Stylistic Studies: 8 1/2

Fellini's 8 1/2 was an incredibly inspiring film for the aspiring filmmaker. It's as if the film is being made as you watch it. We travel behind the director's eyes, into his dreams and nightmares, and out into his reality as he deals with the fact that he is unable to make any decisions...

General Update I

Holy Cow. I've been a very bad blogger of late. I've just been finding it difficult to find the time to write and even when I've had the time, I just, you know, haven't really felt that sort of "I really want to write about my experiences" feeling. But here I am today. I just got out of my Directing the Actor class with Anita Addison. Jon, a classmate, directed a scene from Neil LaBute's play "The Shape of Things". He chose a really tough scene: the two characters Evelyn and Adam are in bed, and he's falling in love with her and she's totally messing with his mind, and sexuality is at play, and need is at play, and power is at play. A lot of really hard, intimate stuff to take on. But, he and the actors did an admirable job. Through this class and these scenes, we've really been seeing how important the connection between the actors is to the reality of the scene. If the actor doesn't believe or connect to their partner in a real tangible way, then no matter how many actions we change or adjustments we give, the reality will not surface. Things like personalizations are really important. A personalization is the use of a person taken from the actor's real life and projected upon their acting partner. Anyway, the whole program puts an emphasis on solid, believable performance, and arriving at this goal, I'm finding is really, really challenging.

Other News: This weekend, we're shooting the first of our 2-minute movies. I'll be shooting mine Sunday from 1-5pm. As a class, we will be shooting 19 films over the next 9 days. My group will be shooting six, and over the course of the production of these six films, each team member will serve in six different capacities: Director of Photography, Assistant Camera, Assistant Director, Gaffer (this is the lighting guy for any of you out there who didn't know - I didn't know), Sound Mixer, and of course Director. We've all been working like mad on our storyboards, shot-lists and floor plans. My initial script called for 2 locations. I was strongly encouraged to narrow it down to one due to the limitations of our 4 hour shoots, so finally, yesterday, I arrived at a solution that will allow me to shoot in one location. And it actually improves the story. I'd rather not go into the plot of the film, titled Reset, as I will be posting it up here and on MandarinPictures.com as soon as it's finished (this should be sometime in in December).

The program has been pretty intense thus far, although honestly, not as completely exhausting as I feared it might be. My weeks are 6 days long and are composed of many workshops: cinematography, sound recording, screenwriting, working with actors, and to a lesser degree post-production. We're all starting to get a stronger grasp of on-set protocol, who does what, and how, and I think we are getting ourselves primed to the point that each team will be well-oiled, humming, filmmaking machines.

Stylistic Studies: The Servant

The Servant

Stylistic Studies: Badlands

Terrence Mallick's first film follows the lives of two cast abouts who go on a road-trip killing spree, looking for something fill the empty shells that are their lives. Mallick has only made 3 movies: Badlands, Days of Heaven (nothing to do with Days of Thunder), and The Thin Red Line. And each of these films are masterpieces of tone, rhythm, and performance.

Badlands is a very strange film because the characters Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) are so detached from their actions and consequences. As professor Rosen says, they are posing the entire time. They are imitating, more invested in their image than in their core.

I definitely recommend this film. While it was made on a really small budget, the style and the content marry perfectly.

Okay, there's my review. Here's hoping that Theron sees it soon and does it justice.

Stylistic Studies: Goodfellas

For the record, the second film we watched in stylistic studies was Scorcese's masterwork Goodfellas. I've now tried four or five times to start writing about it and I just can't seem to find anything worthwhile to say about this most worthwhile of films...