Category Archives: BLOG

Why? is this blog called “Movies Without Cameras” (part 1)

A good movie makes you think and feel, and puts you in touch with your self. A movie that can achieve all this without using cameras is even more worth watching.

The first time I saw a movie actually made without cameras was in 2001 when I bumped into an an animation by Norman Mc Laren, the canadian filmmaker who made most of his films by painting and scratching directly on celluloid strips.

You can see some of his original films and process here.

This one won an Academy Award in 1952, and was considered violent.

Neighbours by Norman McLaren, National Film Board of Canada

When you have time, come back to see this feature documentary on McLaren’s process

Creative Process: Norman McLaren by Donald McWilliams

(to be cont’d.)

is making a movie like playing in the band?

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My favourite filmmakers use the same crew for every film. Do yours?

For example, I am Thinking of John Cassavetes, actor -director who shot many of his films inside his own studio-house. He cast his wife Gena Rowlands and his best fiends in every picture.

Each new movie was a challenge to a familiar formation of artists. The scripts went directly to the actors, not to outside casting agents or on-shot producers. The movies were not easy to make and the edits ignored audience tastes. The film “Husbands” was cut long and much less of a comedy than the studio insisted on, costing Cassavetes and his “band” pretty pennies, but resulting in a one-of-a-kind film. (the plot? three friends go to a hotel in London after the funeral of their best friend in the U.S.)

But like a band that plays every new song different, John Cassavetes played film different. He changed the rules of a game that has today changed even more.

Especially if you are making short films, your filmmaking is already like playing in a band. An adventure with friends.

The name of the awesome band in the clip is VIDAR. Worth keeping an eye on.

The dark shines: Alumbramiento

“Alumbramiento”: a family faces the last night of its eldest member, showing their different ways of dealing with a life’s ending. In a surprising manner, overcoming fear and taboo, one of them will guide the passing” (from website, Arrivano i corti film festival, Italy)

This short by Eduardo Chapero-Jackson is a powerful almost static cinematic experience, simple yet unpredictable. The surprise, as the title suggests – delivers in a new light the big unanswerable question. Where does life go?

Now we’re in a car, slicing through a yawning sequence of on/off lamp-posts, flashing like low-energy question marks

It’s a  journey. No peace of mind. The man drives, focused, spent. Eyes gripping the road, his mind taking logical stabs at the scarcity of solutions

His woman sits by him, navigating feelings. She offers a hand but he refuses, they don’t hold together. Pain and fear creates distance, Uncured it can be fatal. The director frames them separately, two broken halves in silent visuals of the hallucinatory real.

The dawn is further away. Can life be fixed?

Scant dialogue, surgical.
120 seconds into the film we are immersed in an amniotic texture of lucid confused re-investigation of a dead-end relationships and memory.
(what city are we in? where are they going? who is sick?)

A dark bedroom engulfs and suppresses our resistance. We witness magnetized, polarized spaces. Bare practical lights. Devastating narrative undercurrents: life is weaker or stronger, uglier or more beautiful when death arrives announced? We spend ten minutes in this bedroom. It feels like forever.

The forces of life assemble around each other’s weakening pulses, matching optimism against pessimism. “She will make it. She always makes it”.

The son-who-is a-doctor directs a nurse in the technical requirements of tonight’s pain-aversion attempts. He tries to appear in control as his woman observes. Cutaway characters come to life as pairs of silent eyes.

The old woman on the deathbed: childish, angelic. Wrapped in breathing tube and coughing all she seems to have left inside, with resistence. Time and place is now, morphine. Sister morphine.

In “Alumbramiento” the passing on of the old mother is a childhood song, not the end of the story. The doctor’s wife now replaces human logic with a peaceful caresse and a simple imperative: – Breathe, you did well in life. Just breathe.” She removes all power from the predictable. Two plain beats open “Alumbramiento” to emotional heights: fear becomes love, shared experience, forgiveness, of life as it was. As it is.

Eduardo Chapero-Jackson is the director of “Alumbramiento”, it means in Spanish both “illumination” and “delivery”.

Gracias, Eduardo. Looking forward to working with you some day.

