Welcome to Coffee and Celluloid, a blog dedicated to the fine craft of filmmaking from the point of view of a film school student. I realize I just jumped into the action, so it's about time for a recap of the story so far. I'm a first year in film school -- one of...
Film School
My Life For The Next Two Years
I know I poorly explained the film projects we make during our film school experience before, but I think I have a better idea of how everything fits into the next two years (my class, the first year BFAs, graduate Fall 2008). F1 - Fall 06 - These are done, as I've...
What We Watch
Each semester we have a Film Genres class which is basically a screening of a film selected by a different faculty member each week. The following is an incomplete list of the films we watched (I can't remember all the films) with some links to the complete film,...
Drawing The Line
So as noted here before, and it's a pretty big distinction for how films are crewed and scheduled at The Film School and in the real world, jobs are classified as Above-the-Line (ATL) and Below-The-Line (BTL). It's not too hard to remember the difference. Writers,...
On the Road Again
Some back story: So the other two members in the Doc group are focusing on the Patriot Guard and Celebrity Impersonators, while I'm doing Cubicles. The Patriot Guard is a group of motorcyclists that go to the funerals of Iraq soldiers per the family's request to...
Documentary Tools 2.0
I'm a big Web 2.0 fan, so I unsurprisingly relied heavily on various tools to aid in research, notetaking, and organization to manage filmming the Cubicle Documentary. Here's a list of some of the tools that greatly helped me out, and others that I tried but didn't...
More Bits of Interestingness
There's been a lot of talk about the RED camera, and I've been kind of skeptical of it, but this sample clip from a film shot by Peter Jackson looks pretty amazing (via FreshDV). Supposedly the Film School is supposed to be ordering some, but I'm sure by the time that...
Jumping Above the Line
With Thesis films right around the corner, I'm about to begin my first job in an ATL position - Art Director (a job that I didn't realize was ATL). Basically I assist the Production Designer with whatever they need. The film I'm working on is pretty contemporary - no...
First Director’s Prep
Just finished preparing for the Production Design aspect of the Thesis film this weekend. I'm a NY Times Sunday subscriber, so basically I've been saving all the NY Times Magazines knowing down the line they'll come in handy for reasons like this. So preparing was...