Making A Scene: 11 Performances

The New York Times asked oscar winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to direct 11 scenes (or rather: vignettes) with outstanding actresses. The result is really great. Here you can watch the Making Of of the shortfilm project, that was produced for the New York Times film issue. And here is an article about the future development of cinema.

What is a scene?

One of my script consulting teachers, Don Bohlinger, professor at the USC film department, taught me this: “Each scene is either a chase or an escape.” It is not only true for scenes with actual chases in action movies, but for basically every scene with more than one characters in it, and it is even true for scenes with a …

Why Do You Write Strong Female Characters?

Recently I had a discussion with a guy. He thought it was not important to “gender” the German language according to male/female expressions. (Maybe this is hard to comprehend in English, so here is an explanation). Anyways, the guy said it is all about mutual respect. While I consider this important as well, I still think that we should use …

A Childhood Movie

Bastian’s Father: I got a call from your math teacher, yesterday. She says that you were drawing horses in your math book. Bastian: Unicorns. They were unicorns. Bastian’s Father: What? Bastian: Nothing. When “The Neverending Story” hit the movie theaters, I was almost 12 years old. I saw the movie several times and read everything I could get hold of. …

SOURCES 2: Lectures

At the Sources 2 workshop I attended in October, Michael Seeber held a wonderful lecture about keeping your ego out of the mentoring process (at least this was the core of the speech in my opinion). The title was “Yang-Shan Meets San-Cheng Or The Art Of Mentoring”. You can download it here, next to a lot of other interesting lectures …

Storytelling And Advertising: Skype

In the future I am going to write more about storytelling as such, and also about cross media storytelling. This will include branded content and branded entertainment. This is the first example: Sarah is born with an incomplete left arm. Sarah’s mum starts looking for children with a similar problem on the interne, and she finds Paige. The girls start …

Book Review: On Directing Film

While discussing our favorite scriptwriting literature on Facebook with some friends, I remembered that I wrote a long review about David Mamet’s book “On Directing Film” back in February 2013 for the newsletter of the Association Of Film- And TV Script Consultants (VeDra). This is the article:   The moments that shifted my perspectives on screenplays as a script consultant …

Viennale ’13: The Act Of Killing

THE ACT OF KILLING by Josh Oppenheimer is a159 minutes long examination of perpetrators boasting about their killings. And it is one of the most powerful documentaries that I have seen in a long time. The movie is about the men who killed more than 100.000 “communists” during the Sumatra massacres in 1965 (I have put communists in quotes because …

Viennale ’13: Gold

Only few of my friends liked Thomas Arslan’s last movie IM SCHATTEN (IN THE SHADOW). I did, and somehow I did not mind the long scenes where almost nothing happens. So I was looking forward to seeing GOLD, because I was eager to know how a genre movie would deal with slowness and gaps in the narration. On the surface …

Viennale ’13: Like Father, Like Son

Do you know that feeling when everything is happening at once? I mean, during the Viennale Film Festival. This year I had the presentation of Runtastic Story Running, and now I caught a nasty cold. But somehow I managed to watch three movies, so here is the first review. I was really looking forward to LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (SOCHITE CHICHI …