Friday, May 29, 2009

Update: April 13-March 30

"Maybe it's better not to be the best. Then you can lose and it's ok." ~ Movie: Searching for Bobby Fischer

I apologize for not updating you all in... a long time. To say the least, I have been extremely busy. But enough of excuses. Allow me to expound upon said busyness:

Week 2 (April 13-17) Technical elements of film. Lighting, camera operation, tri-pod, etc.

Week 3 (April 20-24) Screen writing. We had a speaker named Kevin Miller (screenwriter for Expelled). He was positively fantastic. The methods and ideologies of storytelling were eye-opening, to say the least. If you're at all interested in what he taught on, contact me. I have easily 10 pages of notes.

Week 4 (April 27-March 1) Visual language. Our school leader, Willy, helped us with composition and how to more accurately capture on film (or tape) what we wish to communicate.

Week 5 (March 4-8) Editing. We had a couple days of brief teaching on how to edit our films.

Week 6 (March 11-15) Production. I took away a lot of good stuff about what it takes to make a movie happen. Since producing is one of my passions, I ate up this teaching.

Shooting week (March 16-24) Filming for nine straight days. These are about the most intense days of my life. We have 14 students in our Film school (excluding the 4 actors in the school of acting that runs along side our filmmaking school). We all have our own scripts that we have been working on for weeks, and all of us were split into 3 groups--two groups of 5 and one group of 4. I was in the group of 4. Also in my group was Urban, a 40-something year old from Sweden, Jon, someone my age from southern Indiana, and Meijer, also about my age from South Africa. Each of our groups had these nine days to divide between us to take turns directing our short films. The others in our groups (in my case, the other three) became the other crew (e.g., Grip/gaffer, Director of Photography, and Sound. And we also had to share about 15 other roles that in a "big budget movie" would have been delegated to numerous other people).
If you want to know more about my film, feel free to ask.

Week 9 (March 24-now) Post-production. We're starting to edit our films. By Tuesday (June 2) we have to have the first draft of our movies edited (AKA "Editor's Cut") We also had David Cunningham speak with our class. He is the son of Lauren Cunningham (the founder of YWAM) and is a well-established filmmaker/director (To End All Wars, Little House On The Prairie, Path To 9/11, The Seeker).

Next... We also all had the opportunity to pitch a new film idea for the last projects. This time, the students and staff would all vote on the top 3 of the proposed film ideas. We had about 9 pitches out of the 14 of us. My script didn't get picked as one of the top three. Instead, I ended up on the 5-man crew for a comedic musical about a corpse-abusing mortician. I'm in charge of the whole art department, and I'm a grip. Get that. Hah. I love it.

Thursday, May 28, at 11:24PM, a man named Brad came and sat next to me and a friend of mine. Brad is schizophrenic. Majorly. I wish I could have recorded his dialogues with himself.

'Til next time.