Autumn Thoughts | FilmStack Monthly Challenge #8
This is a game of fix it in post...
Autumn Thoughts is a short film in response to FilmStack Challenge #8: Shoot Something!
I shot something — though since this is FilmStack the essay is probably as important as than the film itself!
Below I go into some detail about my process of translation and adaptation.
The Challenge
This month Alex Rollins Berg set an excellent FilmStack challenge: go and shoot something. I read that and got to work, I never bothered reading the rest of his article (sorry Alex!).
Substack is very much a writer oriented site (at least for the moment anyway), and it is far easier to write about making films than actually making them.
It is easy to complain about the state of things, write about the things you are going to do, and never quite get round working on the thing itself. FilmStack is not film making. FilmStack can be an exquisite procrastination. No doubt it takes time and organisation to get good results but going out with a camera to shoot is not that hard. It’s easy to overthink it.
I’ve not see a huge number, but what I have seen has been so much fun. It’s a little like being in film school. From Amanda Sweikow and Josh Carter’s fun promos through the abstract visions of Liam Easley’s and Michael Lavine to the glossy New York city of Joshua Caldwell. I wish there was a way to actually index these challenges during the month as the come in (not just of this challenge). I’ve been doing intermittent searches… Substack seems not to have a reliable tagging/search mechanism. There can’t only have been five responses…. right?
So here we are. I shot something, I cut something. I posted something. It’s the first thing I’ve shot and cut that wasn’t paid for by someone else in quite some time. It was novel and fun to be out shooting something for myself. Which in retrospect seems really weird. Why do we always work harder on other peoples stuff?
I have - just this moment looked back at the original post and read it. A bit late perhaps (I did this in school too, some habits never change), but there were more conditions to “Shut up and shoot something”.
2. Join me in making a micro-short. Two minutes or less, one location, shot on a smart phone.
Well, total runtime is 80 seconds, as it happened I did shoot it on an iPhone, and I’m going to state my train/train station counts is a single location. Just for the record.
Either way, here is how the sausage got made.
Autumn Thoughts
Way back in 1999, I attended a talk at the Asian American International Film Festival in New York and briefly got to chat with Ang Lee. He gave me the best description of film making I know, which is something I often return to.
“Film making is like cooking,” he said. You have a recipe, which is your script. Then you go to the supermarket or forage for ingredients; that’s production. Then finally, you take everything home and cook it up in the edit suite.
The thing is, your recipe might say you’re making tomato soup, but when you get to the supermarket, there are no tomatoes, only onions. You don’t have a recipe for onion soup. But you buy the onions anyway, pick up some herbs that aren’t on your list as well all the things that are. Then you have to go make onion soup in the edit from your tomato soup recipe.
Early November was the peak of autumn here in London. The leaves were in the middle of turning and drifts of them were building in the streets. I decided to do some kind of mood piece about autumn. That was easy. Next?
Gear. I was tempted to get out some real cameras, but with concerns about time investment, I decided to commit to shooting everything on my iPhone. Anyway, I had been planning to test it as a camera for inconspicuous shooting or quick off the cuff shorts, so this was a good opportunity.
To keep it cheap and solo, without acting or worrying about sound, this means montage plus voice over. My instinct was to look for some kind of poem about autumn and put visuals to it. Some kind of portrait of London. I’d collect moments over the month and cut it together. This was probably going to end up Terrence Malick/Wong Kar Wai adjacent, so avoiding corny pastiche was a necessary precondition.
I trawled across the internet looking for something appropriate for autumn. There’s all the classic John Betjeman London suburban commuter poetry which is good, but too obvious. I wanted something a little more gothic and unsettling.
Older, and more obscure is always better. If an idea translates across the centuries as contemporary and interesting, though perhaps needing some kind of work to make it more relevant, it suggests to me there’s something there to develop.
After spending an hour or so trawling through and quickly dismissing all the poetry 101 stuff (Rilke, Shakespeare, Eliot… etc. etc.) it occurred to me that if this was going to end up WKW adjacent then maybe I lean into it. Maybe this is about going to Asia. Maybe this is not just an adaptation, but a translation…
I’ve discovered recently that I quite enjoy translation. It’s a process very much like film editing. Indeed, Walter Murch discusses this in his excellent new book and I totally agree. I also find adaptation easier than writing original material; and particularly liberating is using translated material and adapting it.
Embracing Treason
Traduttore, traditore!
“Translator, traitor!” as the old Italian proverb goes. There is something liberating about putting yourself in a situation where there is no right answer only wrong ones. It is not therefore about translation but re-invention along your own interests.
