Ken Burns on filmmaking

If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path.

10secondfilms.org

Some think content will keep getting longer and longer until movies are 3 and 4 hours long. That’s fine. OK with us. We also like the idea of not spending 3 or 4 hours to get something out of it. Like music, there is a time and place for a long song and a short…

Coldcuts: Reuben Palmer in Barcelona

I’ve met some cool musicians while living in Barcelona and traveling elsewhere. Why not shoot some vids, have some fun and help them spread the word? In that vein, Coldcuts was just created to showcase these pals’ work. This weekend, we shot some tunes with Reuben Palmer in my flat here in the Born:

On Generosity

One thing keeps coming into my mind now that I’ve been back in Spain from Senegal for a couple of weeks: grace and generosity are a completely different sport there, as shown to us by our hosts. It was astonishingly unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Anywhere. Generosity is the habit of giving freely without…

Here, Now

Easy to take this all for granted. Breathing. Walking. Seeing. Feeling. Any sense. Pick one. And it’s even easier to stroll through this whole thing blind to the possibility that this may just very well all be some dream. We know nothing about what any of us are doing here. In the meantime, we find…

Swim Until You Can’t See Land

We salute at the threshold of the North Sea in my mind And a nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide and swim (Whoaaaa) I swim (Whoaaa) oh swim (Whoaaa) Dip the toe in the ocean. Oh how it hardens and it numbs. And the rest of me is a…

Temple Grandin: The World Needs all kinds of Minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works — sharing her ability to “think in pictures,” which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of…

slowly, very well

These were the words spoken by one of my young, student directors as she attempted to motivate her 3rd grade counterparts appropriately during one of our practice shoots:

Art of the CSA

CSAs require 90 seconds or less of our time and, when done well, can be artful while they make great impact. This is a particularly good example, thankfully tipped off by Julian Gough, who we tip our hat to for it:

Education at its Finest

BFIS and Habitat for Humanity in Senegal A small window into the experience of students from the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona who spent a week near Dakar, Senegal in Keur Mbaye Fall, working in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity. “If we wish to teach fish to swim, it helps if we put them…

Senegal 2010

The Senegalese are among the friendliest people in the world. Given the challenges they face as a people, this is magnified ten-fold when considering the grace with which they shared their homes and hearts with us this past week. Below is a rather large sampling of still images from our week-long visit to work with…

Dakar

View Larger Map As I write this, I am taking meds to fight off malaria. I am leaving for Dakar this morning for a week and the meds are a final, though ongoing, step in a series of vaccines administered to me en masse (The first of two rounds knocked me for a loop for…