Novice Filmmaker

I liked the animation of Martha Colburn. It seemed like she cut out her animations with construction paper, stitched them together and created something amazing. My favorite piece of hers was the Pug the dog taks about sex education, it gave a lighthearted yet informative view on sex education which was in my opinion more accurate than the videos we were shown as children. Marlon Riggs had some amazing pieces with him backing his films with his black and gay pride. The biggest take away from his pieces was his instructions on using snaps to express emotion. I've taken his instructions literally as I now have snap off with my friends when words escape us.  I liked that Guy Madden took an ode to older styles of cinematography and film making to make his pieces. The use of German Expressionism was obvious but it seemed to fit his surrealist vision. I was confused about his fascination with Winnipeg but I could see that through his pieces Winnipeg was home to him and he was very f...

I absolutely loved watching everyone's self reflection. I liked how vastly different in style everyone's pieces were. Each one I felt like was a true reflection of the creator. With each piece I saw the creator put their true thoughts and feeling into the idea of "Who am I?"    When I was shooting my first problem I had to learn was how to hold the camera so it doesn't throw my subject out of frame (Which happened a lot!) But once I figured out how to do that I forgot how to walk without running into everything. The final trick was creating genuine moments, some people would just instantly be saying some thing and I scrambled to get as much as I could out of it. Some would be completely out of character as soon as I started recording. My uncle who is a very loud man would almost never say a word whenever I was filming.    My biggest wish was that I wish I had more time to shoot. There were so many more people and things I wanted to try to shoot but w...

Cucalorus was a lot cooler than I ever thought it would be. I spent a majority of my time there backstage as a screen coordinator. This was how I ended up meeting sever different filmmakers and got to talk with them about their work. The hardest part about the entire weekend was finding Matt Malloy. He was a reoccurring emcee for the festival and he was famous for disappearing and reappearing. But what made this frustrating is that I could never find him when I needed him but if I was at the bar after a screening I would run into him. I started out with Mapplethorpe,  a narrative film about the life and death of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It was very stylistic with many montages that lead up to the actual photographs taken by Mapplethorpe. Next I watched probably one of the best films all weekend, Lords of Chaos. The film had that perfect mix of horror, drama and comedy to make a highly satisfying film. I watched this film with several classmates which was nice compare...

So my idea involves taking several pov shots about various people and events in my day to day life. My intention is to show myself through interactions of some of my closest friends to random people I happen to meet while working on my project. I want to string all of the shots with matches on actions so all the shots flow together. I have no intention of scripting scenes because I want the scenes to be realistic and then I can throw them all together in post and create something with all the footage I have. My interntion is to show myself through interactions with other people. My working title is "An Hour to Kill."

Before this project all I knew about editing photographs was lectures from pack about various charts and what they show. Editing the photos in light room allowed me to see the charts that I recognized from class. With this in mind I knew what a "normal" photograph was supposed to look like, all I had to do now was figure out what I wanted it to look like. Unlike how I feel about permere pro, light room felt very intuitive where I could figure out what I wanted to do with in a few minutes and didn't randomly lose all my work during the process by some error I made. The hardest part of this project would have to be keeping the experimental vibe, many of my first idea were linear and I had to break away from that mentality. 

My first and foremost intention is to not get overwhelmed in this festival. There are so many events to go to so will need to plan on going to specific events. I plan to speak with filmmakers after their screening to talk about aspects of their film that I liked. Outside of interviewing filmmakers of films that I saw I also wanted to get familiar with various produces from films I have and haven't seen an just get a better feel for what its like. to work in the field.