All the advice I’ve seen on writing recommend that you develop a “back story” for your characters. The back story is what happens to the character right up until the story starts. This is very valuable to the writer when they create the character. What occurred to me was that I never heard anyone talk… Read Article →
Latest Posts Under: Ideas
I haven’t got the film I shot for Contingency back yet, so this week I worked on some other projects. I have two articles and a short/fake article on the go. One article is about how to listen and the other is about chaos theory, complexity theory, and economics. The story is about a character… Read Article →
A couple of years ago I started to keep a notebook of the ideas I had for my films and writing. It isn’t an original idea. In several writing courses I took, they suggested I do that. The other day I pulled it out to look up some notes I wrote last week for an… Read Article →
I want to improve my website and have started to experiment with some changes. My first improvement was to add an e-mail notification to my blog. Google’s Feedburner allows you to sign up for notifications every time there is an update to the blog. I tried it out myself and it works just fine. Now… Read Article →
I’ve often read that you need to be very committed to a movie project if you want to finish it. In the last few days I’ve come across a couple of examples that drove it home for me. The first was a piece on TV about the movie Loose Change. The movie puts forth a… Read Article →
I did an article a while ago about how I developed my film Line of Taxis. Note: The original post has been taken down. If you are interested in reading the article, let me know and I can post it on this website. That film grew out of plan to develop my skills as a… Read Article →
Many years ago, long before I got serious about writing, I came up with what I called “The Seven Character Theory of TV Shows.” It came from my observation of the TV program Gilligan’s Island. What I noticed was that there were seven regular characters on the program and I wondered why. My explanation was… Read Article →
The concept of no budget filmmaking appeals to me. Largely because I can’t see that I’ll ever get the money for even a low budget movie. The other day I followed a link someone posted on Twitter to the article The Rights and Wrongs of No-Budget Filmmaking http://www.huffingtonpost.com/abe-schwartz/the-rights-and-wrongs-of-_b_940438.html I encourage you to have a look… Read Article →
My memory of that time is rather vague, but one incident does stick in my mind. Back when I was young I spent a couple weeks in the summer at “Art in the Park.” It was a program at Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg. We would go to different parts of the park and paint what… Read Article →
Back in 2004, after I shot My Most Difficult Case, I decided that my next movie would be a feature. I felt I was ready for it, but seven years have gone by and no feature yet. I’ve started to consider some of the difficulties I’ve run into. I hope that will help me overcome… Read Article →
