by Mathew Allen Emotion lies at the heart of the filmic experience, and people always talk about how to make characters relatable or likeable. Below are six techniques each for building empathy and sympathy in your scripts. I believe this to be an exhaustive and refined list—both in that it covers every possible kind of […]
by Mathew Allen One thing I get asked a lot is how one goes about finding the motivation to actually sit down and write (and complete) feature screenplays. I hesitate to teach this element of screenwriting—as there seem to be as many different ways in terms of what writers call their “process” as there are […]
By Mathew Allen There are countless books out there about screenwriting. Each has its good and bad points, but I figured I’d give you a run-down of the best, most useful things I learned from reading many of them. In this case, I’m gonna focus on five (as that’s a catchy number) and try to […]
There comes a time in the life of every creative when you’ll have to work with material that you don’t feel any personal connection to. So what do you do? You could just half-ass it and hope a better job comes along next time, as many do in this situation, but why waste the opportunity? […]
The day is finally here. You’re making your movie. Your stomach aches from too much coffee and you’ve passed a fitful night of disturbed sleep but you made it! Now comes the hard part… Here’s what will go through your head on your first day on set. I’m a Fraud This can be a particular […]
Last week, I explored the Japanese directors who screened at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, having found the festival catalogue in a Tokyo second-hand bookshop. Of the three, one was already a superstar director, one was at the beginning of a fairly successful career, and one never made a film again. This week, I will […]
Vintage lens fans and sufferers of gear acquisition syndrome will no doubt be familiar with Tito Ferradans from his YouTube channel and strong presence on Facebook. His channel branding gives him the appearance of a mad professor: his thumbnail shows him in white labcoat and glasses, and regular viewers will be familiar with his wild […]
Baseball fans will no doubt be following Shohei Ohtani’s career in the Majors very closely. For those out of the Japanese news loop, he is a headline-grabbing baseball player who has just moved from the Japanese league’s Nippon Ham Fighters to the United States’s Los Angeles Angels where he is cementing his status as a […]
Why filmmakers should stop obsessing over the latest camera technology. Robert Capa’s photograph of a soldier struggling ashore during the D-Day landings is perhaps the greatest ever taken. Blurred almost to the point of abstraction, The Face in the Surf (1944) undoubtedly proves that technical perfection is unnecessary in art or storytelling. The viewer is […]
We invited former English Language Film School Japan student, Anita, to write a guest post on how she is progressing on her filmmaking journey, a couple months after taking our course, Making the Short Film. Read on for her observations and experiences. Making the Short Film — First Baby Steps as a Director by Anita […]