bitdepth

Top Ten Films of 2008

2008 was another good year for film with many solid entries and it was probably one of the easier years for me to come up with a list of favourites for the year and to carefully consider what should and shouldn’t be on the list. Here in roughly descending order are my top ten films: Un Conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale), Synecdoche, New York, Visioneers, Frozen River, Tell No One, Rachel Getting Married, Be Kind Rewind, Man on Wire, Milk, and Slumdog Millionaire. If there are any themes that run through the films maybe it would be love, family, relationships and obsession, which is the stuff our lives are made of. The films looked and sounded gorgeous and were filled with beautiful moments and great performances. Read on for the reasons why these are my favourite films of the year and for the runners up that almost made my list. Continue…

December 30, 2008 2008, filmmaking, lists, top10

Atlantic Film Festival 2008

Another year, another Atlantic Film Festival, with this one being the 28th. This time I think that I got the balance just right and ended up seeing more films and socializing just the right amount. Overall the lineup this year was more consistent with the films being all generally good without a wide range between great and not so great. If I count the short films, I was able to see 68 films in total (with 15 of the films being features). Continue…

October 11, 2008 aff2008, festival, filmmaking, halifax

Back to School

The first week of school is done at the Nova Scotia Community College where I teach in the Screen Arts program. It is always a busy and exciting week with the incoming learners getting up to speed and the returning filmmakers who are beginning their final year. Luckily I’ve been teaching for a while now and it gives me the opportunity to build upon what I’ve done and improve things every year.
Last year we started back in the new Waterfront Campus in Dartmouth along with all of the challenges of a new building that hadn’t been filled with people yet. This year everything is pretty much up and running smoothly, so the focus is on teaching and learning much more than figuring out how to connect things and which classrooms are on what floor.
I really need to have a structure with things organized, so I was very happy to have the whole term organized with Basecamp. Each course that I teach is project and all of the assignments, exercises and quizzes are milestones. In my Google Calendar I subscribe all of my Basecamp projects, so the deadlines all show up on my calendar. Each of the evaluative tools are stored as Writeboards, which lets me revise them before I lay them out in Pages in an assignment template that I’ve created. For support material I usually will have some presentations in Keynote (and I try to make things as visual and not text-heavy as possible) along with handouts or pointers to web resources.
For each class I have lesson plan that I create in OmniOutliner Pro that keeps me on track as I have tendency to drift. But I usually have a detailed course outline that breaks down all of the major topics as well as any readings. I’ll print out the outline that keeps me on track and I keep the paper that I use organized in file folders (green for year 1, red for year 2, and purple for the class that has both year 1 and 2). Every year a new Moleskine pocket notebook is used for notes and a pocket agenda (that is red) is a paper backup for my schedule (which I copy in to it from my Google Calendar).
With the systems that I have in place now it keeps me focussed on teaching and less on figuring out what I need to do. By having a solid support structure it opens the possibilities of improvisation as even if I get completely lost, there is an underlying structure and flow to the term that I can always fall back on. It’s fun to teach after you have everything in place.