Originally machine learning systems were designed as translation tools and with Google Translate and LLM’s like Claude, translation investigation is much faster to do, and you can quickly dig into a lot of nuances in the text.
So off I went to find some poetry I’d never seen before. I directed Claude to suggest poems that fitted my criteria (autumn and nostalgia) and give me summaries and snippets of translations. This way I could get a taste of certain themes, styles and poets. I was also interested in a poem that worked in the Kishotenketsu story structure, because I was relatively sure it would be good for the 60 second mood piece. I thought it would give it more of an interesting structure. This is a traditional Asian four-act story structure.
Introduction to the world (Ki).
Development of the world with complications (Sho).
The paradigm shift (Ten).
You’ve had two acts of relatively normal development, then somewhere around the mid-point or shortly after the third totally recontextualizes what the story’s about.
Exploring the new world.
Here we developing the implications and further complications (Ketsu).
I particularly like the way that its central organizational point is a twist. It allows you to create compelling and interesting stories without the need for typical character development arcs.
I eventually came across Autumn Thoughts by Ma Zhiyuan, a well known 13th century Yuan Dynasty poem. It could be read as not just exile and distance, but temporal exile too. I loved the general minimalism.
枯藤老树昏鸦，
小桥流水人家，
古道西风瘦马。
夕阳西下，
断肠人在天涯。
Here is the translation I found:
An old tree, dried vines entwined, by ev’ning crows come roosting;
O’er a small bridge, by a running stream, homes of people nestling.
On an old road, in the autumn wind, a scrawny horse keeps trudging;
The sun slanting, to the west setting —
Heart-torn, lovelorn, the wanderer, to the verge of the sky a-roaming.
But that’s not minimalism!
You start to see the problem: if each Chinese character is one word - and the whole poem is 28 words - then how do we have a 56 word translation? And this is before we get to anything about the cultural meaning of the horse or the homes the water. And all those rhymes?
I took the Chinese and put it into Google Translate:
Withered vines, old trees, and crows at dusk;
a small bridge, flowing water, and a humble dwelling;
an ancient road, a west wind, and a lean horse.
The setting sun sinks in the west;
a heartbroken traveler is at the ends of the earth.
And Claude:
Withered vines, old trees, evening crows,
Small bridge, flowing water, someone’s home,
Ancient road, west wind, lean horse.
The setting sun descends—
A heartbroken traveler at the edge of the world.
You can see Google Translate introduced “a” and “an” which is missing in the original, also - “is at the” versus “at the”. Claude is more minimal as in the Chinese. It is more direct and formal in terms of translation. However, you’d still never get much from the poems detail “someone’s home”. As I understand it 人家 in the original carries nostalgic warmth - the 13th century equivalent of pastoral comfort, like a cottage with smoke from the chimney. It’s intended as a nostalgic, homely image and there is no way an 21st Century western audience is going to get that. In addition, the choice of “a” versus “the” as the article at the end is… a debate I had with myself, but more of that later.
This is the word by word transliteration. There are no articles in the Chinese, the concept is very much minimalist brush strokes on canvas, creating the image (montage!):
枯 藤 老 树 昏 鸦
withered vine old tree dusk crow
小 桥 流 水 人 家
small bridge flowing water people home
古 道 西 风 瘦 马
ancient road west wind thin horse
夕 阳 西 下
evening sun west descends
断 肠 人 在 天 涯
severed intestines person at sky edge
Severed intestines!?!
Where did that come from?!?
Traduttore, traditore!
This was a brilliant surprise.
I had many of these moments when translating Ibsen’s Master Builder. Something that gets me in translations is that so often the more shocking elements are rounded off. I feel translators often prefer the logical or the average to the visceral and the notable (in this case, quite literally).
There is a colloquial phrase in Chinese to sever your intestines is to feel extremely sad. “Gutted” is the same in British English - this strikes me as the perfect translation. It may not work in American English, but it’s legible enough - and more importantly - it keeps the visceral shock for the ending.
This poem is sparse which provides interpretive space. It opens with autumn imagery, and develops the autumn feel. Then the development: it’s melancholic, not just simple nostalgia. This continues to develop until the twist: the sun descends. This is active and present: it’s happening right now. Then the final development is almost a double-twist: someone is observing these things, a traveler, long way from home, sad he can never return. In Chinese travelling west often has connotations of parting, but also decline and enlightenment. There is also the “west wind” problem which is spring in Europe but autumn in China.
