art
Ego Check
The Worst News You’ll Ever Exhaustively Seek Out One thing they can’t teach you in film school (or art school or writing school or whatever school) is how to take a review. There’s an actual skill to it, even if the review is positive or… I’m tempted to say “bad .” But the use of [...]
The Accidental Shakespearian
My apologies in advance, as this is some self-serving BS I’m about to serve: Comedy, Tragedy, and Chainsaws… I’ve often claimed two competing kinds of geekery – theater and horror. If I had to tell anyone which one started first or took a deeper hold, I really couldn’t. As long as I had a personality [...]
A Tale of Four Possums… Or the End of Creative Procrastination
Sorry, I’m not going to rant about Final Cut Pro X or directing theater today – I have something more philosophical on my mind and it was all inspired by true events. Warning: graphic wildlife-in-domestic-homes pictures to follow. Playing Possum Nothing helps me to shake of the shackles of procrastination like a live possum in [...]
Editing for Dummies
The Morning After… After over a decade as a happy Final Cut Pro user, proponent, and propagandist, it’s been a terrible two weeks for me. When George Rizkallah and I went in on our first FCP v.2 system from Promax back in 2000, little did I know how accessible editing would grow to change my [...]
Summer Reading
10 Blogs Filmmakers Need to Read As I emerge from my NDA-driven rathole and rediscover the things I did before work consumed me, I’ve been catching up on some reading. Specifically blog reading (and a book or two as well). My friend Jenelle likes to make fun of me for being late to the Blog [...]
Fiction Abuse
Warning: Shameless Self-Promotion Ahead… Yes, yes. I know. It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working more than usual, and I haven’t had the blogging time I would prefer. I take that back – I’d rather be working. But I could take more time to do this as well. I promise to [...]
Dirty Hands
The Myth of the Filmmaker Who Does Nothing but Dispense Brilliance When I attended film school, the indie-film craze was ramping up. Filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Stephen Soderbergh were making huge waves in both indie and studio models, DIY filmmakers like Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Robert Rodriguez were burning up [...]
Capture or Record?
What Does Your Footage Mean to You? Yesterday, an actress friend of mine told me that her boyfriend is a writer and aspiring director, so she was thinking about getting him a Flip Camera for practice and did I think that was a good idea? I told her that there’s nothing wrong with the flip [...]
