Don’t know why the embed’s not working.

With many thanks to Phyllis Flick who’s been blogging about adult food for some time now at Paris Notebook, here, for those of you who remember purple-haired ladies and recently paroled cooks slinging beef-sort-a-goulash, here is the French approach to the school lunch.

Aired yesterday on Sunday Morning

We’ll cover Lighting, Sound, Setting and Story (which really means editing).

Participants will be expected to have a video camera, lap top, compass and a white cloth napkin.  

More as I work out the details. Any questions, I’m at David@turecamo.com

No thank you. I hate being grabbed by anyone especially a stranger. You don’t want to grab your audience for the simple reason that then you’ll start thinking about “how to grab them,” which means you’ll start to wonder if they’ll like this shot or if they’d rather see this. You won’t be making the film yourself but for a phantom producer.

What’s the core of your film?

What’s the single most interesting shot (sequence) you have? Start there – then build – put together the elements that excite YOU first then you can go back and be more critical – “this is boring, this too long, maybe people won’t understand this part or it needs more explanation.” That’s fine but whatever you do – FIRST put it together for yourself

CAN YOU TAKE AN ENTIRE FILM AND REDUCE IT TO SIX IMAGES???

Perhaps when the film is as iconic as PSYCHO.

So could you shoot a dozen or twenty images of your day — a ride on the metro – an open air

market – and reduce them to four images which could communicate what happened???

That’s our first exercise.

What do you need to tell the story???

People have always marvelled at the depth and subtlety of the actor’s performance his ability to evoke hunger, despair and desire. And though he was a star of the Russian Cinema, Ivan Mozzhukin, here was performing nothing except a blank stare. The three images he sees – the soup, the child, the woman — were basically “found footage” intercut with Mozzhukin’s close-up. Get it? He wasn’t looking at anything except possibly the back wall or the cameraman’s head. It is the viewer who creates the relationship between the images and gives them meaning.

It always kills me though when somebody critiques a film and says “and the photography was gorgeous!” So what?  The photography is meaningless unless you’re talking about Cartier Bresson. Editing is the unseen engine of filmmaking; it’s not the shot but the sequence which determines the viewer’s response.

In the interest of full disclosure: that’s my grandmother, Warhol and me in 1966. They were friends and colleagues from their time at Harper’s Bazaar. I just wanted to meet girls.

I said, “No, Dad, I select the best parts and put them in order.”

August First I had the first of my workshops for filmmaking. It was test run with four incredibly intelligent women – Meg Zembeck http://parisbymouth.com/and Phyllis Flick http://parisnotebook.wordpress.com/ and Dorie Greenspan http://doriegreenspan.com/ but after three and a half hours we had a glass of champagne and – me? I felt it went well because I learned all over just how much I love filmmaking because it’s about writing, about light, about spatial relationships and communicating.

And a big thank you to my friend Patty Lurie who helped me hash this out. By the way she has an amazing APP based on her book: A Guide to Impressionist Paris. Check it out.

this, by the way, is a Moviola upright.

This is how movies were editied for probably seventy-plus years.

You may see the Stone Age – but I see my youth hunched over that machine

PARIS FILES is an attempt to show another Paris, one by turns gritty as well as glamorous. I’ve been making short pieces about this city for eight years now for CBS Sunday Morning and I’ve seen parts of it that many Parisians don’t know or won’t go. That’s what — along with the Eiffel Tower and usual stuff – I’d like to present.

At the same time I’m also trying to create an atelier; an attempt to teach people about making films with nothing more than an idea and whatever you can comfortably carry in a Domke bag.

This is a DOMKE  bag