Framin' The Shot

As film enthusiasts, Cotton and I have made a tradition out of regularly spending a weekend watching several films across 2 days, trying to explore films neither of us has ever seen before. For our first episode back, we decided to record our thoughts on this latest marathon and share our explorations with you.

For this marathon, we left our comfort zone of narrative films and chose to explore 6 documentary features along with seve...

In Part 2 of our exploration of cartoon adaptations, we now reach the Thought Experiment portion.

With the ground-work and context firmly set for what films have come before, my co-host and I now offer up our own ideas for how we might adapt a particular cartoon into a live-action feature. To help guide this process, I spent the previous day (before this recording) writing up a series of detailed questions that would address each ...

In our first Thought Experiment episode (a two-parter), we start with a particularly tricky topic: how to turn a cartoon into a live-action movie.

The legacy of cartoon adaptation is not a very strong, or respected one. There is often a charm to seeing favorite characters portrayed by a beloved actor in a colorful costume, but this excitement doesn't last long if the film doesn't have a strong foundation of narrative, production de...

A question I've never heard asked before is, "What is Movie Magic?" It can mean many different things, and different things to many people. Cinema and film is full of magic, it's own kind of magic, at almost every stage of production. Even the act of creating magic within a movie is magical behind the camera, and in a seat in a theater, seeing the end result.

Today, my friend Cotton and I discuss this broad topic, and try to descri...

Continuing the conversation from our first episode, Chris and I branch off into discussions on Character Introduction, Characterization/Motivation, and even Voice-Over Narration, all of which not only relate to each other, but also have connections to our previous topic, Opening Sequences. There's a lot that can go wrong, and a lot that can go right when it comes to characters, they're the surrogate for the audience, allowing them ...

In our introductory episode, my co-host and I discuss the pivotal subject of 'Opening Sequences,' and how to begin a film on the right foot. This can include title sequences, credit sequences, a pre-title sequence, or even just the very first moments of your film. What elements of these initial moments draw us into this new world and these new characters to make us care about them, and want to explore them more?

If you'd like to su...