Take the Survey: 50 States, 50 Filmmakers
The United States of America I’ve been looking over Ted Hope’s blog lately and one thing he keeps returning to is the idea that in order for cinema to be truly free (i.e., liberated), we have to do our part to help film culture. I agree. That’s part of what this blog has always been about. One of the reasons I began this blog was to champion filmmakers working regionally. But now I’d like to undertake a concrete project spec

Uwe vs. Indies
As far as boxing writing goes, it’s not quite Ring Lardner, but Karina Longworth’s “Uwe Boll and Tim League Fix The Falling Sky With Physical Violence” is still worth a read.

Final Cut Pro tips: Here Comes Mr. Jordan
I started noodling with Final Cut Pro soon after it came out (ten years ago!) and taught myself how to use it. By taught, I mean that I learned to hack my way around and accomplish what I needed. But it wasn’t pretty or fast. After a few years, I really started feeling the limitations of my abilities, so I decided to dig into some tutorials. For whatever reason — probably because I’d seen a few for free online — I chose Larry Jordan’s Lynda.com video tutorials. These helped me immensely with everything from media management tips to techniques that greatly reduced the time I’d spen

Congrats to Rooftop Films Filmmakers’ Fund Recipients
Rooftop Films today announced the four recipients of their 2009 Filmmakers’ Fund Short Film Grants. It gives me a lot of pleasure to spread the word about this because, in addition to being someone whose career benefitted greatly from a short film grant, I happen know two of the recipients. Recipients and summaries of the projects: ROOFTOP FILMS AND THE CHICKEN & EGG FUND SHORT FILM GRANT + Sara Zia Ebrahimi: Norman Schwartzkopf Made Me Gay ROOFTOP FILMMAKERS’ FUND SHORT FILM GRANTS Underwritten by Cinereach + Moon Molson: Crazy Beats Strong Every Time + James M. Johnston: Knife

For Memories’ Sake, pt. 3: Organizing Content
Once I had completed the most basic research and transferred Angela’s movies to video, I had to figure out how to keep track of the content of her collection. Though I only later learned about the importance of metadata and the availability of online archivist classes, I began simply and naively with a system that has served me well. I created a basic Filemaker Pro database with screengrabs from the home movies and just enough data to let me quickly find movies by persons featured, keywords, and/or