RISD on Set

Our 10 live-action film/video seniors at Rhode Island School of Design are busy shooting their projects locally and in New York, China, Poland, and the Philippines.  Pictured here are some of the cast and crew from Alexandra Pizzuti’s The Coop – a hilarious fantasy about a gay conversion camp where the teen campers get converted into chickens instead of straight people.

Other films include a moving story of two teen brothers trying to find their way alone after their mother dies; a supervillain movie pitting different forms of evil against one another; a semi-autobiographical narrative about a young Korean man trying to convince his Polish girlfriend’s Catholic parents to let her marry him; and a dream-like reverie about live streaming's impact on relationships.

It’s been a lot of fun co-teaching the Degree Projects workshop with veteran filmmaker Peter O’Neill.  Can’t wait for our show May 10-13!

The Fish is the Last to Discover Water

Last night I took my RISD video students hear superstar artist Alfredo Jaar speak at Brown University.  The room was packed with hundreds of students, professors, and artists - and it was dead silent from the moment Jaar began, with the question: "How can I make art when there is so much going wrong in the world?"

The audience hung off his every word as he moved through a very structured presentation detailing his many large-scale works responding to genocide, human rights abuses, and social injustice. In between, he repeatedly showed a series of images of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach - images that moved the world and inspired at least some countries to begin accepting the desperate refugees.  At the end of the talk, Jaar came back to these images to emphasize to us how very much an image can create an impact.  When asked what he thinks of art that does not take on pressing social issues ("art for art's sake"), he responded that he thinks ALL art is political.  All art makes a statement about that artist's view of his or her society.

Jaar often takes years to get to know the context of the culture and society where he is producing a work.  At the same time, he mentioned the privilege one has as an "outsider" to a situation, referring to the proverb "The fish is the last to discover water."

My students and I found Jaar and his work super inspiring. What a great opportunity to hear from this genius first-hand.

Camera Format Workshop

I had loads of fun today doing a camera format workshop with my Intermediate Video class at Rhode Island School of Design. We shot video on six different cameras ranging from tiny consumer cameras to large-sensor cinema cameras.  I was amazed at how much the GoPro Hero can do for just $400 (including the ability to monitor etc. from a cell phone using a free ap) and how beautiful the Black Magic Cinema camera's images are... I guess I see what all the hype is about!

Auditions for RISD Student Films

We are holding auditions tonight for my Intermediate Film students at Rhode Island School of Design. I am excited to have Casting Director Annie Mulhall of LDI Production Services coming to talk to us about how to get the most out of the audition and to help us run the audition.

My eight students are each making their own film, in 16mm. Shooting in film makes scripting, casting, and shoot planning all the more important.

Last semester as visitor came to RISD and told students he believed that casting is 95% of narrative filmmaking... maybe it's a slight exaggeration, but it is definitely a crucial part of carrying out a director's vision.

Field trip to Cinelab

I took my Intermediate Film students from RISD on a field trip to Cinelab today. We arrived to the old mill building in New Bedford, which looked exactly as I had imagined over the past twenty-five years of working with them (remotely) as a student and teacher. I thought it would be a great opportunity for my students to see how their film is developed and printed - in one of only about a dozen or two motion picture labs still operating in the United States.

Brad Chandler took us on a tour of the facilities. It was definitely cool to see all of the love that goes into film, and all of the highly engineered, vintage analog and mechanical equipment they have kept running for decades. But I couldn't help but feel a sense of the impending extinction of the medium... it feels like just a matter of time before all the companies give up the ghost. It will be a great loss. I have truly enjoyed immersing myself and students in the discipline and beauty of cinema.

I've put a lot of thought into the question of Why Film? lately... what are the types of projects that make sense to shoot in celluloid, in the age of infinite digital possibilities? Here's what I've come up with so far:

• You’re interested in the particular aesthetic - the grain, the color response, the beauty, thesoftness
• You like the physicality: chemical rather than digital process means something to you... holding the film in your hands
• You’re making a reference to photography
• You want to shoot black and white with full richness
• You're trying to evoke a historical period
• You’re referencing a film genre (such as Noir)
• You're incorporating archival material and generating your own to match
• You like the process or workflow, and want the discipline that the preciousness of film requires: you have to conceive of things ahead of time, it’s expensive so you have limited stock, you can’t see what you are getting.
• You’re interested in the chance factor (also double exposures) and happy accidents
• You’re going to work with the film itself (hand processing, optical printing, etc.)
• You’re going to do something conceptually with the medium (for ex., shooting the length of a film roll, double exposures, etc.)