Tom Ramcigam (magicmarmot) wrote,
Tom Ramcigam
magicmarmot

Notes from waking up too early:

Love does not come in your mailbox.

That's the creepy old guy from two doors down.

Dreams about living in a big apartment complex that turned out to be filled with student filmmakers. I was running a workshop on filmmaking in the common area, kind of an outdoor porch area. One of the girls was asking me about titles, and had the words Boggy, Creek, Good on the page, and was making a film called The Legend of Boggy Creek. When I woke up, I googled it, thinking that there was a recent film being made by that name, and lo and behold, I found a total stinker from 1972.

It did add a couple of branches to my filmmaking curriculum though:

1.) Shooting with a still camera
In this segment, you don't have access to a motion-picture camera, but you have a digital still camera. You have to make a movie of seven minutes or less in length. Note that even if the digital camera has a movie mode, you can't use it.
This is ultimately very flexible since it opens up to a wide variety of formats from stop-motion to slideshows.

2.) No edits
In this segment, you have a motion picture camera (film, video, or what have you), and you have to shoot a short movie in one take. No edits, including in-camera edits, but you can do as many takes as you need to. Again, seven minutes max.
That ultimately leads into:

3.) in-camera edits
The very first special effects ever created for films used in-camera editing. It's extremely primitive by what we can accomplish today, but it is still an extremely useful tool. It focuses a lot of thought onto getting it right, because you only get one chance. Realistically, this is a CUT TO transition, and can be used as such, but I don't want to limit the thought to just that.

There's more stuff at an intermediate and master level, but this struck me as being a really good intro to the technical elements of storytelling in a visiokinetic medium.
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