Film Making 201-Thursday Thirteen

1) I am beginning a new idea for a documetary. No I can't tell you online what that is...top secret, the keyboards have ears. What I can tell you is that it involves a fair bit of road trip and a lot of interviews. My first official interview is next week. I have two interviews lined up for next Tuesday. I'm pretty excited. But I realized a lot of my Thursday Thirteen pals may not know I make short films. The purpose of Thursday Thirteen is to share stuff about ourselves with opther bloggers so I am going to take up a terrible amount of time and space with online information about "film making". Sorry I tried to make this post short...but it just keeps on growing! The most important "message" of this post is that I believe everyone is an artist, storyteller whether it's with recalling memories, painting or film making. We all have stories that we want to tell.
I'D RATHER BE SAILING...WITH A CAMERA....
2) A lot of my experience with film making has been built up around...well winging it. Okay lying. Okay, bullshitting my way into a film set. I have taken lots of film workshops...but nothing beats getting out there and jumping in , in my opinion. Film making is so much easier these days because there are entire computer programs available for everybody. But...nothing beats the library or google...or just starting to write some stuff and showing your friends. Once I had an interview, sheesh, a long time ago...on a independant film production and I was asked if I could schedule a film. I said YES of course. I had no idea what scheduling a film shoot entailed. I went to the library. Found a book by Ralph Singleton (if you click on that link...you can look inside and see the breakdown of The Conversation and get a good idea of what I'm trying to describe) which saved my ass and taught me so much!and followed the directions.
It was an amazing learning experience. I doubt film schools even teach this anymore because like I say there is a computer program. But kicking it old school entails going through a script with several colored fpens...and breaking the script down into cast, extras, props, wardrobe, locations etc. A different colored pen for each category. I photocopied the graph images provided in the library book...and proceeded to schedule a feature length film in two coffee filled days and nights. Old school style meant cutting thin strips of paper representing the broken down categories of actors and extras and manually piecing them together ona board...actually a little like what you see on crime dramas when they post photos of suspects and locations on huge bulletin boards.
3) The Plank Cam...excellent idea which I've used myself here and there in the past...

4) Home made steady Cam-25 bucks!

5) cheesy commercial, out of sunc, but nice camera....but a big mistake people who want to make films make is they spend a lot of energy buying a huge camera. Film makers don't buy camera's...directors of photography/cameraoperators buy cameras.
6) I think this link is an advert, but it's a stepping stone at least mini-glossary.
7) Ths one is the BEST: Robert Rodriguez 10 Minute Film School it fits very much with I feel about the organic natural aspects of film making/story telling...for example....What you need to learn is that being creative is not enough in this business. You have to become techinical. Creative people are born creative - you're lucky. Technical people however can never be creative. Its something they'll never get. You can't buy it, find it, study it - you're born with it. Too many creative people don't want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? they become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that. If you're creative and technical, you're unstoppable.
8) A very interesting "10 things not to do" list.
9) There seem to be a fair bit of online film schools...I wonder what they are like, here is one "film making in two days" like, who has 2 days?
10) The following are the basic guidelines for making a script look professional.

The very first page of your script should be the cover page. The title is typed in underlined upper-case twenty-two spaces from the top (and that’s the top of the page, not the top of the upper margin). At twenty-six lines appear the words An Original Screenplay followed two lines later by the words By [Name]. In the lower right-hand corner of the page should appear your name and address (unless you have an agent in which case their name and address appears instead, preceded by the note Literary Representation: ), singled spaced in upper- and lower-case. In the lower left hand corner of the draft number (first, second, ect.) should be noted in all in all capital letters and underlined. On the line below this should be the date upon which that draft was completed.

On the first page of the screen play itself should be the title in underlined bold type seven spaces from the top. Five spaces below that should be the words "FADE IN:" and two lines below that should be your first scene.

All dialogue, description, and narrative is single-spaced and written in upper- and lower-case letters.

Double space between two pieces of dialogue, narrative, description, or any combination of the previously mentioned elements.

When used in with dialogue character names are typed in capital letters at 40 picas.
11) Film Festivals


12) 1920-1930 was the decade between the end of the Great War and the Depression following the Stock Market Crash. Film theaters and studios were not initially affected in this decade by the Crash in late 1929. The basic patterns and foundations of the film industry (and its economic organization) were established in the 1920s. The studio system was essentially born with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars by the studio's production chief and in-house publicity departments. After World War I and into the early 1920s, America was the leading producer of films in the world - using Thomas Ince's "factory system" of production, although the system did limit the creativity of many directors. Production was in the hands of the major studios (that really flourished after 1927 for almost 20 years), and the star system was burgeoning. from here...
13) Glossary of Film Terms