I’ve been listening to the 1964 Beatles album “Beatles for Sale.” It doesn’t have any of their really famous tracks, but it’s a really good album, from before they became super-duper famous, and evolved in their music. The rock melodies feel really traditional and basic – but in a really good way. I especially like “No Reply” and “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.”
Monthly Archive for May, 2009
I’ve been thinking about movies a lot lately… well, ok, nothing new. But still, I was thinking, it’s pretty amazing that we’re able to watch movies, or tv, or read books, or watch theater, wahtever – and even though we know that what we’re watching isn’t really happening, that it isn’t real, we’re still able to be emotionally affected by the events that we see.
It’s amazing that the human mind can do that, understand that something isn’t true on one level, but then still let those same things have such a profound impact on us. Imagine that an alien came to our planet who couldn’t do this for whatever reason. They would see a movie and just not believe it, they would not comprehend the true characters, and they would only see actors. Most art would be irrelevant to this alien, because it could not suspend belief, even emotionally to understand anything that’s happening.
Speaking of actors – it’s even more amazing that we can see the same actors in dozens of movies and still believe them to be different characters and people every time, while still knowing that they’re still acting. This dual-minded ability, whatever you call it is so much a part of our society and how we interact within it. Graphical user interfaces on computers are also based on this idea – they try to replicate things in real life – a button in a computer program is based on a buttons in real life – but what if we couldn’t comprehend the fact that those pixels were a button, and we couldn’t get past the fact that we KNOW it’s not a real button?
Weird.
I had sooo much fun over the last few weeks doing the Tribeca Film Fellows program! Since my last post, I’ve been to a ton of screenings of great movies including “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench”, “Fixer”, ”Off and Running”, and the youth short film collection “Our City, My Story” which the film fellows shot the intro for.
But probably the best part of it all was developing my film pitch with a Tribeca film mentor, and although I didn’t win one of the prizes, my mentor Sean McPhillips was incredibly helpful in helping me to formulate an idea for a movie that I am now starting to make. Through the program, we met twice to discuss how to craft my movie idea into something worth making – and I feel like the idea I have now is really great.
So over the next few weeks I’m going to be making the movie, currently called “Connect”, and hopefully filming this weekend! I’ll post more on it later.
