You grew up in Madrid, loving American as well as Spanish films.
That’s true: I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Al Pacino. The other day I was watching ‘‘Dog Day Afternoon’’ again, and I see a man who is so true, so interesting and I understand more about the world from 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.

It’s back to producing mode, so here’s one of my favorite and least expensive tools: the Ikea Big Blue Bag.
About a year or so ago, Ikea started charging five cents for plastic bags. So I picked up three of these for 59 cents each (and snuck one of the yellow shopping bags in there, too). [...]

In a perfect film set world (real world), you shoot for the day, send the film to the lab that night to be processed, return the next day, shoot some more, and then during lunch (or beginning/end of the day), you watch what you shot the previous day. These are called dailies, because you do [...]

Since I’ve been sound mixing for the past three days, with three more to go (a double show), I thought it would be appropriate to post some tips on getting the best audio possible from Christian Dwiggins, Master Engineer and owner of Engine Room Studios, a sound production facility.
Here they are, from Christian:

Good sound starts [...]

Yes, we got 91 set-ups1 in 3 days. That’s about 30 a day. The 6 day show had 106 set-ups. Bottom line is we got a shit-ton of shots.
And this was despite company moves, lots of extras, a tired crew, and broken/missing equipment. The odd thing is no one brought up any objections or said [...]

Ten cans of film have been turned in after the longest producing job I’ve had yet - six days of summer thesis kick-off. You get three days to shoot your thesis film, or you can team up and double your resources as the DP and Director did here and shoot for six days with twice [...]

Here’s a story that combines a little six degrees of separation with a hint of networking. I was having dinner last night with my mom at Oriente on Ocean Drive. Across the street, near the beach, we noticed some giant tents set up - looked like some sort of party. But I noticed a sign [...]

Here are a few notes I dug up from an early cinematography class. They’re short and good to keep in mind.

Eye first looks at what is moving, then what’s brightest.
Film is a 2-Dimensional medium. The idea is to create the appearance of 3 dimensions through composition, lighting, and camera movies. Tilt, Pan, and Zoom are [...]

Yesterday was our first cinematography class. We had to choose the worst shot from the F3 we were Director of Photography on, bring it in, and discuss what went wrong. It was a good idea, and a good way to learn.
My shot (not the one pictured above) was this clunky 180 hand-held we tried. [...]