Truth Takes Time short

This "motion picture book" was animated by Ellie Krnich and tells the story of a young trans woman. The music an the animation are lovely and its definitely worth a watch.

Tips from Raindance on writing shorts

Loving Stéphanie Joalland's article over at the Raindance website where she lays out the 7 rules for witing a good short film:

"A short film script can be a great calling card for a writer. Short films aren’t a lesser form of cinematic storytelling. In fact writing them requires the exact same skills as writing a feature length script – though on a smaller scale. Although TV broadcast opportunities may be limited, there are more and more outlets for these opportunities."

It's an ace read, check it out!

"Premier Automne"

Top 5 Pixar Shorts

 Feeling a lot of love for shorts recently and Pixar release a short film with every new theatrical release. I'm not too thrilled by the fact that a lot of the stuff they have lined up are sequels but we shall wait and see.

Anyways in celebration here are my 5 best Pixar shorts starting with:

Picture from here

Luxo Jr. (1986)

Movie Making Madames Part Four

Sometimes it can seem like all the films being churned out are either remakes or sequels. Hollywood can seem formulaic and narratively simplistic. Ever since movies began there have always been people who have wanted to try something different and so the independent film industry was born. It lacked the money and influence of mainstream film industries but it made up for that with maverick ideas and inventive ways of bringing them to life.

Picture from here 

Germaine Dulac did a bit of everything. She started her career as a feminist journalist before pursuing her passion for still photography that propelled her on to working as a film director, writer, producer and theorist as well as becoming the president of Fédération des ciné-clubs, a group dedicated to promoting up and coming filmmakers and teaching photography and film, putting many of her contemporary counterparts to shame.
Dabbling in both Impressionism and Surrealism, Dulac’s big successes in cinema such as The Seashell and the Clergyman and The Smiling Madam Beudet came before the advent of sound cinema and before Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’sUn Chien Andalou, arguably the most famous Surrealist film ever (If you’ve never heard of it is the film where Buñuel slices a woman’s eye open, it turns into the moon and he and Dali are monks… watch it).

After the introduction of sound Dulac’s career faltered and she spent the rest of her life making newsreels for Pathe and Gaumont. When she died it took three weeks and numerous re-writes before her obituary to be published, she was so controversial.

In the US, Maya Deren is the Grandmother of Indie film and the experimental director Stan Brakhage called her “the mother of us all”, “Us” being everyone who felt like giving the finger at narrative and stylistic conventions.

Image from here

I first encountered Maya Deren during my second year of university when our class was shown arguably two of her most famous short films, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which I later based my first solo project on and At Land (1944). Art films and experimental films usually get a bad rap outside of hard core film theorist circles because it can look like jumbled mess and overly pretentious. Deren thought of her films as visual poems, capturing fleeting emotions and states of being rather than events or characters. The films rely on striking images and haunting concepts to draw in the audience. Deren acted in her films but never credited herself, preferring to keep her characters as anonymous figures and her film crews were similarly simplistic. Deren worked on Meshes with only her second husband Alexander Hammid and a 16mm camera bought using inheritance money. Deren once claimed that “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick” and she was a fierce critic of the way she felt Hollywood was stifling creativity and diversity within American Cinema.

Tragically, Deren died in 1961 from malnutrition, possibly due to her drug use. A posthumous documentary was released in 1985 from footage Deren shot between 1947 and 1951 when she made multiple trips to Haiti. Divine Horsemen: the Living God’s of Haiti (1985) led to some criticizing Deren for leaving the avant-garde but Deren herself felt she needed to progress as an artist and Vodun traditions and rituals were fascinating to her. Her book of the same name is considered an important text on the subject. Sadly, Deren never completed the project and the last film released before she died, The Very Eye of Night (1958) gives us a glimpse at how her work could have unfolded.

Cross posted to Yellow Bunting

Life (especially work) has been a bit manic of late hence why there has been so little posting. My apologies for that and I can only say that things should become more regular after the christmas period!

