Inspiration is waiting to meet you around some corner, on your personal film adventures. Look at this Galapagos Terrapin showing us how to go forward without fear, how to be following only one’s own nature. [shot on HERO3 GoPro, Islas Galapagos, 2013]
Do you remember the first time you ever felt inspired? What happened?
Pope Benedict XVI resigned today, and the film Habemus Papam [We have a Pope] by Nanni Moretti immediately came to mind. Habemus Papam is a farce about the human limits of a holy man, who succumbs to the dilemma: to be or not to be Pope? The film screened at the 2011 Cannes Festival, to mixed reactions. Fact and fiction don’t seem so far apart. What other movies have predicted the future?
Resources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/13/cannes-2011-review-habemus-papam
I was introduced to Nanni Moretti as a kid in Rome, Italy. My history teacher at the “Alfieri” middle school was the austere Mrs. Barbieri, Moretti’s aunt. She spoke a few times in passing about her teenage nephew Nanni and his attempts at making a super8 feature film. History proved her right: today, Nanni Moretti’s early pictures stand as masterful low budget debuts. Films made by young filmmakers about the pains of being young people are still not common today, despite the lower costs of digital film.
You can see some clips here (Italian only)
“Io sono un autarchico” 1977 (“I am Self-Sufficient”)
“Ecce Bombo” 1978 (…)
Both films have vision, personality and an in-your-face – uncompromising desire to mix open wounds and a pinch of salt. Moretti cracked a small opening in the italian film traditions. He appeared on scene and never left, without dominating it, but with an impossible-to-ignore brutally honest take on paradoxes and contradictions of human nature: a dark self-criticism blended with utopian optimism about politics, love and family. Every Nanni Moretti film is an unsentimental drop into the bloody battleground of hypocrisy we call “middle-class life”.
I recently spent some time in the Yasuni region, in the Amazon. We could start to learn some tips & tricks from the plants and animals in the jungle. Each has an organic solution to is basic needs: plants need space to grow high and get more light. Animals need to reproduce. The story of nature is an un-sentimental cycle of survival efforts.
Look at this post on organic packaging from Evocative via GOOD.is
http://www.good.is/posts/mushrooms-based-packaging-and-designing-a-circular-economy
The Cinemahead logo is 12 years old. I made it with Alessandro Savoldi, creator of Talento Naturale. We had no specific symbol or metaphor in mind when we designed it, other than a modular logo for dynamic uses, project to project.
The morphed one you see here a is from a 2007 short film title sequence [Scratch] made by motion graphics artist Finn Deivert.
By now, you’re probably used to seeing Facebook “LIKE” buttons attached to content all over the Internet. The team behind CentUp wants to take that concept and monetize it — giving money to the people who create content as well as to charities. A few cents per person for a given blogpost can really add up when you think how popular some content gets. A $20 contribution earns you 2,200 cents for when the product launches!
CentUp is an intentionally simple button that lives next to all kinds of web content. It lets people toss a few cents at blog posts, photos, videos, and songs they really love. The kicker? Half that money goes to charity.
Click here to find out more about this project at indiegogo.com!
This still by Dick Blau [Milwaukee, WI 1995 ] is a peak into the stop-motion animation process of “The Twinkie Movie”, a film by Chris Smith (in the foreground, to the right, by the 16mm Bolex). I [Daniel Aleg] am the head on the top left, moving the conveyor belt in the back, through a wall of Twinkie boxes. Chris’s awesome idea was this: Twinkies have souls, and they try escaping from the distribution chain in a quest to return to Twinkie-Land, far away in the desert. The story had won a funding competition from Hostess and became the official celebration of the 60th product anniversary. The shoot took place in the glorious Kenilworth building in Milwaukee. It was my first week in town.
Watch the Twinkie Movie here
The final product shows why Chris Smith later emerged as a unique cult-filmmaker: he is a cinematic wonder, a Mozart of film. His working is like thinking directly in film form, ideas in action without language or symbolic translation. He often skips the script phase all together to shoot simple stories, using simple story structures but extraordinary characters. One example of his risky but inimitable low-budget approach is his first live action feature “American Job” –http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112345/ – Shot during one summer mostly as a solo-crew, the story was a simple masterpiece: a midwestern kid needs a job, but he can’t keep a job for the life of it. So he tries a sequence of low-level repetitive, demeaning, mind-numbing jobs (the ones that require “teamwork”).
I was happy to find “American Job” on several “best ever” lists. But the most famous cult-film Chris made, he made with Sarah Price – also from our UWM Film class: “American Movie” – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/?ref_=sr_1 with Mark Borchardt and assorted other Midwest phenoms. American Movie won Sundance (as a doc) and was picked by Sony Classics for theatrical and DVD release. It has become the narrative of record in the meta-cinema doc genre (films about people making films). Mark Borchardt – who went on to more “Late night with David Letterman” fame, had – during the shooting of “American Movie” a brief part in my own meta-cinema film “Czar Of Make Believe”, in which he played himself, a cinematographer on a low budget set, and on which Chris graciously helped with some lighting.
So this picture from my mentor Dick Blau means a lot to me. Dick and the filmmakers on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) faculty made our Film Department the best “worst-kept” secret among small film schools in the country. And the motto “we keep the school out of your filmmaking” is unforgettable. It was life-changing to be part off our graduate-school class at UWM. The name Milwaukee-Wood was coined by an indie magazine after “American Movie” won best doc at the Sundance Festival. You look up what year…
I like this French Poste ad, where reality and dream melt into one space. It’s not only about the basic difference between the material and the abstract, but also about how in the cinematic experience opposite dimensions and feelings can – convincingly and inseparably – coexist.
I posted this Dave McClure tech talk because the strategies for new companies and those for innovation films aremore similar than you would think. If you are making a film that has (really) never been made before, you will need to find, attract and retain your crowd. Plus Dave is a funny speaker.
Startup Studios -> users = audiences
Infographic by: Wistia
The Doc.Mob manifesto is short and simple, just like the film-making principles it proposes to young mobile documentarists.
