Most Recent
- Calculating fantasy baseball auction values with Jupyter Notebook
- Cats (!!!…?)
- Freedom and constraints
- Marketing indie films: marketing starts with the product
- Marketing indie films: how do people choose which films to watch?
Filmmaking
Writing & Storytelling
- What is suspense?
- Stories as maps
- Marketing, Drama, and Tension
- Drama / melodrama / comedy / farce
- Bohm on creativity, order, art, and mediocrity
- Sociological vs. Psychological Storytelling
- A Review of Highland 2 (vs. Final Draft)
- Screenwriting as a professional fascination
- The crap +1 fallacy
- Everyone is writing TV pilots
- Two kinds of writing advice
- Do screenwriting contests matter?
- Skill vs talent (in screenwriting)
- Steal a bit from a lot of different places
- “Art is fire plus algebra”
- “If I were wrong in the script, then that’d be as wrong as I could be”
- “The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair”
- “If you haven’t anything to say…”
- More daring and more sincere
- The joy of breaking a story
- In your head, on the page
- Burglars
- Connect more, collect less
- The cardinal sin is dullness
- Kubrick on originality in film
- Kubrick on suspense vs. surprise
- Make your characters want something right away
- Deliberate Practice for Screenwriting
- Editing and Forwards
- Kiarostami on curiosity and cinema
- Timelessness in writing
- Some very good tips on screenwriting
- Creativity vs. imagination
- Write what you feel bad about
- Notes on Soliciting and Interpreting Feedback on Videos (or other creative work)
- Some deep wound or hunger was imprinted on them early in life
- How to create suspense in writing
- A long-term project is like a palimpsest
- A story created this way will always be full of life
- They don’t go to the police because it’s dull
- It doesn’t matter what the MacGuffin is
- Screenplay feedback and accepting that something is broken
- Hitchcock on plausibility and dullness
- What I accomplished by writing an hour a day for most of a year
- A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity
- But it is the thing that wants to live
- Can data help you write a better screenplay?
- Happy New Year. You’re running out of time.
- Writing a screenplay (process)
- Rewriting on paper vs. screen
- Audience feedback and finding ideas
- Pornographic Westerns?
- One of my favorite quotes on creativity
- Meisner Setups for Writing Short Plays
- Anachronistic Profanity in Deadwood
Directing
- Better ugly than dull
- The worst sin a filmmaker can make
- Back pocket notes
- Making people move
- What’s the most indirect, intriguing way to present it?
- It was by thinking of Hitchcock that I could find solutions
- The Level-up Method of Filmmaking
- Physical comedy is hard
- Christopher Nolan on starting out as a filmmaker
- Tony Zhou on stealing from other (older) filmmakers
- Kiarostami interview
- Wide-angle close ups and the Coen brothers
- Sidney Lumet on theme
- A surprising number of earnest conversations
- That’s a wrap
- Truffaut on filmmaking
- Directing kissing scenes
- The day before production
- Mike Nichols on Directing
- Breaking down a script as a director
- “The frame is a playground. So play.”
- Notes on Directing Improvised Scenes (on camera)
- Note on Directing for the First Time
- Mike Nichols on how improvisation influence his directing style
- The Kinski entrance
- Watching with a detached gaze
- No close-ups, unless we need to
Comedy
- Physical comedy is hard
- “The frame is a playground. So play.”
- Ernst Lubitsch coined the term “meet cute”
- The Art of the Gag
- Notes on Directing Improvised Scenes (on camera)
- Mike Nichols on how improvisation influence his directing style
- It’s a great joke but it’s an expensive laugh
- Existentialism, identity, and comedic characters
- How to Make it as an Independent Improv Troupe in Baltimore
Producing
- Writing grants
- The SAG short film agreement is now the short project agreement
- The weekend before production
- The stress of the big 3
- Wisconsin bird magic
- Breakfast, Windshield Wipers, Kinko’s
- $10k Short Film Budget Template
- How to make a microshort
- Pre-production stress
- How to Make a Short Film with SAG Actors (and not kill yourself)
- Notes on Pre-production and Planning for a Web Series
- Pre-production, resistance, and finding the antidote
Acting & Casting
- The stress of the big 3
- Actor reels, web series, and casting
- The Eternal Casting of the Director’s Mind: Fishing, Hunting, and Foraging
- How to create your own work as an actor
Editing
- Temp Music
- The long dark winter of the edit
- That first assembly
- Sidney Lumet on Editing
- Feedback in the editing process
- Tony Zhou on editing
- Speed up Adobe Premiere Pro with previews (how to get rid of those yellow and red lines)
- Editing and Forwards
- Exporting to ProRes from Adobe Premiere on PC
- Notes on Editing Improvised Video Footage
- Walter Murch’s hierarchy of editing priorities
- My Adobe Premiere workflow for editing improvised scenes
Film Festivals
- Marketing indie films: how do people choose which films to watch?