September 7, 2008 filmmaking, learning, me, nscc, teaching

Community

I’ve been lucky to be part of many different communities in my life. At the time you don’t necessarily think of them as communities as they just seem to be the cool people that you are hang out with. One of the first communities that I was involved with (and I’m still connected to) was the NB Filmmakers’ Co-operative in Fredericton. I was born and grew up in Fredericton and when I found the coop I felt like I belonged. There wasn’t a lot that I had to explain why I was there and we shared a lot in common. We also made films and that becomes addictive. Filmmaking and community are closely connected.
Technology has seemed to also play a role in the communities that I’ve been involved with. Film is built around cameras and tape recorders and it is filled with specialized terminology like the NPR, the Bolex, the Nagra, and the Steenbeck. I love those things and for members of the filmmaking community they mean something. But filmmaking isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about the equipment. It’s about the stories and the people. That’s what keeps you there.
With my use of email via the universities where I studied I was able to connect with other communities thanks to that technology. As with many new communication media a lot of time and space was taken up with discussions of the technology itself and what it meant. Email was more complex then and numbers played a far bigger part in what you did online. I still have the black notebook where I wrote down the addresses that I used to connect to other systems. But what was amazing and fun and addictive were the connections that I could make with other people. I could be in touch with people from all over the world and we could discuss things and share our interests. Another place where I didn’t have to explain why I thought that this was so amazing.
But as a new technology becomes more widely dispersed we grow accustomed to it and take it for granted. I don’t have to think about using email now, I just use it. That’s how I stay in touch with people and keep track of things. This blog is one extension of that. With bitdepth I try to keep it fairly original and think a bit more and not just post collections of links. I’m part of the blogging community, but I like reading and watching others more than putting a lot of stuff out. So while I’ve been part of this blogging thing for a while (bitdepth has been up for 2 1/2 years now!) and with the new Screen Arts site I’m over 100 posts, which is quite amazing.
One of the things that has prompted this more reflective post is the recent US election and the IRC chats that I’ve participated in with some bloggers that I’ve been reading for a while. Kevin Marks combined the log of one of the chats that David Weinberger set up with QuickTime and an MP3 of the debate and then I felt a bit more connected. Then on election night I was able to chat again and it was still snarky, but not as much fun (most of us in there would tend to the left side of the political spectrum) since things weren’t going the way that we had hoped. During that chat Halley mentioned about posting that day and I checked out her posts and they changed my perspective a bit as a bit more of the personal side started in to my consciousness. She had a health scare which is the big shift, but a smaller thing is that I realized that we both do the same yoga routine. It made me realize again that it wasn’t just technology or topics, but humanity that connected us. More cool people who were human and good and sharing part of themselves.
So we commiserated and the evening got a bit more depressing and many people had colds and everyone started drifting away. But even though I wasn’t in the best mood I was happy that I shared the experience with other people and I felt that I was part of a community and that made me feel pretty good.
Yesterday was a great day at work as well. I get to work with a very talented and committed person every day in teaching a group of very cool people who share our interest in film so I love going in every day. What made yesterday great was that I was able to have two guests in to speak about filmmaking. One of them was one of my oldest friends and the other was one of my newest friends. But both love making films and the day reminded me of why I love this stuff and why I do it. It’s about people and stories.
The other thing that prompted this is my latest obsession, which is Flickr! and how my use of that has meant that I haven’t been doing much in this space. I noticed today that I’ve uploaded 500 pictures since I’ve started, which I didn’t think that I’d do. The reason I’ve been there so much is the sense of community that is there. It’s not sharing the photos, but it’s a way to communicate visually and get another perspective as you get to see how people see the world and the people around them. So it was appropriate that some of the first images that I uploaded to Flickr! were from a workshop that I took at the Film Coop in NB recently. The more recent pictures are from where I’m working now in Halifax. I was wondering if there were many other people taking pictures in Halifax and then one of those strange connections happened as I found through the tags that AKMA, who I occasionally read and who was in the election chats had been in Halifax a few months ago and had taken pictures there. So my communities had connected again and that made me think about how great it is that we can connect and share no matter what is happening in the world. We’re part of a virtual community, but there are real, live humans at the other end of these electronic connections. It’s about people and sharing and that’s why I love making films and why I’m glad that I have this space to share this.
I think that I’ve made up for the lack of recent posts… thanks for sticking with me!

November 5, 2004 community, filmmaking, flickr, fredericton, halifax, irc, nbfilmmakerscoop, screenarts, technology

Bolex Workshop

Bolex Last weekend I went up to Fredericton for a two-day workshop at the NB Filmmakers’ Coop. It was the Bolex: 2 Day Filmmaking Boot Camp workshop taught by Chris Giles. It was a lot of fun and I learned things that I should have known a decade or two ago. The Bolex is a 16mm motion picture film camera that was first introduced in the 1920s and it is still being manufactured! The coolest part of most Bolex cameras is that they operate using a spring-powered motor, which means that you never have to worry about batteries. In the two days we went through all of the aspects of the camera and lenses, came up with films to shoot, and then loaded the camera and shot the films! The Bolex takes 100 foot rolls of film, which translate into 2 1/2 minutes or 4000 frames. We shot black & white reversal film, which means that there is no workprint and what you get back can be projected. The film is off to the lab now and so I don’t know if it came out or not, but that’s part of the excitement of shooting film. I shot a hybrid stop-motion walk around the block with Cathie LeBlanc as my partner and soon I’ll find out if the exposure and focus was sharp or not. The difference between shooting film and video is quite striking. I haven’t shot film in a long time and I’m always pleasantly surprised at the different perception of time when you shoot film. Shooting film makes you think more carefully about what you are rolling on as with the Bolex you only have 2 1/2 minutes total footage (if you shoot at 24 fps) and can’t run that long on a wind… so you have to have a good idea of what you will have before you shoot. But it frees you up in other ways as you start and then feel the rush of adrenaline as the film runs through the camera.

May 18, 2004 16mm, bolex, filmmaking, nbfilmmakerscoop, workshop

Film Co-op Spring Social

Friday was a busy day for me. I started out the day with the last day of the term with a wave of assignments coming in to me that now need to be marked. Then my friend Errol and I drove up to Fredericton for the NB Filmmakers’ Co-op Spring Social. We didn’t tell anyone that we were coming, so it was a surprise when we showed up. It was a great night with many old friends that I hadn’t seen for years and lots of memories. The party had a wide range of members from over the years, from one of the founding members to some of the newest members. I started hanging around the co-op in the early 1980s, but at the party I saw my original membership application which was dated August 28, 1985! So while I worked on some things before I joined, I officially joined then. That’s still a long time! I hope that I will be able to be around the co-op a lot more this year to catch up more with the current members and to see the stories that they are telling.

April 25, 2004 errol, film, filmmaking, fredericton, me, nbfilmmakerscoop

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