Filmmakers

My new friend gave me the names of establishments where the drinking was best. They included Eleven 79 on Annunciation Street, owned by a gentleman named Joe Segreto, who is also a sometime filmmaker. 

In which we encounter Einstein, Rumi, God, the anthropic principle, Stephen Hawking, the Bible, Proust s hyper-realities. The Lobotomy Club, Sushi Never Sleeps, acto/5, brain surgery, Italian filmmaking, neorealism, stellar nucleosynthesis, the Big Bang, Paul Davies, Frank Tipler, Marcel Proust, H. P Lovecrafi, Andrei Linde, Sir Fred Hoyle, Rudy Rucker, Robert Jastrow, The Templeton Foundation, multiple universes, Paul Kammerer, synchronicity, and the shoreless sea of love. 

Moon Unit Zappa is a magazine writer, a stand-up comic, a filmmaker, the author of America the Beautiful, and a wife and mom. "Boobed Out When Baby Wants More" 2006 Moon Unit Zappa. Printed by permission. 

Five years since she had collected the dole. The allowance had risen eight dollars. She scanned the fifty-odd professions listed on the application form, the government s notion of legitimate workers. Business legal medical. Administrative, social services, teaching, trades. There were no musicians no performers no artists no filmmakers. There were no poets. She didn t expect to find DJs listed but would have liked to have been proven wrong. She was right. She ticked other. 

Writer, editor, filmmaker and proprietor ofwww.alisonjohnsonmcs.com... 

Exposed is a beautiful movie (40 minutes long) about an American MCS patient. The protagonist, a professional dancer, often filmed herself throughout her life. She kept doing so when she developed MCS, and thereby documented on tape very intense emotions, thoughts out loud, and so on. Some moments were very moving and touched me deeply. The filmmaker intersperses the patient s own recordings with old commercials about chemicals, interviews, and other material. 

This movie is definitely recommended for everyone. It can be ordered from the filmmaker, Heidrun Holzfeind, who can be reached through the website www.ex posed.at. 

The movie [SAFE], starring Julianne Moore, actually starts off well (recognizable moments, the loneliness and lack of sympathy inherent to MCS), but it ends oddly involving some kind of spiritual therapy in New Mexico. The filmmaker appears to let his own conviction surface through the therapist — that you are the cause of your own illness and that it s all because you don t love yourself enough. That was a real turnoff (although some MCS patients fall into the hands of such therapists who convince them of all sorts of things). 

Composers and filmmakers were also expected to be engineers of the soul. ... 

There was a period of silence, during which he may or may not have whispered, Note how reflective and rectangular the screen is, to his partner. The slack was taken up by a group to his right, who were attempting to recall what this film was about, perhaps on the assumption that the plot, due to malicious filmmakers anxious for financial ruin, would remain inscrutable for the next two hours. 

What is Taos A skier s paradise An artist s enclave A filmmaker s showcase A Native American village A nondescript town It could be any one of these things it all depends on when you show up. 

B The Belize Zoo maintains 125 animals native to Belize and was originally set up to adopt animals used in filmmaking. See tapir and large cats like spotted jaguar and ocelot. 

This book is primarily intended for film and video students or independent video- and filmmakers who are faced with the necessity of writing a short narrative script. For our purposes, we consider a short film to be one of 30 minutes or less, as films longer than that usually need a secondary, or minor, plot-line to sustain audience interest and, in addition, are much less likely to be eligible for festivals or suitable to be shown as "portfolio" work. 

While it is true that there are filmmakers in the experimental and documentary area who continue to work in the short form, more and more filmmakers in these areas are moving to the long form as well (Bruce Elder or Su Friedrich in the experimental film genre, and the work of Ross McKelwee and Barbara Kopple in the documentary, for example). The short, at least in North America, is more and more an economic necessity for the student filmmaker and the novice professional, and while there are still short films produced in the educational corporate sectors, they are far fewer than in the past. 

Another film, Gare du Nord, written and directed by noted ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, uses the same structure to explore a very different territory. It is one of an anthology of six short films made by European directors, each set in a different section of Paris. 

Male or female, we are all "younger sons" in one way or another, and what seizes us as we read or listen to or watch a well-told story is that powerful intermingling of feeling and thought that Aristotle called "recognition." If you substitute the word "image" for "sentence" in the quotation above, you will understand why it is that, as teachers, we have found myths and fairy tales so useful to the novice short-screenplay writer (who may well regard herself or himself as a filmmaker, and not a "real" writer at all). 

Two questions often prove major stumbling blocks for film and video students, as well as for filmmakers who have never written a narrative script. What, specifically, do I write about How, specifically, do I write about it In screenwriting, general ideas are of little or no use when you sit down at a desk to write, and it is often difficult for those who are not "natural" writers (in the way one may be a "natural" cinematographer or director) to come up with fruitful story ideas. Yet, as anyone experienced in the arts knows, learning a skill is a process, and that process has to start somewhere. 

Ever since This Is Spinal Tap, student films about performance, filmmaking, writing, and music have relied on the hybrid form loosely called the mockumentary. This is a form that both evokes realism and pokes fun at it. Not quite as intense as the satire, the mockumentary criticizes gently the subject of the film, which is often the media as it interacts with, and often creates, a star. In this sense, the mockumentary is a self-reflexive and self-critical form, as the "mock" in the word suggests. If your idea centers on the relationship between the public and a character, and if the media can play a role in the story, the mockumentary is an amusing and often insightful form. 

If your idea is best presented with the elements of moral lessons, the mythical, and animal characters, the fable can transport your idea from the realistic to the fantastic. Although the fable may pose particular filmmaking challenges, it can be done. Jean-Jacques Annaud s The Bear is a recent example. 

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