Personal Hero: Alice Guy

Cross posted to Yellow Bunting

In the early years, when filmmaking was still new and being developed as an art form, there were more women working in the industry than there has ever been since. In fact less than 10% of film directors working today are women and that drops to 6% for Hollywood directors.

There has only been one woman in the history of cinema to own and manage a film studio and this was between 1910 and 1914. That woman was the Grandmother of narrative film, Alice Guy.

Born in France, Guy worked as a secretary for Léon Gaumont, a renowned photographer. Gaumont had made his own movie camera after a visit from Louis Lumière, one half of the Lumière brothers. Up until this point film had just been used as a device to document but Guy saw potential for something greater. She was allowed to experiment with camera as long as she didn’t neglect her work. What resulted was one of the earliest (if not the earliest, though it is hard to date these early films) examples of narrative cinema, a 50 second film titled La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy):

This was the first step in a career that saw Guy write, direct or produce over 700 films in 25 years, even when she was pregnant with her children she was still making 2-3 films a week. When titled La Fée aux Choux premiered Gaumont relieved Guy of her secretarial duties and put her in charge of his filmmaking division. She later established her own studio in New Jersey with her husband, Solax Studio, which at the time was one of the most powerful studios in the world.

However, history was not kind to Guy’s memory. The studio went bankrupt after her divorce and the rise of Hollywood as a more cost effective place to make films. The studio was auctioned off and Guy returned to France in 1922 but she never made another film despite the fact that she was beginning to venture into another fledgling medium – sound.  Gaumont made no mention of Guy’s role in developing his studio or even the medium itself when he wrote an account of his company in the 1930s despite Guy’s protestations. She was effectively edited out of the history of a movement she helped to kick-start. It even took until the 1950s for own country to honor her for her services to filmmaking with the Legion of Honor, France’s highest, non-military award.

Photo from here

Though she ceased making films, Guy continued to write about them and worked for International Film Service and we can only wonder at how she would have made use of the multitudes of technological advances that were introduced to the film industry after 1922.

Alice is Guy is an important figure in the early years of cinema not just because she is a woman but because the codes and conventions of cinema today have their beginnings in a whimsical experiment from a woman who realized before anyone else that a story could be told with a medium that many others thought would not see out a decade.

There are two kinds of people in this world...

From James Chapman

A further example of why Superhero films are awesome!

Hero Story was Film School Rejects's short film of the day on 1st August:

I love it. I love the gentle cheesiness and the obvious love the genre that Kaylon Hunt (who also play Neuro) has. Mostly I love the slightly DIY feel that still manages to retain classiness.

The film has its own site here complete with tonnes of behind the scene goodies!

88:88

I found this amazing short film today that I just had to share with you guys. It's shot beautifully in HD with very little dialogue but the cinematography and special effects are awesome! The film has a website here.

A charming little film to brighten your day!

Courtesy of Sean Mullen comes the Pixaresque The Artists. It is beautifully animated and wonderfully funny!

Shameless Self Promotion

This is My Sad Night:



It is indeed my student film! It was my final independent project and it is online for me to share with you!

Tim Burton: A Filmography

Hot on the heels of my Dark Shadows review from last month, I rediscovered this little gem of a film by animator and film maker Martin Woutisseth:

Echo Chamber

I'm a big fan of the TV Tropes website and they have just released the first two episodes of the second series of Echo Chamber, the show made by tropers for tropers.

Basically the story is this: A guy named Tom has been tasked with making videos about certain tropes (for those who don't know a tropes are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations"  (according to the website) for a mysterious employer. Along with his snarky producer Dana and his cloudcuckoolander cameraman Zack, he struggles to complete videos, the subject of which always seems to relate to whatever they are doing.

Show Within a Show is the first episode:

Obviously the show relies a lot on meta humour and reflexivity and is a must for anyone who has so much as glanced at the main site. I sat and watched all twelve episodes today and I am hooked. It's updating every Tuesday and Thursday and the videos can be seen here along with the relevant tropes!

Beautiful Student Film

Had to link to this lovely period drama. It was shot in only five days and it's a final year university project. Spread the love!

Sarah xo