- At the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham
- Back from the Middle Coast Film Festival
- Film festivals, feedback, and re-cutting
Marketing & Distribution
- Marketing indie films: marketing starts with the product
- Marketing indie films: how do people choose which films to watch?
- How much should indie films spend on marketing?
- Marketing, Drama, and Tension
- Add marketing to the list of things you need to know
My Films
- Better ugly than dull
- Wrapped on my first feature film
- The weekend before production
- The dinner party movie is almost ready to go
- The stress of the big 3
- Breakfast, Windshield Wipers, Kinko’s
- Making a feature
- Writing again
- A review of Words Fail Me + an interview with me
- Why I made a web series and not… something else
- Great Opening Night for Cut to The Chase
- Neighbors
- The Most Depressing New Year’s Ever
Life, Work, Culture
Art & Commerce
- Reasons people watch movies
- Sturgeon’s Law
- For a city to have a thriving arts scene
- You can have my movie-watching big data
- Everything is a remix
- Are there too many films being made?
- The phrase “starving artist” is relatively new
Work & Personal Development
- Freedom and constraints
- Leaving Chicago
- Travailler, toujours travailler.
- Near misses and future success
- Re-entry problems
- Escaping the predicament of the self
- The pushing sort of person
- How to not be busy
- Sure, follow your passion, you masochist
- Stories get you through
- Rules for work
- Instead of planning your career…
- Don’t keep a schedule
- Survivorship bias
- Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest
- Dissatisfaction
- Self-doubt vs. self-criticism
- Between stimulus and response there is a space.
- The identity gap
- Listen to everything, but say no to almost everything
- The task of the craftsman
- Mark Duplass on career development for filmmakers
- We are creative because everything isn’t okay (yet)
- Two kinds of perfectionism
- Identity and the other
- Don’t surround yourself with smarter people
- Multiple projects at once
- All you need is one person to say “Get in”
- There is actually no such thing as atheism
- They will probably be hustlers, too
- Taking notes by hand
- Boredom is one of the most important things
- As far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required
- Get a day job, but don’t get too good at it
- Doing two important things at once improves the quality of procrastination
- Sorry I killed everybody! I just really need my alone time.
Ideas
- Transgressive behavior: when is it celebrated and when is it punished by power?
- Despite your complete lack of distinguishing features, we have decided to hate you
- Witch hunts
- Two competing revolts
- The phantom goodbye
- Kafka’s best joke
Movies, Music, TV
- Cats (!!!…?)
- Deadwood returns
- The Passage
- The Party (2017)
- How to choose which movies to watch
- Tangerine
- A reasonable request
- I love this scene from A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting Existence
- Steal Like an Artist, Tommy Wiseau Edition
- Thoughts on Project Greenlight
- Victoria (2015)
- Cronies
- Computer Show
- Roger Ebert on The Exterminating Angel
- OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
- This scene from Wet Hot American Summer made me laugh so hard
- Some people find the taste of pilgrim guts to be too strong
- Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes)
- Headhunters (2011)
- My review of Grown Ups 2
- The things fictional characters shout upon orgasm
- After Hours (1985)
- My favorite Deadwood quotes
- Watching Westerns This Week
- Thoughts on Snowpiercer
- Thoughts on The Lego Movie
Books
- Shark Drunk
- The days of small things
- Exhilaration comes from naming the unnamable and hearing it named
- The worst sin a filmmaker can make
- “We are driven back to the ‘blood’, the thriller”
- I started to wonder what I was doing there
- Only people who don’t give a damn have style
- Fiction is the truth, fool!
- My days become dreamlike
- Stephen King’s “On Writing”
- So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Coding
Artificial Intelligence
- Do deepfakes ironically make blackmail harder?
- Deepfake casting
- Interviews with GPT-2: The golden age of television and The Wire
- AI is really funny, and maybe, creative
- Deepfakes
- AI can mimic human voices
Places
- You get nothing but the wider world
- Despite your complete lack of distinguishing features, we have decided to hate you
- Witch hunts
- Leaving Chicago
- Notes on Berlin
- At the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham
- Dining not alone
- Isle of Skye
- Travel notes from Edinburgh
- Wisconsin bird magic
- Paxton, IL
- Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring
Creative Writing
Humor & Satire
- An Email Chain Between 4 People Depicted in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”
- The Perfect First Date
- Picking The Low-hanging Fruit: Case Studies for the Innovative Business Exec
- A Yale Admissions Letter from a Desperate Girl
- A Woman Wonders If She’s Spending Enough Time Plugged in to the Internet
- A Letter to My 7th grade Science Teacher Regarding Black Holes
- Humor: What We’re Reading This Summer: Staff Picks from Maypole Leaf Books in Halifax, Canada
- Diary of an Unemployed Elitist
Weird Hemingway
True Stories
- The day the mouth harp guy came to town
- The Saddest Retirement Party In Recent Memory
- The Time My Friend Made a Really Bad Decision to Buy a House in West Baltimore at an Auction
- Non-fiction: Did you hear those fireworks?