workshop

Making a movie is so often described and practiced as an art of storytelling. Storytelling is functionally held as the primary purpose of cinema, where the majority of audiences, whether theatre patrons or programmers, are looking for engrossing narrative revelations. Of course, what “engrossing,” or even “good,” might mean is entirely up to the individual viewer, and most filmmakers will create works that reflect their positions, which are nourished by these judgments. The biggest mistake these same filmmakers will persist in making, however, is to see storytelling as a purely expositional practice, failing to understand the relationship that representation has to the emotional content of your narrative. You can’t just film your story and cut it together. You need to critically assess your methods of representation: you need to understand how the images on screen create emotional resonance in the context of your story. The craft of a filmmaker is dictated by their curiosity and imagination, yes, but these elements need to find material expression in their art. And so a fundamental question all filmmakers need to ask themselves: How do I translate my ideas into a medium as technical as the cinema?

In this workshop, we will discuss the language of images, their emotional content, and how making movies is about much much more than a good script and pretty pictures. We will come together and realize how to create a relationship between those two things.


IN- PERSON AT 76 GEARY AVE **