The Sentence and the Image.
Who hasn’t been reduced to pursuing reading solely in the search for material to adapt for a movie? Novels, novellas, short stories — riches to be mined for narratives, for characters, for worlds. Sometimes you dip in, know this isn’t the one, dip out, move…
Not a beat but…
On the page, it’s easy to read a simple action in a scene without giving it a second thought. A character sees something, registers it, and reacts. Another hears the doorbell, goes to their front door and opens it to see who’s there. Another hears a…
… Or why are you already making them?
This has been said to me more times than I could count. If this is your reason, become a front-line health worker, a community activist, or join an NGO and support people in need, just…
The Trap of Easy Answers — for Filmmakers and Anyone Else
Of all human activities, ‘rocket science’ surely takes the biscuit for the most casually and regularly dismissed endeavor. There you are, faced with some new activity, challenge, skill to be gleaned, task to be performed, perhaps knitting your brow…
What’s Right for You?
You don’t want to go to film school? You can breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve saved yourself as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. But how do you go about learning your craft?
You have many ways — more than ever before…
1. Just…
Which is Right for You?
“It’s not wha’ yer know, it’s ‘oo yer know!” my mother told me, when, as a callow youth, I yearned to get into the world of film and TV in my native England. To an extent, given the English class system at the time and…
The Inspiration–Perspiration Spectrum
Concept and Experiment in the Creative Process
A friend recently introduced me to a book that claims profound insights into how artists set about their work. Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David W. Galenson https://bookshop.org/books/old-masters-and-young-geniuses-the-two-life-cycles-of-artistic-creativity/9780691133805 …
The Chemistry in the Contradiction.
How do we think of function in the context of a story? As it pertains to a scene, a shot, a beat? What purpose they serve perhaps. How they work. The result they lead to. How they relate to something else. Their part in the…
How You Show What You Show
Most social media posts, when discussing camera, refer to the physical entity, a device for capturing an image. Such posts are usually concerned with models of camera. Alexas, Reds — what have you. Filmmakers like to post pictures of themselves alongside a camera —…
What Matters, and What Doesn’t
Why do so few posts in social media filmmaking groups ask questions about story, about world, about character, about their representation on the screen, the forms this can take and the ways in which these can work? About the emotions a movie conveys, the thoughts…
Consultant, educator, author, former AFI Conservatory directing head, I discuss filmmaking, visual storytelling, cinema. https://www.filmdirectingclass.com/