/ daniel alegi

This txt article appeared in full length in “P.O.V.” A Danish Film Studies publication edited by Richard Raskin, now online as Short FIlm Studies.

The OpenWritersRoom at BBC – until 3.28.2013

You know how, well, access for writers is still kind of a problem? You write the script and it takes 2 years and nobody loves you anymore and all the lost sleep and still you can’t get good readers you can trust, industry folks who care about your work?

In the US you have to find an agent who guarantees that :

a) your script is not stolen, “plagiarised” or “inspired” by someone else’s.
b) can get into a decent pitch meeting (executives are always in a hurry).

In the UK the BBC has re:opened the writersroom doors again!

Here is what you do:

1. Find your masterpiece from last year. (It’s holding up the blue chair)
2. GO in to BBC and plop your script on the pile, digitally speaking.
3. Relax. You got nothing to lose.

What? you don’t believe it?

Real experts will read it, merit will shine, and the bells may toll for you.

go to the BCC.co.uk site or get more info at the awesome mediamuppet.co.uk

if you need to do a rewrite, or your movie was about phone booths and polaroids, stop in our twitter @cinemahead.

Dust dust off those rusty scenes just one more time. Let them shine!

Free Scene Feedbacks from the cinemahead forum You got it, free script consulting until, well, April st1 2013.

God save the green [film tour]

GOD SAVE THE GREEN is on a GREEN TOUR in ITALY:
A film by Michele Mellara & Alessandro Rossi

The full schedule for this growing film event is planted on:
www.godsavethegreen.it

The GREEN TOUR OPENS in:
Bologna 7 al 13 marzo Cinema lumiére:

and is in Rome @

Roma Casa del Cinema:
20 marzo ore 19:15
21 marzo ore 18:00
23 marzo ore 18:00
24 marzo ore 16:30

www.mammutfilm.it

Learn code, learn story. Get under the hood, kids.

I never thought I would be posting Bill and Zuck bragging about their early coding experiences, but here I deny it and do it. Why? Because I too started to code as a kid in 1980, in school, in Naw Haven, Connecticut. I wrote a program in BASIC, called “2 minute football”, with my older brother Greg. A player had only two minutes to come back from 9 points down and win. No graphics at all. Just a number matrix and a flashing ball.

Then as a freshmen in college I coded in Assembler language and Pascal. I made a Cat & Mouse graphical video game that challenged me more than 4 years of latin in greek in high school. Solving problems for credit, what a blast. I went to work for IBM and for 3 years sold software solutions. With the money I shot my first films. What I knew as “Problem Solving”, I began to call… “Conflict”.

I love Coding because it’s problem solving in a controlled environment. It’s logical (plan, design) , abstract (math) and narrative (code begins and ends, like a story). But Code serves another primary purpose, learning form your own mistakes, debugging your own thinking process. Coding allows to do stuff we just could not do before. Coding empowered me with new knowledge and experience. And now that film is digital, Code and Story go even more together.

Thanks to Code.org for activating the EDU button in the global algorithm, and for joining two key pieces of the puzzle: kids and problem solving.

Let’ fit more puzzle pieces together.

.Danny
CINEMAHEAD

http://www.code.org

Academy Award for “Searching for Sugarman” (sweden)

The Swedish documentary “Searching for Sugarman” won an Oscar today, and I am both grateful and overwhelmed.

I am grateful for the film itself, a simple piece about a one-of-a-kind life-journey. Sugarman” is an unlikely hero who makes a unique personal choice revealing not only his own true nature, but also ours.  The film shines a  light on the unanswered dilemmas we all must face: who are we and what is our purpose in life?

I am overwhelmed with honoring and congratulating Kaj Ivanovic who took the credit as post-production colorist [Chimney Pot post-house, Stockholm] Kaj  helped turn diverse found-footage materials into an academy-award winning aesthetic in support of an unforgettable narrative.

Kaj has been part of the Cinemahead family since 2004. He brought to life the first Karlstad film workshop series (with Daniel Wirtberg, Jonas Bergergård, Sara Broos, Jenny Jansdotter and others).

Congratulations Kaj!