Skip to main content

mediajock

Search This Blog

Mad Max 2 / Road Warrior dialogue word cloud

Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Wordle: Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior dialogue

Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Fredrick Wiseman at Docyard: Luck, Judgement and Patience.

I got some insight into what kind of temperament one needs to sustain a 60 year career in documentary when I asked Fredrick Wiseman what I imagined to be a fair question: What recent trends in documentary film do you find heartening or perhaps disheartening? "I don't go to films. I mostly read." I pressed him: "You don't watch films? When you go to film festivals or these kinds of events?" "I still read. There are hundred of years of literature to choose from. I prefer that." I plopped down. Was that a dumb question? Was that an arrogant answer? Should I take this personally and title this blog article "Wiseman to Aspiring Documentary Filmmakers: Drop Dead"? I wasn't the only questioner at The Doc Yard's screening of "Hospital" (1969) who didn't get far with documentary director Fredrick Wiseman . The host, an academic in film studies, had his first question brushed aside as well, and he was forced to regr

Does your language shape how you think?

A fascinating article in the NYTIMES magazine by Guy Deutscher on language and how it can influence your ability to understand certain concepts. It is particularly interesting in discussing languages that use egocentric coordinates (left, right, straight, behind) vs. languages that use cardinal directions - north, south east west. Anyone who has lived in Bali and has tried to ask directions has experienced this - the Balinese never say "take a left at the light and then take your 2nd right." - they would say "Go north, and at the light, east, and then after two blocks, go north again." But Deutscher errs when he leaves the impression that the Balinese have a purely cardinal approach to orientation. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 19

Editing

A great blog post, about a course we all need to take. Who could teach it? "It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version. I don't care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence. Along the way you'd trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors."

Powered by Blogger