FCP X Organization

G.I.R. Team:

Here's an article about how we are organizing our Media for FCP X.

http://www.rippletraining.com/managing-fcp-x-events-projects-with-disk-images.html

- A. Manriquez

How to Write a Documentary

NMA Juniors:

YOUR HOMEWORK: Read chapter "Short Introduction to Documentary Styles" (pages 5-9) from How To Write a Documentary for discussion tomorrow (period 2) and Wednesday (period 4).

- A. Manriquez

LAUSD Student Account Management

To activate your student single sign-on account to have access to Mymail and Google Drive, visit the site linked below:

LAUSD Student Account Management

Dayton/Faris Reflection

NMA Juniors and Seniors

To reflect on your video conference with directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, write a narrative (minimum 250 words) answering the following questions and anything else you'd like to share about the experience.

• Jonathan and Valerie spoke a great length about what influences them. What are some influences that they mentioned have helped them in their projects and what came to mind for you about what you would like to use as an influence on your projects?
• As a married couple, disagreements at work have greater stakes for Jonathan and Valerie. How do they manage disagreements, and would those tactics work for your projects?
• What do Jonathan and Valerie look for when searching for a project to work on? Why is that important? Do you think your projects apply?
• What advice did Jonathan and Valerie give about working with non-actors?
• What was the most useful thing you took away from the conversation?

Please share this with me as a Google Doc.

Name the document "Px_DaytonFarisReflection_Lastname"

Click here to watch some of their work.

NMA Casting Notice Blurb

Juniors and Seniors:

Please copy the blurb below at the top of your casting notices.

The Hollywood High School New Media Academy (NMA) is an inclusive program comprised of students representing a wide range of abilities and talents.  Curriculum is designed to integrate the content for English Language Arts, History, Science, Mathematics, Digital Computers and Video Production. The Video Production courses cover all aspects of production, from script development, project pitching, camera & lighting, to post-production (including Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Certifications). Each project created in the NMA has the guidance and supervision of Academy teachers and a professional mentor. Students are expected to create their projects at the highest level of vigor and professionalism to deliver high-quality stories with high production value.

The Kubrick Legacy

NMA Juniors & Seniors, take a look at the videos and article at the link below to help you with your Kubrick Doc project.

The Kubrick Legacy

Stay in LA: Sometimes We Have to Stay Here

I response to my last post, Bruce Postman from Columbia College Hollywood has offered the following counterview.

If you are from the L.A. area and want a career in the film and television industry, there are some very compelling reasons to stay in Los Angeles for your film school education.  While movies and TV shows are shot all over the world it is here in Hollywood that the majority of them are conceived, written, cast, shot, edited and distributed.  If you want to make films in the United States Hollywood is still the place to be. 

Internships have become one of the key ways film students launch their careers.  At the school where I teach, Columbia College Hollywood, almost everyone takes at least one internship, most take two and many have been hired for their first industry jobs off their internship.  Film students from around the country fly themselves into L.A. and put themselves up at their own expense in order to get these internships.  If you go to film school in the L.A. area it is as easy as hopping in your car or taking the bus to your internship.  Moreover, after the internship ends, if they like you, they might call you in for a day of work here or there before they commit to hiring you full time. This is possible if you are a car ride away. It is not possible if you are an airplane ride away. 

Networking for your career starts in college.  The pool of people who can help you is largest and most accomplished in Los Angeles.  Not only do you have the opportunity to meet more people who can help you, but there are more opportunities that they can find for you here.  If you go to film school outside of L.A. any meaningful networking will start after college when you move back.  If you start that process while you are in college you’ll be up and running in your career sooner. 

When you are in film school you want your professors to be working professionals. You want them to know how the industry works today.  The pool of people who are working in the entertainment industry is much greater in L.A. than anywhere else in the country. You will get the best and most useful education and guidance here.  Film schools in the L.A. area have their pick from the best of the best to teach at their colleges. I know that at CCH we have files of impressive industry professionals who want to teach. I know it is the same at other L.A. area film schools.  People with that kind of experience are much harder to find outside of L.A. 

Another way people get jobs is through their teachers.  At CCH, since all the teachers are working professionals, we often hire students.  I am doing a series of 10 educations films over the next year and my entire crew, production and post-production, are CCH students or recent graduates. And I’m not the only one. Steve Haberman, who also teaches here, was just nominated for an Emmy for an HBO Special with Mel Brooks. He hired one CCH student to cut it and another to do the color. Other teachers do the same.  We don’t hire students to be nice or to help the school. We hire them because we recognize talent and we trust them.  The pool of industry professionals who can do this outside of L.A. is much, much smaller. 

Because there is so much production in Los Angeles there is an abundance of equipment here.  At CCH we own a lot of terrific equipment (including two Red cameras and Sony F3) but we can’t own everything we need. We can, however, borrow or rent what we don’t own because of the abundance of equipment in town.  35mm cameras from Panavision, 3D camera rigs, and other expensive or hard to find pieces of equipment easily acquired here.  They are not so easy to find outside of L.A. The same is true for facilities and services.  We have more sound stages, cranes, actors, special effects make up artists, fight coordinators – the list goes on and on. 

