filmmaking

Today my DP Casey and I flew up to Seattle for a second round of location scouting for my upcoming short film, The Lost Fortune of Oliver Brody—the one I’ve been documenting on the channel. You might remember our first scout up in Lake Tahoe. Beautiful place. Great vibes. Totally unusable. For a number of reasons we had to go back to the drawing board on our hunt for the perfect location. Since then, we’ve done a full test shoot of our shot list, black box theater…

I came across a great series of narrative writing lectures with Brandon Sanderson, the best-selling fantasy and sci-fi author. Besides being an excellent writer/storyteller, a few things make Brandon unique – he’s very entrepreneurial (creating the most-funded Kickstarter of all time for his novels), and he’s an excellent teacher. He lectures at BYU and is kind enough to put them up on his YouTube channel for all of us to enjoy for free. I’ve been soaking them up like…

The Oscars marked a victory for independent filmmakers. The lowest budget indie film in the running for the major awards (at $6M), Sean Baker’s Anora, swept the show! On top of that, the indie animated feature, Flow (budgeted at $3.7M), beat out Pixar’s Inside Out 2 ($200M) 🤯. By the way, if you haven’t seen Flow, it’s on Max right now and it’s amazing. Am I biased because I have 3 cats? Maybe… But in this issue, let’s talk about a less-examined selection of films at…

In a rush today, my DP and I are about to (hopefully) finish the first round of shot listing our upcoming short film! In the spirit of that, let’s analyze some shots from 3 of the modern masters of the language of cinema: Joel & Ethan Coen, and their trusty DP, Roger Deakins. This issue of Friday Film Notes is sponsored by: Audiio Audiio has been a game changer for finding stock music for my edits. Between their LinkMatch & Hans AI tools, you can find the perfect track for…

Sometimes a book really hits you. I recently read one that’s made me rethink not only how I run my business, but how I approach filmmaking. It’s called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. The book breaks down the common notion that we can or should try to do it all. It instead recommends ruthlessly eliminating all but the essential in our lives, so that we can live more simply, more happily, and make meaningful progress in what truly matters. This…

This issue is a first for me – I’m writing it out on a 50-year-old electric typewriter my girlfriend gave me (thanks Toni!). Why? Am I that much of a hipster? Well you won’t catch me setting this thing up in Starbucks anytime soon. But I love the idea of being forced to type forwards only — no going backwards to re-think or re-word a sentence — especially for writing stories. You’ll never get perfection writing this way, but you will get other benefits that are much more…

As I write this, it’s a sad day for film – David Lynch passed away. Love or hate his work, he was incredibly influential and showed us how dreamy and mysterious cinema can be. I’ll never forget my first time seeing Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, etc. They opened my eyes to a totally different kind of storytelling. On top of that, he was such a unique and endearing person, which is part of what made his many cameos as an actor so fun to watch (The…

First off – what a wild week. I caught a random virus that knocked me out for 2 days, and then the whole city of LA catches on fire. Fortunately the fires (for now) seem far away enough that they won’t reach us, and I’m feeling back to 100%. Tight on time this week, so here’s just a quick look at what got me through the chaos! The smoke and wind outside my office window this week. This issue of Friday Film Notes is sponsored by: Audiio Audiio has been a game changer…

I’ve spent a lot of time the past week thinking about what goals to set for this new year, and even how best to approach this whole topic. To me, this is the most important thing I’ll do all year. Because no matter how far along in it we already are, there’s always infinite directions we can go in life… And so much happens in the course of one year. So where we choose to direct our energy and focus for even a mere 365 days can create huge changes that will be felt…

Happy holidays! Hard to believe 2024 is almost over. This time last year, I set out 3 goals for myself related to work/filmmaking. Here’s how it went and what I’ve learned about working towards long-term goals this year… Goal #1: Write a newsletter every week for a year ✅ With this issue, this goal is officially done. Friday Film Notes has been the most fun experiment of 2024 for me. Partially because the size of the email list has doubled since the beginning of the year -…