Film Production, по Кавказский

by Thomas

The Basics. Photo by Mexman.

The film school in Baku asked me some time back to host a masterclass for the students. Because my background is in film production rather than, say, film criticism, I proposed a six-week production workshop. My main goal was to get as many of the students shooting and editing as possible. With such a tight schedule and limited resources, I decided it would be best to have the students submit proposals for projects they want to shoot and my selection team would choose the four strongest for production. I encouraged the students to keep it simple, and I think for the most part they took that advice to heart, though there were certainly a fair number of deeply philosophical scripts. In a perfect world there would have been time to go through a couple of revisions of their proposals, but it was critical that they shoot over Novruz (the week-long Persian new year holiday) in order to have lots of time for review during post-production.

I am very impressed by the students. They are very well-versed in film history and theory, but simply haven’t had the opportunity to get their hands dirty on set. In this regard I’m a good fit for their needs. We met on Saturday for a camera tutorial and to work out the remaining administrative details. I teach the classes in Russian, but guiding them through what turned into a four-hour tutorial, with all the technical basics of motion picture photography, was almost more than my poor Russian could handle. Thankfully, the photography course I’ve been teaching at the Slavic University had introduced me to much of the basic terminology: aperture, shutter speed, key light, etc. But explaining things light color temperature and white balance in Russian to someone who has never heard of it before was a challenge. But we got through it, and at the end of the day I was able to push them out the door and into production. Sort of like when Dad helped you learn to ride a bike. They’ll wobble down the street at first, perhaps fall over a few times, but soon enough they’ll be gliding along nicely.

I very much look forward to seeing the dailies.