Caldwell’s first film with Michigami was "Patterns," a story about a juggler and conman whose life takes an interesting turn after a con goes bad. Before taking a scriptwriting class five years ago, she wrote primarily poetry and short stories.


Cate Caldwell and Matt Pearson enjoy an evening rehearsal of, "The Yaw". Pearson serves
as the Michigami cinematographer.



"Most scripts that are made into movies are very structured compared to short stories, poetry and novels," Caldwell said. "With a script, it is like, ‘This is where Act One is; this is where your climax is,’ which seems like it is not creative. But I notice that when I follow that structure, my writing is better for it."

Pearson’s political satire "This War Blows" is a six-minute film that Michigami shot in just one night. "It was a very simple set up — basically just two guys talking with some animations cut in," said Pearson. "We wanted to do something before ‘The Yaw’ started up, and we just approached it as an exercise: ‘Can we do it in one night?’ I think it was good for us to do it."

"This War Blows" parallels the current situation with the war in Iraq, but has to do with water instead of oil. "It seems like a blatant anti-war film at the beginning, but then you watch it, and you see maybe it’s not," said Pearson. "Some good points are made on both sides of the argument."

Nettles, who writes political essays, is toying with the idea of resurrecting an old script involving a mom-and-pop party store refusing to close up shop when a big, shiny Wal-Mart-type store comes to town. He is also working on a new script, which he describes as being in a "major revision stage."

For him, the toughest thing about transitioning to scriptwriting is letting go of reality. "I am so tied to reality, it is hard for me to break away from that and say you can make things happen that are not necessarily real," he said. "When I try to do it, it feels fake somehow. Right now I am working on a script about an area that is sliding downhill, and the question is: Do you pack up shop and get out, or stay where you are and be the change, like Gandhi said?"

"Each one of us has our own distinct writing style and subject matter we tend to gravitate towards, so it makes things interesting," said Pearson. "I had done some technical writing and published a couple of papers on the exploration and colonization of Mars and that sort of thing. So it was kind of natural that my writing would go toward science fiction."

In fact, the next short film project Pearson has in mind involves his script about a trip to Mars — from the perspective of a cat. 

"I am thinking, ‘How are we going to get some of these shots?’" said Pearson. "There is a scene where the cat is let go in zero gravity and is just hanging there, so I have been thinking about how I am going to suspend the cat on a wire to film this scene. I may have to bribe him with steak and Reddi-wip. Nick is working on a script that parallels Gandhi’s philosophy, and in the meantime I’m working on a script about a cat going to Mars."

"We’ve had a lot of good lessons in DIY — do it yourself," said Gamache-Nettles. For Caldwell’s film "Snapshots," an elevator set had to be constructed. The set was built in a large, empty building, which created some problems with the audio.

"We had all kinds of echo, to the point where we had to re-dub a 10-minute scene," said Caldwell. "So just from that mistake, I learned a lot about how certain locations affect the sound."


Gamache-Nettles focuses intensely on actors performing a rehearsal of her script.


For Gamache-Nettles, just the process of writing the script for "The Yaw" was a major learning experience. Coming from journalism, she was accustomed to using a lot of description to tell the story. Consequently, her first scripts were too long and, on some levels, too complicated. It took her two years and several revisions to hone the script for "The Yaw."

"I had no idea about formatting scripts or anything like that, so at first I always overwrote," she said. "I would take a page-and-a-half to describe a scene, but now it is down to a couple of sentences. I don’t know how many drafts I had of ‘Yaw.’ I had to go through a lot of changes to make it a more shootable script."

As a budding production company, Michigami has a very limited budget. Sometimes that affects the script, although, more often than not, any revision seems to make the story better.

"If you have a huge budget, you can have 25 locations and a fight in a bookstore, but we can’t do things like that," said Caldwell. "Like, you have to think about ‘Where are we going to get a bookstore to have this fistfight in?’ Sometimes when you don‘t have money, you have to take a good script and make it more realistic in terms of actually filming it."

So Gamache-Nettles cut her original body count in half, and, although she didn’t dramatically reduce the number of locations used in the film, she made the locations more doable for Michigami.
 
"I work full time and then I had cancer, so that delayed my finishing the script, too," said Gamache-Nettles. "I had the idea, it bounced around in my head, I wrote something out, had an outline, then came back to the drawing board to make it more realistic, came back again to try and make it more production worthy. I am a late bloomer in this, and it takes me a long time to get things done. It is not overnight."

Besides writing strong scripts, one goal Michigami is committed to is being known as a production company that treats its actors and everyone else it touches with kindness and respect. Michigami doesn’t want to burn bridges, it wants to build them.
 
"We always have tons of food on the set because we can’t afford to pay people anything," said Caldwell. "We want to make sure we take care of people in other ways. A lot of our actors do paid work in commercials, films or on the stage, but they work with us because they like us."

They also like Michigami’s scripts. One actor appearing in "The Yaw" told Gamache-Nettles that he has turned down paid jobs because the scripts were bad. He chose to be in "The Yaw" because he liked the script and working with the Michigami crew.
 
"Some groups are all about making money — we are not like that," said Nettles. "We can promise you food and whatever exposure we can get you; we will get you a DVD of the movie and do whatever we can do to publicize the movie. We look for small, family-owned businesses and tell them we can give them some exposure if they let us use their place. There have been a lot of people who have been very supportive. We just want to make it so that anyone we work with has a positive experience."

In the short time they have been making films together, the four Michigami founders have learned a lot. The importance of preproduction tops the list.

"You have to plan everything out: the prop list, the storyboards, everything," said Caldwell. Pearson points out that Caldwell is the very meticulous type of producer and director, where he is more likely to show up on set and fly by the seat of his pants. But they have found that their different approaches can work well together.

"A lot of times, especially when you are small and have no budget, something goes wrong with the plan," said Caldwell. "So here I have everything planned out — and there is a wrench in the machine. That’s when Matt takes over and figures it out."

Filmmaking is a very meticulous art that involves much repetition and discipline. "It’s not magic," said Nettles. "The magic is in the editing room when someone says, ‘Hey, who left the soda can in that shot? Let’s take it out.’ That is the only kind of magic there is in filmmaking."

Regardless of which project follows "The Yaw," the Michigami crew will have its eye on the goal of always making a film that is better than the previous one.
 
"At least if we can say our next film is better than our last, we are moving in the right direction," said Nettles. "When everything is done and you are watching the movie you made, it can be a huge sense of satisfaction that something you thought was never going to be done is completed. It’s a huge sense of accomplishment. Filmmaking may not be as glamorous as people imagine, but it can be fun."

"We wouldn’t be doing this," Gamache-Nettles said, "if it was not fun and we didn’t have a passion for it."

 Visit the Michigami Web site www.michigamillc.com