think the film is so visually rich, that it would still work on some level if you totally took the sound and dialogue away. So I’m curious about your process for storyboarding and deciding your shots. Is it fairly organic and free-flowing? Or is it a systematic deconstruction of the script?

Coyula: Yes you are right. I’m very much into telling stories through images.  They’re the most important component in my films.  Sometimes while I’m storyboarding, I realize that I don’t need certain pieces of dialogue, because the images are already doing all the talking. But let me start from the beginning: Only after I have a final draft of the script do I start creating the storyboard. I always discover new stuff when storyboarding, new little actions or lines for the characters that may slightly alter the script itself and create new layers of meaning. I think storyboarding is important because it allows you to revisit the script from a different angle and then all kinds of new stuff come up.  For example, while storyboarding I decide which scenes should be handheld and where to switch smoothly from hand held to a shot using a tripod. I didn’t have a steady cam or dolly, so I knew that the only travelling shots could be done outdoors from a car.  However, transitions between scenes are always scripted beforehand. That is the one thing [transitions] that I’m always very clear about from the very beginning. It also happens that while I’m shooting, I get an idea for a new shot but I do it only after I cover my storyboard, that way I know that it will work in the editing.  I go through four stages in putting together my images: Script > Storyboard > Shooting > Editing.  In a way, you could say that storyboarding is like editing before the film is even shot - storyboarding is the most important stage. To conclude, my approach to storyboarding is mostly a systematic deconstruction of the script.  Once on location the storyboard pretty much dictates what I�m going to shoot but I’m always open to improvising a thing or two.

MicroCinema Scene: Is there one part of the filmmaking process that you like more than others?

Coyula: Well, shooting can be really stressful, especially when you’re on a low budget, but it’s also fun and with lots of sudden adrenaline rushes. On the other hand editing, even though it can get tedious and boring at times, makes you feel safe and in control. The biggest reward comes when you finally reach the end and you get the results just the way you envisioned it. For that alone, I would say that editing is my favorite.

MicroCinema Scene: RED COCKROACHES is easily one of the best looking low-budget DV films I’ve ever seen… and I see a LOT of them.  You’ve set a new standard for what can be done with practically no money. Can you describe how you worked to get such a high quality finished product.

Coyula: I took me two years to get it done the way I wanted.  Two years where the only life I led was this film. I think sometimes people rush to finish on a tight schedule and that affects the final result when you don’t have the right budget. I have to thank the actors for staying with me to the end, even if it was such a draining experience, sometimes doing 30 takes and shooting mainly on weekends. You’ll laugh at this but I actually used the same tripod from my old VHS camera (now 10 years old). I bought two 500 watt scoop lights at a hardware store and a few color gels.  One of the things I was really trying to avoid is the graininess of dark scenes in DV, which really annoys me when I see it. So I took special care to avoid that. I practically used no diffusions in the light when I had night scenes. It is harsh, with very high contrast. I also did a lot of filtering in postproduction, sometimes obsessively. For example I shot a scene in the summer that was supposed to be in the fall. So I had these trees with green leaves that I had to turn brownish. I had to Key out the green (with a Green Screen Filter) and then replace the color. There is a lot of stuff like that throughout the film, sometimes to create a specific effect and others to solve problems.

I also color corrected and masked like a maniac (sometimes 5 different areas on the same frame). Changed the color of the sky there, adding a painting here, futuristic buildings merged with real ones, putting flying cars, clouds, rain, smoke, removing grain.  Sometimes frame by frame, putting 2 actors in the same shot after being shot separately, making things glow, darkening others, etc. All of the stuff that was beyond my control during the shoot. For example: people walking, traffic, overexposed skies, or improper backgrounds. All that was corrected in the computer. The timeline of the projects would sometimes have as many as 30 tracks causing endless hours of rendering times.

Same for the sound, since I was doing the camera with one hand and the microphone with the other, I had wide open shots in which the sound was unusable, so I would always do a sound take (in the set) after each scene, and then replace word by word, sometimes syllables or consonants in the editing. I did the music track with Skake Tracker a Windows based software, which I like a lot.  Two friends of mine in Cuba did a little CGI creature that I needed in 3D, but other than that the special effects I did them with painful 2-D animation and compositing in post.

MicroCinema Scene: Speaking of post… what was your post-production set-up like? I’m sure our readers want to know the geeky information like what computers and software you used.

Coyula: The post-production set-up was as basic as you can get.  Hardware: Apple Mac G4 800 MHz [single processor] with two 80 Gig IDE 7200rpm HDs and an external 120 Gig firewire drive for backups. I had no NTSC monitor and was forced to color correct by eye. Software: Final Cut Pro 3 for editing/sound mixing and Photoshop 7 for miscellaneous stuff.  For music scoring I used Skale Tracker, a sample based windows software that I really like (http://www.skale.org). Since I couldn’t afford to buy the latest double processor Power Mac from Apple the rendering times required for those very complex multi-layer timelines were painfully long. That’s when I would switch over to my PC and work on the score. Overall I was very happy with Final Cut Pro, which I might add I had never used before and had to learn from scratch.

MicroCinema Scene: Do you have plans for your next project yet? Are you going straight into OCEAN?

Coyula: The script for OCEAN is ready to go. Yet I have this other idea in the back of my head, which takes place in the same world of RED COCKROACHES and OCEAN.  So maybe I’ll have a trilogy, but I’m not sure yet. At the moment OCEAN is next in line and I’m gearing up for the pre-production.

MicroCinema Scene: You obviously have a lot of creative and technical talent as well as some very challenging ideas and concepts.  What kind of films do you see yourself making in the future? Is your goal to make films as part of the film “industry” or will you be content making films as a true “independent”?

Coyula: Well that’s hard to tell. I used to do promotional videos in Cuba to make money.  I can see myself someday making one of those stupid Hollywood films just so that I could make some money to finance my real work—but not really.  The day may come when one of my films catches the attention of the industry, but I’m not banking on that.  I don’t think my personal films will ever be blockbusters and I’m totally OK with that, actually I’m quite happy about it.  As far as I can see right now, I will continue to work as an independent.  I’m not sure that I could give up the creative freedom that I know enjoy for the highly structured safety of a studio project.

For more information about RED COCKROACHES and Miguel Coyula visit http://www.redcockroachesmovie.com.

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