To steal from the real estate playbook: there are just three secrets for making a memorable smartphone documentary: character, character, character. Australian filmmaker Andrew Robb demonstrates this wisdom in “Tofu Man,” which won Second Place in the 2016 Mobile Film Festival. The movie’s title and the opening sequence make us think we’re going to get a lesson on turning soybeans…
read more →Movies are the most complex art. They combine actions, characters, places, talk,, things, plot, sounds, and light. The challenge arising from this richness is finding coherence. In his classic book The Art of Dramatic Writing Lajos Egri advises that writers start with the theme. By theme, Egri means the one big idea that audiences will remember. While Egri’s focus…
read more →The famous call—”Lights! Camera! Action!”—reveals the essence of movies: action! A movie without action is just a slide show. Audiences expect movies to move. But while Hollywood has conditioned us to expect explosions, battles, rampaging dinosaurs and other big actions, there can be delight in capturing subtle actions. As Jamie Fuller demonstrates in “Gloomy Day,” a filmmaker with a good eye can…
read more →In the 1960s, the “experimental movie” genre suggested something artsy or weird. One thinks of Andy Warhol’s “Empire,” a black & white film, running 8 hours and 5 minutes, showing the Empire State Building—in slow motion! Audiences did not stretch around the block. How different from Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s “Hardcore Henry,” an action picture whose…
read more →We’ve all seen documentaries that record subjects telling their stories in quiet locations, for example, an office or living room. That’s the easy way to do it. But it’s not necessarily the best. For a creative alternative, consider Camilo Estrada’s “The Bahian,” an entry in the 2015 Original iPhone Film Festival. This four-minute smartphone video biography, shot with…
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