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Showing posts with the label Monday morning mixer

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 1.6.2014 (The-New-Journey edition)

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HBD John Singleton (director of Boyz in the Hood, Poetic Justice, etc.) and Anthony Minghella (director of The English Patient, Cold Mountain, etc.) [d.] and RIP Victor Fleming (director of The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, etc.) who died this day in 1949. WRITING: Is it possible to be a screenwriter and have a family ? (the bad news and the good news) PRODUCING:  What is your filmmaking game plan for 2014 ? FINANCING: What are investors considering when they fund films?   DIRECTING: Everyone knows that having famous actors in your movie will help it get financed and screened. So once you have them committed and casted, how do you direct famous actors in a microbudget film ? LIGHTING: Here's an homage to all the things grips and electrics have to do to light and shoot without the gear they actually need... shitty rigs . SHOOTING: How can you use camera angles to sell your scene ? SOUND: A tutorial on the importance of the pre-production process for your sou

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 12.23.13 (HBD Transistor Edition)

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Amplifier circuit, common-emitter configuration with a voltage-divider bias circuit. HBD to the transistor , the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices , found in everything from TVs, mobile phones, radios, calculators and computers.  That you can read this post is a function of the transistor's capabilities, so thank you John Bardeen , Walter Brattain , and William Shockley for developing it at Bell Labs in 1947.  Thanks to the transistor we can watch movies on screens as large as walls and as small as belt buckles. WRITING: What are the elements of a good scene ? LEGAL: How much does an entertainment lawyer cost ? PRODUCING: Do women prefer films made by female filmmakers ? FINANCING: How do you finance a movie using VOD sales projections ? DIRECTING: How do you turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller ? (h/t to Jeffrey Michael Bays and makes a great last-minute gift) SHOOTING: How do you add diffusion to your image by 'netting

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 11.25.13 (YOUTUBE TUTORIAL EDITION)

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Today, I'd like to try something a little different... and that's use video to answer every question today.  So thank you YouTube!  I still wish I had created you, but alas... thank you for being you.  Today's theme will be NO- to MICRO- to LOW-BUDGET FILMMAKING.  P.S. Don't forget to visit the Filmmaker's Toolkit for all the forms, templates and information you need to make your films at every phase of production from Development to Distribution. WRITING: Why do most people fail at screenwriting ? PRODUCING: How do you pre-plan a no-budget movie ? FINANCING: Why do you need money to make money when it comes to making a film? DIRECTING: What are the top 5 tips for new directors or how you can become a better director? SHOOTING: How do you make a dolly track ? LIGHTING: Building a lighting kit, what are the professional film lights you should stock your kit with (at a minimum)? SOUND: How do you record high quality audio on a

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 11.18.13 (MICKEY MOUSE & SYLVESTER STALLONE EDITION)

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Last week was an off-week for The Film Strategist so my apologies but had to focus on some important work. Now I'm back so stay tuned for some interesting upcoming posts including your Monday and Midweek mixers. On November 18, 1928 – The animated short Steamboat Willie was released.  This was the first fully synchronized sound cartoon , directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks and featured the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse . This is also considered by the Disney corporation to be Mickey's birthday.  The short was such a success that it propelled Disney to international stardom. Now, what I want to know is when will Steamboat Willie and other works of that era finally fall in the public domain?  Because it should've happened a while ago already. But as Timothy B. Lee makes clear , "15 years ago [on October 25], President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended copyright

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 11.4.13

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November 4 Barack Obama became the first African-American president today in 2008. For many that was a new day of hope and, for others, the first step into hell. Well, whatever, I for one was happy.  But that's life, a heady mix of the good and the bad depending on your perspective.  And in the film & TV industry, today was both a happy one and a sad one too.   Happy for those born today, like... 1879 – Will Rogers , American actor (d. 1935) 1913 – Gig Young , American actor (d. 1978) 1918 – Art Carney , American actor (d. 2003) 1959 – Ken Kirzinger , Canadian actor and stuntman 1961 – Ralph Macchio , American actor 1961 – Jeff Probst , American television host and producer 1969 – Sean Combs , American rapper, producer, and actor 1969 – Matthew McConaughey , American actor And sad for those who died today like... 1982 – Jacques Tati , French actor and director (b. 1907) 2011 – Andy Rooney , American radio and television host (b. 1919) +++++++++++++++++++++

