Doug Block is a multiple award-winning, New York-based documentary director, cameraman and producer. My discovery of his blog was quite by accidnt but I’m glad I found it. His latest series of blog posts are about (naturally) documentary Film.

He had the occasion to speak as a guest in Anthony Kaufman’s NYU Contemporary Documentary class. What he gave was his list of The Ten Rules of Personal Documentary Filmmaking. They’re fun and irreverent and best of all. . . true.

• RULE #1: Don’t make it all about you (even though, of course, it’s all about you)
• RULE #2: A personal doc is not your personal therapy.
• RULE #3: Don’t tell us your feelings. Show or indicate your feelings.
• Rule #4: A sense of humor is essential (especially self-deprecating humor)
• Rule #5: Put your story in context.
• Rule #6: Don’t make yourself out to be better than your other main characters.
• Rule #7: If you’re in it, don’t overstay your welcome.
• Rule #8: If you’re shooting it, learn how to shoot. (this is a big one)
• Rule #9: You’re not really you. You’re just a character in a story.

These are all great rules and if you look arefully, you can put them to use in your own life.

If you want to read more of Doug Block’s blog, click here

"Juno," a U.S. film about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and tries to find a couple to adopt her baby, won best film Saturday at the Rome Film Festival.

The film is directed by 30-year-old Canadian-born Jason Reitman, whose 2005 comedy "Thank you for Smoking" scooped a string of awards and was nominated for two Golden Globes. It was first runner-up for the people's choice award at last month's Toronto International Film Festival.

Critics praised the performance by actress Ellen Page as Juno MacGuff, the quick witted young woman who falls pregnant at her first sexual experience. Suddenly plunged into adulthood, she sets out to find a suitable set of parents to adopt her unborn child.

The best actress award went to Chinese actress Jang Wenli for "Li Chun" (And the Spring Comes), about a provincial opera singer who dreams of becoming the star of the Beijing Opera in the years between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Rade Serbedzija of Croatia won best actor for his role in the Canadian-Greek production "Fugitive Pieces." In the film, he plays Athos, a Greek archaeologist who saves a Jewish child from Poland who is orphaned during World War II.

A 50-member public jury, made up of selected moviegoers from Italy and elsewhere in Europe, judged the in-competition films at the second annual Rome Film Festival. Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, who won the best foreign film Oscar with 2001's "No Man's Land," presided over the jury.

Source: AP, Canada.com and IHT

Originallly printed at FilmStew.com
They cast their extras via MySpace, found locations and props through CraigsList and raised part of their $8,000 filmmaking budget by buying and reselling used horror film DVDs. They also relied upon MySpace to recruit their film’s soundtrack composer, a member of the Church of Satan, and for the critical role of babies, enlisted the services of a newborn nephew and niece.

Now, Baltimore pals Chris LaMartina and Jimmy George have a Best Feature Award from Shockerfest 2007 and a screening at the Charles Theater on October 23rd to show for Book of Lore, their indirect homage to the horror films of the 1980’s. Blending together the intrigue of a string of 1985 murders, a contemporary killing spree and a found book urban legends, Lamartina’s follow-up to his horror anthology film Dead Teenagers has been garnering solid reviews.

Given the fact that Teenagers was made for $300, it may well have the capability to cause brain damage, which happens to be the name of company distributing it on DVD via the Internet - Brain Damage Films. But say what you will, going from a budget of $300 to one of $8,000 is an exponential leap; at this rate, LaMartina and George may well be playing with a couple hundred thousand in a few years. In the meantime, there’s another small budget to raise for their next film, Dismember the Dolls.

“It’s an anthology, a sardonic splatter flick,” LaMartina tells the City Paper of Baltimore, where he works as a videographer for the office of Mayor Sheila Dixon. “It’s this guy who has to go around on Valentine’s Day and get all the body parts of the women he used to date. I’m thinking of it as Phone Booth meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.”

Notable passage from On Film Editing, by Edward Dmytryk:

Should the cutter make the cuts exactly as the director spelled out, or should he cut the film his way to arrive at the results which he thinks the director wanted, basing his judgment on his interpretation of the director’s expressed instructions?

The wise cutter will, of course, follow the second procedure, making the cuts in question his way to arrive at the desired result. And, if he is a very good cutter, that result will be, in the director’s words, “exactly what I was looking for.”

Here’s a quote I especially like:

In any creative effort, one must do one’s own thing, even if that thing is being done in response to another’s order. To do otherwise is to seriously risk a result which will please neither the requestor nor the executor.