However, this was great material to start with. In translation you have two choices: formal or functional. Formal translation takes the Chinese word for “bridge” and translates it to the English word “bridge.” But characters (or words) have multiple meanings and different connotations depending on language context. This is where Claude becomes a brilliant assistant. I can spend 10 minutes discussing the Chinese cultural significance and connotations of “small bridge”. What are its multiple meanings, how is it used, why does it appear in that line in that way, what is its relevance to the situation, what do Chinese scholars say - translate academic research on the poetry.
It’s good to know everything so you can truly be a great traitor!
I’m looking at this for London. When it says “desiccated vines,” I think: there aren’t any vines here, but there’s bindweed and ivy everywhere. Ivy has cultural meaning in England. So I went for “withered ivy” rather than “desiccated vines.”
The Chinese creates autumn atmosphere dead plants and crows returning to roost. “Black cabs at dusk” was my first idea for dusk crows - both are black silhouettes moving through twilight, but cabs are specifically London/urban. This didn’t sit right though. I felt that ravens provided the more interestingly threatening Gothic London atmosphere.
I considered “withered branches” because it preserves the 枯 (withered/dead organic matter) while working in urban context and creating subtle metaphoric link to railway branches (tube lines) that pays off later with “leaf on the line.” However, while I liked that - it was doubling down on the trees which I felt wasn’t necessary and dead ivy is very London.
This poem is about exile and distance from home. And for this script, I’m interested not in geographical distance but temporal distance—exile in time, not geography. So I work through the words looking for how to translate them into words that match the London setting, the concepts of temporal exile rather than spatial exile.
My final version:
Withered ivy, old trees, ravens at dusk;
Past bridge, water flow, the window light;
Old road, autumn wind, leaves on the line.
A fading sun over the west.
The gutted man at horizon’s edge.
This translation me gets closer to the desired shape of of nostalgia → decay → existential dread.
The clearest moment of functional translation is the “leaves on the line.”
This also dictated the decision to make the rhythm match on the previous lines. I tweaked “past” from “small/familiar” because I felt okay leaning into the commuter traveling connotations earlier - it also weakly opens up to bridge from/to the past. The key thing for me here is theTen - my version is focused on trying to achive the same paradigm shift as Ma: you think this poem is about nostalgia, it’s actually about existential dread.
You can see where I felt the need to round off the minimalism of the Chinese in the rhythm at the end of the first three lines.
The original has a series of concrete minimalist images, that also work metaphorically. Then it gets to the emaciated horse. This is an image that would be understood as exhaustion, and the toll of journey; a creature close to death. That’s not going to work for us in 21st Century London.
I needed some kind of visual proof of decay and the toll of the journey. At first I tried “fuel runs low” but that’s pretty weak. What I needed was the verbal equivalent of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire where a heroic warship is being towed into the scrap yard at sunset. Indeed, this poem is very much in a similar tradition of examining nostalgia and decay. In The Fighting Temeraire the noble vehicle of empire is reduced to salvage, a visual representation of systemic decline - depicted against a warm nostalgic sunset. I needed a mundane detail revealing larger collapse, like the thin horse.
And so “leaves on the line.”
This is a legendary excuse that British Rail used in the 1990s to explain train delays and cancellations. It became a national joke about institutional incompetence; the ridiculous bureaucratic ass covering of a decaying system. Institutional decay as it’s own satirical punchline.
Overall though, the more precise I can be in formal moments, the more leeway I think I have to be functional in the changed moments like “leaves on the line,” where I throw away the emaciated horse entirely.
In addition, I struggled over the “a gutted man” or “the gutted man”. “A” to me makes it seem more universal and seasonal/cyclical. However, I liked the visceral gut punch of the “the”. It jumps out at you, especially combined with “gutted”. There are no articles definite or otherwise in the original Chinese, so “a” felt a little more appropriate. But I came to think that’s wrong.
The structure of the poem is kishotenketsu - you need that turn. While the original has no articles I think you need, in English, the definite article of “the” to make the turn. To make the visceral, “Wait. What?” of the Kishotenketsu work, you need the strange impact of “The”. Everything else to this point has been a list, non specific, indefinite. It goes from small specific indefinate moments across the canvas, then expands to the horizon with the fading sun, then you get the punch of the final definate article. You zero it into the consciousness of a person.
I liked the original minimalism, the two word images. This is poetry, so I didn’t think I needed rule following grammatical English. It’s also going to be voice over on picture. So I condensed phrases, trying to get back close to the original Chinese rhythm, edging towards the formal translation where I could. Given two functionally similar choices on language, the closest formal translation wins. In the process, my version squezes in British decline, told through the voice of a commuter, using the words of a 13th century Chinese poet. Seemed an appropriately autumn thought...