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 10.21.13

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October 21, 1984 - François Truffaut dies One of the central figures of the French New Wave, François Truffaut, died October 21, 1984. Born in Paris in 1932, living an itinerant childhood with his single (later remarried) mother and several relatives, Truffaut became a child of the cinema early in life. He would steal away from school and sneak into matinees — childhood experiences that would form the basis for his first feature, The 400 Blows . He won the Cannes Best Director Award in 1959 for the picture, in which the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud played his alter ego, Antoine Doinel, enacted the tale of a neglected child poised between a life of petty crime and something greater. Before The 400 Blows , Truffaut had made several shorts but was mostly known as a tough-minded film critic at Cahiers du cinéma who often savaged conventional French cinema and endorsed instead the journeyman Hollywood directors celebrated by “auteur theory,” the critical school he helped found. Thr

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 10.14.13

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1930 National Science Museum copy of 20 frames from the Roundhay Garden Scene  October 14 The world's oldest surviving film was shot today in 1888 ; the year Jack the Ripper went on a killing spree, Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear, Susan B. Anthony organized a Congress for Women's Rights and director F.W. Murnau, playwright Eugene O'Neill and poet T.S. Eliot were born. And on this day 125 years ago, Louis Le Prince filmed the first motion picture: Roundhay Garden Scene .  It was recorded at 12 frames per second and runs for 2.11 seconds. Was it meant to be a scene for a documentary, a fictional film or reality TV?  What do you think? If you're into movie firsts and vintage film like this then check out this YouTube channel: Change Before Going Productions. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ And now with a little history under our belt, let us proceed with the questions that will make us better filmmakers...  (FYI: There is a heavy New York

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 9.30.13

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Film-Makers’ Co-op Press Conference, 1964 L to R: Gregory Markopoulos, P. Adams Sitney, Andy Warhol, Ron Rice, Jonas Mekas © 1964 On September 30, 1962, a group of New York filmmakers (including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Emile de Antonio, and Jack Smith) released “ The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group ,” a manifesto by New York artists to herald in new age of cinema. Railing against current modes of exhibition, distribution and financing, this group proclaimed low-budget filmmaking as its own aesthetic: “The low budget is not a purely commercial consideration. It goes with our ethical and esthetic beliefs, directly connected with the things we want to say, and the way we want to say them.” Overall they called filmmakers to unite and storm the box office. In their vibrant last words, “we don't want rosy films — we want them the color of blood.” While few of the filmmakers became household names, The Film-Makers' Cooperative they started liv

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 9.23.13

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Many years ago, two great films opened today, Berlin Symphony of the City (1927) and The Silence (1963).  What makes the two films equally memorable are how the directors expanded the language of cinema by focusing on a little-considered aspect of a subject (Ruttman) or doing something different from their past work (Bergman).  These works have became a source of inspiration and style for many filmmakers ever since. " Walther Ruttman’s unfurled Berlin: Symphony of a Great City on 23 September 1927 in the city for which it is named. Having entered film from the fields of architecture and design, Ruttmann saw form and shape where so many others perceived character and story. And while the film employed documentary strategies, it’s aim was more aesthetic than journalistic, trying to capture––as the musical title suggests––the rhythm of the city and the masses who inhabit it. Influenced by Soviet theories of montage, Ruttman divided his piece into five acts, a nod to s

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 9.16.13

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Captain's Log Star Date: 9.16.13 Almost 50 years ago today, A Fistful of Dollars was released in 1964. On September 16, 1964, a new kind of Western hero arrived on the scene… in Italy. On that day the first of Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” westerns, Fistful of Dollars, opened there, three years before it would arrive in the United States. Casting an American actor, Clint Eastwood, best known for his stint on the TV series Rawhide, Leone reinvented the American Western by not only shooting the film dubbed in Italy but also by creating an operatic style that favored wide screens and epic landscapes, emotional and unusually arranged music by Ennio Morricone, and morally ambiguous characters. At the center of Morricone’s movie was Eastwood, with his side-slung poncho, cigarette and a serenely unyielding visage. Of his star, Leone famously commented, "I like Clint Eastwood because he has only two facial expressions: one with the hat, and one without it.”

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 9.9.13

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Captain's Log. Star Date: 9.9.13 September 9, 1980 - The Third Generation opens "Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s terrorist comedy The Third Generation exploded when it opened in New York City in September 1980. In the New York Times , Vincent Canby raved, “There no longer can be any doubt about it: Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the most dazzling, talented, provocative, original, puzzling, prolific and exhilarating film maker of his generation. Anywhere.” Following on the heels of his international success The Marriage of Maria Braun , The Third Generation mock-heroically takes on the problem of domestic terrorism in Germany. Fassbinder explained the title’s relation to contemporary Germany politics in the following way: “The first generation was that of '68. Idealists, who wanted to change the world and imagined they could do that with words and demonstrations. The second, the Baader-Meinhof Group, went from legality to armed struggle and total ill