Austin Film Festival Panel: Anatomy of a Crime

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For the final day of conference panels during this year’s Austin Film Festival, I had a few options for the 11:30-12:45 block. It was pretty hard to pick which panel to go to.  At first, it was suggested for me to attend “Ins and Outs of Overall Deals” because the other choice “What Managers Want” would have be useful to cover for the Filmmaker Mixer Podcast’s audience. However, that panel had over 300 attendees signed up for it.  The fact is, my first choice was actually something else.  As such, it must have been fate that I arrived early to downtown to first meet the co hosts in the press room.

Here I am pictured with Filmmaker Mixer Podcasts’ Andrew Lamping (left) and Jeff Stolhand (right) and to my right, we are all joined by Emily Everhard, this year’s winner of the Enderby Filmmaking Fellowship. Emily wrote and directed the live action short, SPECIAL DELIVERY.

And, it was just my luck, the location we were meeting also happened be where my first choice of panel was being held! Thus, I waited in line in the heat, which you can see evidenced by the change in my hair, when I finally got a chance to snap a selfie with panelists, Zach Baylin (below left) and Jeffery Reiner (below right).

“Anatomy of A Crime” involved two filmmakers, Zach Baylin and Jeffery Reiner, who each discussed an unreleased film of theirs that fell under the crime genre.

Surprisingly, the panel was less about crime specifically, and more so about the general writing process. This is because they approach the stories like they would any other narrative- write a story about a character who is in a situation that makes him in some way involved with the crime. The crime is part of the narrative but it’s a character centric story first and foremost, in other words.

While both panelists had a lot of interesting things to say, I was really fascinated by a lot of what Reiner talked about. Both had experience working for television, but Reiner was an editor, not a writer, and learned plot structure from watching and putting together ten minute clips. He said he knew the beats of a story based on the number that the clips hitting those beats were labeled with. That was just really fascinating to me, personally.  

Both writers talked a lot about the process of making their films, such as how they just told themselves to freely change whatever they wanted as they wrote their scripts- so as to not to expect perfection from their work, or how they’d take out lines of dialogue while shooting or editing that began to feel excessive.

It was very, very insightful.

The Q&A involved a lot of great questions. I ended up asking about whether they’d fluctuate between loving and hating their scripts, and then put it away for a while, look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and want to barf. The moderator, Barbara Morgan, translated this question to, “how much anxiety do you get about your scripts,” and I remember Zach Baylin saying something along the lines of “what you said was a pretty accurate description,” and Jeffery Reiner responded by saying that the anxiety doesn’t stop at just the script, because then there’s editing and getting other people to work on the film.

Another audience member shot a really interesting question at them, which was “how do you go about writing criminals” specifically white supremacists.  This particular group was covered in Zach Baylin’s film, as mentioned at the beginning of and throughout the panel. He essentially told her to treat them like a person who just happens to be in whatever group they are a part of- and of course weaving that thing that sets them apart into their character. You do this by asking yourself, who does he care about, where does he come from, what does he want and why. Just think of him as a person, try to remove the judgement you have of him, etc.

This was a terrific panel and I was very glad I got to attend it.  Great questions were asked and the interview was very educational because it reinforced a lot of what I already learned about writing while in college.  I think the big takeaway is that while every genre has some different rules and conventions, the general gist of the writing process will never be lost on any of them. Plot structure, rewriting, writing what you know, centering it around characters and not just concepts alone, these are pillars to a great story in any genre.

Madelyn, Filmmaker Mixer Correspondent

My selfie with Emily that I couldn’t figure out how to get in the article without it formatting weird. (I’m not an expert on WordPress)

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