Auditions

We put out a casting notice for all 5 of our short scenes. Well I was putting one together for mine and told the guys I'm booking a room and putting out a notice anyway so if you want in send me your summary and character breakdown. They all did because they're not stupid, I was doing a bunch of work for them. And I don't really mind since it was no more work than just doing it for myself.

But now I've realized that yes it is. Because I put my email as the contact and since we don't have the room reservation confirmed yet - I put in the request but I'm still waiting to hear - told them to let me know if they were  planning to come so I could tell them where once I know. And I still wasn't thinking that was going to be much. Well, the notice went out yesterday afternoon and so far we've got 22 people coming for a total of 10 roles.

I'm a little worried about our 3 hour block of time being good enough. We will need to be very organized on the day. And none of us have ever really done auditions before so we're all just faking it. I really hope that's going to be a topic of conversation in at least one of our classes this term.

Director vs Director of Photography

So this question got posed in my earlier post about the lack of women cinematographers:

hate to sound naive but... whats the difference between cinematographer and director? 

And answering it will also give me the chance to talk about my 4th class which I haven't mentioned yet which is Advanced Directing. I find it kind of entertaining that they call it Advanced Directing since none of us have had beginning directing. Unless they count all the stumbling around self taught directing that we've all done on our films so far.

Monet or Degas?

For Cinematography we have an assignment to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, select a painting with a landscape orientation (so similar to how our cameras shoot) and then do a 1 page write up about what you see that's interesting and why you picked it - a clinical look and a personal look.

I found it entertaining to wander around the MFA this morning for homework. I had a really hard time picking though. I managed to only take pictures of 7 paintings (we have to have a copy of the painting along with the write up). And now I've narrowed it down to 2.

where are the women?

For Cinematography we are going to have to do a report on a cinematographer of our choice. As I'm not the kind of person to memorize crew names of films, I don't really know any apart from Haskell Wexler from last term's film studies presentation. So I've arbitrarily decided I want to pick an American woman working in fiction film. WHY ARE THEY SO HARD TO FIND?

Prompt me please

I'm not a writer, not really. And I knew that. Part of picking BU was that they had screenwriting MFA students that I could befriend. That hasn't quite gone as planned yet. I only saw them in my film studies class last term and that wasn't the kind of class where you get to know people, it was all just lectures. And now they aren't in any of my classes so I'm not sure how to find them.

And we're back

First day of classes. I woke up to snow. I love snow in theory. I don't so much like it when I'm biking to campus. Fortunately the roads were clear enough (Mom), but the freezing rain stinging my eyes was unpleasant. But I am happy to report that my waterproof pants and my waterproof boots held up well so I think I'm actually ready for the winter. And I'd still rather have a cold winter than a hot summer.

But anyway, classes. It was good to see the fellas this morning. Everyone seemed refreshed, happy, and ready to go. I know I am. I think we all took a look at what's on the line up for the next few months and thought this is going to be fun, let's have at it.

Creativity Will Begin Promptly at Three

Someday I'm going to use that post title as a film title. It was something that we used to joke about when I worked at the Kennedy Center, the idea that in schools art class happened at a certain time and that was the only time students are allowed/encouraged to be creative.