Subversion
A Swift Kick to the Head
Why Big Stars on Raising Money on Kickstarter isn’t Hurting Smaller Projects Allow me to start by saying that I’m not a Zach Braff fanboy. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and he seems to have things he wants to say through filmmaking. But judging based on his debut feature nine years ago as well […]
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 […]
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 […]
Putting the “F” into FCP
Confessions of a Final Cut Pro Apologist At 5:30 am this past Tuesday, Apple blew the minds of editors around the world. And not in a good way. Final Cut Pro, the professional nonlinear editing (NLE) suite released by Apple over a decade ago, never had it easy. When it first appeared on the scene, […]
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 […]
The Myth of Indie
I’m Getting Tired of Asking Where We Went Wrong My friend and fellow filmmaker Tom Moser said something about my last post that I think merits its own topic. The post was about how awesome 1981 was for genre fans, how many amazing and landmark horror, sci fi, and fantasy movies were released that year. […]
On Sucking
If you are an artist of any consequence, you too will suck one day. Before I begin work on any creative or semi-creative project, first I have to extinguish the unquenchable fear that this is the one. The one that will suck. I mean, I’m sure I’ve created a lot of sucky things in my […]
Wag the Dogme
15 Years On, What We Should and Shouldn’t Learn from Dogme ’95 On March 22, 1995, a group of Danish filmmakers including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg made a simple announcement, sparking a movement and an ideology which ripples throughout all filmmaking to this day. Their innovation: a new filmmaking structure called (excuse the Danish […]
Faking it for Real
A Mock-Doc/Horror Manifesto …Because it’s about damn time someone wrote one. Last night I went to see Daniel Stamm’s exciting new entry to the mock-documentary/horror genre, “The Last Exorcism.” Although I have my quibbles with the film (specifically the ending – which I will not spoil here), I found it smart, engaging, atmospheric, and mostly believable […]
