Film in NoCo

Film is the type of industry that is so easy to break into, and yet so hard.  A common refrain is the idea that anyone with a smartphone can make a movie. To an extent, this is true. "Tangerine" was shot entirely using iPhones. It was also director Sean Baker's fifth feature-length film. What separates "insider" and "outsider" art is rarely the cost of materials. Instead, it has more to do with experience and knowledge. The most expensive cameras on the market won't save you from bad shot composition. Thousand-dollar lighting setups still need to be placed carefully. Throwing money at Adobe Inc. is not an effective use of Premiere Pro or After Effects. So who keeps the gate? Do we privilege those who went to film school, who took the time and maybe even the loans to get more comfortable with their skills as artists? What about those with on-set experience, which up until recently has been hard to come by in Northern Colorado? Filmmaking isn't j...

We are entering the season of the 48-hour film festival! There's just something about summer that spurs people into going out and actually making stuff.  I'm one of the crazy people who can't work without crazy constraints. If you don't give me a tight deadline and a word count to reach, the project is just going to sit rotting in my drafts, forever. From the proliferation of 48-hour film festivals, I can assume that others feel the same way. During undergrad, I actually tried to organize my own 48-hour film festival with my university's film club. I advertised it as a "film jam," thinking more people would be familiar with games jams and hackathons. Bad move, because the target audience was students at a famously liberal arts-focused college. The results can be found on YouTube here ( 1 ) ( 2 ). One pitfall? It can be hard to round up a group of friends willing to commit to 48 whole hours focused just on filmmaking. One solution that did work out was recr...