I didn’t want to use my own voice on the film. I wanted an older, grizzled sound. A Chinese sixty-a-day smoker ideally. That was out of reach. Instead I recorded my own performance and processed it using Eleven Labs voice shifting tool. I’ve this to be very useful for scratch VO tracks when you don’t want every voice over for your clients to sound like some random Scottish guy. (It’s also great for faux table reads of scripts where you act every voice!).
The voice you hear is me, but you’d never know it.
Traduttore, traditore!
Yet another adaptation.
The Shoot That Wasn’t
I came up with a shot list. Then schedules slipped. Meetings shuffled, weather refused to cooperate, and I didn’t prioritize the FilmStack challenge over other work.
The first day after I’d written the script, I shot some stuff around the house. Macro shots. I’d had notions about shooting some VFX because that’s easier from your desk—one thing about CGI is you don’t have to deal with the real world, which is unpredictable. I even rendered some crude things on the computer and filmed them off the screen to give a slightly unusual look. Nothing fancy.
Eventually I got to shoot some things at the end of last week. Unfortunately, when I lay it all on the timeline, it all felt twee and heavy-handed. I’d effectively shot illustrations for the poem, not a film. Withered ivy. Old trees. Cancelled trains. Yuk! What the hell was I thinking!?
I tried cutting but it wasn’t very good. The footage is… meh. Too much Terence Malick imitation, too much wide angle Wong Kar-wai. That the best lenses on the iPhone are very wide angle didn’t help. The first cut was exactly the corny pastiche I had hoped to avoid.
I’d gone to the shop and bought rotten tomatoes. Now all I have are the onions and herbs left.
Future Noir
My original intention was slightly Blade Runner-esque sci-fi sound. There is a guy who writes this stuff that I know. I was going to license one of his tracks. I liked the idea of bringing that sound over old buildings.
The problem: all that Vangelis-y sci-fi synth stuff is actually melancholic and blues. As soon as you put that on the footage, I saw I was giving the whole game away. I was revealing the paradigm shift twist with the first note. What I needed was music that would trick you into thinking this was about nostalgia, not decay and isolation.
I started cutting instead to Philip Glass. It had more momentum and a better mood. Eventually I got something down, but it wasn’t working either.
I started trawling my music collection. I remembered a jazz record Beasts of Scotland from the Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith. I hadn’t listened to it in years, but I remembered a track I thought had a cool Vangelis vibe. That track didn’t work at all. But on the same album was another song called Salmon.
I threw it down over my selects. Salmon worked… just about. This gave me the impetus to recut the footage again. I shuffled it a bit to avoid the heavy handedness of earlier cuts. It’s not great, but… finally a minimal viable product for the challenge!
Still, it’s not that successful. It’s a rough sketch. I do have a better sense of what I’d need to do. Mainly I’d need to really focus more on the commuter experience. I’d do more to evoke the nostalgia at the start, so that it turns properly around the Ten and shifts into existential dread. I don’t think that’s working right now.
And I’d dump the iPhone and use a real camera.
The iPhone For Film Making
Ultimately the major benefit for me on this project was testing out the iPhone for film making. I wanted to see what the BlackMagic camera app could do with new ProRes 422/422HQ codecs. Historically I’ve found iPhone footage is over-processed and yucky. It’s 4K footage, sure, but it’s designed to be viewed on a screen four inches across. As soon as you put it on a television screen, you see all the problems. This hasn’t changed.
In some ways it’s nice to shoot on an iPhone. Nobody bothers you, you can put it in really small spaces, it’s good for macro. But even there, the advantages start to fall away. To do reliable shots you need to rig it up with a handle for better grip. Once you do that, you’re now looking weirder and drawing more attention than shooting on a little mirrorless camera. And on the mirrorless you’ll get a better image with more control.
The great thing about the iPhone is that it’s there all the time. You can shoot stuff anytime anyplace. It’s perfectly okay for a quick sketch, or a quick little project. You could absolutely shoot if this is all you had. For me, it’s just more annoying than liberating. I’d rather have a real camera with knobs, buttons and a better image.
So, if there is one takeaway from this challenge it’s this: I’m going to look for another solution to inconspicuous cinematography. Possibly something like the Nikon ZR, which is also cheap and matches nicely with RED footage.
The iPhone is still great for location scouting and prep; but as a production tool, it’s not for me.
gosh I’m new to film. this article is a gold mine!!! thank you for sharing your process
Wonderful!