Classes and Seminars

Over 175 people attended the first VideoCamp Austin last Saturday, February 27, and the event was a rousing success. Co-organizers Talmadge Boyd and Weston Norton of Reel Social Media and Lights. Camera. Help. co-founder David Neff coordinated the event, which took place at The University of Texas at Austin's Jesse H. Jones Communication Center. Local aspiring filmmakers and videobloggers learned techniques and tricks of the trade from fellow attendees with years of experience. 

VideoCamp Austin followed the barcamp model of the "unconference," in which a large piece of paper was taped to the wall with a handwritten schedule on it. Sessions were written on stickies and then placed in open time slots. Folks who showed up early to sign up had an idea of what they wanted to talk about, such as Arts from the Streets filmmaker Layton Blaylock's presentation on making a documentary. However, spontaneity was the main focus, as Rachel Farris of PetRelocation.com learned. She didn't have a presentation prepped, but used PetRelocation's Pup in the Air videos to demonstrative the effectiveness of "Using Online Video in Your Business." Air Sex World Championship host Chris Trew of The New Movement taught an "Improv Comedy in a Video and Filmmaking" session where a few of the attendees were pulled into the demonstration.

Last year, Slackerwood featured a Guide to Austin Summer Film Camps that listed local day camps for kids interested in making movies. Although Tuesday's snowfall might make you think that summer's far away, it's never too soon to enroll in these highly sought-after programs.

Here are a couple of Austin summer film camps that have already opened registration for this year ... for kids a bit older than the budding filmmaker pictured at right.

Austin Film Festival Summer Film Camp 

Austin Film Festival's Young Filmmakers Program is proud to present the eighth annual Summer Film Camp. The camp offers students unparalleled access to in-depth, personal instruction on screenwriting, filmmaking and claymation from local industry professionals. This year, the camp's workshops and panels will take place at Austin High School.

Next month's VideoCamp Austin event is a free one-day ad-hoc gathering of video, public relations, new media and marketing professionals born from the desire for people to learn about best practices in online video production and distribution in an open environment. David Neff of Lights. Camera. Help. and the American Cancer Society, Talmadge Boyd and Weston Norton are coordinating this collaborative event that includes discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event. Not surprising, as I'd first met Dave at BarCamp Austin 3 in 2008. Although he shared information about his project SharingHope.tv, the real take-home message I got that day was that non-profit organizations should use online video and documentary filmmaking as a way to convey their messages. With VideoCamp Austin, Dave is taking this mission even further.

VideoCamp Austin will be held on February 27 from 10 am to 4 pm on the University of Texas campus at CMB Building UT Campus, Studio 4B. The event is being organized in a "barcamp" style, that is, it is an ad-hoc rather than pre-determined schedule. Barcamps are an international network of user generated conferences -- open, participatory workshop-events, with content is provided by participants. The first Barcamps focused on early-stage web applications and related open-source technologies, but the format is now widely applied to a variety of other topics, including social media tools and now video and filmmaking.

There are only a few days left to vote in the SXSW 2010 PanelPicker mentioned in my previous post - you have until midnight CST on Friday, September 4 to participate in the community voting process.

I've taken a look at several dozen panel submissions, and voted for a few of my favorites. Here are the film panels I found interesting at first glance:

There's Gold in Those Archives: Long-Long-Tail Filmmaking (organizer: Center for Social Media) -- I had no idea what long-tail filmmaking was until I saw this panel submission, but it was intriguing enough to read the questions and comments. Licensing and distribution are critical aspects of the longterm results of making a film filmmaking. I would expect this panel to convey some valuable information to filmmakers and distributors.

Austin FilmWorks is now accepting student registrations for the Feature Lab sequence in Fall 2009. Feature Lab is Steve Mims's demanding filmmaking class sequence that requires students to produce two short films and play a key role on a class-produced feature-length film.

Divided into three levels, Feature Lab includes introductory, intermediate and advanced courses -- Production One, Two and Three -- where students create an individual short, a group short and a group feature in an intense 16-month, four semester program.

Steve Mims is a long-time Austin filmmaker and teacher whose award-winning short films, music videos and features have screened widely in festivals and on television. As Slackerwood reported recently, Mims was awarded a Barbara Jordan Media Award for a 2008 film about dyslexia. His short film gives an insight in children's experience with this learning disability.

