Enrollment is open for the special January session of WRAPPED in 30 Days! Class begins January 2nd, and by the end of the month, you’ll be wrapping a crowd-pleasing film you can be proud of. What a prolific tone to set for 2025, huh? What’s WRAPPED in 30 Days? WRAPPED is my proven, step-by-step system to write, shoot, and edit a crowd-pleasing short film—fast (no matter how small your budget). I teach you everything, AND push you into action to…
This week, let’s skip all the BS about screenwriting and explore an extremely actionable writing tip… I don’t remember who said this advice originally, but it has stuck with me for years: Put your characters into situations that are impossible to get out of. Then it’s your job as the writer to find a way out. If you succeed, you’ll have a satisfying bit of drama. Let’s give this idea a whirl with a fairly generic example, and see how much it holds up huh? Trapped in a Trunk -…
This issue is about control, and how needing to do everything my way has often held me back. So if you’re anything like me, hopefully this email will open your mind to better ways to work in this collaborative medium… This issue of Friday Film Notes is sponsored by: Audiio I just discovered Audiio and it’s a game changer for finding music. Their LinkMatch AI lets you drop in songs from Spotify and pulls similar tracks from their catalog. Huge time saver! Use code…
I’m typing this newsletter from the air, on a flight cross-country to celebrate Thanksgiving in Miami with Toni’s family. But I’m also typing it using a application I recently discovered and fell in love with, called Cold Turkey Writer. It suimultaneously makes it MUSCH easier to write these quickly, and encourages an open-mind while typing. Why? Because it completely takes over my computer screen, and will NOT let me quit the application until I’ve met my writing goal -…
First off, a quick note: 🔔 I’ve had people asking me if there will be a holiday discount on WRAPPED in 30 Days this year… Well… yes! In December I’m offering a very special deal on WRAPPED during a free, live class I’ll be hosting for you all, teaching my simplified approach to making festival-level short films, fast. Whether you want to actually join WRAPPED or not, you’ll walk away with some great strategies & tips for your own filmmaking. More details coming soon! 🔔 Ok…
It’s been an exciting couple of weeks! We’ve hit a breakthrough in pre-production for my upcoming short film, The Lost Fortune of Oliver Brody. After months of struggling to find even one suitable location, and just as we were about to rewrite the script to make things easier to shoot, our location scouting took a sudden turn for the best, and we discovered realistic options for all of them—cave interior, cave exterior, river, woods, and tent! I’ll be making a video…
If you’re anything like me, you find it incredibly easy to wake up and let the day whisk you away into whatever chaotic direction it wants to take you. But this isn’t ideal, especially for anyone with creative ambitions. So here’s a simple rule that (over time) may be the single most important change you could make in your life: Make before you manage. Disclaimer: I stole this idea from Tim Ferriss 🤫 But these 4 words really resonated with me. For filmmakers, here’s how the…
As filmmakers, we pride ourselves on focusing on the details, making sure every frame is polished. But let’s be honest—there are endless ways we obsess over minutia that no one else (except maybe our fellow filmmaker snobs) will EVER notice. Here’s a reality check on the things we love to overthink: 1. How to Credit Ourselves When I completed my first feature and started typing up the end credits, I suddenly realized: this is it—whatever I call myself here will set the tone…
How about some concrete screenwriting tips this week? The kind of thing that for some strange reason, they wouldn’t ever teach in my USC writing classes. Let’s talk about expository dialogue—done poorly, it can make your film a chore to watch. So here’s how to do it seamlessly. Dracula sucks blood. Renfield just sucks. By the way, I was inspired to write this issue because I tried to watch the movie Renfield, and oh my god was the writing rough. I couldn’t even get…
It seems you all liked Ernest Hemingway’s tip from a couple of weeks ago, so here’s another creative productivity tip from another famous author. In fact, it’s probably the most important lesson I ever learned for increasing my creative output, and it comes straight from your Huckleberry (Finn), Mark Twain. Ready? Here it is: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning.” What does this mean? Who’s eating frogs? You, me, all of us….