I loved this movie. It was by far my favorite film at Full Frame. I’ve noted before how I’m on the fence about going into narratives or docs. This proved you can accomplish both.
Following four high school seniors, American Teen was like watching all the best high school classics - Sixteen Candles, Fast Times, Risky [...]

HBO Documentaries: Documentary Films Series: The Blacklist: Synopsis
Previously mentioned The Blacklist is now playing on HBO. Schedule here.
Definitely worth a watch once you think of it as a collection of moving portraits (Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the director, is a portrait photographer).
Coincidentally, I started watching Thinking XXX to discover it’s also directed by Greenfield-Sanders and his [...]

TWiT Live - Live Netcasts from TWiT with Leo Laporte and Friends.
If you’re bored Thursday, I’m interviewing Leo Laporte. But in a documentary first (?), he’s going to be broadcasting the interview online through his TWiT Live show.
So who will be interviewing who? Find out. Tune in at 11a Pacific, 2p Eastern at http://twitlive.tv.

Peter Shankman’s “If I Can Help a Reporter Out”
This is a very cool site for both sides of the story - the writer/documentarian and source. There’s two parts to HARO.
The main part is where anyone can sign up for the mailing list. A few times a day you get an email with a list of [...]

Below are my notes from the one panel I attended at Full Frame - The State of the Doc. It’s a little more cheerful than Mark Gill’s outlook on independent cinema, though re-reading this now, some panelists seemed to be predicting what was going to happen.
It was moderated by Liz Ogilvie of Docurama Films. On [...]

Out in the middle of the Mojave desert at Ft. Irwin, California, is a billion dollar mock Iraq village in an Army training center, filled with Iraqi roll players. Before units are deployed to Iraq, they come here for three weeks to simulate what they will encounter in Iraq.The subject of Full Battle Rattle is [...]

That’s right. In keeping with my fascination of offices and productivity, my next doc is on life hacking.
It’s been tough explaining life hacking in one sentence. I’ve been going with ‘an online community dedicated to finding shortcuts to save time and make oneself more productive.’ Working smarter, not harder might work, but I feel like [...]

Perhaps a little heavy for a 10 AM screening, with an occasional missing head and dead body, I still enjoyed My Daughter the Terrorist. It’s about the civil war in Sri-Lanka - a war I didn’t know was happening. Labeled by the world as terrorists, the film follows two female best friends in the guerrilla [...]

It’s finally happened. As previously mentioned, the podcast spin-off of Cubicles has finally launched, though very quietly.
I’m still trying to work out the bugs. I’ll explain my work flow in more detail in another post, but basically I’ve exported the movie into an iPod friendly .m4v 320×240 and am hosting it through my server.
I decided [...]

I had my meeting with the Dean. I don’t think it could have gone better.
“I’d like to take the footage that didn’t make it into the documentary and turn it into podcasts.”
“You know, I’m feeling in a real experimental mood. The school is trying to do all sorts of new distribution methods and this was [...]