Traveling the world is a good thing. It changes your perspective and introduces you to new people and views of the world.  But it is not a wise choice to move elsewhere for your film education. You will just move back here eventually and need to start all over. Save your travel for vacations and out of town film jobs. Stay here, stay focused and use the opportunities that are right in front of you.

Bruce Postman is a teacher at Columbia College Hollywood in Tarzana, California. He can be reached at bpostman@columbiacollege.edu

Leaving Hollywood: Sometimes We Have to Go "There" to Make it Here.

For more than 100 years, stars and starlets from the hinterlands – places such as Nebraska, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Canada – have trekked west to Hollywood, to find fame and fortune in the cinematic arts. Packed into their bags were hopes, dreams, dancing shoes, good hair, killer cheekbones and raw ambition. Something else that many brought was a perspective on life and people who live outside the world of movies and entertainment. Arguably, knowing who movie audiences are and how regular people live regular lives enriches how they write, produce, edit and star in films.

So if you grew up in LA, is there something you’re missing?

Perhaps. It’s hardly the case that the Los Angeles-raised individual is handicapped at making a career in film. The opportunities to train in the industry are here, with acting and film schools drawing people from around the world. It doesn’t hurt to have an uncle, and high school classmate or someone you caddy for at the golf course to be in the industry, someone who can help you get your own start.

But entertainment in general and the movie industry in specific exist outside of Hollywood. The sheer size of Bollywood and its audiences is the most obvious example. A Website, CFNC.org, the College Foundation of North Carolina, encourages young people in that state to observe how on-location shooting and digital technologies undermine the assumption that a film career needs to be developed in Southern California.

Another example is the New York Film Academy, which has campuses in both Los Angeles (at Universal Studios) and Manhattan, but also at Disney Studios near Orlando, in Europe (Florence and Paris), Asia (Kyoto, Shanghai and Beijing), South Asian (Mumbai and New Delhi), the Middle East (Abu Dhabi) and Australia (Queensland).

School administrators say that studying abroad reflects both the film industry’s hot spots and traditions. But just as important, it provides an opportunity for students to get that experience of going “outside themselves.”

While NYFA has its own LA film school campus – acknowledging that the majority of the industry’s base remains firmly ensconced on the West Coast – it encourages all students to rotate their studies from location to location, if at all possible. Yes, the Angeleno who takes a 3-, 4-, 8- or 12-week class in another city or another country will have to navigate the challenges of travel and housing, currency and language. But who doesn’t have to do that if they want to work on a world stage?

The experience of travel and relocation has an ability to strip a person down to his or her core, away from the social set they may have cultivated and the accomplishments that exist in their past. It was none other than D.H. Lawrence who said, “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”

Which is probably what Judy Garland (born in Minnesota), Brad Pitt (Oklahoma), Charlize Theron (South Africa) and perhaps even Zach Galifianakis (North Carolina) had in mind all along.

NMA Seniors: Summer 2012 Assignment

NMA Seniors (Yes, you're seniors now!):

As I explained to you several times during the last few weeks of school, you have a summer assignment. When we come back from break, we are jumping right into the first project of the semester. We are also jumping into using Avid Media Composer for all the rest of your projects in the New Media Academy. But I didn't want you to be ill-prepared, so you have this assignment.


The assignment has multiple parts.

• First, go to Avid Community and create an account.
• Then, head to the Get Started Fast forum. This forum is designed for new users of Avid Media Composer. You can search for answers, post questions, and get connected with other new Avid users.
• Optional: Join the Avid Student Facebook page to connect with other students of Avid software like yourselves.
• Take a look at this post about tutorials and training. Here, you will find tons of available resources to help you get a head start on using Media Composer.
• The particular resource you need to look at (in its entirety) is the Edit to the Future webinar series from ProMax with Steve Holyhead.
• While watching the webinars, TAKE NOTES on what you're learning in a Google doc that you will share with me as soon as you create it. (Name it: P4_AvidNotes_Lastname) This document is going to be where you store all your notes about these webinars and all the lessons we will go through over the year to prepare you for the Avid Certified User exam.
• After watching each of the 12 webinar sessions, check into our backchannel conversation on TodaysMeet. Here is where you can chat with me and all of your classmates to ask questions, answer questions, and keep up with how everyone is doing on this assignment.

If your personal computer meets the minimum specs, download the free trial of Media Composer. The tutorials and training post linked above also has info about downloading trial media to play around with. The webinar also has source footage to use while following along.

Of course, if you have any urgent questions, email me. The more you explore in the Avid Community forums, the more notes you take, and the more time you spend poking around the software, the more successful you will be this school year. Good luck!

Moviola Jobs Class

NMA Juniors (who are going to the Moviola class this weekend)

Please read these articles:

A Brief History of Film Editing Technology

The Story of Moviola


See you at 9:45 a.m.