Workshops today

Today was 2 workshops and a trip to the airport and no actual films. The workshops were very good though.

The first workshop was on personal documentary filmmaking. I almost skipped it because most of the time I hate personal documentaries. I don't just mean festival level films either, most distributed and funded ones also. I feel like people doing docs about themselves never seem to get enough perspective. But we went and I'm very glad we did. The presenter was Judith Helfand. She was showing and discussing her film A Healthy Baby Girl. The film was good, interesting, her experience as a case study for something much larger. And also she was a very good presenter. She was engaging, and interactive, and everyone in the room could hear her. She had a pretty good idea of what she wanted to talk about, while also being flexible enough to be responsive to her audience.

The second workshop was directing with James Mottern. He had a feature film play here a few years ago that I didn't see called Trucker, and he's just about finished shooting a film called God Only Knows starring Harvey Keitel, among others. His was interesting too. Much more: ok ask me some questions and I'll ramble on answering them. Good answers, interesting answers, didn't say anything that contracted what I learned from Jan. And led to a good discussion with Linda on the drive to the airport about how to apply what he was talking about to our own work.

Then I had to drive Linda to Providence for a 6:20 flight. I will miss her, but I've been meeting enough people that I don't expect I'll be uncomfortable going to events alone. Because of the airport run though I wasn't able to go to any of this evening's films. Well, I would have been too late back for the 7s and I'm a bit tired and didn't want to get home at midnight again so I skipped the 9s. Especially since there's a ton of things going on tomorrow so it'll be a long day if I can manage to keep my energy up.

Oh I had a lovely short conversation with another shorts guy just before the first workshop started. He said he was telling his wife about me this morning because he really liked Killer. He said it felt so natural it didn't feel like I had actors at all. Just like I had captured something really happening. I'm paraphrasing, but roughly that. It really made me feel good. Not that I was feeling bad or inadequate, but still, cool. Also he's a Boston filmmaker and his short was well done. Bonus. Networking is what we come here for.