I love a good deep dive into a niche topic…
Writing
SO HERE’S THE PITCH: Guppies
We’ve had Jaws, we’ve had Piranha, now it’s time to get ready for… GUPPIES. So you know those spas where you can stick your feet in the pools and little fishies just eat all the dead skin off your toes? Well, one night, one of these spas has a terrible accident and someone dies after…Read more
The Oppenheimer script is disappointing (to put it politely)
So in film there is very little that can be described as objective, but the screenplay and screenplay format is one of them. What I think people don’t seem to understand is that the format and conventions of screenwriting are not without reason. A screenplay is at its core a functional document. There is a…Read more
Lesson from the film festival 4: a trope I think we should retire
We haven’t even made it through the submissions sent in for the early bird deadline and I have watched the same movie four times. Not because they were the same film submitted multiple times, but four films that each had nearly identical plots: a group of dysfunctional people must travel back to their hometown to…Read more
Lessons from the film festival 3: always put narrative over aesthetics
We live in a very visual world. People these days have been raised on a diet of visual content since birth, and we have an almost instinctual understanding of how visual compositions and editing is supposed to fit together. But we also live in a world with a rich history of different visual traditions, from…Read more
Lessons from the film festival 2: audio and sound design
True story time, buddies, circle up. Fun fact about myself, I do not handle ASMR-style audio well. The close-to-the-mic whispers, the tapping, plastic crinkles… no likey. It makes the underside of my skin itchy in a very real and very uncomfortable way. So, with that, let me set the scene: I am watching a festival…Read more
Lesson from the film festival 1: finish your movie
This should be obvious, right? Right? You should finish the thing before putting it out there. Who would do such a thing? Well… If I had a dollar for every time I had to get my heart broken by a compelling film that got interrupted by a card that said something along the lines of…Read more
Lessons I’ve learned from the film festival
For the last couple of years I’ve been an associate programmer for the Florida Film Festival. It is a great gift, because I get to study a wide array of films from all over the world. And while every film made is a miracle, every film is also a lesson. For the last three years…Read more
Public Domain Goodies: Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, by Harry Houdini
God bless Project Gutenberg, and all who maintain her. I’ve been doing some research for a project about fraud mediums and I came across a beautiful gem of a book. Harry Houdini wasn’t an outright skeptic in the internet, YouTube way that we think of today. He was open to being convinced of a life…Read more