Have you recovered from Part One yet? If so, read on for more basic theater etiquette.

Personal Space. Just because you put your feet up at home does not mean that's okay in the movie theater. No one should have to share an armrest with your toes, or be forced to look at them in the seat next to them. If you put your feet on the tables at an Alamo, I hope the waitstaff puts theirs on your food.

Hats Off, AKA Bouffant Be Gone. Seriously, if your thinning hair makes you so self conscious that you can't remove your hat indoors, either sit in the back row or talk to your doctor. As for you, Big Hair, the 50's want their bouffants back, and no wants to get whiplash trying to look around you. If you don't sit in the back, pay for the seats that you block.

Dear Austin,

I love Austin, and it's film geek heaven. But apparently fewer and fewer of us know how to properly behave in theaters. It seems Austin's movie audiences are getting worse, even at the Alamo.

The theater is not your living room. And you are not alone in it. It's past time for a Theatergoers Primer.

Stop Talking. Shut it. When you arrive in the theater, stop using your outside voice. It is acceptable to talk, but quietly, not like you're at a nightclub. When the lights dim, so should your conversation. Stop talking during the trailers, as some people are actually trying to enjoy those, even if they are available online. When the film talks, no one should be talking.

Every spring, John Pierson teaches a master class at The University of Texas in which filmmakers, actors, producers, and other film-related professionals chat about the work they've been doing. And in the summer, KUT broadcasts many of the best moments from these classes so we all can enjoy hearing these professionals.

The excerpts will play on KUT's show "The Best of Public Radio" starting on Sunday, June 21 at 11:30 am. The Austin Chronicle film blog, Picture in Picture, has posted a tentative schedule of the shows. You can hear Pierson and his class talk with Harvey Weinstein, Morgan Spurlock, Mike Judge, Ellen Kuras, and local film critics Marjorie Baumgarten and Chris Garcia. I've attended Pierson's classes in the past and the discussions are always lively and interesting.

One of Pierson's classes that isn't making it to KUT this year is his conversation with novelist and screenwriter Tom Perrotta (Little Children). However, Austin Kleon drew one of his cool "mind maps" of the session, which I've included above -- a visually engaging way of taking and sharing notes. Thanks very much to Austin for putting a Creative Commons license on his illustration so I could share it here. And if you want to see a photo of Pierson and his guests in action, here's an entry with photos I took from the class with Matt Stone in 2008.

You may think Austin has plenty of filmmakers, actors and crew in town now ... but just you wait another dozen years or so, and we'll be even more packed. That is, if you're judging by the number of summer day camps for kids interested in making movies. The camps cover everything from screenwriting to acting to claymation. At the end of many of them, your children attend a screening of the movie they helped make, or bring home a DVD to hold their own private screening party. All I ever brought home from summer camp were lanyards and painted rocks, so I'm envious.

Here's a list of all the summer movie-related camps and classes in the Austin area that I could find. The descriptions are pretty much verbatim from press releases or websites, since I haven't attended any of these camps personally. Sadly, they're for kids and not adults, although you'll find a couple of options for grownups at the end of the list. At least we can all go to the free summer movies, regardless of age.

Why does this entry include a photo of Brendan Fraser from the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards, you might ask? The answer is that I have no idea. I didn't feel like digging around for something more relevant, and at least this photo is funny. And no, this is not part of a covert plot to feature a Hot Dudes of SXSW photo gallery on Slackerwood. Although, since someone did suggest such a thing ...

Ahem. Anyway. Onto the latest Austin film-related news:

• If you missed Bradley Beesley and/or his doc Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo at SXSW this year, you can say hi to him and hear about his film on Wednesday afternoon. He's visiting Ellen Spiro's documentary class at UT from 6 to 8 pm, and visitors are welcome. There may even be snacks. The class is in CMB (the brown building at Dean Keaton and Guadalupe), in Studio 4D.
• Congrats to the Alamo Village for getting a spiffy new projector, a Sony 4K digital that can project 3D movies. I wish it had arrived before Coraline was in theaters, since I'm not especially excited about Monsters vs. Aliens. However, this also means that all first-run movies at the Village will now be digitally projected, and that should be pretty cool. Alamo programmer Lars Nilsen says (via Facebook), "It makes all other digital cinema look like a bear pooped on it."